I pressed my lips together. “You know, there’s so much we have to just trust you with. That you really are working against Daedalus and not for them. That Beth and Chris are where you’re saying they are, and now, that you didn’t really know about onyx.”
“I know how this looks.”
“I don’t think you do,” Daemon said, letting go of my hand as he propped his hip against the fence. “We have no reason to trust you.”
“And you’ve blackmailed us into helping you,” I added.
Blake exhaled roughly. “Okay. I don’t have a glowing history, but I want nothing more than to get my friend away from them. That’s why I’m here.”
“And why are you here right this instant?” Daemon asked, obviously at his patience threshold.
“I think we can get around the onyx,” he said, pulling his hands out of his pockets and holding them in front of him. “Now, hear me out. This is going to sound crazy.”
“Oh, goodie,” Daemon muttered.
“I think we need to build up a tolerance. If that was what Daedalus was doing, then that makes sense. Hybrids have to go in and out of those doors. If we expose ourselves to it—”
“Are you insane?” Daemon turned around, running his hand through his hair, clasping the back of his neck. “You want us to expose ourselves to onyx?”
“Do you see any other option?”
Yeah, there was one—we didn’t go back. But was it really an option? Daemon was starting to pace. Not a good sign. “Can we do this later? We’re going to be late.”
“Sure.” He sidestepped Daemon. “After school?”
“Maybe,” I said, focusing on Daemon. “We’ll talk later.”
Taking the hint, Blake skedaddled out of there. I had no idea what to say to any of this. “Expose ourselves to onyx?”
Daemon huffed. “He’s insane.”
He was. “Do you think it would work?”
“You’re not…?”
“I don’t know.” I switched my backpack to the other shoulder and we started toward the school. “I really don’t know. We can’t give up, but what other options do we have?”
“We don’t even know if it will work.”
“But if Blake really is sort of immune to it, then we can test it out on him.”
A wide grin spread across his face. “I like the sound of that.”
I laughed. “Why doesn’t that surprise me? But seriously, if he has a tolerance to it, then shouldn’t we be able to? It’s something. We’d just need to figure out how to get some.” Daemon was quiet for a few seconds “What?” I asked.
He squinted. “I think I have the onyx part covered.”
“What do you mean?” I stopped again, ignoring the faint warning bell.
“After Will got you and a couple of days after Dawson came back, I returned to the warehouse and stripped most of the onyx from the outside.”
My jaw hit the ground. “What?”
“Yeah, I don’t know why I did it. Kind of like my big FU to the establishment.” He laughed. “Imagine their faces when they went back and saw it was all gone.”
I was speechless.
He tweaked my nose. I smacked his hand away. “You’re insane. You could’ve gotten caught!”
“But I didn’t.”
I smacked him again, this time harder. “You’re crazy.”
“But you love my craziness.” He leaned down, kissing the corner of my lip. “Come on, we’re late. The last thing we need is detention.”
I snorted. “Yeah, like
…
Carissa still hadn’t returned to school on Monday. The flu must’ve been kicking her butt. Lesa seemed a bit jealous over the whole thing. “I’m, like, five pounds from my goal weight,” she said before trig started. “Why can’t I come down with something? Geesh.”
I giggled and we moved on to some gossip. For a little while, I forgot about everything. It was nice and much needed downtime even though we were in school. The morning blew by and when Blake entered bio, I refused to let him ruin my mood.
But then he opened his mouth and the big “what the hell” statement came out. “You didn’t tell Daemon about what I said to you in the woods? About me liking you?”
Ah, what the frig, man? “Um, no. He’d kill you.”
Blake laughed.
I frowned. “I’m being serious.”
“Oh.” His smile faded and he paled. I imagined that he was playing that scenario out in his head: me telling Daemon about his dirty little secret and Daemon going ape poo poo over it. He came to the same conclusion as me. “Yeah, good call.
“Anyway,” he continued. “About what I said this morning—”
“Not now.” I opened my notebook. “I really don’t want to talk about that right now.”
I smiled when Lesa sat down and luckily, Blake respected my request. He chatted it up with Lesa like a normal person would. He was good at that—pretending.
A knot formed in my stomach as I looked at him sharply. He was telling Lesa about different kinds of surfing techniques. I was pretty sure she wasn’t even listening, considering her gaze was trained on how his shirt strained over his biceps.
He laughed easily, blending in perfectly. Like a good implant would, and I knew from previous experience that Blake was skilled at faking it. There really was no way of telling what side Blake was truly on, and it was stupid to even guess.
At the front of the class, Matthew pulled out his roll book. His eyes met mine briefly and then shifted to the boy beside me. I wondered how Matthew did it—kept calm all the time. How he stayed the glue that kept everyone together.
…
I stopped at my locker and grabbed my US history text at the end of the day. The chances of a pop quiz tomorrow were high. Mrs. Kerns had a schedule, which really didn’t make the quiz a big surprise. I closed my locker door and turned, shoving my book into the bag. The crowd was thinning out as everyone rushed to get out of the school. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to rush or not. Blake had already texted me during gym about getting everyone together to talk about the onyx situation, and I really didn’t want to.
I wanted one day to go home and do nothing—no plotting or dealing with alien shenanigans. Books needed reading and reviewing and my poor blog could really use a makeover. I couldn’t think of a better way to finish out a Monday.
But it was probably not going to happen.
Stepping outside, I trailed behind the last group of students heading to the parking lot. From my vantage point, I could hear Kimmy’s high-pitched voice from the front.
“My daddy said that Simon’s father has been talking to the FBI. He’s demanding a full investigation and won’t stop until Simon comes home.”
I wondered if the FBI knew about the aliens. Images of
“I heard on TV that the longer a person is missing, the less likely it is for them to turn up alive,” one of her friends said.
“But look at Dawson. He was gone for over a year, and he’s back,” another said.
Tommy Cruz rubbed a beefy hand along the back of his neck. “And isn’t that strange? He’s gone forever. The one Thompson kid bites it and then Dawson shows up? Something insane with that.”
I’d heard enough. Going between cars, I put distance between the group and me. I doubted their suspicious
