Page 85 of Lost Touch

They talked.

They started to protest and posture, but Drew extended his claws, flexed his hands, and told them to sit the fuck down.

Both of them dropped down on the couch like someone had broken their kneecaps, Clayton’s nose still bloody and his neck blooming with bruises, and Brian, who’d muttered his name in response to Drew’s demand, looking like he might faint any second.

Drew pulled up a chair—for me, as it turned out—and then stood next to me, facing the other two, and loomed.

“I know Ash didn’t beat you up,” Drew said. “And I know he didn’t steal a car. What happened that night? Full story. Leave anything out, and you lose a finger.”

“How would you know if we—”

“Shut the fuck up, Clay!” Brian hissed. “That’s a fucking alpha, he’ll kill us both.”

“He won’t kill you,” I put in, hoping that was true. “Right, Drew?”

He glanced down at me. “Not unless they lie to us.”

Well, okay then. I shrugged at the shivering duo across from me, making a face that tried to say “Well, I did my best, and you’re on your own.”

They apparently got the message, because Brian swallowed hard, turned green, and started to talk.

And I listened, with mounting disgust and a huge side helping of horror.

Also, homicidal rage.

Although Drew probably had that covered for me.

We’d started out at a club, a place downtown where Clayton and Brian, who’d been roommates since their sophomore year of college, liked to go for the half-price off-brand liquor. Brian drove because Clayton wanted to get wasted, and I tagged along for the ride. I had in fact been dating Clayton at the time, although Brian volunteered that “You guys weren’t, like, official or anything. Clay’s too into girls to give them up or whatever.”

Their story cut off and meandered, and they were both obviously trying to lie to make themselves look better, but finally we got to the point: Clayton thought I needed to “loosen up a little,” which turned out to mean “let him fuck me,” because I’d only been giving blowjobs so far.

That bought him a noise from the depths of Drew’s throat that hadmyinternal organs trying to crawl out my nose and run away, let alone Clayton’s.

Because Clayton had drawn his knees up and was staring at Drew in abject terror, it fell to Brian to explain that Clayton had put a hefty dose of ecstasy in my drink, given a more reasonable amount to Brian and taken some himself, and then talked Brian into going up in the hills for a drive.

By then, Brian said, I’d been totally out of it, rubbing myself all over Clayton in the back seat and acting like a—he stopped abruptly in the middle of that sentence, because Drew had started growling again.

Just as well, because I thought I might be sick. Clayton had been someone I’d slept with, had trusted—and even if I couldn’t imagine feeling that way about him now, he’d betrayed that trust. Hearing more of Brian’s nasty description of my behavior, drugged and taken advantage of, might’ve broken me.

Brian hurriedly skipped over that part and went on. We’d stopped a mile or so out of town, up in the foothills between the city and the mountains. Brian and Clayton got out to smoke a joint and then got in a drunken fight. They didn’t even seem to remember what it’d been about, so Drew gave up on trying to press the point, but Clayton knocked Brian out, got in the car, and took it and me for a joyride, eventually crashing it into a boulder.

And then he panicked. He thought I was dead, and he ran, walking all the way down the hill and into town, going a different way than the way he’d driven up because it was shorter and thereby not running into Brian.

Clayton made it all the way back to their apartment—this apartment, and it set me shivering with something between fury and nausea that he’d beenhere, right here, when he gave me up for dead and then probably passed out drunk.

When I was kidnapped. When some opportunistic asshole found me, either one of the warlocks or someone who knew they’d want me. While I was being dragged out of that wrecked car and taken away to be tortured for a year, Clayton had probably been lying on the same couch he sat on now.

It took me a second to get myself under control, biting back a fresh wave of nausea and stilling the shakes in my hands.

The rest of their story didn’t take long. A police car doing a drive along the road up there found Brian beaten and unconscious and called for an ambulance. The next morning, a jogger called in the totaled car.

I wasn’t in it.

And when the police questioned Brian—and Clayton, who was Brian’s emergency contact and had ended up going to the hospital a couple of hours before dawn, long before the police arrived—they told them I’d been the one to beat Brian up and take off with the car.

Because I’d vanished into thin air. And they were convinced that they’d be arrested for manslaughter if they didn’t cover their asses.

With me gone, there wasn’t anyone to contradict their story, even though it stank to high heaven.

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