Page 95 of Amethyst Flame
She backed a step, and then another. And then shook her head and got into the elevator. It closed, leaving me with a dozen granite-jawed security randos who just minutes ago were okay with shooting me dead. Fun.
I texted Jacob as I waited.Disaster movie marathon tonight?
Which was the code for the shit has hit the fan.
I’ll pop the cornwas Jacob’s reply.But big bro isn’t home
I thought about the dragons I’d be getting soon.We might have to start without him. Catch him up when he gets in
I paced the lobby. The hired muscle stared at me, back and forth, back and forth—dizzy yet?—until Oluwa returned.
She held a silver case in her hand. “Onlyyouwill be able to unlock this. Anyone else tampers with it and the contents will be destroyed.”
She had to mean my butterflies could open it.
“We’re trusting you,” she said.
“Uh-huh,” I told her.
I had absolutely no doubt a tracker was inside the case with the dragons and that I’d be followed by her deluxe flex squad. Couldn’t be helped. Besides, BantaMatrix had to know where I’d been staying the past few days, anyway. I was their miracle. They had to have been tracking me everywhere.
On my way,I texted Jacob.
When I pulled up, the Kidnapper was missing, but Jacob met me at the door. “Still can’t get a hold of Dane. What happened?”
We went inside and I told him.
As I talked, he swore a lot and ogled the silver case in my grip. The mission hadn’t gone down as we’d wanted, but I still got the treasure.
“I’m guessing Will is going to take Ruskin to his father’s lab,” I said. The angry spark in Will’s eyes when he talked about his dad had been deep and not just the hive’s fault. I’d be betting my life. And Ruskin’s. And Will’s. And…okay, that was entirely enough responsibility. But where else did Will have to go but back to the beginning, where it started? Where he’d be the boss now, in control. After all, if Will had to bear the repercussions, he should be making the decisions. And that was where all the important decisions about his life had been made. “That’s where you should search for Will’s Tesla.”
Jacob tilted his head. “Let Banta rescue Ruskin. We’ve got what we need now that we have the dragons. You don’t have to risk yourself for her.”
I stared at him. “Except I do. She might be the only person who can save my life, so maybe I should, I dunno, return the favor? And there’s an almost-as-good chance that Will’s dad and his lab are going to be the hive’s next victims.” I pushed to my feet. “Who else can stop them?”
Typing frantically, Jacob sent some sort of bat signal and then pulled up a half dozen tabs on his laptop, muttering that a white Tesla couldn’t bethathard to find. His phone pinged a second later. “Dane says we have to wait for him. And wait to open the dragons.”
No surprise there. I had been debating how to use them. Should I attempt another symbiosis? Like, just cut my other hand open and pour them in? Or did I need pomegranate smoothie syrup too?
I had no idea.
Will’s situation scared me. Him losing control… It was as if I would be battling two adversaries trapped in the same skin, their motives…tangled. How would I defeat someone like that? I needed a strategy.
Yeah, maybe for once, I’d wait for Dane. He’d asked me to trust him—maybe it was time I did.
Meanwhile, I prepared for what was to come…and went to find something sweet to eat. Maybe I could bribe my hive not to hijack me if I gave them all the good stuff.
Grabbing half a gallon of Alden’s from the freezer, I settled on a stool at the kitchen counter and pulled out my phone. Swann had answered my text from late last night asking if her brother had come to his senses with a multi-bubble string of shit emojis and, inexplicably, the flag of some country I didn’t know. I texted back an elephant.
Bouncing one knee nervously as I ate, I scrolled to the top of my messages again. Nothing from Will. Waiting until he could find a way to contact me that he thought I couldn’t trace?
Or maybe he and his hive were killing Ruskin right now. If his hive did see me and mine as a threat, then killing Ruskin would be smart. With Ruskin gone, Will and Co. could lettimetake me out.
Maybe—and this was a horrible realization—he’d already offed Ruskin and had won the battle without us ever fighting it out.
The ice cream balled up like a morgue corpsicle in my throat and I choked.
Suddenly I wanted that chance he’d given me in the desert. One on one.
