Half Lost (The Half Bad Trilogy #3) - Sally Green Page 0,49
cheek where Jessica caught me with the photo frame when I was a child. I guess I was about three or four, so Jessica would have been ten or eleven. She’s oldest of us four children, though she’d just say three children and a half Black. I can’t remember any occasion when she was nice to me. She hated me from birth. And in a way it’s understandable; my father killed her father. And yet Deborah and Arran didn’t blame me for what Marcus did. And they must have wondered about me, wondered about my Black Witch side.
I pull my hair back to see my eyes. They’re the same as ever: black, and the empty triangles in the blackness tumble around slowly and steadily. And the tattoo on my neck is the same: B 0.5.
I feel my cheek and the stubble there, but I don’t need to shave much. I’m still only seventeen. My chin and my patchy beard say seventeen but my eyes, and maybe my soul, say one hundred and seventeen. I guess I’ve done a lot more than the average seventeen-year-old.
I see my father in my face too: a younger version of him. I’m not sure if that’s part of my problem. That what everyone sees when they look at me is his name, his myth, the people he’s killed and eaten. And maybe that’s what happened with Annalise. She began to see not me but only Marcus and the stories about him.
And part of me is proud Marcus was—is—my father. I’m proud that I’m like him. We’re alike in so many ways. Fighting, yes; being good at drawing; our Gift to turn animal; and our appreciation of solitude. But I’m unlike him too. I had a White Witch for a mother and a grandmother. I’ve got—
“Hi.”
I look in the mirror and see Gabriel is standing in the doorway. “Nesbitt wake you as well?”
It’s not really a question and Gabriel doesn’t answer; he stays in the doorway and I stay leaned over the sink.
“You OK?” he asks. A genuine question.
I speak to my reflection as I reply. “Yeah, great.”
He doesn’t say anything.
So I look up again at his reflection and ask him, “How old are you, Gabriel?”
“Umm . . . nineteen.”
I turn to face him. “You look older. Twenty or twenty- one maybe.”
He shakes his head. “Turned nineteen a couple of months ago. You missed the big party.”
And for a brief second I’m jealous to think there was a party, with Greatorex and the trainees and I didn’t get an invite, but of course he’s joking. But then again a couple of months ago I was with Annalise and I’ve no idea what Gabriel was doing when I was with her.
“Wish I’d known. I’d have done something. For your birthday, I mean.”
“I doubt it.” And he leans against the door frame, clearly not going to come into the room, and says, “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I really don’t care about my birthday.”
And I’m irritated. I think he does care, maybe not about his birthday but about me not even knowing or asking before now.
And I suppose I can still give him a present. He bought me a knife for no other reason than he wanted to give me something. And, typical of Gabriel, it was a perfect present, beautiful and useful. But less typical was how nervous he was when he gave it to me. I’d like to do that: give him something and make it so clear it was special, that it was important.
I say, “I can still give you something.”
“Yeah?” He sounds skeptical.
“A knife or . . . I don’t know . . . a book or . . . or something.”
“That would be nice,” he says, and then adds, “Nice isn’t normally one of your strong points.”
“No . . . Sorry.”
“And did you say sorry then?” He shakes his head as if clearing his ears. “That’s the second time you’ve said that to me.”
I know that I owe him lots of “sorry”s. He once said he liked how I was honest with him and recently, since I last said sorry to him, I’ve tried harder, but I never tell him half of what I think, not a fraction. And I wish he’d come into the room but he’s still standing there in the doorway. And I know he won’t come in because of what happened last time we were here and I kissed him.