“I’ll never run like I could before, so what’s the use?”
I held my arm out to him, flexing my hand downward at the wrist so the bend of my elbow was very flat and the scars were very clear. It wasn’t like they were ever not visible if I wore short sleeves, but I’d had them so long that I just didn’t think about them much anymore. They ran white and thick across the bend of my arm, mounding at the elbow and running in thin ropes of scar tissue away from it. I’d been told I should have asked for a plastic surgeon when it happened, but once they told me I might lose the use of my arm I hadn’t really worried about scars. Now they were a part of me, like a freckle, or a mole, just something on my skin that had always been there, though of course, the scars hadn’t been there always.
Tomas’s voice was almost hostile as he said, “I’ve seen them before in the summer.”
“I don’t try to hide them, any of them.”
His gaze went lower on my arm to the cross-shaped burn scar, now a little crooked from the claw scar that a shape-shifted witch had given me. I pointed to a much smaller scar on my arm near the shoulder. “This was my first bullet wound.”
He looked at the slick, white mark. “I know you got shot this year, but you healed it, you healed all of it because you’re like . . . magic”—and even to him it sounded lame, because he looked angry, eyes uncertain, as he added, “You know what I mean, you heal it all.”
“Every scar you just looked at was before I could heal it all. There’s a few more, including one from the same vampire that tore up my arm. He chewed at my collarbone until he broke it.”
He gave me suspicious eyes.
“I swear it.”
His eyes narrowed, and I wondered where he got the attitude. It couldn’t be just since the kidnapping, because it took time to build a bad attitude. I should know, because I had one of my own.