“We need to go,” Eden urges. “They won’t be down for long, and they’ve probably already called for help. If we have any chance of actually getting out of here, now is the time to go—before reinforcements show up.”
Her nose starts bleeding as she talks, and she wipes the blood away with the back of her hand.
“But we have to get Mekhi to the infirmary,” I protest. “We can’t leave him out here alone.”
“There’s no time,” he tells me. “I can hear them coming.”
“We all can,” Xavier agrees. “We’ve got to go, Grace.”
I turn to Jaxon. Surely he gets that we can’t just leave his best friend here in the middle of this mess. But he, too, is shaking his head. “We’re out of time, Grace. It’s now or never.”
I want to say never, but I know I can’t. Not now that we’re so close.
“I’m strong enough to fade because of you, Grace. Now, go.” And just like that, Mekhi’s gone, fading into the forest.
“Let’s go,” Flint says grimly, and then he’s shifting back into his dragon form. I shift back to human at the same time, and now, Jaxon doesn’t wait for me to climb on under my own power. Instead, he all but throws me on top of Flint and climbs on right behind me.
Next to us, Xavier and Macy are climbing onto Eden.
And then we’re off—bruised, bloodied, battered, but not broken (yet)—in search of a monster that absolutely no one has ever been able to kill.
Piece. Of. Cake.
98
Fly by Night
“We have a problem,” I tell Jaxon about ten minutes into our flight.
“I know,” he agrees but then doesn’t say anything else. Nothing at all, even though I wait several more minutes.
“Are we going to talk about the problem?” I finally ask, not because I’m trying to be obnoxious but because I really think we need time to plan. And yes, we’ve got a couple-hours flight ahead of us, but who knows how long it’s going to take to figure out what we’re going to do now that our plan is down a person. And not just anyone—one of the most important people, considering Mekhi’s power is hypnotism.
“You could still turn back, you know,” Hudson says quietly in the corner of my mind.
You know he won’t listen. So if you aren’t willing to help, just go back to sulking and let me figure out what to do.
“I wasn’t sulking earlier,” he tells me, then seems to think better of it. “Okay, yes, I was sulking, but I’m over it.”
Glad to hear it. But seriously, any suggestions on how we can do this now that we’re down to six people?
“Besides turning around?”
I purse my lips at him in annoyance. Yes. Besides that.
“Well then, I go back to my idea from the other day, which is to tell you not to try to kill the beast.”
I already told you we’re not going home.
“I’m not saying you need to go home. I’m talking about going in there and attempting to have a conversation with the Unkillable Beast before you try to kill it…and lose.”
You don’t know that we’ll lose, I tell him.
“Oh, you’re all going to die a most horrible death. You really think six high school students, no matter how powerful they are, are going to just waltz into a cave and defeat a beast that lore claims people have been trying to kill for two thousand years?” He laughs in my head, but there’s very little humor in the sound.
Well, what are we supposed to do? We need this heartstone it’s apparently protecting. How else are we going to get it if we don’t kill it?
“Honestly? I don’t know.” He shakes his head. “But I do know that going in, powers blazing, is only going to piss it off. And I don’t want to see that happen—to any of you.”
And going in with our hands up isn’t going to get us killed, too? I shake my head.
“I don’t know. But I do know not every monster is what they seem.”
His words hit home, probably because I know he’s not just talking about the Unkillable Beast.
I don’t know. I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what to believe. I sure as hell don’t know if he’s right. We aren’t even sure if this monster can communicate. And what if the time it takes to try to reason with it is all it needs to kill my friends?
My cell phone goes off in the middle of my mental debate, and it’s Macy texting me, because obviously she and Xavier are having the same conversation that Hudson and I are having—and that Jaxon is currently avoiding.
Macy: Any ideas?
Me: None
Macy: Yeah. Us either
“You know I have a dozen other ideas, too, right? Virtually any idea I come up with will be better than my brother’s plan to just go in, guns blazing, and kill a monster with ‘unkillable’ literally in its name.”
He accompanies his last statement with a massive eye roll and I can’t help taunting him a little. Careful, you keep rolling your eyes like that and they’re going to get stuck that way.
He snorts. “I should be so lucky. At least then everyone will know how I really feel.”
I laugh despite myself. You’re what my mother would have called a “piece of work,” you know that?
“Yeah? Because you’re what my mom calls ‘dangerous.’”
I think back to my meeting with the vampire queen and answer, I’m pretty sure your mother doesn’t think there’s anything dangerous about me.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” he tells me. “Both my parents are terrified of you. If they weren’t, they’d be back in jolly old London right now.”
Before I can ask what he means by that, Macy texts me again.
Macy: X says we need a new plan
Me: No shit
Macy: How do we get into the cave?
Macy: If Mekhi isn’t around to hypnotize it, how do we distract it?
Me: Get a banjo and dance the hula?
Macy: You aren’t Timon or Pumbaa and this isn’t the Lion King.
She follows it with an eye-roll emoji.
Me: I know that. I meant YOU
Macy: I’m not Timon either. And I’m sure as shit not Pumbaa
Now it’s a string of eye-roll emojis, which makes me laugh. If Macy and Hudson are rolling their eyes at me like that, then I must really be on a roll tonight.