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“It doesn’t matter. You said you wanted to talk. That’s fine. But I think it’s my turn to ask the questions now. Like this biggie: what are you doing here anyway? How did you even get out of the asylum?”
“You mean the Black Pine facility?”
I nod.
“There was no point in staying there after you left. I checked myself out.”
I blink, surprised. “You could do that?”
“Sure. It was part of the deal I made when I checked myself in.”
That’s right. While most of the juveniles on our floor were put into the asylum when we were minors and we had no choice, there were a few exceptions. Carolina joined the nineteen-to-twenty-one age group last year so she’s definitely older than eighteen. I guess she’d have some say when it came to how long she was inside.
I’d say lucky, but I know better.
“What about you? You weren’t released when you disappeared. I know because the whole place went on high alert when the techs realized you were gone. How did you do it? I have to ask. Breaking out of the facility is supposed to be impossible.”
Supposed to be. Just like I’m supposed to be human and Carolina is supposed to be just another patient who forgot about me once I was gone—
—like I forgot about Jason until me and Nine chanced up my former groupmate-turned-statue in the Fae Queen’s garden.
I shake my head. I made a conscious decision to pretend that that never happened. I had to. Not only was the threat of the Fae Queen made real in that very moment, but Nine said that Jason—a human working for the fae inside of Black Pine—must have been working against me before he met his fate.
Now that Carolina is here, now that she’s admitted to knowing something about the Faerie races, I keep getting flashes of Jason’s dark face, his terrible expression, and the way he was positioned in the garden, his body language screaming in fear before he was frozen.
I have to kill this conversation.
“I had help, okay? So I left a couple of days early. Big deal. Besides, it’s still my turn to ask the questions. Why did you check into the asylum in the first place if you left as soon as I did?”
“Help,” she echoes, ignoring my last question entirely. She nibbles on her bottom lip, then asks softly, “Was it the fae?”
Crap. Did she really have to go there again?
“You keep bringing up the fae. I don’t want to talk about them. Okay?”
“We both know that won’t make them go away.”
As much as I’d rather pretend otherwise, I do. I do know that.
To my continued surprise, so does she.
9
I’m torn between wanting to make her tell me everything she knows about the fae and trying to sell the act that I have no idea what she’s talking about. After six years in the asylum, I’ve gotten pretty good at convincing others that the fae aren’t real.
Will it work with Carolina? I’m thinking no. I might have had a shot earlier, but once she saw my ears? Once she saw me freak out because, yeah, I definitely had no clue that that happened to me? Yeah. The time for hiding the truth is way behind us.
Doesn’t mean that I need to tell her all the dirty, smelly details about what’s happened to me since the fae came back into my life.
That’s not all, either. Something warns me against giving her any information about me, Nine, or what I’ve been dealing with. Then there’s my shade-walking. Shadow travel. Nine said it was a gift. I decide my weirdo talent should also be a secret.
You know what would be good right now? A distraction. Her brow furrowed, her nose wrinkled, Carolina is watching me so closely, I feel like she can see everything I’m hiding. Letting her inside the house was a mistake. Choosing to enter it myself was probably pretty stupid, too.
Oh, well. Nothing I can do about that now. Except, maybe, kick her the hell out.
Right before I do, my st
omach grumbles. Loudly. So loud, the snarling growl rumbles like thunder in the quiet of the empty room.
