Baby’s first heartbreak, I guess.
Whatever this pitiful, soul-rending feeling inside me is, it seems too dense to be borne. Because Lowe is right: I’ve spent years being at home nowhere, and my best friend disappeared after the worst argument of our lives—yes, probably voluntarily, and probably because she doesn’t give a fuck about me, not nearly as much as I do about her. I’m no stranger to pain, to loneliness, to disappointment, but this. This pressure inside me, it’s not solvable. The weight of it, how does one bear it?
I find no answer by pressing my fingers to my eyes until I see stars.
My shower takes five minutes. I valiantly try to scrape the rejection and humiliation off my skin, but fail. I barely have time to find a change of clothes before the buzzer rings, and Mick’s voice informs me that Lowe asked him to come get me. A heartbeat later I’m sliding into the passenger seat of his car. “How are you, Misery?”
“Good.” I try for a small smile. “You?”
“I’ve been better.”
“I’m sorry.” I give him a cursory look. Then another. Maybe taking care of someone else’s distress will alleviate mine. “Is there anything I can do?”
“No.”
I go back to focusing on the streetlights and wait impatiently for Mick to finish puttering around and start the car, but I don’t know why. I have no reason to be impatient, because I have nowhere to be. No place to call mine.
“Have you talked with Ana recently?” I ask. If Lowe sends me elsewhere, I likely won’t see her again. I guess I’ve grown overly attached to her, too, because my heart squeezes even tighter.
“No,” Mick says. “But I think it’s for the best.”
I lean my temple against the window. My head pounds with a dull kind of ache. “Why is that?”
“It’s complicated.”
I huff out a sour laugh, and my breath mists the glass. The same fucking words as Lowe’s. What a cunning way to get out of telling the truth. “You Weres sure love to say—” A bug prickles my skin, and I swat it away. But when I turn around, what I find is not something I can make sense of.
Mick.
Holding a small syringe.
Injecting it in my arm.
I look up at his face, trying to parse what is happening. “I’m sorry, Misery,” he says. His voice is soft and his eyes are sad, down-tilted in a way that makes my battered chest hurt even more.
Why? I ask.
Or I don’t. The word doesn’t make it out, because I’m tired, and my limbs are heavy, and my eyelids so laden with iron that the darkness behind them feels too sweet to—
CHAPTER 27
There is very little he wouldn’t do, very few people he wouldn’t kill, just to ensure her well-being.
When we were young, eleven or maybe even twelve, before Serena managed to grasp the difference in our physiologies, she would sometimes get bored of spending her afternoons all alone doing homework or watching TV, and slink into my room to shake me awake when the sun was still too high in the sky. She’d be surprisingly ruthless, more forceful than her little body looked capable of. She’d grasp my shoulder and waggle it hard, with the force of a pack of rottweilers chewing their favorite toy into a slimy chunk of plastic.
That’s how I know that she’s here, with me. Even before I open my eyes. Vampyres do not dream. Therefore, this commotion must be happening for real. And there is simply no other being in The City, on this Earth, who could be this fucking—
“Annoying,” I say.
Or slur. My tongue is still asleep, far too cumbersome for my mouth and made of papier-m?ché. I should open my eyes, at the very least one of them, but I suspect that someone embroidered my eyelids to my cheeks and then soaked them in superglue. Upon consideration, the best choice would be to ignore all of this and go back to my nap.
“Misery. Misery? Misery.”
I groan. “Don’t—yelling.”
“Then don’t—going back to sleep, Bleetch.”
The word tears my eyes open. I’m once again on a damn bed, where I once again don’t remember lying down. My internal clock is shot, and I have no clue whether it’s day or night. I instinctively move my neck—ouch—checking for sunlight pouring in, and find . . .
No windows. I’m in a wooden attic, large and climate-controlled, with ceiling-high shelves full of books on every wall. There is a plate on the coffee table nearby with leftover pasta smeared all over it, and a small pile of soda cans and plastic water bottles.
I take an achy breath, feeling the drugs fade at a snail’s pace. It’s not day, not yet. Not even close to sunrise. I must have been out an hour, two tops, which means that Mick didn’t carry me that far. Mick—Mick, what the fuck, Mick?—must have decided to stash me with—
Serena.
I’m with Serena.
“Holy shit,” I mumble, trying to sit up straighter. It takes two attempts and substantive help from her to manage a still mostly prone position. “Holy shit.”
“Why, hello. How lovely of my oldest and most treasured friend to join me in my humble abode.”
“I’m your only friend,” I cough out, wondering whether my brain is making shit up. Vampyres do not dream, but they do hallucinate.
“Correct. And rude.”
“I . . .” I smack my lips. This dry-mouth situation needs to be addressed. Is this why Humans and Weres drink water all the time? “What the fuck?”
“Did they knock you out? I couldn’t find a bump on your head.”
“Drugged me. Mick did.”
“Mick being the older Were who deposited your lifeless body here like a sack of potatoes and brought me SpaghettiOs?”
“Not lifeless.”
“The thing about Vampyres is, you tend to look pretty lifeless.”
“Shit—Serena, you know how long I’ve been looking for you?”
Her smile is commiserating. “No. But if I may hazard a guess, I would say . . .” She taps her chin several times. “Three months, two weeks, and four days?”
“How—?”
She points behind her. She’s been carving lines on the side of the bookshelf, tallying time in groups of five days.
“Shit,” I whisper. There are so many. The physical manifestation of how long Serena has been gone and—
Without thinking, I half roll, half push off the bed to hug her close. I can barely hold my arms up, and it cannot be a good experience for her, but she valiantly squeezes me back. “Did you just initiate physical touch? What is happening? Did you start therapy while I was gone?”
“I missed you,” I say into her hair. “I didn’t know where you were. I looked for you everywhere, and—”
“I was here.” She pats my back. Squeezes me harder.
“Where the fuck is here?” I pull back to study her. She’s wearing a pair of too-large jeans and a long-sleeved shirt I’ve never seen on her. She’s soft and curvy as always, but the last time I saw her she had bangs and a bob that made it just past her chin, and her hair has now grown into a completely different cut. “You look good.”
Her eyebrow lifts. “That’s a weird thing to say in the let’s-exchange-vital-info stage of a joint abduction.”
“It was a damn compliment!”
“Fine. Thanks. I was always very self-conscious of my forehead, as you know, but maybe unnecessarily? Maybe I’ll spare myself the whole monthly trim—”
“Okay, now shut up. Where are we?”
She rolls her eyes. “I have no clue. And believe me, I’ve tried to figure it out, but there are no openings and the place is really well acoustically insulated. There must be at least four or five stories underneath us, just based on listening to the pipes in the bathroom. The guards who feed me are very careful not to show themselves or come near enough for me to guess their species, but now that your friend Mick is in the picture, I’d guess we’re in Were territory. That doesn’t narrow it down by much, though.”
Emery. She has to be part of this. And Mick must have been helping her all along. He was one of Roscoe’s seconds, after all.
I pinch my forehead. “Why did you get yourself involved with the Weres?”