door and squealed, running to Ryan and Yaz. I grabbed them both in a bear hug and squeezed. “I missed you guys so much!”
“Darling, you’ve only been away for a week. Are you really that homesick?” Yaz asked, confused by my reaction to seeing her. If only she knew the truth. I pulled back to look at her and grinned. She was sweaty and in her workout gear, as if Rocky plucked her from the middle of a Pilates class. “And who was your dashing friend that brought us here? A private helicopter ride to your cruise ship. How utterly luxurious.” Yaz looked around in awe, her mouth dropped open as if she were standing on the deck of a boat and wasn’t in a dark room downtown. This compulsion thing was terrifying.
A hand wrapped around my arm, and I was tugged away from Yaz and into Ryan’s arms. His lips brushed against the shell of my ear, and he started to frantically whisper. “Why am I in a hotel room and not on a boat? And why do I keep waking up with sticky notes on me, written in my handwriting that say, ‘You’re being hypnotized.’?”
“Shit,” I whispered. My stomach sank. This was one mystery Ryan seriously didn’t want to find out. Diego mentioned that he was becoming harder to glamour. This was fucking risky. I didn’t want to know what the council did to humans that found out their little secret. “Play along for now. I’ll find a way to talk to you.”
He stiffened, and I knew that my words validated him in a way. I hated that he felt like he was going crazy, but there was no way for me to explain right now. Hopefully, that little bit of confirmation would be enough until I could talk to him without supervision. He pulled away from our hug and gave me a small nod, letting me know that he understood.
“Oh, what a nice stateroom. We must be on the Atlantic right now. What a lovely time we are having here. All together. In your cabin on your cruise ship,” Ryan said, overexaggerating every sentence. “Is that a blue whale? How majestic.”
God, Ryan was a bad actor. I summoned the best death glare I could and tried to telepathically tell him to tone it down before he got us killed. He must have gotten the message because he stopped talking almost immediately. Fortunately, Yaz was still completely lost in the fantasy. “We are having such a lovely time, aren’t we?”
“Yes, we are! I’m just so happy to see you both. How’s Pussy?”
“She loves living with me, she may never want to go back home with you,” Ryan teased in his normal, not overacting, voice. “I feel obligated to make a joke about cuddling pussy every night, but it would be too redundant.”
I giggled. I picked her name for a reason. All the puns. All the time.
Yaz interjected. “Also, I borrowed your Chanel blouse yesterday for my date with Daddy. I’ll have it dry-cleaned and returned. And you’ve been holding out on me with your shoe collection. I thought we weren’t the same size!”
I’d been lying to Yaz about our identical sized feet because she had a habit of raiding my closet. I worked too hard for my shoe collection to let Yaz steal them.
“Oh. You must be wrong, we aren’t the same size at all,” I replied, willing her to drop it and leave my beloved Louis Vuitton heels alone. I was about to change the subject when Yaz tilted her head in a daze.
“We aren’t the same size,” she replied in a monotone. “We aren’t the same size at all.”
“Are you okay, Yaz?” I asked with my brow furrowed.
Ryan stammered, “You did the th-thing to her.”
“What thing?” I whispered.
“The freaky mind control thing.”
Oh, shit stick.
I put my arm around Yaz and guided her to the only couch in the room, vowing to never mind control her again. Even in the name of shoes. Even if said shoes were designer and bought as celebratory gifts every time I had a successful product launch. Ryan joined us, and the three of us talked a mile a minute trying to catch each other up. I mostly reacted to their stories, not being able to talk about my glamorous new life drinking blood and sleeping in a coffin.
“Are you alright, Drew? You’ve been so quiet,” Yaz asked.
I was about to answer when Rocky pushed his way into the room and announced,