I swiped my phone from the nightstand and checked the text messages Kat and Nana had sent me last night.
Kat: Hear UR w/other slayers. Catching butterflies? Or do I need 2 race over there w/a crowbar & an alibi? Never hurts 2 B prepared!!!
Kat: BTW, U owe me a girls’ day out. Let’s put 1 on the books 4 the sec U get home!
Nana: Just got to missing my girl. Hope all is well with you. I love you!
Kat: Stop me if U’ve heard this 1. What did the zombie say 2 his date?
Kat: I just love a woman w/BRAAAINS.
I grinned and fired off a round of responses. I told Kat no crowbar or alibi was needed, but the girls’ day out was as good as done. I told Nana how much I loved and missed her and that all really was well.
Cole emerged from the bathroom dressed in the same clothes he’d worn yesterday. His hair was damp, making the black strands appear blue. A few water droplets slid from his temple to his jaw and fell to the floor. I moved in front of him to rub my towel through his hair.
He wrapped his arms around me, holding me against him, just breathing me in for several moments. “Do you want to hear reason sixteen?”
“So much I’ll probably rearrange your spinal cord if you refuse to tell me.” The reasons he loved me were just as important to me as breathing.
Smiling, he said, “Even if you know the end is coming, you refuse to let me go.”
The end? No, no, no, we weren’t going there. “We’re just getting started,” I said and dropped the towel to beat at his shoulders. “There will be no end.” Not for decades to come. “You said we’d be okay.”
“I know, love. I know. I’m not talking about the vision.”
I relaxed, but only slightly. “Then what?”
“When we had the vision of you making out with Gavin—”
“Hey now! We weren’t making out. Z.A. was trying to eat him.”
Cole kissed the crown of my head. “I know. But the point is, I stopped trusting you, and what I knew about you, instead trusting in what my eyes, or mind, had seen. But you didn’t. You loved me, and you were willing to fight for me. Well, I need you to trust me again. Trust that I’m not going anywhere.”
Trust. He was right.
Last night I’d trusted him with my body. Today, I would trust him with this.
“Like I said before, I just won you back. Nothing and no one will be able to take me away from you, Ali. Not ever again.”
Chapter 14
THERE’S NO
PLACE LIKE BONES
During the hour-long drive to Mr. Ankh’s house, I created a mental decision tree.
Root question: Where had Camilla and River gotten the coded papers?
Trunk: to ask or not to ask.
The branches: if I asked, they would know I’d seen them. If I didn’t ask, I wouldn’t get an answer.
Would their knowing be such a bad thing?
Not really. What was the worst they could do? Accuse me of snooping?
So I did it. I asked.
“How dare you!” Camilla snarled. “You went through my things.”
“Actually, I didn’t.” Maybe I should have charted the branches a littler farther and picked a better place to have this conversation. A crowded car—bad decision. “Is it my fault you left the papers on your desk for anyone and everyone to see? Wait. Let me answer that for you, since I’ll be honest. No. Now, who wrote the code and do you have any idea what it says?”
The question I really wanted to ask: Do you know who “she” is?
River scowled at me. “One of our spies saw the document at an Anima facility and made copies. And no, we haven’t been able to decode it.”
Truth or a lie? Trust him or doubt him? I couldn’t do both.
“Can you?” Camilla demanded. “Decode it, I mean?”
Well, heck. No matter what it cost me, I couldn’t—wouldn’t—lie. Isn’t that what I’d told her? “Yes,” I said. “They talk about the sacrifice of one leading to the liberation of many and a ‘she’ that is coming. What they don’t say is who she is or what she’s supposed to do.”
“How were you able to decode it?” River asked.
I pressed my lips together, refusing to mention the journal.
“It’s a spirit thing.” Cole drummed his fingers against the wheel of Mr. Ankh’s SUV. River’s crew had been the ones to take it but had given it back as a gesture of goodwill. “You have to look at the pages through the eyes of your spirit, not your mind.”
My phone beeped, the sound almost like a trumpet in the sudden quiet.
I looked at the screen. Another text from Kat.
RED ALERT. Cops R here asking Q’s about Trina & Lucas & Cruz. Like what we were doing other nite, & Ankh is being honestish, just not mentioning Cole’s injury, the Z’s or Anima. He even told them U guys were on UR way. Oh, & FYI, he said Cole’s dad is away on business, & UR Nana went w/him—she’s like his new assistant, I guess. Now, back in the lion’s den 4 me. I told them I had 2 pee, & I don’t want them 2 think I ran away. Or, U know, had 2 do #2. C U when I C U. Good luck!