"We're not normal people," he says, sounding utterly defeated. And it's quite possibly the first time in their entire lives that she's ever wholeheartedly agreed with him.
Because a normal person would not be sitting here, with her head nestled against her brother's shoulder, having just watched the so-called loves of both their short lives walk out on them, lost to them forever, and find herself overcome with the urge to climb into his lap, kiss his pain away, and do anything and everything he needed to make it all better.
(A normal person also wouldn't be sitting here in cold, clammy panties beneath her jeans, soaked through during the wicked awesome fight between her jealous werewolf boyfriend and her hot, overprotective big brother, but Alex refuses to acknowledge that fact. Because she is so not the kind of chick who gets turned on by the thought of two boys fighting over her. Besides, she was totally looking for the pendant, and not paying attention to them at all. Not even out of the corner of her eye. Nope. Not even a little bit.)
Mason's enchanted necklace still sits in her lap, its clasp snapped in two, its heart as dark and cold as her own. Her fingers toy with the shattered ends of the chain. It would be so easy to knot them together, to slip it over Justin's head before he realized what she was doing. To learn the answer to the unspoken question that's been burning within her for months, now. The only thing that keeps her from giving in to the impulse is her fear that the pendant won't glow for her. Or maybe her fear that it will. She doesn't have the faintest idea what she'd do in either case, anyway.
She hears Max shift on the parapet above, rattling the mummy's eyes in his palm like dice as he keeps watch over them, uncharacteristically silent. And if he finds anything odd about they way they're sitting, how comfortably close they are, he doesn't let on. But then, he never has. In the back of her head she hears Conscience's voice telling her that Max has never once thought of it as wrong, this complicated relationship that she and Justin have. To him, it's just one more extraordinary thing he's grown up thinking of as completely and utterly ordinary. Just like magic.
Alex snorts, wishing-not for the first time-that the world was as simple as the way Max saw it. Life would be so much easier, then.
Because, Christ, what a mess it is right now.
Somewhere in the distance, Mason howls again. Alex cringes with a pang of loss, mixed with guilt that she doesn't feel that loss nearly as keenly as she ought to. It's not that she won't miss Mason, because she will. And it's not that she doesn't love him, because she does. It's just—and she appreciates how completely and utterly fucked-up it is of her, but as hard as she tries to deny it, it's true—it's just that she loves Justin more.
And even though he looks lost in his own misery, Justin has enough presence of mind to wrap one arm around her and squeeze her shoulder reassuringly.
God, he can be such an absolute doll, sometimes.
He sighs, then-the heaviest, most world-weary sound she's ever heard him make in all their years together-and leans his head against hers.
"Come on," he says bitterly. "Let's get the hell out of here."