this. Trust me, we’ll be staying with you, and you might get sick of us when we aren’t saving the world.”
I shrugged.
“Neither of you leave the toilet seat up or leave underwear with skid marks on the floor. I’d say you’ve already got two things on my list going for you.”
Leif kissed the top of my head.
“What’s on this mysterious list, Speedy?”
“Money is useless, so I don’t know if you pick your teeth with folded up five-dollar bills. I already know your mother won’t hate me and try to break us up. I haven’t met your friends yet. What I know of you now, I’m pretty fucking fond of.”
“How do you feel about toothpicks?” Aeron asked.
Where in the world did that come from? Number one, I hadn’t seen either of them with a toothpick this entire time. Number two, if a toothpick were the only option to get shit out your teeth during the apocalypse because you couldn’t find floss, I’d rather watch someone go to town digging pork out their teeth with one than look at it just stuck there.
“I’m toothpick neutral, but I don’t understand the question.”
“Dice quit smoking six decades ago, but he still has this hand and mouth fixation. He always has a toothpick on him.”
“Yes, but I’m not dating Dice, and I swear to god, if you bring up my orgy painting, I will nut punch both of you.”
They both just chuckled and squeezed me like if I dated two of the Four Horsemen, I had to take the entire set. I didn’t even know their friends, and we needed to be focused on stopping my father, not what was in my painting.
I changed the subject.
“You said you might have a cure in the lab?”
“I have a theory I’ve been working on since I got the Rage Mutation research. All I was missing was you. It might not work. Aeron, can you bring us another test subject? Jose might not make it if this works.”
“I hate that you name them,” Aeron muttered as he left the apartment.
Leif held out his hand.
“Want to see if I made a miracle?”
Yeah, I totally did.
Chapter 27
I
could remember enough that Isaiah pretty much ruined every single holiday and birthday for me growing up. They didn’t start getting good until I met Miss Mabel. I was getting flashes of Christmas in her apartment. I spent every Christmas with her. She invited me over my first Christmas after I ran away, and I saw she had made me a stocking. We didn’t have fireplaces, so she hung it on the bookcase.
She cooked an enormous meal, and that stocking was full of chocolate and little essentials for living on my own. We watched Christmas movies until I passed out on her couch. We didn’t watch Die Hard. I didn’t even need Aeron in the room to know he would consider that a Christmas movie.
Walking towards a lab that might have the answers to ending this holding Leif’s hand felt like Christmas with Miss Mabel. Her stockings got more and more creative the longer I lived next door, and it was always a massive highlight of my night when she handed it to me. Whatever Leif had cultured in his lab was just as exciting as what could be in her stockings.
“Is it a cure or a vaccine?”
Leif just smirked at me.
“Who said I wasn’t working on both at the same time?”
“You’re fucking amazing.”
“You seemed to think so last night. You blew out the light bulb.”
“You sound prouder about that than you do about what’s in your lab, Leif.”
“Well, I’ve cured diseases throughout the centuries. I’ve never fallen in love before.”
I stopped dead in my tracks.
“Stop it. Yes, you have.”
“None of us have. We weren’t expecting to this time either. We weren’t prepared for you.”
I gulped. No pressure or anything there, Leif. What if I totally fucked this up? Because I had fallen pretty hard for the Horsemen of Pestilence and Death. The idea of them just leaving when this was over punched me right in the gut. How did they manage to be this old and never fallen in love before? And how were they both such amazing lovers?
“Then how did I explode that light bulb last night, Leif? Are you being serious?”
“We’ve taken human lovers. Some of us more than others. Feelings were never involved, and it was never the same woman more than once so there wouldn’t be. We never wanted to bring human women into our deal because they could