“Yeah.”
“So how old are you? Real y?” He must be total y ancient.
“Two, three hundred years?”
Ash gave a testy smirk. “Over eleven thousand.” Nick’s mouth fel open in disbelief. It wasn’t possible. He could not be that old. “Bul shit!”
“Watch your language, kid.”
“Okay, bul crap. There’s no way. We didn’t even have people back then. You’re yanking my chain.” Ash shook his head. “I assure you, we did. I was even on a first-name basis with some of them.”
Nick remained stil as that sank in and he tried to imagine the world Ash must have come from. What would people have been like back then?
Was Ash just ful of total garbage?
“You’re real y not kidding, are you?” Nick asked.
“Dead serious.”
Stil , he couldn’t believe it. Could people real y be immortal?
He’d seen the movies and read the books, but …
“How? Are you a vampire or something? What made you immortal?”
“Real y good DNA.”
Nick rol ed his eyes. Ash’s glib answers were starting to irritate him. He wanted an answer and he wanted one now.
“Oh, come on. I have to know about the who-do voodoo that you do. Most of al , I want to know how I can become immortal … wel , not at my age ’cause that would suck. But in a few years when I’m fil ed out and in my prime.” He grinned at Ash.
“Make me immortal.”
Ash wasn’t charmed. “Look, Nick, I don’t like talking about my powers and not a lot of people know what I can do. I’m trusting you with a secret and I expect you to keep it. If you can’t …” He tilted his head down as if he was looking at him over the rim of his sunglasses. “Wel , I’m sure your mom’s going to miss you.”
“Not half as much as I’d miss me if you kil ed me.” He blinked like a girl and leaned against Ash’s shoulder. “Please don’t hurt me, Ash. Please. I don’t want to die while I’m stil a virgin. At least let me get laid before you kil me—which according to my mom I can’t do until I’m married and I can’t do that until I finish col ege. So you have to wait a good ten years before you snuff me. Deal?”
Ash shoved him back onto his side of the car. “You’re real y not right, are you?”
“Yeah, I know. It was al the paint chips I ate as a kid. They were good, but chromosomal y damaging.” Ash let out an audible sigh as he forced himself not to laugh at Nick’s antics. He was real y beginning to like the kid a lot more than he should. There was just something about him that was infectious. “Ten years, huh?”
“Yeah, you can kil me when I’m twenty-four, provided I’m not stil a virgin, but not a day before that.”
“Al right. It’s a deal … provided you keep your trap shut.”
“Trap nailed shut, sir.”
“But at twenty-four …” Ash let his voice trail off.
“I’m al yours, babe.”
Ash shook his head. “I don’t intimidate you at al , do I?”
“Wel , when you chased me through Kyrian’s house, I did wet my pants a bit. Guess I’m not housebroken after al . My mom wil be so disappointed after al she went through to potty train me. But once you let me live … your big mistake … now I know you think I’m too cute and fluffy to kil .” It was real y hard to be agitated at someone with that kind of humor. And in al honesty, it was nice to be around someone who wasn’t trying to prove himself, wet himself, or posture. It’d been a long time since someone who knew he wasn’t human had treated him like one.
“You are cute and fluffy, but never forget, kid, that I’m a carnivore from a time and place where we had to kil and skin our food in order to eat it.”
Nick’s eyes widened as he tried to imagine Ash dressed like a Goth caveman in a studded black loincloth chasing down saber-tooth tigers and kil ing them with a spear. … Did they have saber-tooth tigers eleven thousand years ago?
Did people have loincloths or did they hunt naked?
Dang, his teachers were right. Some of that trivial crap could come in handy.
But that wasn’t the point of this conversation. Nor the point of what Ash was tel ing him. “You just like to scare people, don’t you?”
“As much as you like to annoy them and for the same exact reason.”
It kept people from getting too close. Nick did it so that others wouldn’t mock him or so that when they did, it didn’t hurt as much.
What was Ash trying to protect himself from? It was definitely something to think about.
Ash pul ed up to the curb in front of Nick’s house, which looked al the more dilapidated after he’d been in Kyrian’s neighborhood.