So maybe it was time I acknowledged it, gave up, and quit pining for Cody Fairfax for good. Maybe it was time I explored my attraction to Stefan, a prospect that filled me with equal parts of exhilaration and terror.
Or maybe that was the very choice the Norn warned me about. On the one hand, it seemed pretty freaking arrogant to imagine that the fate of the world might hang in the balance because Daisy Johanssen of Pemkowet, Michigan, decided to try dating the hot ghoul.
On the other hand, Stefan was one of the Outcast, banned from heaven and hell, and I was a demon’s daughter. As my old teacher Mr. Leary might say, that made for a heck of a potent eschatological cocktail. Eschatology—look it up. I did.
And of course there was the fact that Stefan Ludovic was the medieval Bohemian version of Hamlet, for Christ’s sake, a six-hundred-year-old immortal knight with a tragic backstory, and I was a twenty-four-year-old file clerk with a high school diploma.
That’s the sort of thing that looks ridiculous on paper, right? And yet it didn’t feel ridiculous.
After all, I wasn’t just a file clerk. I was Hel’s liaison. And despite everything, Stefan was a man—a man who had once been mortal, who had been Outcast in the prime of his life. He had the same longings and desires as any other mortal man. Well, plus one major addition, what with the subsisting on emotion and all.
Anyway.
Whether or not it was in reference to this particular choice, the Norn had told me to trust my heart. The problem was, Stefan was right. My heart was human. More, maybe; human, definitely, with all the confusion, messiness, and uncertainty that being human entailed. They say the heart wants what it wants. Well, mine wanted a lot of things.
I wanted what Stefan offered me.
I wanted what Cody couldn’t offer me, too.
Hell, there was a big part of me that wished Emmeline Palmer had never come to town and I was still dating her brother, Sinclair, still riding on the handlebars of his bicycle and enjoying a harmless romance that wasn’t overshadowed by insurmountable complications or inherent peril.
But you can’t turn back the hands of time, at least not that I’m aware of. What was done was done.
Sooner or later, I was going to have to make a choice. When all was said and done, I doubted that the fate of the world hung on this one. The Norn was probably talking about something else, something I couldn’t yet begin to envision.
At least I hoped so.
I’d have to think about it some more.
