Came Back Haunted (Experiment in Terror #10) - Karina Halle Page 0,83
how painful it gets.”
Maximus swallows. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t know.”
“I know.”
“She wouldn’t have been with me, and that’s a good thing.”
“Well, actually,” Dex muses slowly. “She did end up in Hell.”
He frowns. “How is that possible?”
“She didn’t belong there,” I tell him. “But then again, neither did you.”
“But she got out,” Dex says, his voice rising in strange excitement. His eyes go wide and shiny. “She got pulled out.”
“Back to…here?” Maximus asks.
Dex shakes his head, his leg bouncing. “Back to where she belongs. Heaven. Wherever or whatever. With Perry’s grandmother, Pippa.”
Maximus looks at me. “You did this?”
“No,” I tell him, and a wash of shame comes over me, as it often does when I think about the fact that I had nothing to do with it. “It was Ada.”
Max balks, brows raised. “Ada? Your sister?”
I nod, the shame quickly turning into pride. “Yeah.” I smile. “My little sister. She did that. She had help, but she was able to do it.”
“Help from who?” he asks.
“The same man who helped you get here,” I tell him.
“Which means,” Dex says, leaning forward in his chair, “that we don’t need Rose at all. We have Ada.”
“No.” The word automatically falls from my mouth, my hackles rising. “No, no, no.”
Dex turns to me, incredulous. “Why not?”
“Because she’s my sister!”
“You were going to have Rose do it.”
“Rose isn’t my sister. I barely know her,” I tell him. I look at Maximus. “And you trained Rose, right? She knows what she’s doing.”
He nods but Dex keeps talking. “Ada knows what she’s doing. She got your mother out of Hell. That’s not nothing.”
“She had Jay and Jacob,” I tell him. “And now Jay is gone.”
“So she has Jacob.”
“Jacob won’t do it. Or he can’t do it.”
“Did you ask him?”
“As a matter of fact, I did ask him. He said that he’s not able to and that Ada isn’t ready.”
Dex looks at Maximus. “She’s ready.”
I punch Dex on the shoulder. “She’s not. Stop volunteering my sister for a suicide mission.”
“How is this a suicide mission?” Dex cries out. “It should be a fuckton easier than what she did for your mother. She’s not going to Hell, she’s coming into this house, into this very spot where we’re all sitting and having a fucking grand old time, and she’s going to do something to the Veil and pull him out.”
“May I say something?” Maximus says, raising his hand like he’s in school. “First of all, I just want to say that it might not be as simple as all of that. What does Ada have that the two of you don’t?”
“A nicer handbag collection,” Dex says.
“She can do things,” I tell him. “She was being trained by, well, one of your kind, and then I guess things got complicated between them and he was sent off.”
“So she’s like Rose, then,” Maximus says. “If we’re not guarding, then we’re training. Sounds like she’s shaping up to be the same. Which means she should be able to do this just fine.”
I clamp my mouth shut. I don’t want to tell Maximus that I don’t want my sister to get him out of here, but I hate that she’s been brought into this at all. She’s already going through so damn much with Jay leaving her.
“However,” he goes on, coming over to us and sitting his big frame down on the leather couch. “Just because she can doesn’t mean she’ll be able to. You said that Jacob sounded against it?” I nod. “You have to wonder why that is.”
“Exactly,” I tell him.
We all lapse into silence for a few moments.
Dex then says, “So it sounds like the plan is, we bring Ada here and we don’t let Jacob know.”
“Dex,” I growl at him. “Stop it. And what makes you think she’ll want to do this? She’s barely even talking to me.”
“That doesn’t mean she won’t want to help Maximus. She was his friend, too.”
Maximus looks pleased at that. It’s almost adorable.
“Perry,” Dex says, grabbing my thigh. “Come on, kiddo, you know this is the only way.”
“Not if Rose gets back to me,” I grumble.
“Then Rose will get back to you and it will all be fine. But if she doesn’t…”
I sigh, rubbing the heel of my palm into my eye, feeling exhausted all of a sudden. “I can’t ask her over the phone. I’ll have to ask her in person.”
“We’re going there for Christmas,” Dex points out.
“That’s like three weeks away.”
“But Big Red here said time doesn’t pass the same.”