“What? This is how I have our conversation going down. I tried to apologize, and you left me hanging all day, like a chump.” I pull out my phone and show her. “Then you’re hanging out with Evan all evening?”
“It wasn’t like that.” She lands heavily on the edge of the bed and appears to be in a daze, trying to figure this all out.
“Tess?” I sit down next to her.
She blinks, and her gaze comes back to me. “You don’t have your Instant powers?”
“No. I tried a few times to see, but I’m basically a regular human now.”
A soft smile graces her lips. “You were never a regular human. Too hot.” She winks.
“That’s sweet.” I nudge my shoulder into hers, playfully hoping we aren’t mad at each other anymore. “But what are you thinking is going on here?”
“I think someone is fucking with us.”
Anger fills my chest. “The guys?”
“I don’t think so.” She bites her fingernails and ponders it. “I mean, they’re sort of fucking with my head, but in person. They told you, right?”
“That they want you? Yeah.”
She sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. “It doesn’t feel like them to mess with our texts. They’d have to know it would only come back to haunt them. Besides, I don’t think either has enough skill to hack my phone without Instant’s powers. And if you say your magic no longer works, then I suspect the other former Instant agents don’t have their own powers either.”
“Then who would mess with us like this?” I ask, eager for her to figure this out so I can beat the shit out of them. I don’t usually become brutally possessive, but this fuckery is beyond boundaries.
“I don’t think Death’s gifts could do this. And why would anyone from my work do this? I only know Megan, and she doesn’t strike me as someone to fuck with us.”
I shrug. It doesn’t make sense. “It’s similar to something Instant would have us do.”
Tessa blanches white. “You don’t think…”
“No. She’s gone.”
“Maybe. But what if…” She grasps my shirt sleeve, looking like she’s ready to freak out.
I cup her face and stroke my thumb over her cheekbone. “She can’t get you. We watched Death rip her apart.”
“Death said she could materialize again,” she says, and I feel sick at the thought. What if Instant was after her again? “It could be another god,” she suggests.
“Like who?”
“I don’t know.” Tessa pauses and stares off in the middle distance, like she’s trying to psychically decipher what’s going on. Then she confesses, “I’ve been having some weird dreams, but I thought they were just dreams when I woke up.”
“What were your dreams about?”
“A dark god, with black wings on his back and small wings on his ears. Maybe Greek origins?”
The image in my head of a hot Greek god does nothing to soothe my nerves. What if he wants to claim her?
Calm as I can, I ask, “What happens in these dreams?”
Her cheeks turn pink. What could she be embarrassed about?
“Did you have sex with him?” My heart goes cold, waiting to hear the worst.
“No.” Tessa squeezes my thigh and shakes her head. “He just talked to me.”
I sense something’s not right. “It feels like you are keeping something from me.”