“He’s right,” Nate added, moving his hand to rest firmly at the base of my neck right over my racing pulse. “You’re experiencing a massive psychological shift, and it’s completely natural to feel a loss of identity when your environment and your physical reality change this drastically. But your identity is not fragile, Callie. It’s the very core of why we are drawn to you. We don’t want you to change who you are. We simply want you to let us in.”
“But it’s too much,” I argued weakly, a tear finally slipping free to trace a hot path down my cheek. “You guys are so old and so intense. You’ve been fighting and surviving for centuries, and I’m just a girl from the city who needed a job. I don’t know how to be what you need.”
“You don’t have to ‘be’ anything other than exactly what you are r
