Angel's Mark

Twelve

When Cian and I returned home, the whole house smelled like rotting wood and sawdust. The two of us cast each other a look to make sure the other picked up on this, observed that the other did, and only then did we warily step further into the house.

There was a trail of wood chips leading up to the living room; I carefully sidestepped them. "Mom?" I called.

"Guess again," said Nura from within.

The hallway opened up again. Nura was perched on the couch, her sable black hair in a long ponytail hanging from the crown of her head. A pair of protective glasses obscured her eyes, and in her tawny hands was a block of wood and an X-acto knife. A pile of wood peelings slowly built at her feet.

Cian and I both stopped a bit awkwardly.

"Nura," said Cian after a while, "what in the world are you doing?"

She set her knife into the block of wood, shaving another piece off. Then she turned her head, meeting her adoptive brother's eyes levelly. "Whittling."

Cian glanced at me, like I knew what the heck to do. To Nura, he said, "I didn't know you could do that with an X-acto knife."

"You can do anything with an X-acto knife," Nura responded. With each sentence, the wood block got smaller and smaller. "Open a box. Cut out a stencil. Sever an artery."

"No, Nura," I said. "We don't sever arteries. That's illegal."

She scrunched her nose at me as I approached. Waiting until I'd plopped down on the couch beside her, she held out her wood block for me to see. "It's supposed to be a dolphin," she informed me, which was good to know, because I certainly wouldn't have known it otherwise. "Does it look like a dolphin?"

I hesitated. It looked like a suffering block of wood, but there was so much hope in Nura's young, milky brown eyes that I would rather die than tell her that. Cian had said that when he'd laid eyes on me when I was born, when the nurses had lowered me into his arms, he'd known he was going to protect me for the rest of his life. There was something about Nura that stirred that same feeling within me. Maybe since the beginning, when she'd clung to my arm as we fled her father's massacred bar. Maybe when she had forgiven Cian when God knew she had every right not to. Maybe when we'd gotten the approved adoption papers back and she'd told me, "You know, I wouldn't choose any other family in the world."

Nura Horne. What a specimen.

So I just said, "Yeah. I'd say it looks quite dolphin-ish."

She beamed and went back to work while Cian clicked through channels on the television. Sometime between when we'd come in and when Nura had asked me to evaluate her wood dolphin-thing, he'd retrieved a lollipop from the kitchen, as the stick of it now bobbed up and down from his mouth as he worked at it. Sometime while he'd been retrieving said lollipop, he had decided not to get me one.

Favorite siblings weren't a permanent thing for me, but something that changed depending on the situation. The odds weren't in Cian's favor at the moment.

I placed an arm around Nura and leaned to get a closer work at her fine art. She was too busy twisting her X-acto knife to notice. "When did you take up whittling, exactly?"

"Mm. Maybe five minutes ago."

"Oh?" I replied, my eyebrow raising. "Uh, why?"

Nura shrugged, licking her lips. "Pinterest."

"Oh my G—" I cut off, starting again, my face in my hand. "You're turning into our mother."

To my surprise, Nura paused her whittling. She sucked on her bottom lip, looking up at me through her eyelashes. It was an incredibly endearing expression. I almost hated how much it made me love her. "What else am I supposed to do? I'm not going back to school yet, and you're always training, and Cian's always job-hunting, and when either of you aren't training or job-hunting, you're out with Lucie."