Page 24 of Choosing Jenny
Her eyes narrowed on me. “Swear it.”
I shot her a disbelieving look. “Since when is my word not enough for you?”
“Since that asshole came back from the dead,” she snapped.
“I swear it,” I said, meaning it. “I will never fuck Rex Terian again, so long as we both shall live. Or die. Or whatever he’s doing in that stolen body.”
“Better.” She leaned against the wall, folding her arms. “Now, how are we going to kill him? For good, this time.”
“We were just discussing that,” Jenny said as she lovingly pet Rhonda as they came in. “You cleaned her up?”
“That’s what took us so long to get down here,” Longshot said.
“Why did she break Rex’s glass with the soup in it, and then roll around in the shards?” Jenny asked curiously. “Didn’t that hurt her?”
A flicker of a smile tugged at Longshot’s mouth. “No. Warmth makes her move faster, so she knew the heat from the soup would speed her up. As far as the glass pieces go, I believe she wanted the glass stuck to her to make it more difficult to remove her from Rex’s leg.” He scratched beneath her jaw affectionately. “But strigella are prone to their own whims, so itcould be that she simply liked the feeling of the glass against her scales. She’s had a challenging shedding this cycle. It may have removed some of the dead skin.”
“She stopped her rampage for a body scrub?” Jenny asked with an incredulous laugh.
He shrugged. “One never knows with a strigella.”
“As I was saying,” I cut in, rerouting everyone’s attention back to the business at hand, “to kill Rex and Justice, we must kill Noc Prisberd. To kill him, we must ensure our strategy will not be interrupted by whatever Sarah has planned, be it war or something else. To that end, we will go to Halla to find out what she is up to.”
“The further we are from Rex, the better,” Tiger grumbled, before he got up and began to pace. “I hate that guy.”
Jenny tilted her head. “For threatening us?”
“I hated him since Credo’s island, when he was flirting with Mal,” Tiger muttered. “The threats only made it worse.”
Longshot rolled his eyes. “You must train your mind to parse through what is important and what is not, Tiger. Otherwise, you are a slave to your emotions.”
“What do you know about it, Longshot?” Tiger snapped, rounding on him. “The only thing you love is that damned strigella.”
“It was flirting. It was harmless,” he said, his tone even. “You need to let it go, or Rex can and will use your anger against you.”
A muscle in Tiger’s jaw clenched. “You don’t—”
“Stop being so insecure,” Longshot said, more blunt this time. “It was Rex being Rex, and he is likely to be worse the longer this goes on, so brace yourself for that or be prepared to suffer.”
Tiger glared at him. I’d never seen such anger in his honey brown eyes. Not even when Rex, himself, was being an asshole.
Surge cleared his throat to break the tension in the room. “We need to know how Noc Prisberd made Rex. Did he make the body?”
I turned my attention to Surge, grateful for the change in subject. “No. According to Rex, the body he’s in was originally known as Jar Elvironri, a farmer from Grenevar. Discord, did you know anyone from that family?”
She searched her memory. “No. He must be a farmer from one of the minor houses there.”
“Makes sense,” I said with a nod. “Why piss off anyone important who runs our food belt?”
Surge’s brow furrowed. “So Noc took a body and figured out a way to possess it?”
“Worse,” I said quietly. “According to Rex, Jar’s ghost was executed while he was alive. Presumably sent back to the ether. He didn’t just hijack the body. He cleared it out first.”
Surge looked ill, his deep black skin turning gray. “He stripped alivingbody of his ghost and inserted a ghost from an orb…moons above.”
“What does that mean?” Jenny asked.
Surge pressed a hand to his stomach. “First, the implications are horrific. I mean, who says he couldn’t do that to anyone? Second, if Noc has that kind of power, how the hell do we stop him? Who knows what else he’s capable of?”
