I open my eyes. The world is slower now. Harsher.
I flinch against a wave of pain.
For a second, I wonder if I’m still dreaming, because the room around me is dark. Then I see her, and I know I’m truly awake. “Kissy?”
She smiles at me, but it’s not right. Maybe because she’s hovering over me.
Maybe because there’s a gun in her hand.
I try her name again.
My leg is killing me.
I think about Ethan and his warning.
The woods must have eaten me.
“You’re okay,” Kissy says. Her gaze goes to my chest. The place I’ve been stabbed. She isn’t fretting there long. “But we need to leave. Now.”
I realize I’m in a bathroom. It takes me a beat to assume the Fulton house. I don’t know where the gun came from. Or why Kissy is sweating something fierce. I let her help me to my feet but hold onto the question until we’re walking.
“What happened?” I ask.
Kissy bares some of my weight. I find my own steps when we’re almost at the front door. I feel five kinds of woozy, but not like the wave of darkness I was battling on the way from the cemetery.
Basically, I’m not in danger of passing out anymore, but that doesn’t mean I’m out of the woods for feeling like shit.
“Grant and the man in the cemetery showed up.”
I nearly stop dead in my tracks, but she swings the front door open, and I’m looking at an unfamiliar SUV.
“Where are they now?” I ask.
Kissy’s voice sounds like it’s scraping the bottom of the barrel.
“Upstairs. They won’t be following us.” She pulls something from her back pocket. “I got their keys.”
The way she’s talking, the way she’s not making eye contact, and the way she’s holding the gun, puts me at a decision to make.
I could either ask Kissy how exactly she got her two new items since I passed out or I can trust her and in doing so listen to her.
I choose the latter.
“Give me the gun, and you can drive,” I tell her.
She hesitates.
It gives credence to my growing theory that Kissy’s used it.
I make sure my voice doesn’t have an inch for uncertainty in it.
“Give me the gun, Kissy. I want it.”
That gets her.
She lets it go and hurries around the hood of the SUV.
I’m a bit slower.
