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To make matters worse, once I drag myself out of my room to have breakfast with my sweet parents, all I can think about is the wild idea that I actually do invite my dreamboy’s real-world alter ego and his daughter to our Thanksgiving.
Hey, Mom. Hey, Dad. Can I please bring the hottest man I have ever met into our little home for a holiday? You know. If he wants to come. I think I’d like to sit beside him and eat mashed potatoes while his daughter rambles on about faeries.
By the way, I still haven’t found any proof or anything, but they might be in a cult.
Is that cool?
Are we cool with that?
The whole drive to school, I’m waffling between desperately wanting to ask my parents if it’s okay and the logic that demands associating my family with a cult is a bad idea.
It’s like associating with the mafia. The deeper I go, the harder it will be to untangle myself. I need to stay in the shallows. Or else.
Logic has never heard of biceps.
Logic pales so pitifully in the face of biceps.
Pollux has got biceps. All of them. Every muscle in the designation bicep. If provided with a marker, I could graph each and every one right on his skin.
“He also blows things up in his basement lab, you nut case,” I mutter as I park in my usual spot, in front of a school camera. “Right, and need I remind you, you’ve not actually seen him since you received that information?” My heart rate does the unthinkable and gets faster. “True. He could be hurt, and I wouldn’t know it.”
I should visit him after school. Walk Andromeda home and see if he’s all right. For her sake. Duh.
After all, if he isn’t all right, he won’t be able to take care of her properly, and Alexios seems a little more devious in his cultic commitment—what with how he’s asked for my soul several times now and all that. Weird that he didn’t join us for movie night. Weird that Pollux hadn’t been to movie night before. I best do my due diligence.
Walk Andromeda home.
Sit her father down.
Ask him about the rules his cult follows…
And, while I’m at it, I should send my mother a perfectly stale text about how one of my students has a single father who might not have anywhere to go on Thanksgiving.
Both Mom and Dad will be planning my wedding before I even get home. But, you know, I’ll have the paper trail record that implies I’m little more than a worried teacher who finds it cruel that anyone might be alone on Thanksgiving.
Grabbing my purse as though I am not swiftly descending into the madness that has infected this town ever since Andromeda and Willow showed up for a tour, I unlock the front door and find a little girl standing in the shadows—blue eyes agleam.
I look behind myself at the door I just most definitely unlocked. I remember clearly locking up the back door yesterday because Zahra was providing me with a verbal Baconian essay on why we needed to go into the woods when I did it. She had references to strengthen her three main points and everything.
“Meda…how did you…” I shake my head. “Why are you…”
She wraps her fingers around my hand. “Come on, come on! I have a surprise.”
The surprise is that she’s a master lock picker. They teach classes. In her cult.
All the same, I follow her as she takes me past the door to my office, through the main room, and out the back door. Letting go of my hand, she dances in front of me and throws her arms wide. “Tada!”
My mouth falls open as I drag my attention toward the massive playground behind her. It sprawls, filling the entire fenced-in space, dwarfing the metal swings. At one end, a boat. At the other, the façade of a mansion, complete with windows that display an elegant array of wooden furniture inside. Tucked into the middle of rock walls and slides, there’s a drive-through window with Taco Bell branding, complete with an ordering menu carved into the wood signs and painted with deep purples.
It is majestic.
It is…impossible.
Dazed, I trail toward the thing and dare to touch it.
Real wood.
How much could this possibly cost? Clearly, it was made from scratch. Designed from scratch, even.
