Aoiki grabbed my free hand with both hers and shot a look around as if to make sure no one was listening. “There’s a way to bring him back,” she said in a hushed voice.
All my attention perked up at that. Suddenly, I was squeezing her hands back. “What?”
“The blade, Bob, has a way to call back the entities it kills. You can bring Xander back.”
“I can what now?” Bob asked in a muffled voice from where he was tucked in my coat.
Excitement and hope welled inside me, nearly bursting through my chest.
I tried to tamp it down. “That’s not true. The blade of bane is the only weapon able to permanently kill any immortal.”
A sly smile crept up her face. “Miranda. I take the same high school physics class year after year. Some of the shit they teach is totally off the mark, but they are right about one thing. Matter can ever truly be created or destroyed. Things merely change. There is a way to change him back into a god again.”
I deliberately tried to numb myself against the hope Aoiki was dumping on me. It was too much, and I wasn’t thinking straight, “Why are you helping me?”
She shot me a look like the answer was positively obvious. “Because I know what it’s like to be in love. If I were to lose that love, it would break me.”
Sunny. She was talking about the quiet fae girl with a bobbed haircut. How long had they been together out of her five hundred sum years?
If I had five hundred years with Xander I doubted it would be enough. I missed him so hard it made my bones brittle. I missed his touch, his eyes, his wry sense of humor. Hell, I missed his crazy. I knew I could help him control it, and I felt robbed at not getting more of a chance.
Then Aoiki whispered while looking around to make sure no one heard. “Can I meet you tonight? Where he died?”
I immediately made plans to have Jamal stay with Uncle Javier. “Yes,” I nodded.
“Good,” she said, with a nod. “I’ll see you at nine PM.”
Then she ran off, mentioning she couldn’t be late for schoolagainand risk detention.
The idea that I could get Xander back made the minutes of the rest of my day crawl by. What if we were going to be reunited in a matter of hours?
That would change everything.
It wasn’t over until it was over.
And when I got him back, I was sure Xander would help me figure out who set me up to kill him and why.
ChapterThirty-Four
THE BADASS
Aoiki was an hour late, but when she arrived she had Sunny in tow.
“Sorry about your loss,” Sunny murmured avoiding eye contact with me as if she was painfully shy.
I only nodded, unable to respond to yet another person’s sympathies. I hated it. And if tonight went well, they would be unnecessary.
The girls set down their backpacks in the corner of my living room. “Sorry it took us a while longer, we had to sneak out.”
“Your parents don’t know you are here?” The mom alarm went off in my head.
“I tried to feel them out on it, but I didn’t get the sense they’d exactly approve.”
“Why not?” I asked, feeling suddenly uneasy. They had helped me find the Blade of Bane, they had ultimately helped Vivien resurrect Grim.
Aoiki rolled her eyes as she tightened a pigtail. “Who knows. My mom was in one of her moods today. You know how she is.”
It was true, Echo was temperamental to say the least. And she was the one who told me to follow my heart. Everything in my chest screamed at me that bringing him back was the right thing to do.
