The lie didn’t work. She looks even more hurt. “Do you not want to?”
“Of course I want to! I always want to.” I’m not in the mood for movies, though. I’m in the mood to hit something. To run more. To do something, anything, with all this energy itching through me. I need to find Leo, to see if Eve has any additional insight about what we ran into last night. And the journals taunt me from their hiding place. Whose are they, that my mother kept them? What might they tell me about how to be a Slayer?
I sit on my bed. “I just don’t know where we are right now. I didn’t want to force you to do this.”
She carefully lines up our bottles of polish. She always wears black, but she lets me paint her fingernails in bright rainbows. “Maybe this seems pointless now, with everything going on. But I want a normal afternoon with you. If you want.”
She can’t mask the hurt in her voice. I was always the one who counted down to these days. But maybe she needed them even more than I did.
Guilt washes over me. My changes have disrupted her life too. I’ve been mad at her—with good reason—but I can also be patient and understanding. The Watcher diaries aren’t going anywhere. Neither is the Coldplay demon. “I want that too,” I say quickly. “A normal afternoon. You pick the movie.”
As she looks over our stacks of DVDs, it strikes me that Artemis is just a teenager. Like me. We’re sixteen, but she never gets to act it except these few precious hours once a week. Thinking of how young we are reminds me of why I ran from the library. “So,” I ask casually, “did Mom talk to you about boarding school?”
“What? No. What are you talking about?”
I take a deep, shaky breath. What if Artemis agrees with our mother’s reasoning? It will break me. But I can’t keep any more secrets. I can barely hold the ones I have. “She wants to send me away.”
Artemis whips her head around and stares at me in shock. “Are you kidding me?”
“She had a pamphlet and everything.”
Artemis’s eyes flash with fury. “No. I won’t let her do that. She’s not separating us.”
My relief is sudden and overwhelming. Whatever we might disagree on or fight about, Artemis is still on my side. She might do more with our mom, might be the one our mom wants to stay, but Artemis is mine. I plop down on the bed. Artemis sits beside me, and I lean my head against her shoulder.
Now that I know for sure it won’t happen—Artemis won’t let it—I can relax enough to actually think about it without being angry. “What if you came with me? Traded fight training for physical education. Demonology for geology. Latin for . . . well, Latin, I guess, but probably less creepy Latin.”
Artemis snorts. “Can you imagine us in a normal school?”
I close my eyes. “I can, actually. And think: If it were an all-girls school, so many options for a babe like you.”
Artemis laughs, but it’s dark and a little sad. “I’m never getting out of here, Nina. Mom would never send me. And the Council wouldn’t agree. Or pay for it. I don’t know if they even could at this point. Besides, now you’re a—”
I wait for her to say “Slayer.” I want her to. As soon as she acknowledges it, maybe it will break this weirdness between us. I can tell her how confusing last night was for me. I can tell her all the things I’m feeling. And I can tell her about the demon in the shed.
But she doesn’t finish the sentence. “Well, whatever is happening with you, we’ll figure it out together. Mom’s not sending you away from me.”
It’s not quite the validation I was hoping for. But I appreciate that she’ll still fight for me. Out of the secrets piling up between us, I pick one truth to tell her. “I stole something from Mom’s room.”
She puts the laptop aside. “What?”
I slide off her bed and go to mine, where I retrieve the diaries. She sits on the floor across from me. I open the first one to the front page. It’s Bradford Smythe’s Watcher diary.
“Weird,” Artemis says. “Why would Mom have that?”
“I didn’t know he was ever an active Watcher. I can’t imagine him in the field.”