Page 40 of Blood on the Ice

Speaking of the errant professor, I follow Lucas out to the driveway as I text Iggy to see if he’s got a hold of Professor Nakamura. He doesn’t answer, so I fire off another text to Slade, hoping he’s heard something. We need to get into that greenhouse and if they can’t swing it, I’ll have to pull rank. I really don’t want to do it, especially since I’m already stepping on alotof toes since I arrived. But if it means we can cure Lucas, I’ll piss off every single person on this damn campus.

“Babe? You okay?”

The casual moniker makes me turn bright red, and I get flustered. “No. Yes. I mean, I’m okay, but I can’t get Ignatius to answer about his little quest today. So I’m annoyed.”

“Give me your keys and I’ll drive,” he says with a grin. “Then you can be mad at your phone all you want.”

I gape at him. “Absolutely not! You’re doing fine now, but you’ve nearly passed out several times in a matter of days. You arenotsuited for driving yet, Lucas Wolfberg. We aren’t adding vehicular manslaughter to your pending charges list.”

Pouting, he rolls his eyes and walks to the passenger side in a huff. “Fine, be that way.”

If he does that too often, I’m going to have a bitch of a time saying ‘no.’

“Get in and be good, so we can get coffee on the way home.” His eyes widen and he grins, ducking into the car quickly.

As it turns out, men are just grown-up toddlers.

The sprawling mega-martis busy as hell when we arrive. I’ve never considered what a hardship this kind of mess would be on humans with disabilities, much less a supernatural who looks perfectly normal on the outside. Lucas grabs my hand as we walk up the crowded lane of the packed parking lot and though I know he’s doing well now, I know he’ll be straining by the time wefinish. Luckily, we can get a cart at the front and he can mask his weariness by pushing it when it finally hits him.

“You’re on cart duty,” I murmur as we approach the automatic doors. “I want you to lean on something if you get tired without drawing attention. You look too damn young and hot to be falling over without someone assuming you’ve got a plague.”

Lucas smirks at me, arching a brow. “I have a plague, remember?”

“Don’t be obtuse,” I growl softly. “You’ve been poisoned; you don’t have a disease. Humans are fidgety as fuck since that big virus and if you look healthy but keel over, I’ll have to call in reinforcements. Do you want to explain to your Nana why they have you locked in a hazmat area in a human hospital?”

That makes him pause, and he wrinkles his nose, but complies by grabbing a cart to push. “You win again, Dean Hardass.”

I mean, I turn to stone; he’s not wrong.

“Thank you. Now let’s stock up on enough food to get us through two shifter appetites for a week or so, so I can have coffee and you can lie down at home.” I pull out my phone, flicking through the list to remind myself of the things I’d had him put on the list while we drove.

A hand clamps on mine and I look up from my screen to find him giving me a shy smile. “Home, huh?”

My chest squeezes, but I give him an annoyed look. “No time for sappy shit. We’re on borrowed time, Wolfberg.”

His chuckle is deep and rumbling, but he lets go and starts walking. “Where do we go first?”

I haven’t been to one of these places before. The warehouse-like store’s size and the number of people are astounding. “Uh, I honestly don’t know.”

“Morgana, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were intimidated by a Wally World.” The amusement on his face makes me blush, but he tilts his head at the spacious aisle full of displays and people. “Follow along with me on the magical journey through American big box stores.”

Narrowing my eyes, I follow along as he navigates us through the towering shelves full of myriad brands of every kind of foodstuff imaginable. I’m not excited by the produce section, which makes him roll his eyes, but we tick off item by item of the non-perishables. I laugh when he shoves a massive amount of snacks, both healthy and decidedly not healthy, into the basket with zeal. Before we leave the freezer aisle, he’s put tons of ice cream and other treats as well.

How does he stay so damned cut if he eats like this? Genetics suck.

“I canfeelyou brooding,” he says. “I don’t eat junk all the time, if that’s why you look ready to murder me. But until I get this shit out of my system, I feel entitled to some bad behavior.”

I whip my head around. “How did you know?”

He shrugs and gives me a smug smile. “Because I grew up around enough women who were pushed to hate their bodies to know when food is making them feel inadequate. The standards for the girls in our circles are rough—it’s not surprising many of them take it out on others once they fit in. They’re often hungry, under enormous pressure, and miserable.”

“Yeah, refusing to eat is definitely an excuse to treat people the way I’ve watched rich girls in the elite groups do in the past.” I can’t roll my eyes hard enough at him to convey my sarcasm. It’s hard for guys to understand that it’s not simply being overweight that draws the venom of mean girls; it’s anything that makes you different, whether it’s physical, mental, or even psychological.

Lucas holds his hands up, his eyes wide as he scrambles to walk it back. “I’m not making excuses, Morgana. I know they cause a lot of damage to others. And I know it’s not something that goes away when you grow up, either. My mother is a prime example of someone who got pushed in that direction and, clearly, she’s never once tried to atone for the sins of her youth. Hell, she didn’t even bother to do more than pop me out.”

I frown, looking at him for a moment. “Your parents really abandoned you, didn’t they? You aren’t exaggerating.”

Despite their antics in the news, I sort of believed he was just pulling the ‘poor little rich kid’ act to get me to feel sympathetic.

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