“Is anyone even listening?” Evan said from where he sat on the ground in front of the fireplace.
“To what?” Malcolm descended the staircase shirtless, still toweling off his hair.
“We need to prove to the public what the Pinnacle was doing. And we need to do it now. The fact that a bunch of vamps spilled out of Pinnacle HQ is suspicious, but only if we make sure people realize it’s suspicious.”
Malcolm nodded his agreement as he walked over to the couch and squeezed in on my other side. He put a hand on my knee and stared into my eyes. “Shakespeare, you need to hack some shit and stir the people up. Work your computer magic and then we can hit up the news.”
I rubbed a hand over my forehead, exhausted. “Can we talk about this in a couple hours?” I wanted to curl up. Just for two hours. Just long enough to recharge. We’d been running since last night, all engines go since we’d started the heist. I wasn’t even running on fumes anymore. My eyelids were literally ready to stage a revolt. My brain was fritzing and about to go into sleep mode like my damn computer.
“In a couple hours they might find us,” Malcolm shook his head and messed with his wet blond mop.
“I resent that,” Gray retorted. “We’re hidden.”
“It wasn’t an insult.” Malcolm turned and looked into my eyes, and I already knew he’d get whatever the hell he wanted out of me. He always did. “Just a little more, Hayley. I just need you to hold on a little longer. We have to get ahead of them. We have to feed the news.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose and nodded, stifling a yawn. He and Evan were right. It was stupid to come this far and get this close and not follow through. “Ok. Grab a computer and I’ll grab some coffee.”
I stood and shuffled past Grayson to the kitchen where I saw a full pot of coffee already made. I glanced into the living room, where the guys chatted, my gaze landing on the back of Gray’s head. Did the rich boy know how to make coffee?
Hmm. Guess I learned my new thing for the day, I told myself wearily as I pulled out a mug and poured, adding a little milk before savoring the liquid stimulant. The only thing that would make this better was a shot of Clarity so I knew what to do next. But the side effects for that were far worse than any other drug on the magical market. There was no way I’d trade the use of my limbs for clear-headedness right now.
I made my way back to the guys, figuring I’d sit cross-legged on the floor next to Evan and do my hacking. But I stopped short.
No way.
“What’s the matter?” Evan was the first to notice me standing stock-still in the middle of the room. He shoved off the floor and put down the decades-old sports magazine he’d found in the kindling pile near the fireplace.
I blinked, not quite sure of what I was seeing. But when I opened my eyes, Evan’s nose was still covered in grey fur and hanging down like a fuzzy elephant trunk or anteater nose or … something horrific along those lines. His furry nose was so long that it covered his lips.
Malcolm sat up on his knees, peering over the dilapidated, floral print couch at me. His nose … also was not his nose. The tip of his nose stretched up tall and thin, flickering back and forth like a windshield wiper or a hairless puppy dog tail. Each flick made his nostrils pulse. “Hayley?” he asked, as if I were the weird one and not him.
I put a hand to my forehead and stared down into my coffee cup. And that’s when I started to realize what was going on.
I liked it.
A lot.
I took a step forward and tapped Andros on the foot. He lifted the arm that had been covering his face. He had a bright pink nose with whiskers on it, just like a precious little kitten. His whiskers waggled when he frowned at me.
“What?” he huffed.
I laughed.
Z spun around on the couch from his spot next to Malcolm, bouncing on his knees. “Did I miss a joke?” he quirked a brow. His nose was cow-colored, brown with white splotches and his nostrils were wide and round.
My shoulders started to shake and I had to clutch my coffee cup in both hands to avoid spilling it.
I turned to look at Gray, whose nose was perfectly normal.
He grinned at me.
I grinned back and made my way over to him. “Spiked the coffee, huh?”
He winked. I shoved aside his arm, which was still holding his sports drink—a bit of it sloshed down the sides of the bottle—and sat down on his lap.
He raised a brow in surprise but I just shrugged. “I’m afraid the ‘cow’ boy over there might try to chew on my hair.” That was the explanation I gave him, but we both knew it was more of an excuse. I settled into him, grinning. Happy to grin, even if it was just for a moment.
“What the hell did you spike the coffee with?” Z asked. But he didn’t sound upset, he just launched himself over the back of the couch and headed into the kitchen. “Tastes normal!” he yelled, as second later.
Gray and I just started laughing.
Malcolm walked toward the adjacent dining room and grabbed a computer bag laying on top of the lace tablecloth, unzipped it, and brought me a new laptop. He took my coffee from my hand as he slid the machine onto my lap. He sniffed the cup before taking a sip and then setting it on the side table. “Can you please just—” he stopped talking when he looked back at my face. Then he gazed over at Gray and shook his head, pressing his lips into a thin line.
“What’s mine look like?” I asked, grinning.
But Malcolm just went back to his spot on the couch. He dug his feet into the cheap brown carpet and rubbed his lip and glanced at my face then away again, “It’s kinda hard to look at you right now.”
I reached up to touch my nose, but it just felt like my regular nose. So whatever spell Gray had written, it was clearly just a visual illusion.
Underneath me, Gray started shaking with laughter.
Andros sat up. He furrowed his brow and glanced between us. “What’s going on?”
I looked around the room, but as far as I could tell, this place had no mirror, not even in the bathroom. The TV screen was cracked. And when I tried to grab the laptop, Gray swiped it and shut it.
“Nope,” he said. “Not making it that easy.”
“Z!” I yelled into the kitchen. “Come back out here and tell me what my nose looks like!”
Zavier strolled in with an open bag of chips in his hand, mouth already full. When he saw me, he nearly spit out his chips. He laughed so hard he bent double and when he came back up, he had tears in his eyes.
“Does everyone have one?” he asked as he made his way around the living room peering at all of our noses. “No fair, Preschool. You shoulda’ given yourself one.”
Gray shrugged behind me and I could feel his massive chest rumble when he said, “I like it better this way.”
Z glanced back at me. “Yeah, yours is definitely the worst,” he said.
“What the hell is it?” I repeated.
Z just exchanged a glance with Malcolm.
“It kind of looks like wood …” Z trailed off.
“Like a tree trunk?” I asked.
“Definitely a tree trunk,” Gray snorted.
Malcolm sucked in his lips and nodded, finally giving in to the humor, which frustrated me even more because when I narrowed my eyes and glared at him, he still wouldn’t say what my nose looked like.