Half the lie-rents sucked in stunned gasps. The other half grew stonily silent. All their stares landed on me.
“That’s right. He tried torapeher. Fucking lucky thing that my girl Joss here’s a fucking badass who stabbed the shit out of him before he could take it too far.”
Griffin grunted, his breaths coming harder, and I leaned my head on his shoulder to calm him.
“Not only do you owe us apologies, you owe us all the answers and explanations. More than that, you owe usprotection.” Her voice grew thick. “We believed you were ourparents. We believed you’d keep us safe.” She sniffed. “Instead, you conspired against us, lied to us,murderedus—”
“We didn’t—” Porter started.
Layla snapped up a hand, instantly stopping him. “You spied on us. And as if all that weren’t bad enough, ’cause did ya catch it, ya fuckingkilled us?”
Several of them started speaking at once. Layla flung up another hand. “Maybe you didn’t pull the trigger, but what you did was just as bad. You knew it was happening.”
“Honey, we didn’t know,” Celia managed to interject.
“Maybe at the beginning you didn’t, but tell me you didn’t guess at it.”
This time, when Layla finally gave them an opening, none of them said a thing.
When she sniffled again, Brady rubbed her back, and Bobo rested his head on her thigh. Automatically, her hand dropped to pet behind Bobo’s ears.
Looking at him instead of them, she added, “You allowed a predator to feel justified in preying on a friend I love like a sister.”
My heart squeezed.
“Magnum came here and snuck into her room in the dead of night because he knew there’d be no consequences. ’Cause he knows you’ll do whatever it takes to get the answers you want for your belovedscience.” She spat the word.
Celia opened her mouth but ended up saying nothing.
I reached over and grabbed Layla’s free hand, holding it tightly.
She sniffled again. “Magnum knew none of you would stand in his way. He owns you all. Hell, he owns this entire town. He wanted to shoot his load inside Joss, so he came over here to do it, didn’t matter one bit that she didn’t want him to.”
The ’rents as a whole, save for Alexis, squirmed.
“You know why?” Layla asked them.
They stared back at her.
“Of course you do. He wants a new generation of pets that’s easier to control than we are. He wants his genes in the mix, so he can get one step closer to becoming the archvillain of all time with a full array of fucking superpowers.”
Celia’s brow furrowed. “Archvillain? Superpowers?”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever. I know we’re not actually living in a comic book, but that’s how it feels to us. Magnum’s the villain, okay? And tonight he tried to get my girl pregnant so he could make it easier to combine his powers with hers.”
“Powers?” Celia uttered with another scrunch of her forehead.
“Oh, knock it off already, Mom. Or, not-my-mom.”
Celia’s breath hitched, as if that were the worst of the things Layla had said.
“We know Magnum’s not really human. We know this isn’t even the only one of him walking around Ridgemore. Much to our disappointment…”
The ’rents shared yet another look among themselves. Did they not get how incredibly over their stupid, secret looks we were?
Layla had the situation plenty handled, but I found myself speaking anyway. “A lot of damage has been done. More than we can probably ever fully recover from.”
“No kidding,” Hunt murmured.
