a sitting position, drawing her knees to her chest.
‘I miss him too,’ she said, and Evie heard the tremble in her voice.
She stared at Flic for a few seconds in silence, and then she too slid down the wall and sat cross-legged on the floor facing her.
‘I dream about him sometimes,’ she admitted. ‘It’s like I can’t let him go. He feels so real, so alive in my dreams. Sometimes I wish I could just stay asleep forever.’
She risked a glance up at Flic, half-expecting to see her sneering, but she wasn’t; she was listening intensely. ‘I keep wishing that it was him and not Cyrus that came back,’ Evie mumbled, ‘and that’s so unfair and so wrong of me.’
‘You know,’ Flic said after a pause, ‘I hated Lucas for choosing you over the rest of us. Hell, for choosing to die.’ She frowned to herself as if she’d been puzzling over this for a long time. ‘But with Lucas everything was about instinct. That’s what made him such an incredible fighter. All the time I thought he was just being stupid and stubborn for wanting to save you, to protect you when it was impossible, he wasn’t. He was just going with his instincts. So how could he have been wrong?’ Flic asked.
‘He’s dead,’ Evie pointed out.
Flic winced, then shook her head hard. ‘But he can’t have died for nothing. I don’t believe it.’
‘Well, what did he die for?’ Evie asked. From where she was sitting, the reasons were pretty non-existent.
‘I don’t know,’ Flic answered, levelling her eyes at Evie. ‘But I choose to believe it was for something worthwhile.’
‘Where’s Jamieson?’ Evie suddenly asked, both to change the subject but also because she’d just become aware of the rapid heartbeat of a Shapeshifter somewhere nearby.
‘He’s sleeping,’ Flic said, nodding towards a door at the end of the corridor.
Evie smiled. She liked Jamieson, Flic’s boyfriend. ‘And Issa?’ she asked, more out of politeness than because she really wanted to know. She didn’t like Issa, Lucas’s ex-girlfriend, quite as much as she liked Jamieson.
Flic shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She disappeared about eight weeks ago. A few days after Lucas …’ She paused, her voice wavering. ‘She was pretty cut up about it.’
She broke off at the sound of footsteps. Evie turned her head.
Jamieson had appeared in the doorway, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. He was in his usual shift, his sandy-brown hair sticking up all over the place. When he saw Evie, his face split into a wide grin.
Evie jumped to her feet and walked over to him, smiling ruefully. He pulled her instantly into a bear hug.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.
‘Evie’s in trouble,’ Flic sighed. ‘Again.’
‘And there I was thinking this was a personal call,’ Jamieson laughed, giving her shoulders a squeeze. ‘You’re looking thin. I’m going to have to update my shift.’
Evie grinned back at him, the muscles in her cheeks feeling tight and unused to the action. Seeing Jamieson shift into a replica of herself had been one of the weirder moments of her life. And that was saying something.
‘What’s going on?’ Jamieson asked, looking at Flic.
‘We’re just discussing how we’re going to kill a group of Originals who are slaying half the population. And,’ she paused, glancing sideways at Evie, ‘after that, how we’re going to kill Victor.’
Evie’s head flew up. We? She narrowed her eyes at Flic, a smile slowly forming on her lips.
Flic huffed loudly, and got to her feet. ‘You gotta stand and fight, right?’
Chapter 27
He was crouched down in the abandoned shop, wedged between two narrow bookcases. The sunlight streaming through the slatted windows was dissecting the floor, casting prison bar shadows. He lifted his arm up slowly and extended it, letting his hand fall into a shaft of light. He drew it back quickly, as if he’d been burnt and rested his head back against the wall, shutting his eyes – and seeing her, as always.
Why was he still here? It didn’t make sense. Why couldn’t he fade back? As a child he’d been knocked unconscious and found himself in the Shadowlands for the longest minute of his life before he’d returned to the human realm. Why couldn’t he do that now? Maybe he’d been unconscious too long. Or maybe as a kid he’d only dreamt it. Or maybe this was all a dream. He didn’t know. He couldn’t fathom it.
The door, boarded over and pushed just to, was kicked ajar from the outside. His eyes flew open and