“How are you holding up?” he asked in his drawl.
I pulled away and stared up at him. “I think you’re the only thing holding me up right now.”
He gave me a quick smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. Maximus was usually quite easy going, to see the worry on his brow made my heart kick up a notch again.
“Mornin’, little lady,” he said over my head, nodding at Ada.
She held her sheets to her chest and nodded gravely in return. “Mornin’, big dude.”
“So now that I’m here,” he said, walking over to the edge of my bed and sitting down, hands clasped together, “why don’t you fill me in on everything, from the start.”
His eyes briefly trailed to underwear and I quickly grabbed a robe out of the closet and covered myself up before I launched into the events of the last twenty-four hours. Maximus listened patiently as I went on, his brow furrowing even deeper.
When I finished, breathless, he ran a freckled hand through his thick hair and sighed.
“What?” I asked. “What is it?”
He shot me an apologetic look. “Sorry, Perry. It’s a lot to take in, and to be honest with you, I’m not sure where to start.”
My face fell. “What do you mean? You knew Dex back then, when you both lived here.”
He nodded. “It was a long time ago, too, don’t forget that. Dex was living in an apartment. I can take you there, but he rarely talked about his childhood, about where he lived with Michael. I don’t know where that is.”
“But,” I said, stepping closer to him and staring hard at his green eyes, “you do know something, you have to.”
He gave me a sympathetic smile. “New York wasn’t the best of times Perry. I’m sure you know the story by now.”
I crossed my arms. “How you were best buds and then Abby died and then he slept with your girlfriend and went insane all while you turned a blind eye? Yeah, I heard the story.”
His eyes narrowed briefly, a flash of hurt and warning. “Hey, I reckon it’s not as black and white as it seems. But either way, many mistakes were made and I gotta be honest with ya, it’s not easy for me to be here.”
“Well what the fuck are we supposed to do?” I yelled, throwing my hands up in the air.
“Perry,” Ada said gently, about to tell me to take a chill pill.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, turning away from them. Then I turned back, fueled by desperation. “No, you know what? I’m not sorry. Not one bit. I’m mad. I’m freaking the fuck out. I’m panicking. You guys don’t seem to fucking understand what’s happening. Dex is my best friend, my fiancé, my future husband,” I pointed my finger at Ada, “your future brother-in-law. He’s everything to all of us and I am not joking, I am not exaggerating, when I say that we have to get to him now. We have to or we will never ever see him again.”
Maximus studied me for a few moments and a wave of fear trickled onto my shoulders. He thinks I’m crazy. He’s regretting coming here. He’s not going to help me. He’s going to turn around and go home. He doesn’t believe me.
“Okay,” he said after a minute. “I’ll do what I can.”
I raised my brow. “So you believe me, you believe everything I said.”
He gave me a lopsided smile. “More than you know.”
I had no idea what that meant and it didn’t assuage my fears. Though Max saw a lot of the supernatural stuff when we were in Red Fox and New Orleans, I could never really forget that this was the guy that watched me become possessed in front of his eyes and still denied it.
Just then my phone started ringing, now that it was fully charged. I looked over it and at Ada. We knew who it was.
“I’ve got it,” Ada said, snatching it up from the bedside table. Before I could tell her not to answer it, before we could come up with a plan of what to do, what to say, she did.
“Hi mom,” she said lightly, as if everything was just peachy.
She immediately winced and the hotel room filled with the tinny sound of my mother yelling over the airwaves. I watched as Ada tried to get a few words in before she suddenly blurted out, “We’re in New York City.”
You could feel the silence as the truth soaked in.
Then the yelling started all over again. I let it continue for another minute until I pulled out the older sister card and took responsibility.
Naturally, it didn’t matter what I told my mother. Or my father, once he came on the line. They obviously didn’t believe a word of me when I said Dex’s brother was trouble and we had reason to believe he’d been taken against his will.