phone between my ear and shoulder as I lean forward to mute the television in my room.
Uriel picks up on the third ring.
“You rang?”
“SOS. Send wine,” I deadpan, and he snorts.
“That bad, huh?”
I collapse back on my bed, my legs extending in both directions like a star.
“Remind me again why I want to do this?”
There’s a pause, and a second later, Yoselin’s feminine voice greets me. I can picture Uriel’s girlfriend perching on the edge of his bed, her auburn hair meeting the middle of her back in luscious curls.
“Because they’re evil,” she says without preamble, and I hear Uriel grunt his assent. “Because they once locked you in the locker room for an entire weekend. Because Elias asked you to the middle school dance, kissed you, and then Carrie-d you. Because they’re egotistical, nasty, horrendous—”
“Okay, I get the point,” I say with a light laugh, twisting my head to the side to stare at a strand of my white hair. Hair that Lucas told me was beautiful…and then immediately doused with tomato sauce.
I want to tell my friends about last night, when Karsyn came to check on me. I want to pick apart every emotion that distorted his features. I want them to tell me I’m crazy, that I’m imagining things, that it’s impossible for me to truly believe that he has…feelings for me.
He can’t, not after all of the things he did to me. I wonder if it’s misplaced responsibility and guilt, like he’s trying to make amends for the things he did five years ago.
Peony, forgive me, for I have sinned.
“Is Stalker still there?” Uriel chimes in, and I bite my lip to contain my groan. The triangular window in my attic allows me an unrestricted view of the driveway…and the Jeep currently idling at the very end.
“Yes,” I grouse, pulling the phone away from my ear to set it on speaker. My finger hovers over Elias’s name that I reluctantly plugged into my phone last night when he first texted me, asking if I was okay.
When I refused to respond, he drove to my house.
And he’s only left three times since then, to go to the bathroom and eat. Almost every time I look, he’s sitting in that damn Jeep, eyes glued to the attic window, as if he can sense my presence. Which is ridiculous. Elias doesn’t know which room in the house belongs to me, and he definitely can’t see me this far away.
But it almost feels as if his eyes are physical hands, lightly caressing my shoulders and then cascading down the length of my arms to interlock our fingers together. It’s not technically an embrace, but somehow, it feels even more intimate.
“Isn’t that creepy?” Yos gripes, and I can already picture her petite nose scrunching.
“It’s…”
Confusing.
Infuriating.
Sweet.
The last thought causes me to wrench my gaze away from the window, focusing once more on my phone.
“Enough about that,” I say quickly—too quickly. I pray that Uriel doesn’t hear the hitch in my voice. “Tell me about what’s going on in the coven.”
For the next half hour, Yoselin and Uriel regale me with stories of all the people I left behind. Amanda Gray accidentally set off an explosion in the training lab. Jacob and Ryan broke up after Jacob was caught fucking Mr. Leif, the Magic History teacher. And Mom’s still being…Mom. Bossing people around and being an all-around bitch.
I want to ask if they heard about the recent attacks by the Bloods, but I don’t know yet if it’s common knowledge. Besides, I don’t want to worry them, especially since the attacks seem to be relegated to Michigan.
So instead, we keep conversation light, and I tell them a little bit about my revenge scheme on the Devils. When I tell them about Cassian’s boner, they break into raucous laughter, with Uriel pouting because I failed to take a picture. At this point, they know the Devils nearly as well as I do. The three of us stayed up numerous nights, stalking them on social media and discussing different revenge tactics. They know almost everything the Devils did to me when I was younger, and they never once told me to “get over it.”
Because you can’t just dismiss years and years of pain as if it never existed. That’s like hastily placing duct tape on an opened wound and hoping you don’t bleed to death. I’m not saying I want to prolong the pain, but in order to heal, you need to stitch the skin back