The Survivors: Body & Blood (book 3)

Addiction, pt. 2

THAT NIGHT, WHEN I RETURNED WITH NOAH FED, SADIE PUT HIM UNDER WITH the spell she'd used before, and Ben was asleep — or trying to be — next to him. She and I sat in Bibi's Italianissimo, an art deco restaurant near the city center. The place was shiny and dark, atmospheric, and the perfect place for us to escape our troubles. Leave it to Sadie Matthau to drown her sorrows in the nicest joint in town.

She was eating, a rarity for her, when she said, "So. This human thing."

"You're going to have to be more specific."

"The part about me getting more so," she clarified.

"Yes?"

"Do you think it's in other qualities too? Or just that something is happening to my blood?" she asked thoughtfully.

I did, in fact, think she was getting more human by the second, but not because she smelled more like it.

"Well?" she prompted me.

I shrugged. "Has anyone ever told you that you have an addictive personality?"

She laughed. "How does that fit?"

"Have they?" I asked. "I keep noticing a pattern. You sort of obsessively go after a thing to the point that it's an addiction. It's one thing if it's the big stuff, like, say, trying to figure out how to die. Or, say, asking questions and trying to find really complicated answers. But it's the little stuff too. You leave Puritanical Pleasantville and you don't just think, "Hey, clothes are cool,' but you start wearing clothes off runways and structure your whole life around the ability to get them. You decide you want to travel and you don't, say, put down some roots and go on trips. You live on the road for four straight years."

"Your point?"

"Well, that addictive, lack of control . . . it's a really human thing. And I've always noticed this about you, but it's starting to seem more evident now. We've taken away one of your coping skills — one of your addictions, you could say — in keeping you from experimenting with death methods. And now you eat, sometimes you drink. You shop. You dress, let's say, less conservatively at times. You're doing the things people do. Not the right things, I'll admit, but the things humans do. It's very interesting to watch."

She didn't know what to say, and I rarely got Sadie to a state of stunned silence.

"Sorry, I shouldn't have . . ."

"No, it's true. I watched Corrina do it, actually. All those things you said. That's how she coped. I don't know why I didn't see it," she said.

"It's not easy to see stuff about yourself."

"You know your flaws, though," she argued, which was true, but how did she know that?

"What flaws?" I flashed a smile to lighten the mood and get Sadie away from whatever thoughts made that stupid line between her eyebrows appear.

"Can I ask a stupid question?" she said.

"Sure."

"Are you and Everett not close?"

What a question. "We're very different."

"To say the least," she said.

"There's something he's never understood about me either, and recently, there have been . . . issues," I said.

"Like . . ." she urged.

I ran my hand through my hair and took the plunge. "He's jealous of my relationship with you know, which I'm sure you know. He's worried we might have more than a friendship. Which is stupid, clearly," I said.