If I could just get Hunt back alive, his preternatural healing—maybe with the help of a surgeon—would fix him up. I tossed the chair leg aside. It clattered and thudded.
Rounding Hunt’s body, I squatted close and slid my arms under his, hooking them around his shoulders. I prepared to heft his weight on my own, but suddenly Orson was there, lifting his legs.
I glanced up at him. He offered me a grim, hardened smile that was as hopeless as my not-dad’s words.
But when I stood with Hunt’s body, so did he. A pool of blood marked where my friend had fallen. His shirt was soaked, front and back, and dripped as we moved.
We were sidestepping a pile of fallen hardcover books when my dad hustled over and helped me support Hunt’s shoulders.
Gently, as if Hunt’s open eyes weren’t unseeing, we lowered his body to the floor beside Brady. Their legs touched.
Nodding at my progress, I aimed my attention in the direction where I left Griffin and found Armando and Yolanda already carrying his body.
They lowered him next to Layla, Armando cradling Griffin’s busted head with a tenderness that made my heart clench and my eyes water.
His stare stuck on Griffin, Orson said, “Joss, your dad’s right. As much as I’d like you to bring my son back to life … you shouldn’t try. The five of you loved each other like I’ve never seen anybody else love each other. They loved you.”
With filthy hands, he rubbed his eyes. His face was so bare without his usual tortoiseshell glasses. “They wouldn’t want youto get yourself killed, too, trying to save them when they’re”—his inhale shook—“when they’re dead already.”
My dad’s hand was back on my shoulder. “There’s no saving them, honey. The best you can do now is to save yourself. Live for them. Make it count.”
“Griffin would want that,” Orson said. “How he loved you…”
Each time they used the past tense was like a shovelful of dirt over their coffins, deep in a hole in the ground already.
I looked at my dad and Orson. Grief sagged across their features, making them appear a decade older.
So they hadn’t lied… They did love us in their twisted ways.
I gazed from them to the two remaining ninja instructors, then to others whose faces were new, whose names I didn’t know.
The formidable wolf was gone. In his place stood a naked, blood-soaked man who appeared to be in his midtwenties. His stance was strong. He wasn’t defeated.
He nodded at me. A recognition that risks should be taken when the stakes were important enough. Either that, or it was what I wanted to see. It didn’t really matter, regardless.
Armando, in his melodic Brazilian lilt, caught my attention. “Me perdoa.Sorry we not fight for you before. It was right thing to do.”
“I’m sorry too,” I said, the words still sounding foreign, like I was there in my body but also not. Like a part of me was missing.
“Sweetheart,” my dad said, rolling on the balls of his feet, his hands clenched into fists, searching for a way to stop me when he had to know there was nothing he could do. “Please. Don’t do this. You’ll only die with them.” Panic made his plea jumpy.
I had nothing to say to him or to anyone else. No final grandiose speech about the life-changing nature of love and friendship and loyalty, or about the nobility of sacrifice.
The only people I wanted to share anything with were on the other side of death.
I was going to cross that line to retrieve them. If I didn’t succeed? If I didn’t return? Well then, soon enough I wouldn’t feel anything at all.
Bobo rubbed along my legs. Several smears of blood on my jeans were thick and goopy enough not to be fully dry yet, and they dragged across his dark fur. Not that it mattered. His muzzle was coated in the stuff, as were his front paws, like he’d used them to clamp down on the heart.
I asked him privately.
Who was I to judge? I’d been the one to dig out the man’s pumping heart with my bare hands.
Bobo’s tail was pointed.
