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It works. He moans, gripping his stomach, the pain still clear on his face. He’s turned a pale green, and I begin to panic. “Okay, just hold tight, okay? I’ll get help.”
I don’t wait for an answer, I just run toward the mansion, but my stupid heels sink into the soggy ground, and eventually, I quit trying to pull them from the wet dirt. Barefoot, I run toward the house, where Hawthorne, South, and Lennox are all in the kitchen, arguing.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” Hawthorne asks immediately upon seeing me.
“Goddammit,” Lennox growls. “Do you not remember what we were just saying?”
“Look at her…” Hawthorne points to me and their faces all scrunch up in worry.
I look down at myself and see my legs and bare feet caked in mud.
“You were seriously gone for five minutes, Ten.” South pushes away from the kitchen island. “What the fuck did that bastard do to you?”
“He didn’t do anything. He just needs a witch doctor.”
Lennox’s lips curl. “I knew it. You push us away and already you are back asking us for help.”
“Dammit, I know. I’m a flake and a fuck up and I broke your hearts. But this guy is dying.”
Lennox lifts an eyebrow. “We’re already dead, remember?”
“Fine, whatever.” I throw up my hands and begin running room to room, asking for a witch doctor. No one here is one. Of course, they aren’t. We’re in a fancy-pants house on the water, the center of town. Not deep in the Bayou, where the voodoo casts its spell.
“Anyone? Any at all?” I beg, asking guest after guest for help. Realizing I look like a crazy person, screaming for help like this.
I don’t know why I feel loyalty to this man I don’t know. He touched me and said words that make no sense, yet they hit me in my heart. I don’t know who Gaia is or who Harlow might be, but his touch sent a sensation straight to my core.
“Hawthorne,” I ask, knowing he won’t say no. Is it wrong to use him again, the way I always have? “Will you... help?”
Hawthorne and Lennox share a look, and as they do, I see the faintest etchings of a fade burning over their brows. My heart constricts, knowing what is coming. For all of them.
“He just got here and is sick. Something isn’t right.”
Time stills as I wait for an answer. Lennox looks so bruised and broken when our eyes meet. I remember the day I met him. He’d crawled from the marsh and been so damn scared. Hawthorne and I took him home with us. I never let him go.
Finally, it’s Lennox who breaks the silence. “Of course, we’ll help you, Tenny.”
Relief washes over me, and I don’t even know why I care so damn much for a stranger, but I do. “Thank you. Thank you, Lennox.” I wrap my arms around him, kissing his cheek. Grateful for his tenderness toward me as undeserving of it as I am.
“On one condition,” he says as I pull away.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“You stay with us tonight.”
4
South
She answers quickly with a yes. I tell myself it’s because she wants to be with us and not because she cares that fucking much about a man she just met.
But I know Tenny. She loves the newcomers. She’s always asking them questions about their old lives, desperate for some clue as to why she’s been here, stuck, for so long. It’s strange, she and Hawthorne are the only two people here in Styx who age. And damn I’m jealous that he had the honor of growing up with the girl I love.
But unfortunately, Hawthorne, Lennox, and I are old hat. We aren’t novel, we aren’t new. We don’t have exciting stories about the real world to dole out. We don’t have a single story she hasn’t heard.
She knows us inside and out. Up and down, in every possible way.
Except for the way I really want.
I want to know her body the way I know her heart. I want to feel her skin against mine, see her vulnerable for once in her damn life.
But instead of giving me the thing I wanted, she pushed me away.
We asked for more. She said no.
Maybe it was too much, to consider all three of us. Maybe we should have asked her to choose.
But I love the guys as much as I fucking love her. And why choose, when we all love her so damn much?
Instead, she wants us to save some fucking newbie.
“Where is he?” I ask, and then we’re following her from the house to the wet grass, to the man unconscious on the edge of the river.
I want to ask if it’s worth it. One look at him and it’s clear he’s struggling even to breathe. Wouldn’t it be easier to let his soul decide? Why intervene now?
