Steal the Light (Thieves #1)(11)

Ingrid was quiet for a moment, and I asked her a question I had always wondered about. “Ingrid, why don’t you join them? Is it not possible?”

She smiled. “This is my home. This is my family.”

Halle took her hand. “She is not telling the complete truth. She stays because I would never be accepted. I am only a halfling. My father was human. In the great tribes of the past, she would have been a queen. I would, at best, have been a tolerated servant.”

Ingrid tenderly touched his face. I knew in that moment, I didn’t exist for them. It had always been this way with the two of them. Thinking back now, it was the only really solid relationship I had to look up to when I was a child. It was just the two of them in the whole world and had been since the day they met hundreds of years before.

“You are my king. As I said, this is my home and you are my family. I have no need for any other.” She leaned in and kissed him before breaking the moment and turning back to me. “Now, as for you, what does Daniel say?”

I groaned. I should have known she wouldn’t let this subject get away. “He says we do the job by the letter and try not to piss off the demon.”

“He is a wise man, your Daniel,” she said.

“Ingrid, he isn’t mine. He left me.” I didn’t even try to keep the bitterness out of my voice. Ingrid knew how I felt. She had let me cry on her shoulder for days after they took him from me. I had spent a month traveling from bridge to bridge with them as I had when I was a child.

“Bah, he is acting like an idiot,” she said dismissively. “It is—what do they call it in children? I believe the term is temper tantrum.”

“It’s a really long temper tantrum since it’s been years,” I pointed out.

“It’s your fault, child.”

I sat straight up at that. Now I was offended. “My fault? How in all the holy planes of existence is it my fault?”

“He acts as you allow him to act. You must take the reins,” she proclaimed as though it were the simplest thing in the world. She turned to Halle, who was nodding in agreement. “What do the young folk call it now, my love?”

“Scene control,” Halle said. “I have heard this on MTV.”

“Yes, you must get this scene control.”

I threw up my hands in surrender. How could one argue with MTV? “Fine, it’s my fault, but the truth is, I’m not sure what else I can do. I’ve tried everything. I’ve told him nothing has changed for me. I don’t care that he’s gone all fangalicious. I pledged my love. I’ve made a fool of myself on more than one occasion. I’ve tried being patient. Nothing works. He tells me this is all for my own good.”

“Have you tried leaving him?” Ingrid asked.

“I don’t have to. He left me.”

A small smile played on Ingrid’s lips. “He didn’t get very far, did he? I wonder how far he would go if there was…someone else? If he has moved on, you should move on as well, preferably with someone lovely who will anger Daniel in every way possible.”

The thought of dating sent a chill up my spine. It had been so long since I had been on an actual date, much less…

I stopped when I realized what I had been about to think. Much less a first date. I had been on exactly one first date. I went with Daniel to the movies on what we had decided was our first official date. We were fifteen years old, and I don’t think it really counted as a true first date because we had known each other for so long.

What would it be like to go on a date with someone I hadn’t been around for most of my life? Daniel and I had known each other since we were children, so there was never that “getting to know you” period. There wasn’t an exchange of childhood stories since we knew them all. It had been an easy, laidback slide from friendship to romantic love. Up to this moment, my entire romantic life had been about one man. It had been about dating Daniel, loving Daniel, planning a future with Daniel, mourning Daniel, and trying to get Daniel back. How much of myself had I given up for Daniel? Was I willing to wait for the rest of my life for him to come back to me?

“I do not wish to see this life pass you by because Daniel cannot see the truth or because he is too afraid to take what has been offered to him.” Ingrid took my hand in hers and stroked it gently as she had when I was a child and she’d comforted me. “There is too much to enjoy. If Daniel is your soul’s mate, then things will work out. If he is not, then you are wasting time, child.”

I shook my head as if I could clear it from those disturbing thoughts. It seemed too complicated. It was definitely too scary. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t even know how to find a date. I haven’t dated anyone but Daniel.”

“Like I said, you need someone who understands the world you live in,” Ingrid explained. “You need a gentleman who is looking for love as well. And it would not hurt if this gentleman was, as they say, totally hot.”

They let me sit in silence for a moment while I wondered which part of myself was going to win this particular war. The adventurous side of me, the one I had quelled for a long time, was excited at the prospect of trying something, anything to get me out of the rut I’d been in for the last several years. Then there was the part of me that was terrified at having to meet someone new and trying to fit in. Then there was the thought of sex with someone other than Daniel. That almost broke my heart, but I had to ask myself if I was willing to never have sex again. When I got down to the heart of the problem, I realized one thing. I was lonely. “And you might know this person?”