“What about Frank? I saw his neck and—”
Another voice sounded near the staircase. “He’s gotta be a vamp.”
Kiko.
She turned around. His blond hair was wild, his eyes blurry, but he had a strange smile on his face.
Thinking he’d gone too far over the line of devastation, she held her arms out, getting to her knees as he came to her.
They held each other—what was left of the team.
“Trust him,” Kiko whispered in her ear, voice thick. “Trust me. I’ve got it together now. No more meds—I don’t care how much it hurts. We’re going to get these guys. We’re going to slay every last one of them.”
Even above everything else, she worried about what he was saying. Did he think he could just cold turkey himself off those pills?
“You’ll even go after Jac…Eva?” she whispered back to him.
“Especially her.” Kiko hugged Dawn even tighter. “I should’ve known. That’s how it is out here. Never trust what you see.”
Laying her cheek against Kiko’s head, Dawn glanced at Jonah, who was standing off to the side, arms empty, watching his team from a near distance that was a canyon all the same.
Could she trust what she was seeing? Or should she go back to her only other choice: Matt?
As Jonah looked at her, she thought she saw something deep and anguish ridden in his gaze—an emotion she didn’t dare define.
Because that might be a trick of the eye, too.
Dawn framed Kiko’s face with her hands, trying to show him she was strong enough to go on. But he was grinning again.
And when the room filled with jasmine, Dawn knew why.
An invisible force bumped against her fist, and she gaped. At another gentle nudge, Dawn’s chest welled up with thick joy.
She should’ve known…Why hadn’t she…?
“You should have kept faith,”
the wisp of a familiar voice said from a dimension away.
“Breisi?” Dawn asked on a sharp sob that scraped her throat.
The newest Friend wrapped around her team.
Dawn laughed, cried, turned to Jonah, but he was already retreating into the darkness, the shadows dimming him until just the glow of his topaz eyes remained, then disappeared.
Swallowing away the lump in her throat, Dawn went back to her friend and her Friend, eyes wide open with burning, ecstatic tears.
And she was damn well going to keep those eyes open from now on.
Seeing everything for what it really was.