Bride(48)

He huffs out a tired, noiseless snort. “Just go to bed, Misery, before you get yourself killed.”

“I’m nocturnal,” I mutter. “Little offensive, that my husband doesn’t think I can take care of myself.”

“A lot offensive, that my wife thinks that I’d take her with me into a highly volatile situation where I might not be able to protect her.”

“Okay. Fine.” I glance back at him—his earnest, stubborn, uncompromising face. In the fading moonlight, the lines of his cheekbones are ready to slice me. “You can’t do it on your own, though.”

He gives me an incredulous look. “Are you telling me what I can and cannot do?”

“Oh, I would never, Alpha,” I say with a mocking tone that I only half regret when he glares back. “But you can’t even start a computer.”

“I can start a fucking computer.”

“Lowe. My friend. My spouse. You’re clearly a competent Were with many talents, but I’ve seen your phone. I’ve seen you use your phone. Half of your gallery is blurry pictures of Ana with your finger blocking the camera. You type ‘Google’ in the Google bar to start a new search.”

He opens this mouth. Then snaps it closed.

“You were about to ask me why that’s the wrong way.”

“You’re not coming.” His tone is definitive. And when he makes to stand, driven away by my insistence, I feel a stab of guilt and reach out for the leg of his jeans, pulling him back down. His eyes fix on the place where I’m gripping him, but he relents.

“Sorry, I’ll let the matter go.” For now. “Please, don’t leave. I’m sure you came here to . . . What do you do here, anyway? Scratch your claws? Howl at the moon?”

“Deflea myself.”

“See? I wouldn’t want to be in your way. Do go on.” I wait for him to pick critters out of his hair. “Shouldn’t you be sleeping, anyway? You are not nocturnal.” It’s past midnight. Prime awake time for me, the cicadas, and no one else for miles.

“I don’t sleep much.”

Right. Ana said that. When she mentioned that he had . . . “Insomnia!”

His eyebrow quirks. “You seem overjoyed by my inability to get decent rest.”

“Yes. No. But Ana mentioned you had pneumonia, and . . .”

He smiles. “She mixes up words often.”

“Yup.”

“According to Google, which I apparently don’t know how to use”—his side look is blistering—“it’s normal for her age.” He looks pensive for a long moment as his smile sobers.

“I can’t imagine how difficult it must be.”

“Learning to talk?”

“That, too. But also, raising a young child. Out of the blue.”

“Not as difficult as being raised by some asshole who doesn’t know to buy a car seat for you, or gives you Skittles before bed because you’re hungry, or lets you watch The Exorcist because he’s never seen it, but the protagonist is a young girl, and he figures that you’ll identify with her.”

“Wow. Serena and I watched that at fifteen and slept with the lights on for months.”

“Ana watched it at six and will need expensive therapy well into her forties.”

I wince. “I’m sorry. For Ana, mostly, but also for you. People usually ease into parenthood. We’re not born knowing how to change diapers.”

“Ana’s potty-trained. Not by me, obviously—I’d have somehow managed to teach her to piss out of her nose.” He runs a hand over his short hair and then rubs his neck. “I was unprepared for her. Still am. And she’s so fucking forgiving.”

I rest my temple on my knees, studying the way he stares into the distance, wondering how many nights he’s comes up here in the witching hour. To make decisions for thousands. To beat himself up for not being perfect. Despite how competent, self-denying, and assured he appears to be, Lowe might not like himself very much.

“You used to live in Europe? Where?”

He seems surprised by my question. “Zurich.”

“Studying?”

His shoulders heave with a sigh. “At first. Then working.”

“Architecture, right? I don’t fully get it. Buildings are kind of boring. I’m grateful they don’t fall on top of my head, though.”

“I don’t get how one can type stuff into a machine all day and not be terrified of a robot uprising. I’m grateful for Mario Kart, though.”

“Fair enough.” I smile at his tone, because it’s the poutiest I’ve ever heard. I must have found his touchy spot. “I do like the style of this home,” I volunteer magnanimously.

“It’s called biomorphic.”

“How do you know? You learned it in school?”

“That, and I designed it as a present for my mother.”

“Oh.” Wow. I guess he’s not just an architect—he’s a good architect. “When you studied, did you do the Human thing?” Their school system is often the only option, simply because there’s more of them, and they invest in education infrastructure. In Vampyre society, and I assume among Weres, too, formal degrees are not worth the paper they’re printed on. The skills that come with them, however, are priceless. If we want to acquire them, we create fake IDs and use them to enroll at Human universities. Vampyres tend to take online classes （because of the fangs, and the whole third-degree burns in the sunlight thing）。 Weres are undetectable to Humans’ naked eye, and could come and go from their society more easily, but Humans have installed technology that singles out faster-than-normal heartbeats and higher body temperatures in plenty of places. Honestly, I’m just lucky they never expected Vampyres would go to the trouble of filing their own fangs and never developed the same degree of paranoia about us.