Page 64 of How to Entice a Fiend

“What about the blood?”

He hits the button for the windshield wiper fluid, but the body must have damaged it because no liquid comes out of it. Instead, the windshield wipers begin swiping back and forth as they smear blood across the windshield.

“Weird,” I say.

Mads nods. “Thatispeculiar. I wonder if we drove through something strange.” He’s having to lean even farther to the right to see past the broken glass and the blood. “I know the issue. It’s because you guys over here are all driving on the wrong side of the road.”

“That’s definitely the problem and not at all the blood.”

“It’s like a snack for you. If you get tired of snacking on me, you simply stick your head out the window and lick away.”

“This is what happens when you don’t watch what you’re doing and are distracted with people.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says.

“Odd.”

“Right?”

I can’t help but laugh, it’s all so ridiculous.

Mads grins at me, looking pleased, like he thinks he’s done a fantastic job instead of just piling so much ridiculous shit on me that I finally snapped.

“I can’t believe you hit that guy. He was obviously planning on attacking us and probably thought you’d at least hit the brakes a little.”

“It was for science.”

“You use that excuse for the strangest things.”

“Thank you.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

FINN

“Rylee, it really is going to be okay,” I say as she huddles on the ground of the bedroom she’s staying in at Orin’s house. She’s just wrapped around the cat, smoothing his fur down with her endless tears. Of course the cat doesn’t care. The whole room is filled with the sound of his purrs. Orin has some stuff to quickly deal with and asked us to watch her, which means that it’s our job to make her stop crying. How he’s managed to keep her happy, I have no idea because the second she saw us, she burst into tears.

I’m sure Marcus has had plenty of people burst into tears the moment they saw him, but I never have!

“En left me and he’s never coming back, and I love him so much but he doesn’t lovemeeeeeeeeeeee.” That “me” is said with such a wailing noise that it’s dragged out for an unbelievable amount of time. Marcus gets a little impatient waiting for it to end as he gives me a look.

“What about some ice cream? Would that make you feel better?” I ask as I pick her up off the floor and set her on thebed. It makes me feel at least a little bit better if she’s not just wallowing on the ground.

“M-Maybe but probably not but I still want some.”

“Awesome. I’ll go get you some ice cream while Marcus reads you a story. That sounds like fun, yeah? You could read it in bed! And eat ice cream in bed! And then after we’re done, we can go swimming! Doesn’t that sound exciting?”

“Not really!” she complains, but I push a book into Marcus’s hands anyway.

“She said ‘not really,’” Marcus says, like that’ll get him out of it. “She obviously doesn’t want it.”

“She’s just upset and doesn’t know what she wants,” I assure him as I flip open the book to where it looks like she left off and force it back into Marcus’s hands.

“I mean… is Ender really even worth crying about?” he asks.

“He’s the best person to have ever existed,” Rylee declares.

Marcus doesn’t look convinced.

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