word but with a big grin on her face, Vero stepped on the gas and sped off.
Chapter 21
Evie slunk out of the living room and made her way to the room she’d shared for a night with Lucas. She’d been trying to avoid it, but she really didn’t want to sleep on the sofa again.
She stood a while in the doorway trying to conjure the ghost of Lucas – squinting through her lashes to see if she could picture him lying on the bed, one leg bent sideways, the scars on his chest catching silver in the moonlight. But no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t make him appear. The images in her head were fragmenting, fading away.
She trudged to the bed and lay down, recalling for just one perfect second how it had felt when she had lain there with her head on Lucas’s chest and listened as he told her all about his family. She wondered idly how Flic was doing before pushing the thought away. Thinking about Flic and what she must be going through only made her feel even worse. It sapped all her strength, and she needed whatever strength she could summon in order to get through the coming days.
Without being aware of it she had started counting the notches on the bedpost. Cyrus, the old Cyrus, had made them. It made her squirm on the sheets, hoping he’d washed them. Though she hated to admit it, and she was trying not to think of how Margaret must be feeling, she was secretly glad that Cyrus had come back with them.
It was strange. Cyrus seemed different in so many ways. His conversation was no longer ninety percent sexual innuendo, and he wasn’t constantly trying to get her to sleep with him – but the one thing that was the same was his obsession with being a Hunter. For him it had always been about something other than revenge. And Evie had never fully understood it until he’d explained to them that he was just following his instincts. They’d led him to the Bradbury building, so who was she to argue? Maybe, Evie puzzled, instinct was just another word for describing the tug and pull of fate. And following your instincts merely meant taking the path that fate had plotted out for you. But that brought her full circle. She no longer believed in fate – did she?
With a sigh she rolled over and pressed her face into the pillow. For as long as she lived she’d remember Lucas telling her that life took you down a path, and that sometimes it took you past bad stuff, but that it always took you to exactly the place you were supposed to be.
She wished he was here right now so that she could punch him. It was such a load of crap. This place she was in right now, lying in this bed, alone and lonely, with her heart torn in two, was not where she was supposed to be. And if it was, then she hated fate.
There was a cough from the doorway. She rolled over. Cyrus was leaning against the door jamb.
‘Can I come in?’ he asked.
She frowned at him. She’d had to barricade the door to stop the old Cyrus from waltzing in whenever he felt like it. Now he was asking her permission? He’d evidently lost his memory and found some manners. Small blessings. As she sat up she wondered if the softer, less in-your-face version of Cyrus was going to be permanent or whether it would vanish the moment his memory returned. If it returned.
‘Sure,’ she told him, sitting up.
Cyrus entered the room and looked around, taking in the bunk beds with a sceptical, slightly perplexed expression on his face.
‘Did I make those?’ he asked, pointing at the notches in the bedpost.
Evie twisted her head to look and then nodded at him. ‘Yeah.’
He walked closer, obviously trying to count them, but after a few seconds surrendering to defeat. He shook his head in what seemed like amazement, though she couldn’t tell if it was that or something more like awe.
‘But you made that, didn’t you?’ he said, pointing at the massive crack running up one of the posts and frowning. ‘You were pissed at something.’
Evie nodded. ‘You’re starting to remember things.’
Cyrus dropped down onto the bed beside her. ‘Yeah, though not anything useful,’ he sighed.
Evie drew her knees up to her chest and leant her chin on them, watching him, wondering