Anna Dressed in Blood - Kendare Blake [28]
“Dude,” I say, and head off toward the gym, to go through it out to the football field. “Now’s not the time.” Behind me I hear him mutter that it’s always the time. I let myself smirk for a minute before wondering what I’m going to do to keep Will and Chase on a leash.
CHAPTER NINE
When Will and Chase get to the football field, they find Thomas and me sacked out on the bleachers, staring at the sky. The day is sunny, mellow, and warm. Mother Nature does not mourn for Mike Andover. The light feels fantastic on my throbbing head.
“Jesus,” one of them says, and then there are a whole lot of expletives that don’t bear repeating. The tirade finally ends with, “He really is alive.”
“No thanks to you dicks.” I sit up. Thomas sits up too, but stays slightly hunched. These jerks have kicked him around one too many times.
“Hey,” Will snaps. “We didn’t do anything to you, understand?”
“Keep your fucking mouth shut,” Chase adds, pointing a finger at me. For a minute I don’t know what to say. I hadn’t thought that they would be coming to try to keep me quiet.
I brush off the knee of my jeans. There’s a bit of dust on them from where I leaned against the underside of the bleacher. “You guys didn’t try to do anything to me,” I say honestly. “You brought me to a house because you wanted to freak me out. You didn’t know that your friend would wind up getting torn in half and disemboweled.” That was cruel. I admit it. Chase goes immediately pale. Mike’s last moments are playing behind his eyes. For a second, I soften, but then my throbbing head reminds me that they tried to kill me.
Standing beside them but down a bleacher, Carmel hugs herself and looks away. Maybe I shouldn’t be so angry. But what, is she kidding me? Of course I should be. I’m not happy about what happened to Mike. I never would have let it happen if they hadn’t rendered me useless with a board to the head.
“What should we tell people about Mike?” Carmel asks. “There are going to be questions. Everyone saw him leave the party with us.”
“We can’t tell them the truth,” Will says ruefully.
“What is the truth?” Carmel asks. “What happened in that house? Am I really supposed to believe that Mike was murdered by a ghost? Cas—”
I meet her eyes levelly. “I saw it.”
“I saw it too,” Chase adds, looking like he might throw up.
Carmel shakes her head. “It’s not real. Cas is alive. Mike is too. This is all just some messed-up prank that you all cooked up to get back at me for breaking up with him.”
“Don’t be so self-obsessed,” Will says. “I saw her arms reach through the window. I saw her pull him in. I heard someone scream. And then I saw Mike’s silhouette split in two.” He looks at me. “So what was it? What was living in that house?”
“It was a vampire, man,” Chase stutters.
Idiot. I ignore him completely. “Nothing was living in that house. Mike was killed by Anna Korlov.”
“No way, man, no way,” Chase says with increasing panic, but I don’t have time for his waves of denial. Luckily, neither does Will, who tells him to shut up.
“We tell the cops that we drove around for a while. Then Mike got mad about Carmel and Cas and got out of the truck. None of us could stop him. He said he was going to walk home, and since it wasn’t that far away, we didn’t think anything of it. When he didn’t show at school today, we figured that he was hungover.” Will’s jaw is set. He can think on his feet, even when he doesn’t want to. “We’ll have to put up with a few days or weeks of search parties. They’ll question us some. And then they’ll give up.”
Will’s looking at me. No matter how big a dick Mike was, he was Will’s friend, and now Will Rosenberg is trying to wish me out of existence. If there wasn’t anyone else watching, he might even try it—tap his heels together three times or something.
And maybe he’s right. Maybe it is my fault. I could have found another way to Anna. But to hell with that. Mike Andover hit me across the back of the head with a plank and