Page 87 of Mortal Things

“Yes.”

“Do you hate him?”

She shrugs and looks toward the courtyard, where Willow and Scarlet are still deep in conversation. “They are so much more ancient than we are, and so much more powerful. They have been around for so long that they cannot understand these fleeting mortal emotions of hate or love or anger. What they do feel is a form of those things that is so far removed from us that we can’t even recognize it.” She tucks a frizzy strand behind her ear. “So what’s the point of hating him? He doesn’t care how we feel. He’s too closed off from our hearts to understand it.”

I think of the haunting grayness of Raven’s eyes, his icy stare in the face of my anguish.

“I do,” I say.

“Do what?”

“I hate him.” I take a deep breath. “And I feel sorry for him. He’s more mortal than he thinks.”

“Well,” she says, “save your receipt for that pity. You might need to return it.”

A classic Laine one-liner. I roll my eyes and snort in response. The sound makes her glance at me in surprise, and a small smile creeps onto the corner of her lips. She quickly looks away again.

Finally, she says, “Do you remember that one winter? With the blizzard?”

I give her a wry look. “Which one?”

“The blizzard. The one on Christmas Eve.” She wheels her hands as she talks, another familiar gesture that tugs something familiar in my heart. “The last one.”

The last one. The one before we went our separate ways. “Of course,” I answer.

She doesn’t have to describe it, because now I can recall every last detail. That year, Laine had shown up at my new college dorm room right before the power went out, with a ragged little pine tree in her arms, dirt from the pot spilling onto the sleeves of her coat.

For Chrissake, Doc, let me in! I could still hear her breathless exclamation as she bustled inside. She put the sad little tree on my kitchen counter. Happy Holidays, or something. I thought you needed a real housewarming gift.

“How long did that tree survive, anyway?” Laine asks me now, her neck still craned upward.

“About three weeks?” I venture.

“That’s so depressing,” she says. “You better not tell Willow, she’ll kick you out right now, immortal war be damned. What’d you do to it?”

“Nothing!” I protest. “I watered it every day.”

“Every day?” She gives me a look more aghast than when she found me trapped in Raven’s estate. “So you drowned it, is what you’re telling me.”

“It was a tree, it needed water.”

“It needed water, not a flash flood.” She turns her knees toward me, and the nostalgia of that gesture twists something in my heart, too. Her voice is speeding up, her rapid-fire conversation reminding me in this moment of how we used to talk. “Listen, you should’ve held it under the faucet until water drained out the bottom, and then you leave it alone until you do it again the next week. Otherwise it’s just rotting in a bunch of soggy mud, how’s it supposed to breathe in there? Aren’t you the doc here?”

I roll my eyes. “For humans. Besides, it didn’t exactly look healthy when you brought it over.”

“It was the only small tree that hadn’t been bought yet.”

I raise an eyebrow at her. “I could see why.”

“I felt bad for it.”

“It wasn’t a tree shelter, Laine. You didn’t have to pick the saddest one.” But I’m laughing anyway, in spite of everything, because now I’m remembering her bright expression that day, that little pot tucked in one arm, her cheeks pink from the cold.

Laine’s smiling, too. It is the first moment that reminds me of how we once were, and everything in my soul yearns toward it.

“Am I your sad tree?” I ask her, my smile wan.

She gives me a wan smile back. “I think I might be yours.”