Delinquents Turned Fugitives - Ann Denton Page 0,38
his feet into the cheap brown carpet and rubbed his lip and glanced at my face then away again, “It’s kinda hard to look at you right now.”
I reached up to touch my nose, but it just felt like my regular nose. So whatever spell Gray had written, it was clearly just a visual illusion.
Underneath me, Gray started shaking with laughter.
Andros sat up. He furrowed his brow and glanced between us. “What’s going on?”
I looked around the room, but as far as I could tell, this place had no mirror, not even in the bathroom. The TV screen was cracked. And when I tried to grab the laptop, Gray swiped it and shut it.
“Nope,” he said. “Not making it that easy.”
“Z!” I yelled into the kitchen. “Come back out here and tell me what my nose looks like!”
Zavier strolled in with an open bag of chips in his hand, mouth already full. When he saw me, he nearly spit out his chips. He laughed so hard he bent double and when he came back up, he had tears in his eyes.
“Does everyone have one?” he asked as he made his way around the living room peering at all of our noses. “No fair, Preschool. You shoulda’ given yourself one.”
Gray shrugged behind me and I could feel his massive chest rumble when he said, “I like it better this way.”
Z glanced back at me. “Yeah, yours is definitely the worst,” he said.
“What the hell is it?” I repeated.
Z just exchanged a glance with Malcolm.
“It kind of looks like wood …” Z trailed off.
“Like a tree trunk?” I asked.
“Definitely a tree trunk,” Gray snorted.
Malcolm sucked in his lips and nodded, finally giving in to the humor, which frustrated me even more because when I narrowed my eyes and glared at him, he still wouldn’t say what my nose looked like.
“I think you all are liars.” I growled.
Andros stood then, and went into the kitchen. He didn’t say a word, but I assumed he went to pour himself a coffee.
I balled up my fist and slammed it backward into Gray’s gut—not too hard, just enough to get my point across. “Tell me what my nose looks like.”
The laughter just got louder and suspicion started to swirl through my stomach.
Andros came back and crossed his arms. But his tough guy persona was ruined when he saw Gray’s prank. “Epic.”
I glared at every single one of them before I decided to take matters into my own hands. I leapt off Gray’s lap and grabbed Gray’s burner phone from the seat. Gray had insisted on iPhones because the wealthy prankster couldn’t handle the cheap ass phones I’d wanted.
I turned on the camera feature and flipped the screen so that I could see myself.
Fury nearly knocked me out.
Zavier hadn’t been kidding when he’d said my nose was the worst of them all.
Grayson had enchanted my nose to look like a dick. A thick, black one.
13
I woke up to hear the dull pulse of the magical newscast downstairs, the frantic intro music designed to make the masses panic; it was quick-paced, high pitched and annoying … and probably full of things I really didn’t want to hear.
I rolled out of bed and glanced around the little room I claimed at the farmhouse. There was no clock in the bedroom, just a queen-sized mattress and a dresser that had a thin coat of dust on top. I glanced out the window, shielding my eyes from the light as I tried to gauge the time of day. It was midafternoon. I didn’t sleep nearly as long as I wanted to, but there was so much to be done that I didn’t even attempt to roll back over and get more sleep.
I reached under my pillow and grabbed the vial of serum, then rolled out of bed, cracking my neck and stretching as I slid the pouch string over my neck and grabbed two phones, my phone and my newest burner—one Gray had provided each of us before we went to sleep.
I checked the first for a call from my mom, but there wasn’t one. Part of me wondered if she’d gotten away or … if she was so strung out on Calm after everything last night that she wasn’t even able to call me back.
I blew out a breath and tried to get rid of the anger that heated me up at that thought—it wasn’t productive.