“Not quite.” Sal frowned down at his hands, and it almost looked for a moment like he was angry at them—at what they could do. “She wasn’t as resistant to change as I was. But she wanted more time. She refused to become mortal until she had walked every inch of the earth.”

He went quiet then, and both Reg and I leaned forward, waiting.

After a moment, I said, “And?”

“And well, you saw the pictures!” Sal exploded. “She did it! She . . . we walked every inch of the earth. Everywhere she hadn’t already been—twice! And she still chose immortality over me. Over us!”

Reg reached a hand forward, as if to comfort Sal, but then pulled it back again awkwardly. “I’m sorry,” was all he said.

“It’s not that she didn’t love me. Oh, she did.”

I squirmed, trying not to picture whatever Sal was picturing as he reminisced.

“Maybe she still does,” he said. “But she loves life even more. And she just can’t give up the opportunity to keep living it.”

And she shouldn’t, I thought. I didn’t want to kick Sal while he was down, but wasn’t this the twenty-first century, and hadn’t we females been told for decades now to not give up our lives for a man? It wasn’t cool, even metaphorically, but Sal literally asked Lina to die for him. I wondered if he couldn’t see that because he was a slayer . . . or because he was a dude.

Reg waited a tactful moment before asking Sal a question that would have sounded insensitive from anyone but my brother. “But your touch—the power to turn immortals mortal—is it something you can turn off and on?”

I recoiled. “Reg, are you asking how they—”

Sal cleared his throat, and I saw a blush blooming over his mustache. “There are ways to be . . . careful,” he said.

Please no details. Please no details. Please no—

“If I concentrate, I have a degree of control over it.” His expression darkened once again. “But after a time, I pushed hard enough that she began to distrust me. She worried I would turn her against her will.”

“Would you?” I asked.

The darkness in his face blurred to something more like shame. “She was right to fear me.”

“Wow,” I said. “That is so wrong.”

I wanted to feel for Sal, but I was fully on team Lina.

“She thought so too. So, she moved out of the cottage—”

“Wait, Lina lived here?”

“Fifteen years ago. When we first came to Nowhere.”

“Here in this cottage?”

“We split not long after.”

“I just can’t picture her in this—”