“I’m guessing you are too, shit face.”
He winces. “How about we take you back?”
“How about you kiss our sweet asses?”
Aiden jumps in, and I can hear the need to fight in his voice. “Or do you two plan to make us?”
“If we have to,” Finn says, quietly. “But we won’t go down as easily as you think.”
Aiden laughs. “I can’t imagine anyone would go down that easily.”
Suddenly, Finn punches Aiden, and he stumbles back. His foot goes out from underneath him on the gravel underfoot, and he rolls down the drop off. I scream and race after him, even knowing that I’m too late. His body has to have already hit the rocks far below.
But he’s a god… He’ll be okay. Right?
“Damn it, Finn, that’s not how this was supposed to go!” Clancy shouts.
“He asked for it!” the other godslayer shouts back.
I look over the edge, but to my surprise, Aiden rises into the air, his hammer in his hand. For a second, I can really picture him as Thor. His hair seems to flow in the wind, and his skin glows with an inhuman light.
My eyes widen. “How did you…?”
He looks scared as hell. “I don’t know. One minute I was hoping not to die, and the next my hammer was in my hand, and I was flying.”
“You can fly,” I say.
“I can fly,” he repeats, and now he sounds excited.
“He can fucking fly,” mutters Finn.
Our godslayer friends do not share our excitement.
I feel my mouth widen into a grin. Oh, this is good. Really good. Another power to use against all the people who want us dead.
Aiden lifts higher and higher, and a strange look comes over his face. He shifts in the air. He does a little spin. All of it is awkward and clumsy, especially given the massive hammer he holds. But after a few minutes, he seems to get the hang of it.
“Sorry.”
I turn and glance at Finn, who’s watching Aiden with a surprising amount of envy. “I could’ve handled that better.”
“You’re kind of a dickhole,” I tell him.
To my surprise, Finn laughs. “Well, you didn’t just spend the day walking from campus to show up at this little town and see the people you’re hunting eating burgers and fries. You could at least have had the decency to require smiting.”
“So, you’re what, cranky because you hadn’t eaten?”
Clancy is at my side. “He’s the worst when he doesn’t eat.”
Aiden laughs and soars toward us, then drops onto the ground, shaking the earth beneath our feet. When he stands up, he kind of looks like a happy super hero. Which is nice. Aiden isn’t exactly someone I’d call happy.
“That was awesome,” he says.
I sigh. “Well, you get to fly. I get to be an asshole with a hard-on for honor.”
Clancy laughs beside me. “Better than an asshole born to kill people.”
Okay, maybe these guys are growing on me.
“We could let you walk home,” I tell them slowly. “Or we could call a truce, for now, and drive you to the best burgers and fries you’ll ever have and then get back to campus before anyone knows we were gone.”
Finn and Clancy exchange a look, but Finn is the one to respond. “And you guys didn’t do any weird shit while you were here?”
“We roughed up some vampires,” I say, shrugging.
“Haven’t we all,” Finn says.
I laugh.
“Okay, truce then,” Clancy agrees.
We climb into the car, them in the back, and head for more food. Seeing Aiden in a good mood has lifted my spirits too. I think I’ll get that chocolate shake this time around.
And back at campus, we can start on our plan to win Izzy back. A night of Spin the Bottle and doing things right this time around. We couldn’t ask for more than that.
I unroll the windows and turn up my favorite rock band. To my surprise, Finn sings along in the back. Hell, I kind of like them.
I hope we don’t have to kill them.
Chapter Ten
Izzy
The banging on my bedroom door surprises me. I swing it open to find an aggrieved-looking Beth, her arms filled with packages.
“Been doing some online shopping?” she asks through gritted teeth.
“No…” I say.
“I don’t think this stuff arrived for Mr. Wilder, unless he’s taken a sudden interest in evening wear and Sephora,” she shoots back. “Help me carry it in, at least.”
“I didn’t order anything,” I promise her, but I’m curious enough to follow her once she’s dropped the armful of packages on the floor to my room.
Outside the dorm, there’s a mail cart parked haphazardly on the sidewalk. Beth’s voice is irritated when she says, “Nothing can be delivered past the gates, so I had to go get all this stuff. It’s not enough to be gods? You’ve got to bring the mall home?”
“Maybe it belongs to the female godslayer,” I point out.
Beth shoots me a skeptical look, then hands over a teal blue bag. There’s a tag looped around one side, addressed to me. “Unless you don’t want it.”
“I don’t know what all this is! I really don’t. I can’t afford to buy anything from Tiffany’s. I can’t afford to buy anything from Target.”
Beth regards me skeptically for one second, then her mouth tilts up at one corner. “I think it might have something to do with those handsome idiots you run around with, Izzy. At any rate, help me carry it up.”
I’m not sure when she started calling me Izzy instead of miss, but I like it. “Yes, ma’am.”
Together, the two of us carry a ridiculous assortment of stuff up to my room. Then she leaves, and I’m surrounded by bags and boxes. I crouch to sort through them. There’s gorgeous jewelry, a dozen new pairs of shoes from sneakers to stilettos, high-end jeans and tops and a cocktail dress, not that I know where I’ll ever wear that.
It’s all so pretty that it takes my breath away. But where the hell did it come from?
The face of the richest person I know rises in my mind. Van Wellington.
Half-exasperated, half-delighted, I head down the hall and push open the door to his room. “Van, did you rob a shopping mall?”
Four guilty-looking, handsome faces stare back at me.
The guys are all sitting on the floor in Van’s room, cross-legged like they’re kids in elementary school again.
“I didn’t rob a store,” Van says, which is a level of precision that makes me worry what kind of felonies he’d been wracking up. He flashes me a smile that’s more gorgeous than any jewelry. “Just my parents. They deserve it.”
“Van…”
“I think I’m getting written out of the will. It seems only fair.” He shrugs, but I’m not sure that Van’s family is something he’s as immune to as he pretends.
I stare around at the guys. Making a mental note to thank Van later--as well as make sure he knows that, no matter what his family expected, he doesn’t have to buy my affections--my first priority is to figure out what trouble they’re getting into.