“Hmm, that was nice of her.”
“Yeah.” He spun. “You want a bra or not?”
I blinked at the unexpected question. Was this a best friend or a boyfriend thing to do? We were both, I thought, and there’d been too much dying and upheaval recently to figure out our new relationship.
I smiled gently, refusing to let myself feel awkward with the boy I’d known forever. “How about a camisole with a shelf-bra? Do I have anything like that?”
He was already pulling one out like there wasn’t a single strange thing about him selecting my undergarments. “We would’ve dressed you before helping you into bed, but you were hurting so much and it was hard enough to get you out of the shower and into the room. We didn’t even get you fully dried off before you fell into bed. It seemed worse to leave you exposed while we dressed you, so I just covered you up.” His eyes grew heavier. “We had no idea you’d be out this long.”
“I understand,” I murmured, though I didn’t. Not even a little bit. My friends seeing me naked was the least of my worries when I’d apparently lost control of my body and mind.
Not good. So not good. I was going to motherfucking kill Magnum for this.
Griffin placed my clothes on the bed and leaned over to press a lingering kiss to my head. Then he walked out, pulling the door shut behind him.
Despite my sluggishness, I dressed, peed, and brushed my teeth in record time. When I got a good look at my bare skin—and the totally batshit cray-cray going on there—the need for explanations snaked beneath my skin like desperation. My tattoos—the ones that weren’t supposed to be able to just up and move, because, you know, they weretattoos—had freakingup and moved.
The many designs Layla had painstakingly etched across my skin were now different in size or location—or gone entirely.
Maybe I was still sleeping? Shit, I half hoped I was.
I was barely climbing back into bed when I called for my friends to join me again. “And bring me water too, please! And Bobo!”
Hunt delivered a pitcher of water and was filling a glass for me when I pressed, “Where’s Bobo? Is he okay? I remember him touching me when I was being, well, whatever the fuck that all was. Please tell me he’s okay. And tell me more about what happened to your dad.”
Hunt stared at me for so long that I started to get back out of bed, ready to rush off to save them somehow, though I had absolutely no idea what I could do to help.
But Hunt shook his head till I sat back down, swallowing thickly. “I really wish I could tell you that both my dad and Bobo are okay, Joss, really, I super fucking do. But I don’t know if either of them are, and as far as I can tell, there isn’t a single thing any of us can do to change that for the time being.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, draining half my glass. God, I was so thirsty!
I stared up at him with imploring eyes. “Your dad’s not …dead, is he? Tell me he’s not. He can’t be.”
“No. At least, I don’t think he is. He was unconscious when Magnum had him dragged off.”
I sat up straighter. “Wait, you guys let Magnum take him?”
Griffin climbed up on the side of the bed to lean against the wall, while Brady and Layla lowered to the foot of the bed, settling in.
Brady said, “We didn’tletMagnum do a damn thing.” His eyes blazed. “He threatened us. It’s the fucker’s M.O. Threaten us till he gets us to do whatever crazy crap he wants.”
Hunt raised one of the blinds and, gazing out the window, added, “Actually, he threatened my dad. Said if we didn’t let him go, he’d kill him.”
I gasped, though surely I couldn’t have actually been all that surprised. Death and threats of death had quickly become our new way of life.
I didn’t like it one stinking bit.
“When we still hesitated,” Griffin said, “he upped the ante. Threatened to run enough voltage through you to power the entire campus.”
“You knew I’d come back,” I whispered.
Griffin and Brady were shaking their heads. Griffin said, “There’s no guarantee, not that it’ll happen every time. There’s too much we still don’t know about all that.”
“Besides,” Brady said, “you took longest to come back last time.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But I still came back.”
When my friends just stared at me, their expressions terribly heavy, I chuckled awkwardly. “The whole deal with us being here is accepting that we’re going to die over and over again.” I swallowed the lump building in my throat.
