Dawn College

"Convertible, and I wasn't wearing a seatbelt. Ninety, ninety five miles an hour collision, no seatbelt and I went halfway over the windshield, halfway through it."

"Well had you been anyone but you, you'd have been dead. Is that what you were aiming for?"

"Healing kicked in at seven or I would have died before I was eight. Father found out I healed exceptionally well, told mother, and she buried a knife in my eye. I wasn't doing anything in the car except spiting someone. Old model; one of only a couple dozen. Wasn't easy to find parts. He couldn't salvage it."

"Well I bet it made fine scrap." Raine smirked a little.

"It made pretty decent scrap once they scraped all the pieces together. The pieces under the hood were pretty done for."

"I'm sure it got melted down and made into something pretty. Maybe it was the metal that was in my dad's assohole of the year medal I bought him once."

Jace snorted softly. "Because it's what every dad needs; an asshole of the year award."

"My dad doesn't just need one, he deserves one. He puts so much effort into being an asshole, he needs rewarding. He made me melt the metal down in my own hands...."

"Did it stick or burn? Sometimes I take for granted I can't feel and I get ashamed when I dismiss other's pain..."

"Nah, I let it run through my fingers, let it burn a hole in the eight hundred year old white lion skin rug on the floor. I think he wanted it to burn and stick to my hands though, teach me a lesson, instead he ended up making me ruin a ten thousand dollar fur hide."

"That's what he gets for trying to think smart. I tried not to ruin anything over two hundred years old after the first time, I..." Jace trailed off quietly, looking a little discomfited.

"You can go on," Raine prompted softly, "You don't have to mind what you say in front of me."

"I don't know what fucked my biology up so much, but I can't...I can't die from drowning. Keep me underwater long enough and everything starts burning from oxygen deprivation but I just won't die. When I was seventeen...we had a family tree that went back to the fifteen hundreds, a book. It catalogued everything. It was fragile as anything, wispy pages, cracked spine, broken cover. I was locked in a box with holes and kept at the bottom of a pool of ice water for about a month. I just...I wouldn't die."

Raine frowned deeply at that and wrapped her arms around him, smoothing his hair down softly. "That's awful."

"I've never hated myself more to be honest. Not since that point. Though, it did feel like some sort of poetic justice crap when we dumped him in the lake."

"Is that why you chose the lake?"

"That, and it was less hassle than burning him alive. Less conspicuous too."

"Would he have lived if you'd burned him?"

"He's got a mimicry of what I have, not the real thing. He would have burned. Lived through it too, until his brain went. The only reason why I flipped bodies was because I tore the last one apart at the cellular level and look at me right here. Alive."

"If you really wanted your dad gone why not just burn him?"

"Too difficult to set up on the short notice that he arrived. And I didn't really want you doing it. That seems a bit much to ask."

"I'd have passed it off as an accident to anyone that asked..."

"I mean I wouldn't to ask you to do that for me."

"You asked me to help you dump him, why not burn him?"

"Burning is a lot more violent and disgusting than dumping. Scarring experience too."