“Watch your hand! That’s got to be hot.”
He shrugged. Though he wasn’t a true Mythean, he had their healing ability. He felt pain less than mortals and wounds healed quickly, especially small ones. Considering that without his soul, nothing on heaven or earth could kill him, a little burn from a pork chop was nothing.
“It’s fine,” he said, lowering the now cooling chop to the floor for the cat. If the Chairman had been a normal cat, he’d have cut it up. But he’d seen the Chairman with a steak he’d pulled out of the fridge back at Cadan’s house on Mull. The cat liked the challenge of tearing into a whole piece of meat.
“You’re feeding my cat again?” she asked, something unidentifiable in her voice.
“Aye. I like him.”
He caught her appraising look as she raised her beer bottle to her mouth. He had to force himself to drag his gaze away from her lips. He shifted and turned back to the stove, hiding the fact that his cock was growing obnoxiously hard just from looking at her. It took only a second to serve up the simple meal and he and Esha sat at the small table pressed against the wall.
“Thanks,” she said when he placed the dish in front of her.
He watched her take a bite. There was a primal satisfaction in feeding her. He hadn’t had anyone to take care of in centuries.
“This is really good. Do you do a lot of cooking back home?”
“Some. I’ve a nice kitchen that I remodeled a while back. I actually used to live in your tower flat before you arrived at the university.”
She did a double take. “Oh? I thought it was just for outcasts.”
Guilt stabbed at him, an icepick straight to the gut. “Ah, well.”
“You know it’s true. It’s a beautiful place, but it’s at the far edge of campus, as far from everything else as a building could be.”
He sighed. “Aye. When you came, we weren’t sure where to put you. I liked it when I lived there. A fine place.”
“I guess it is, if you don’t mind being a pariah.”
“You’r
e no’.”
“Yes, I am.” Her voice was fierce, the amber in her eyes darker than usual.
“You shouldn’t be.”
“Sure.” She stabbed another piece of zucchini, clearly wanting to change the subject. “So, why were you placed in the pariah tower?”
He shrugged, not wanting to answer. But he owed her the truth. “You once called me a mystery monster.”
She flinched. “Sorry about that.”
“Doona worry about it, you were right. When I sold my soul, I became something other. Deathless in a way that no other immortal is, since I have no soul to take my consciousness to an afterworld.”
Esha put down her fork and stared at him. “So you mean that decapitation or immolation or magic can’t kill you like it will the rest of us?”
“Aye. Without my soul as my ticket to an afterworld, my body will reform with my consciousness. As a result of the change, I popped up on the university’s radar. I couldn’t stay with my clan. It would reveal the existence of Mytheans.”
“Maybe not.”
“Well, it would reveal that immortality is possible, since I’d never die. That’s close enough. The university knew they had to do something with me. They gave me a place to live—the tower, since they dinna know what I was or what I was capable of—until they figured out a place for me.”
“With the Praesidium.”
“Aye.”
She nodded, then laughed bitterly. “So maybe if I stayed another hundred years, I’d make it out of pariah status.”