EPILOGUE
Forever
~Joss~
With its cherry-black, glossy exterior, all-black leather interior, and shiny chrome big block engine Brady the genius mechanical tinkerer had assembled just for me,Cleo was one sweet ride. He said he owed me, that they all did.
He didn’t owe me a damn thing. I’d risked my eternal life for theirs, yeah, and it had majorlysucked. But it was nothing any one of them wouldn’t do for me.
Still, I giddily accepted the unnecessary token of his appreciation. My 1999 Ford Mustang SVT Cobra coupe had gone from a junkyard salvage rust bucket to a wet dream.
Gliding my hands around the leather of the steering wheel, I admired Griffin as he stretched out his legs in the passenger seat.
Now he … he was a wet dream.
My dream guy.
He caught me checking him out, offered me that sly, sexy grin I’d never get enough of.
“What? Like what you see?”
I revved Cleo’s engine, just ’cause I could—just like Griffin revved mine.
“Lovewhat I see.”
His grin softened, grew tender. “I love you, baby.”
“Love you back.”
At last, we could speak openly in our cars and know our conversations were private.
Bobo piped up.
Well, almost private.
he said with a jump atop the blanket I’d draped across the back bench seat for him so he wouldn’t scratch Cleo’s leather. He’d only sprained the leg he’d previously broken and was back to his normal, energetic self.
With thedrashvanquished, my pittie had gotten pushy. It was that same determination that had driven him to save me.
It had taken Bobo and Griffin urging me back to them, and a shove from thelushina, along with an infusion of their collective power, for me to pull a Lazarus.
Magnum hadn’t counted on thelushinagiving me a temporary boost. And he, thank fuck, was no longer around to regret his miscalculation.
Not only had the original Magnum absorbed every one of his duplicates before I killed him, but it seemed his freaky alieny companions couldn’t survive without him, either—some sort of hive dynamic. Fanny, Zoe, Rich, a dozen more of our classmates, including the moron Pike Bills, lots of townies, such as a regular grocery store clerk and the dude who manned the counter at Hughie’s Hoagies we’d thought was kind of our friend … their empty bodies and many others were found all throughout town—dead without a single outward sign of what did them in. Even Tracy Westwick, the scientist who’d served as the inspo for Griffin’s supposed mother Mitzi, and Mr. Thompson, Ridgemore High’s principal, had been hiding a nasty gray secret beneath skin suits.
To our surprise, however, the many mercenaries Magnum hired were plain ol’ human. The soldiers genuinely bought into the Magnum worship he was selling. They actually believed he was the solution to the earth’s many global problems. The misguided dudes were actually trying to help—and didn’t mind killing a kid or five when they got in the way—making great money while they were at it.
Sheriff Xander Jones sent them packing, explaining that they’d served a terrible and devious archvillain—but not that he was some kind of creature from another world—while my crew and I were focused on recovering.
Although our physical injuries were devastating, with the help of some fine surgeons and some even finer preternatural healing abilities, in mere days we were back to normal.
At least on the outside.
New scars marred our flesh, but they were shrinking and fading quickly. Brady no longer sported any sign that rebar had once speared him through the chest at the Fischer House party, and the evidence of the five bullets that had ringed my chest at the high school gym had vanished entirely.
With time, there would be no indication that we’d battled for our very survival here at the institute either.
The lingering trauma of all we’d endured … that recuperation would take longer. But each day it got just a little easier to forget what it was like to have a predatory Magnum hunting us.
