“If Jayden knows, Silas knows,” Quillan countered, sounding resigned.
“What?” I demanded, rounding on all three of them. “What are you even talking about? How could you say that?”
“Easily.” Quillan rolled his eyes. “I haven’t seen Silas since you healed him. He checked out of the hospital and cleared a bunch of his stuff from the mountain house. This isn’t the first time he’s kept a secret from you to try and protect you. He obviously found out who the messenger is, and now he’s going after him. It kind of makes sense… to catch an invisible person, you have to become invisible yourself. At first I thought he was just hiding from the Klovoda or Weston, but this… this makes more sense.”
“But… he was with me last night,” I managed to declare, my words escaping on a strangled exhalation. “He can’t disappear. He can’t… he can’t…”
I was on the floor beside Quillan’s chair, my head falling onto his knee as his hand settled gently on my head.
“He’s going to get himself killed,” Noah groaned, sounding as helpless as I felt.
“We all know he can’t kill himself without hurting us as well,” Quillan countered, trying to be the voice of reason. “He won’t let it get that far.”
“He can’t,” I repeated. Maybe it was the only thing I could say, but it suddenly seemed very important.
“He’s not answering,” Cabe announced, indicating that he had tried to call Silas. “What time did he leave you last night, Seph?”
“I don’t know. I was asleep.”
“Do you think he’ll come back tonight?” Quillan asked, his fingers stilling in their calming tugs against my hair.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and fiddled with the buttons instead of answering Quillan. I didn’t like that Silas was pulling away from everyone, but what could we really expect after he had spent so many months being tortured by Weston? He probably wanted to be invisible.
Making up my mind, I navigated to his contact and quickly typed out a message.
Will you come over tonight?
I stood and walked down to the stage at the bottom of the lecture hall, needing the privacy of my own thoughts as I waited for a reply. I paced from one end to the other, my brow furrowed and worry gnawing a hole in my chest. I didn’t even know if he still had his old number, or if he was in possession of a phone at all. When my phone finally vibrated, I pulled it out of my pocket so fast that I almost dropped it.
You’re a terrible trap, angel.
My heart sank, and I had to swallow back against the sudden threat of tears.
“He thinks that you guys put me up to it,” I called up to them in a strained voice. “I don’t think he’ll come back again tonight.”
“He will if you ask him to,” Quillan returned calmly.
The others didn’t say a thing. Noah had his jaw locked and Cabe seemed too worried to speak. I stared at the screen of my phone until the words started to blend together, and then I forced my fingers to type a single word.
Please.
His reply was instant.
You can do better than that.
I sucked in a breath, clenching the phone in stiff fingers as I marched up the aisle of seats to where the others still sat. I hurled my bag at the ground and ripped off my jacket and scarf, taking a second to deliberate my next move before looking Quillan squarely in the face.
“You might not want to watch this.”
He only frowned in response.
“I warned you,” I mumbled, bending down to pull off my shoes.
“What are you doing?” Cabe asked, standing from his seat.
Noah jumped over the back of the seat in front of him, walking down to stand on the stair below me, his expression curious and guarded all at once. I ignored them all, freeing the buttons on my jeans one-by-one.
“Whoa, Seph, what the—” Quillan surged up, panic in his expression.
“I warned you,” I repeated, tucking my thumbs into the waistband of my jeans and sliding them down my legs.
I stepped out of them quickly as Cabe burst out laughing and Noah’s jaw started to shift like he was grinding his teeth. I notched my foot on the chair that Quillan was still standing in front of, peering down at the flowering bruise on the inside of my thigh.
“Who’s going to take the picture for me?” I asked the room, poking lightly at the mark.
“Is this some kind of new-age sexual blackmail?” Cabe piped up, his eyes wandering over my legs as he leaned back against one of the seats, folding his arms across his chest and making no move toward my phone.
“I don’t even know what that means.” I rolled my eyes at him. “But it has to be in an inappropriate place, or he won’t get mad enough.”
He grinned back and I stumbled over my own smile. Damn Cabe and his stupid smiles.
Quillan snatched the phone out of my hand, closing his fingers around it like he was seconds away from crushing it into dust. His eyes were fixed on my bruise.
“What the hell is that?” he asked me.