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“Your impression of him is shit,” I say as I flop down on her bed. My phone slides out of my pocket to rest on the rumpled, star-covered duvet. “And he never offered to kiss my feet.”
“But he would if you asked him to.” She sounds smug.
It’s at that exact moment my phone begins to ring. I don’t even have to look to know the caller will be Travis Lyle…my ex-boyfriend, with bright-blue eyes, sun-streaked blond hair, and a body to die for.
And the personality of a freaking toad.
Why, oh why, does Travis have to callnow? I’ll never hear the end of it.
The universe seems to be cheeky tonight…and a total bitch. That asshole is clearly winking at me. I wish it could hear me retort with a big, loud, “Fuck you.”
Becka’s grin is positively devious as she flicks her gaze between me, my phone, and then me again. One of her perfectly manicured eyebrows raises.
“You gonna get that?”
“Nope.” I make sure to pop the P obnoxiously. She hates when I do that—claims it makes me sound uncouth and uneducated. Of course, that only makes me want to do it more, just to annoy her.
“Afraid he’s going to offer to kiss your feet?” She waggles her eyebrows suggestively. “Or maybe lick them all over?”
“I hate you, you suck, and I’m disowning you as my best friend,” I deadpan.
“You love me, I suck lots of dick, and you can never disown me,” she retorts without pause.
The smile on her face instantly dissipates, a deep furrow materializing between her brows. Immediately, my hackles raise because I know that expression. It’s her “shit’s about to get serious, so you better listen to me” face.
“Becks…”
“Lily, I know the last few years have been… God, I don’t want to say tough, because that word doesn’t even begin to describe what you’ve been through.” She shakes her head and squeezes her eyelids shut. “But that doesn’t mean you can just press pauseon your life. You can slay monstersandhave a social life. Your parents would want you tolive. They would want—”
“Don’t,” I snap with more venom than I intended.
Pain daggers through me, and a rod of pure electricity spirals through my body. Hot wax seems to slither across my skin. All I want to do is collapse to the ground, curl in on myself, and place my hands over my ears to drown out her words.
My eyelids squeeze shut of their own accord, but that only makes everything worse. Because my parents’ faces are etched onto the skin there—the way they looked when I found their bodies.
My father’s eyes wide and unseeing, glazed over in death.
Blood seeping through his blue bathrobe while in the armchair next to his wheelchair.
My mother’s decapitated head in the center of the bloody pentagram, the remaining five points holding a different body part of hers.
Her arms.
Her legs.
Her heart.
And then I see the figure…
The figure in all black…
The figure who vanished before my very eyes…
“Lily! Lily! Breathe! You need to breathe!” Warm arms circle around me, and a deep, shuddering breath reverberates through my body as I inhale Becka’s familiar, rose-scented perfume.
A shard of glass seems to be lodged in my throat.
God, how can just the memory of them make me fall apart like that?
