Chapter 20

 

Edison

“Blossom, honey,” I murmured, careful to keep my voice calm, to keep the maelstrom of emotion that wanted to devour me locked down so she didn’t feel even an ounce of it. I didn’t look at where Dean sat beside her bed, leant over his knees as he watched her as intently as the rest of us—me, Slasher, and Hugh—or the storm would have blasted through my chest. I wanted him dead for what the trial did to her. He said she was safe .

So why was she sitting in the middle of the bed, her hands limp in her lap and her eyes unfocused as she stared ahead, barely fucking breathing? She’d been that way ever since she shifted back to human form, catatonic and still.

I brushed a lock of pink hair from her face, trailing the touch along her cheek, and Hugh issued a warning rumble.

“Careful,” he growled.

I ignored him. I wasn’t in the mood to argue; that wouldn’t help Rebel right now. Later, though, I’d happily lay into all of them. I didn’t need a reason.

“It’s okay,” I told her soothingly. “The trial’s over. It’s done. And you never have to take another again,” I added, my rage bleeding into a seething tone as I shot a warning at Dean.

“It’s out of my fucking hands,” he snapped, not as in control of himself as I was. Interesting. “Ivelle makes those decisions, I’m just the recruiter and enforcer.”

“Shut it,” I warned, locking my voice into a frozen softness so I didn’t startle Rebel. “Find a way to change it.”

“Send us in with her,” Slasher murmured, his red eyes fixed on Rebel with something like devastation and his voice equally wrecked. “If she has to do it, let us go with her. You’d like that wouldn’t you, sugarplum? You’d like us to be with you?”

When Rebel didn’t answer, staring straight ahead, Slasher’s face collapsed, and he bowed over himself on the edge of the bed where he perched, his dark head dropping into his hands. “What if she doesn’t come back to us?” he whispered, voicing what we were all thinking.

“She will,” Hugh argued, his voice like thunder. He settled a hand on Slasher’s shoulder, and I blinked when his other found my shoulder, squeezing in reassurance. “She will. We wait for her; she comes back.”

I nodded, ignoring the lump in my throat, and leaned forward to press a kiss to Rebel’s forehead as Hugh moved around the bed to stand by Dean’s side. I could have sworn I saw a small black shape flitting in the window behind their heads, almost like a bat, but when I glanced back, it was gone.

“We’ll be here waiting, Blossom,” I promised her, echoing Hugh’s words. “Whenever you want to come back to us, we’ll be here.”

And if she didn’t come back?

I’d rather the whole fucking world ended than never hear her teasingly call me Thomas again. And with the deadly personalities in the room around me, the world just might end if Rebel never returned.