Rogue Descendant (Nikki Glass) - By Jenna Black Page 0,64

doing it.

By the time we started our cool-down walk, my legs were shaking with fatigue, and I was really glad I wasn’t just an ordinary human being anymore or I’d never have been able to get out of bed the next day. Much of my hair had slipped free of the ponytail I’d tied it in, damp tendrils clinging to my face and neck. Maggie was panting delicately, and her face was glowing a bit with the exertion and a touch of sweat, but her curly auburn hair was pristine in its French braid. She looked like she was just about to start a run, while I looked more like someone staggering over the finish line of a marathon. She gave me almost as much of an inferiority complex as Steph did, but she was a good friend anyway.

“So, are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” Maggie prompted when I was no longer breathing so hard I couldn’t answer.

“Wrong?” I asked, giving her innocent wide eyes. “What makes you think something’s wrong?”

“You don’t love running enough to push yourself that hard. Not unless you’re trying to run away from something that’s on your mind.”

I grimaced, realizing she was right. There were times when I enjoyed running, but mostly I did it because it was good for me, not because I loved it. And usually I’d quit long before I’d worked myself into such a lather.

I was sick to death of lying and trying to hide my feelings. Or maybe I was just too exhausted, both mentally and physically, to hold it all inside. Instead of pretending nothing was wrong, I told Maggie about my disturbing conversation with Cyrus. My lips were chapped with the cold, but that didn’t stop me from chewing on them, making them worse.

“What do you think I should do?” I asked. “Should I tell Anderson?”

I realized I knew her answer before she even spoke. Unlike me, Maggie’s first instinct is always to follow the rules. Hiding the truth from Anderson might not be technically breaking any rules, but I suspected it would feel that way to her.

“Of course you should tell him,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “He has a right to know. And he would want to know.”

“But—”

“Besides,” she interrupted, “he’s likely to find out eventually, and he’ll be pissed off that you didn’t tell him.”

She had a point. I kicked out at a pinecone in frustration, sending it straight into a tree so that it almost ricocheted back at us.

“I just don’t get it,” I said, restraining the urge to give the pinecone another kick. “Where is Emma getting all this crazy shit from? What have I ever done to give her the slightest hint that I might be after Anderson?”

I’d meant them as rhetorical questions, and wasn’t expecting Maggie to answer. And yet there was a kind of waiting quality to her silence. Something that told me she had something to say but was thinking her words over carefully. I came to a stop, shivering in the cold now that I was finally cooling down.

“What is it? What are you thinking?”

Maggie gave me an almost apologetic smile. “I don’t think it has anything to do with you or what you’ve done. I think it’s more about Anderson.”

I frowned in confusion. “Anderson’s never done anything that would give her reason to be jealous, either. Not if she were sane, that is.”

Maggie shrugged and turned as if to start heading back toward the house, but I grabbed her arm to stop her. Obviously, she had more to say, even if she was reluctant to say it.

“Come on, Maggie. Help me out here. Is there something going on I don’t know about?”

She looked distinctly uncomfortable, but like a true friend, she answered me anyway. “I’ve known Anderson a long time. I even knew him back when he and Erin were together.” She gave me the apologetic smile again. “I can see the way he looks at you when you’re not looking, Nikki. It’s just like how he used to look at Emma when his relationship with Erin was going south. Emma’s a crazy bitch, but she’s not making it all up.”

I opened and closed my mouth a few times, but I couldn’t come up with anything to say. Never once had I picked up that kind of a vibe from Anderson, but now I had to wonder . . . was it because there’d been nothing to