Eventually, though, the water won.
“I need to use the restroom,” I said when squirming stopped working.
Hunter slid out of the booth, making room for me. He walked me back toward a door.
I opened the door and he tried to follow me in. I turned to block his way. “I don’t think so.”
Hunter looked past me, as if surveying the empty bathroom. “Modesty is useless if you end up dead.”
“But if I can’t pee in peace, is it even worth living?”
He lifted an eyebrow then studied the room once more, drawing in a breath as if to sniff. I could have told him trying to smell a public restroom in hell was probably a really bad choice, but I just wanted him gone.
Finally, he nodded. “You have five minutes before I’m coming back in, privacy be damned. I’ll be right here.”
I shut the door, thankful to have a moment to myself. I thought about how moms always talked about sitting in the bathroom for far longer than it took to actually pee because they needed the break, the quiet, the time to get off their feet and just sit in silence.
After I did my business, squat-style over the seat because I was not going to be sitting on that—who knew what sort of diseases one could get in hell—I washed my hands, ignoring the red-tinged liquid that left the faucet.
We were close. It was strange, since I couldn’t feel magic, yet there was an odd sensation that ran over my skin. It wasn’t a pull, not something I felt connected to, but rather an awareness. The closer we’d gotten to the Court, to the center of hell, the stronger it became.
Why?
Why any of it? I sighed, drying my hands on my pants when there wasn’t anything else to use.
Whys weren’t all that useful, really, since they hadn’t given me any answers.
Something moved in my peripheral vision, and I turned to catch sight of someone through the back window.
The boy I’d seen earlier. Where he’d had an edge of anxiety before, he was in a full panic, now.
He backed away, hands up, tears running down his dirty cheeks. The window was behind the row of toilets, up high enough to give bathroom goers privacy.
I moved without thinking. It was stupid, yes, but all I could think about was how I’d felt as a kid. I thought about the times I’d had no one looking out for me, the times I’d moved to some new group home or foster family with nothing. The fear on the kid’s face was so familiar that the only thing I could think of was doing something.
The reach wasn’t easy, but I pulled myself through the window, using the toilet as a stepstool, and shimmied out.
I planned to grab the kid, to get him to follow me back into the bathroom. Grant had to be wrong about him because he was just a kid.
I followed where he’d gone, just around the corner, to find him cowering in the shadows.
“Hey there,” I said, using my best ‘I’m a friend’ voice. “Come on, why don’t you come with me? We’ll get you somewhere safe.”
He sniffled, then ran the back of his hand across his nose. “I can’t.”
I crouched down just in front of him. “Yes, you can. My friends look scary, but they’re really not.”
Okay, so they really were scary, but that wasn’t the sort of thing that would reassure the kid, so I kept it to myself.
He lifted his face, and it shifted before my eyes. That fear was gone, disappearing as if it’d never been there at all.
It was in that moment I realized Grant had been right, that I’d been stupid.
I’d left the protection of people who could keep me safe and for what?
I was as bad as every stupid woman in a movie, making dumb choices.
“You are so fucked,” the kid said, the words coming from his young voice and yet tinged in so much blood. “Never should have come out alone.”
I scrambled backward but ran into a solid body.
Please let it be Hunter.
I wasn’t so lucky, though, because when I twisted, it was Jerrod’s face I found. His unnaturally pale skin, his yellow eyes—they weren’t the sort of thing I’d forget.
I went to scream, to try to alert Hunter or the others, but he wrapped his hand around my mouth.
It was so similar to that first night with Hunter, but where Hunter had been saving me, I was pretty sure Jerrod had no such good things in mind.
The curl of his lips into a blood-freezing smile assured me of that.
Chapter Eleven
The frayed edges of the string tied at my throat were the only thing that kept me from panicking. I kept telling myself that the men would come looking for me, that they’d find me because of those strings, because of Hunter’s tracking.
All I had to do was buy time.
But why hadn’t they found me yet?
It didn’t seem like we’d gone far, though the streets all ran together so I wasn’t sure. Hunter had said he’d give me five minutes, and it had been far longer than that.
Jerrod had tugged me through the city, then to a building near the inner edge, I was pretty sure. Few had looked out way, and the only ones who had had scurried away at the first good snarl from Jerrod.
The closer to the center we got, the more deserted and run-down things became, and the place we stopped at was no different.
It looked like it had been a shop at one time, with a large counter like a register, but the glass front had been broken then boarded up.
Jerrod hadn’t bothered to bind me, just tossed me to the ground when we reached the building as if I weren’t a real concern to him.
The kid came, too, though his language had further deteriorated.
Hearing him talk like an angry, vulgar eighty-year-old man was at best disconcerting.
“Come on, you don’t even want a taste
