Chapter 28
Chapter
Twenty-Eight
Ihuffed out a breath, relieved. Quickly, I checked the tattoo on my wrist. The sand was over halfway fallen now.
“I need to speed this process up,” I said out loud, talking to the mist. I remembered what I had to do now. Find my way out of the human Under, vanquish my own demons, and let the trickle of fae blood in my veins draw me towards the Fae Under.
Find Donovan.
Donovan. My heart contracted painfully. “Can’t you take me to him now?”
Out of the mist, a bed appeared. Super-king sized, two-thousand count Egyptian cotton sheets—rumpled and covered with brick dust. A man lay sprawled on the bed, face-down, blood matted in his tangled hair.
That was my fault. I’d hurt him…
I pointed at him. “Yeah, I’m not even sorry about that, Vincent. I didn’t hit you with a brick on purpose, but if I could go back, I would have hit you harder. You only had three stitches, you big pussy.”
He disappeared in a puff of smoke.
It was lucky I’d had so much therapy. There were countless moments in my life I’d felt terrible for something I’d done, but most of them I’d already hashed out with Bronwyn, or, on rarer occasions, with Dr Byron, my psychiatrist. I’d already done so much work on myself.
I clenched my fists, suddenly determined.
That’s right, Underworld. You don’t know who you’re dealing with.
Mist swirled around me, every now and then solidifying into a face, twisted with anger or crying pitifully. With no other ideas in my head, I began to walk, desperate to keep moving, hoping that my momentum would hurry me along, letting me move out of the human Under so I could get to the fae one.
Phantoms of my past still lingered around me. They were stubborn bastards, but not nearly as stubborn as me. I had a job to do, and I was going to do it with every ounce of efficiency I possessed. And it was a lot. I was Susan Fucking Moore, and I was an expert in efficiency.
I swung my arms as I marched through the nothingness.
I pointed at the tear-stained face of my first boyfriend as he lurched up out of the mists.
“I don’t owe you anything, Dave,” I said, not pausing in my stride.
“I’m not abandoning you. We’re fifteen, dude.
And you’re going to lose your virginity to your next-door neighbor in three months anyway. ”
He vanished.
A little girl in a ballet tutu cried pitifully as I charged past. “Suck it up, Tonya,” I told the ghost of my first best friend. “If you hadn't messed up the intro, Madam Lecour would have given the solo to you and not me. Why the hell should I feel guilty for outshining you?”
I charged on.