"You're too young, you know," he says. "To be this perceptive."

There's a hint of teasing in his voice, though, and he doesn't really mean it at all. There are so many people who would honestly believe such a thing, that Elsa is too young to really understand what she's speaking of, but Marcus isn't one of them. At twelve he'd been the best exorcist the Catholic Church had seen in decades and before he'd even hit his teens, he had seen more violence than most people do in their entire life. Age has so little to do with what people are truly capable of feeling.

"This isn't quite how I expected to spend the first week of the new year," he admits and then he looks at his hands again and concentrates, and very slowly, begins to build another snowball. "But now that you and I have met, I think I can look at it as a trade off worth paying."