He shrugged.
“I will. And besides, I can tell already that you’re not like most of the girls who seek me out. All they want is to know about death.”
“You did not just make fun of suicidal girls.”
“You misunderstand. Suicidal girls don’t need me. Except for, perhaps, poor Calypso.” He raised his brow and she narrowed her eyes. “The truth is, lots of people are curious about death. They want to know it without knowing it. I can only keep it up for so long. The dance gets old.”
“So you don’t … kill them?”
His black eyes sparkled, and for the tenth time she wished she could tell whether they were dishonest or charming.
“No. I don’t kill them. Except on those rare occasions when it really is their time. I’m Thanatos, not Jeffrey Dahmer.”
“But you’re the god of death. Death embodied. Don’t you need to be killing things?”
He leaned back in his chair and laughed.
“I’m killing things right now. Things die, and are dying, all the time. Everywhere. Plants. Fish. Someone in an apartment twelve blocks from here. I don’t have to be there. I don’t have to choke the life out of them. Atropos, the Fate of death, decrees, and I am her hand, but the phrase ‘the touch of death’ is still just an expression.”
Cassandra’s eyes moved over nearby buildings. Someone dying in an apartment twelve blocks away? The thought filled her with dread and a spike of adrenaline.
“But you have,” she said. “Killed with your hands before.”
He looked into her eyes.
“I have. I won’t make excuses for what I am. Not even for a pretty girl.”
She didn’t know what to say to that, but didn’t have to, as Calypso finally returned with several tacos wrapped in brown paper. They ate in relative silence, and Cassandra was pleasantly surprised to find that she liked the food. Lots of salsa, and the fish was fresh. She watched Thanatos exchange godly small talk with Calypso. Maybe it was the daylight playing tricks with her eyes and mind, but he didn’t seem so bad. Certainly not as coldly menacing as he had in the club and in the serial killer’s pad he kept.
I’ve come this far. And I knew it was going to be dangerous anyway.
“Thanatos,” she said, and the laughter at the table died off. “I’ve made up my mind. You can come.”
*
After lunch, they checked out of their hotel and took their scant belongings to Thanatos’ house in the hills. The second she dropped her bags in one of his guest rooms, which was just as neutral and sparely decorated as the rest of the house, she felt like a fly beginning to notice bits of web sticking to her feet. But when he said it would be easier to make their plans if they were all together, she couldn’t think of a single reasonable objection.
She studied the floor-to-ceiling mirrors in the guest bath, and the oversized claw-foot bathtub. She walked the long hardwood hallways and let her eyes crawl up the walls to the vaulted ceiling. When she got back to the kitchen, he’d poured them glasses of sparkling water.
“What story do you tell?” she asked. “People must wonder who you are, to have all this. And they must notice you have no job besides … seducing girls with slightly self-destructive tendencies.”
“Lots of people have the same,” he replied. “I think it helps that no one can really tell how old I am. Everyone in this town can play from sixteen to thirty-five.” He shrugged. Standing behind the counter cutting limes, he looked not only human, but domestic. “Cassandra?”
“Yes?”
“How long are you going to study me like that?”
Her mouth dropped open, but he didn’t look up to see.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I sort of like it. At least when you’re not doing it with your eyes narrowed.”
“You can stop that any time,” she said. “I’m never going to smile at you.”