Velvet

“What was your childhood like?” I asked, a bit abruptly, hoping to keep him talking.

He blinked at me a few times and shrugged. “I was born in Greece, so I lived with a family there until I was eight. Then I was sent to live with Julian in France for four years. Since we were related and similar in age, they thought it was a good idea to pair us together.”

“Aren’t you guys, like, seventeen years apart? And who’s this ‘they’?”

“The Council—they decide where we live until we come of age. And, yeah, we’re seventeen years apart, but that’s very unusual for siblings; most are centuries older than each other. A demon can only get back to earth in a physical body once every couple hundred years—it simply requires too much energy. My father got through a century and a half ago, created a body, and had Mariana. We destroyed his body and sent him back to hell, since he can’t really be killed.”

“I still don’t understand that,” I said, leaning forward. “Everything can be killed.”

“You can’t kill something that’s not real,” he explained, then shook his head, as if he knew that didn’t make sense. “I mean, they are real, but not like we think of things being real or imaginary. They’re ideas; individual units of energy that happen to have some sort of consciousness. It would be like trying to ‘kill’ light—you can cover a light source, stars can implode and go dark, but you can’t end the life of something that was never really alive to begin with. Honestly, we don’t understand what they are. That’s why we call them demons—they’re the stuff of nightmares.” A dark look passed over his face. “In your case, literally.”

He leaned back against the sofa. “Anyway, he got through again thirty-six years ago and had Julian, which was honestly pushing how quickly we thought demons could regroup their power. Then, somehow, he broke through less than twenty years later and had me. Which should have been impossible.”

Adrian’s eyes narrowed as he glared into the fire. “He’s smarter than the others, or stronger. More adaptive, somehow. Seven years go by and he gets Lucian’s mother pregnant and manages to steal him from right under our noses before we even realize what’s happened. It was an embarrassment. I remember listening to my Greek ‘parents’ talk about it at night when they thought I was asleep. I was only seven, but I knew it was important to get him back. It’s only recently become clear to me that it was to save face, not to save Lucian.”

The firelight hit Adrian’s glowing eyes and turned the silver dark, almost black. He was angry; I didn’t need an internal emotion sensor to tell me that. Lucian seemed to be a very delicate subject for Adrian.

“When I was at your house, you let Lucian climb on your shoulders,” I said slowly, “and Julian said you shouldn’t do that. What did he mean?”

Adrian’s face twisted into a scowl. “Julian’s a jackass. It literally doesn’t compute with him that I actually give a shit about Lucian, because Julian doesn’t give a shit about anything.” He blinked and scrubbed a hand over his face, letting out a long, slow breath. “My older brother,” he tried again, “is dissatisfied with his role in life. He thinks the Council’s rules are stupid. I do, too, but for different reasons.”

“Which rules, in particular?” I prompted. “You have a lot.”

Adrian looked disgusted. “Celibacy with humans. He could care less about having friends or truly getting to know someone, but he’s seriously pissed about not being able to have sex with whomever he likes. Since we’re sterile and can’t receive or pass on diseases, there should be no issue with taking full advantage of his … natural assets. I, on the other hand, could care less about sex. Well”—he paused, blushing slightly—“let’s just say it’s not a priority. But I want friends. I’m in high school, for God’s sake. But the same rule applies to both of us: no intimacy with humans. No friends. No spouses. No one-night stands. I couldn’t even join the math club.”

He glanced over at me and shrugged. “There aren’t that many of us, and we’ve survived this long by hiding, placing ourselves apart from the rest of the world. That level of isolation is too hard for most of us to handle. Immortality becomes far easier to cope with when you stop caring. The couple Julian lived with as a kid basically ignored him for ten years. When he sees me actually trying to be a brother to Lucian, I think he gets mad that he never had that growing up. I understand why he’s an ass, but it’s still hard not to hate him.”

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