I sat next to Wilder on one of the sofa-style seats in the back, while Secret and Lucas sat across from each other in large leather chairs. I curled against Wilder’s side, taking deep breaths, letting his familiar scent calm me.
“I wish we were still home,” I told him.
“I know.”
“When this is over, can we just stay in bed for a week?”
He gave me a grim smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes, and after a much-too-long pause said, “Sure.”
There was a lot to unpack in both the silence and the response, and I almost needled him for answers, but the expression on his face told me now was not the time. When the right time would be I couldn’t begin to say, but I’d let it slide for now.
Still, it added a whole new knot of worry to the already building ball of turmoil in my gut. Something was up with him, something he wasn’t willing to share with me. I thought of all the messages he’d been getting over the last week and suddenly my guilt was replaced by a fierce stab of worry.
Was there something serious he wasn’t telling me? There had to be.
“We’re here,” Secret said.
I hadn’t even felt the plane start to descend, and it felt as if we had barely even left the tarmac in Louisiana, and yet sure enough when I looked out the plane’s window there was the sparkling skyline of New York City spread out beneath us like a glittery map.
The last time I’d been here, the world had been ending.
It was so strange to see it now, looking as if those events had never happened. Everything had changed that night. The dead had risen, secrets held for millennia had been revealed, and the woman sitting ten feet away from me had given up her very life to make sure everything was set right.
Now she, and the man who had died to save me, were both alive and seemingly well, and we were returning to the city where they’d both once died. For Secret, it was a literal homecoming. She and Desmond lived in New York, and she commuted every other week to work with the FBI task force in Los Angeles.
That was, when she wasn’t running all over hell’s half acre hunting down the creepy monsters and creatures who wanted to upset the tenuous new balance we’d found with humankind.
She had a lot of frequent flyer miles.
I caught her staring out the window, her fingernails nervously tapping on the seat arm. She was clearly as worried about Desmond as I was about whatever Wilder was keeping from me.
We had a lot more in common than just our names.
“He’s going to be okay,” I said.
“I know,” she replied too quickly. “Nothing can happen to him.”
To the casual ear her words might have sounded like her saying he was too well protected for anything to happen, but I knew what she really meant. Nothing could happen to Desmond because it would ruin her. She was saying it to the universe, demanding a promise that the indifferent cosmos would never make good on.
Nothing would happen to Desmond because she wouldn’t let it.
Part of me wondered if the presence of Lucas was making her worry. Fate had returned one husband to her doorstep. Would it try to take away the other out of spite.
Secret chewed on her lower lip and shifted uncomfortably in the very comfortable chair.
“Nothing will happen to him,” I repeated back to her.
She nodded, but I wasn’t sure she’d believe me until she laid eyes on him.
For some reason I thought of Santiago, of how he’d looked the moment Deerling’s blade went through him, and in my mind, Santiago’s face became Desmond’s.
I swallowed hard.
Good thing I wasn’t psychic, or I might be worried.
Chapter Thirty-one
“I told you to go home,” Secret burst out furiously as we exited the plane.