Everything spun again, a little more. I set my cup down to grab the edge of my desk. Instead of landing on the surface, like I thought it would, it plunged off the edge and hit the floor. Creamy goodness ran slowly out of the straw and the small hole around it.
I blinked down at the growing stain.
When I lifted my head, Sutton was on her knees, lowering her face toward my spilled drink.
“Am I hallucinating?” My grip on the edge of the desk started to slip. “I think something’s wrong with me.”
Sutton yanked her phone out of the pocket of her jeans, lifting it quickly to her ear. “There’s wolfsbane in Bloom’s coffee. Where are you?”
The world spun again, and didn’t stop spinning this time.
My nausea grew worse.
Wolfsbane?
That was what the wolves called aconite.
It was deadly.
Sutton was saying something else into the phone, but my mind was racing. My heart was, too.
My stomach turned, and I lifted the back of my hand to my mouth, fighting the urge to retch.
Sutton put my paperwork-filled trash bin in my lap, then pulled my hair back behind my face. “Breathe,” she ordered. “Maverick is on his way. He’s in the tower, but he’ll be here soon.”
“I’m going to die,” I said, my voice slurring
I gagged, and she pulled my hair back tighter with one hand. With the other, she opened my desk drawer, searching for a hair tie.
They were organized neatly in their own tiny bin, next to my pink sticky notes. Not to be confused with the blues.
“Can you call my family?” I asked before I gagged again. She tied my hair back deftly, at the nape of my neck. “And Harper. Shit,Harper.”
She needed me.
Velour still hadn’t gotten back to us.
She had to live. I was supposed to help her. Everyone was going to kill her, and the world wasstill fucking spinning.
“No. You’re not going to die, Bloom.”
“There’s no antidote. I know how this goes.” I clutched the desk tighter as everything spun harder.
My stomach turned again, and I vomited into the trash bin. I didn’t feel better afterward, like Harper said she did when she had one of those teeny little human stomach bugs that only lasted a day.
I groaned, resting my face on the edge of the bin as I tried to catch my breath. My heart was racing too fast, and sweat made my bloody-crusted pink sweater feel like it was glued to my skin.
We should’ve burned that thing after Maverick’s challenges.
“You’ll start vomiting blood soon. Within a few minutes,” Sutton said calmly. “It won’t kill you. When your body’s nearly empty,Maverick will feed you his blood, and you’ll recover. It worked for Oren, a few weeks after the war ended. It’ll work for you too.”
I threw up again. It hurt more and went on longer.
“That doesn’t sound like it’s going to work,” I moaned.
“It has before.”
“Only once?”
