Page 137

Justin, I’m awake. My eyes won’t open.
Footsteps echoed around me, and I struggled to move. My fingers twitched, but my eyes wouldn’t budge. I wasn’t sure how long Luna was gone, but I soon felt icy cold water drip across my forehead. As somethingfreezingcold touched my temples and ran across my eyes, I gasped and managed to open them.
Justin was holding me and had an ice cube in his hand while Luna had a wet washcloth.
“Wwwhat hhhapppened?” I said, my mouth barely moving. It was harder than hell to annunciate anything.
“You were roofied,” Justin said. When my eyes tried to close again, he rubbed over my brows and just under my lower lids to make them widen again. His beautiful face was marred with barely restrained rage. “We need to get you to Headmistress McArthur.Now.”
“Do you remember anything?” Luna asked.
“She was roofied. I fucking doubt it,” Justin said angrily. “Let’s get her up and see how she does.”
Justin stood with me in his arms before sitting me on the edge of my bed. My head swayed from one way to the next until he steadied it.
“Temperance, can you hear me?” he asked.
“Mmmhmm,” I moaned.
“Can you talk to me?” he asked.
“Yesss. Ssslowwly. Mmbut yesss.”
“Okay. Do you think you can stay awake long enough to talk to the headmistress? Do you want to go to the hospital?”
He had such anger and worry on his face. I wanted to touch him, but I doubted I could lift my arm just yet. Trying to lift it made me remember the burning pain in it. An ache lingered in my shoulder.
I nodded, and I’m sure it looked more like my head flopping around than anything. “Headmissstresss. Nnno hosssppit’l.”
“You and your damn aversion to hospitals,” Luna said.
“Well, if you’d stayed in one as long as she had, wouldn’t you hate them, too?” Justin asked. “Go down to the lobby and grab one of the guest wheelchairs and bring it up.”
“I’ll be right back, babe,” Luna said before kissing my forehead.
Thank you. “Thhanku,” I said, after realizing my first response was only in my head.
It definitely sounded better in my head…
All I wanted was to go back to sleep, but Justin forced me awake each time I started to fall under. He ran cold water all over my face and even dripped it into my hair to soak it a bit at the roots before laying me down, turning my bedside fan on high, pointing it directly at me, and finally sitting me in front of it.
I immediately chilled. My body shivered, and I took that as a good sign. “This fuck’n sssucksss,” I said.
“Hey! Those were whole words!” he said. “I think you’re starting to come around. Hopefully, you didn’t drink too much. I saw the bottle. You only drank about half.”
“I can’t rrremember anything except pain,” I said. Relief flooded through me as my slurring turned into just slow speech. I could handle talking slowly.
“Yeah, well, you have a whole ass fucking tattoo on your arm. So, I imagine there was a lot of pain.”
My eyes lazily widened. “A f’ckn tattoo?” My head lolled off to the side for a second as I lost control of it while trying to look down at my arm. My vision was still too blurry to make out what the tattoo was, but I could see it covered my entire shoulder and down into my bicep a bit. “Wwwhat iss it?”
Shit. Baby steps, I guess.
He sighed. “It’s an axe thrust into a large block of wood. It saysTempeabove it andThe Lumberjackbelow it.”
My brows furrowed. “Jjjack.”
“What?” he asked.