Obfuscate by Killion Slade Page B

with his hands.
    “Never expected such exciting adventures when we started to date, huh?” I ran my hand down the side of his cheek where there weren’t any burns.
    “Blimey, Chey, you do manage to keep things interesting. I’ll give you that.” He tried to wink, but winced in pain as scorched flesh fell off in chunks, revealing pink shiny skin underneath. Even though he looked as though he would never recover, it was miraculous to watch how his skin repaired itself.
    “Looks like you’re going to need more blood. Is there any way they can bring us live donors?”
    Khaldon shrugged and reclined back on the bed, slowly closing his eyes obviously still too tired to care.
    “I’ll ask and see what I can find out.” I stood and tentatively stretched my newly formed calf muscles and leaned up against the windowsill beside Khaldon’s bed. It looked as though we would have a shy pink and orange sunset in a few hours. In some oddball way, the setting sun offered a renewed hope that we might live to see another day.
    I picked at a silver scab pockmark on my elbow, not trying to think about why we were here recovering in the first place. “Ya know, it was really weird. Right before the explosion, I found a key around Dakota’s waist. It glowed the same as the green orb and it had a serpent’s eye in it. It was so Lords of the Rings cliché, but the weird thing was, the key actually called to me. It wanted me to insert it into the lock. Like it was enchanted or something.”
    “What did you do with it? Do you still have it?”
    “I didn’t do anything with it. Ludovic snatched the key out of my hands and called me a witch. The next thing I knew—Dakota and Ludovic were gone.”
    “Wait—what? He called you a witch? Are you sure?”
    I tilted my head from side to side, not saying yes, not saying no. “No, not really. I’m not sure. But Briggs accused him of calling me that and I’d never heard the word before.” I shrugged. “It’s no big deal, it just made me wonder who planted that key as the trigger for the countdown. Someone spent a lot of time planning to kill us.”
    Khaldon breathed in as deep a breath as he could. “This whole shite show is nutters, but are you all right? This has been very difficult for you.” His voice was kind. So kind, it made me feel guilty for focusing my own needs and not paying more attention to him. He was hurt just as badly as I was.
    “Truthfully?”
    “No, please, lie to me,” he teased. “Of course, tell me what’s going on in that burnt, red head of yours.” His grin reached his green eyes, and I hoped he really didn’t care what I looked like after what we had been through.
    “Please don’t remind me. It’s going to take forever to regrow at this point.” I shook my head. “Physically, I’m better. But earlier, I thought I would lose my mind when I couldn’t see. I still just can’t believe we failed.”
    Khaldon reached out a hand to me. I accepted it and ran a finger up and down where the skin had grown back. My own hand was pink and rosy with renewed flesh.
    “Mentally, I can’t wrap my head around who would want to do that to Dakota. To any of us. They used her as a lure to kill us.” I looked at our hands once again. My breath hitched in my chest as emotion swelled. My words were thick with shock. “I feel like my mind is refusing to believe how my heart is breaking. My brain is in complete denial of what happened. Everything I remember happening on that island was true. I feel more numb than anything and I want to crawl into a hole and hit the reset button on life.”
    Harris reached over and held my hand. “Ctrl-Z, Chey.” Even with a pint of whole blood and two IV bottles hanging above him, his face, hands, and arms were still bloated as though he were a corpse pulled out of a lake several days after drowning. His hands and arms spidered out with angry punctures of red lines radiating from the dart’s impacts.
    “Guys, how can we go on