Ghost Silk (Ghost Perfume, Book 2) | ✔

11 - Tell the truth - Part 3 (Lukas)

A/n miss you all a lot, sorry for the delay in updates! This one's a bit long, please enjoy~~

Lukas

We woke the sleepers and Michael pulled us into the Starbucks at the exit.

It was a pathetic, generic corner of northeastern America, like most of the spaces you tended to find off these highways. A gas station and convenience store. A wide stretch of rundown road that drowned to a river in the downpour. A Wendy's and a Starbucks, square and bright and comfortingly functional, both apparently empty of customers.

Gabriel shook himself alert, but Rose still blinked sleepily and had evidently not yet remembered to be stiff with us. She even gave me a tiny smile as she ran a finger over the braid in her hair.

Alexander cursed as he stepped out of the car directly into a puddle.

Gabriel snickered at him, ducking to share the umbrella Michael held out.

"Hold this umbrella over us," Alexander ordered Rose, leaning down at the open door to the car. She scooted towards him to obey, slinging her backpack over her shoulder.

She'd always kept it close, but now it was almost always attached to her. I supposed it was the death book she wanted to keep close.

When she'd taken hold of the umbrella with her right hand, before she could step out of the car, Alexander picked her up so her feet didn't touch the ground. My eyes seized on the hands that wrapped under her thighs, just a breath away from her ass.

I got out on the other side of the car, annoyed.

"They are open," Michael called to us. Gabriel held the door open so Alexander, carrying Rose, could walk in first.

We took over the couches in the corner of the cafe, while some of us ordered or ducked into the bathroom. Rose became surprisingly talkative with the giant hot chocolate in her hands.

"Gabriel? How do you feel lately?" she asked.

"I'm well." He flexed the fingers of his recently injured hand.

"You heal fast," she marveled, taking his hand to examine it herself. "But what about withdrawal symptoms?"

"No, that's all over," he said.

I doubted it.

He had once told me that the flower spoke to him always. If that had been so, it couldn't possibly have been silenced yet.

But he'd found a way to ignore the voice, and that was all that counted.

Rose snickered. "I can't, the barista's watching," she murmured. She must have been addressing the revenant.

She prodded Gabriel about work then, and he said it was even more boring now than it'd been before.

"Um. How did you end up working together at the security company? Did you want to? Because sometimes it seems like you don't like it." She blushed, embarrassed at what she really meant, which was that it never seemed like we were happy.

How did you explain the silver call? We knew she had to feel an echo of it herself; from the very beginning, she had seemed too eager and trusting with us.

We never spoke of it, but I was increasingly uncomfortable with the possibility, and I was pretty sure the others had to have wondered the same thing by now – that the silver call explained a bit of her friendliness to us. Maybe not all of it, but some.