“Jeez, Will—why not tell me how you really feel.”
“Listen here, this ismyglorious demise, not yours.”
“You’re so right. Please, go on.” Lucas made a twirling gesture with his hand.
“Thank you, I will. So I’m dodging Runners, shoving one into another, jumping over the bodies of the ones I’ve already killed. I’m karate chopping, high kicking—”
“Karate chopping? Last time you told this story, you’d jerry-rigged a lawn mower into a chainsaw and there was blood and guts raining everywhere. Now you’re karate chopping?”
“Excuse me? Can I finish my story?”
Laughing, Lucas pushed away from the tree branch and slung his arm across my shoulders. Tugging on a handful of my braids, he planted a soft kiss at the corner of my mouth. “I love you,” he said fondly.
Relaxing against him, I ran a fingertip down the full length of his aquiline nose, flicking his nose ring. Kissing each of his prominent cheekbones, my fingers found the straight shape of his mouth, bumping over each of his matching lip rings. “I love you, too,” I whispered.
My boyfriend since middle school, my best friend, too—my only friend, actually—Lucas had been my entire world for as long as I could remember.
“You two plan on being useful today?”
We broke apart to find Logan standing in the doorway, the remnants of the spiderweb hanging in tatters around his hulking silhouette, the spider crushed beside his boot. His narrowed gaze was fixed on us, his heavy brows pinched tightly together. Who knew how long he’d been standing there—Logan, despite his size, was as quiet as a cat and as stealthy as one too. He could move in and out of places with no one the wiser. Meanwhile, Lucas and I couldn’t seem to take two steps without the whole world taking notice.
That wasn’t the only difference between the brothers; almost three years Lucas’s senior, Logan outsized Lucas in every way. He was taller, bigger, bulkier, and what was only a smattering of hair across Lucas’s cheeks and chin was a full-fledged beard on Logan. Even their shared features were noticeably different—Lucas’s blue eyes were light and guileless while Logan’s were heavy and hard; Lucas’s long locks usually hung free, while Logan kept his pulled back wound into a tight knot.Tightly wound… just like the man himself.
Lucas sighed. “We’ve been looking—we just haven’t found anything yet. What about you?”
Logan continued to eye us both, his expression as stony as ever. “The garage is barricaded,” he growled. “Sounds like there’s a couple of Creepers inside. Who’s going to help me clear it?”
“Willow is!” Lucas exclaimed.
“Traitor!” I sputtered, stomping my foot.
Lucas shrugged. “You snooze, you lose, Wilbur.”
“Don’t call me Wilbur,Lucifer.”
“Don’t call me Lucifer,Willard.”
“Don’t call me Willard,shithead.”
“Oooh, shithead. Real classy, Will,real classy.”
“You know they say that people who curse are more intelligent than those who don’t, right?”
Lucas chuckled loudly. “Who says that? More importantly, where are they now?” His chiseled features went comically slack as he let out a deathly groan—a near-perfect imitation of the dead.
“Hey,” Logan snapped. “If you two are done fucking around, can one of you get your ass downstairs?”
Lucas and I shared a glance. Logan rarely relaxed; he wasallbusinessallof the time. In his mind, every day was a new battle he had to fight where he was the general and Lucas and I were his unwilling soldiers. And with the current heat index, lack of water, and subsequent food shortage worsening his mood, Logan was only going to grow grumpier.
But truth be told, Logan had always been this way. He had never been able to simply “sit down and take a load off”, and the end of the world had only made his compulsions that much worse.
First, the farmhouse would need to be cleared—checked for both threats and supplies. Then it would need to be secured—locked up tight so nothing could sneak up on us. Only after that could camp be set up; a camp that was bothdefendableandescapable—Logan’s two favorite words. And only after camp was set up could we even begin to think of relaxing. Any sort of deviation from the plan and there was a good chance Logan would lose his shit. Scratch that—any sort of deviation and Logan would definitely lose his shit.
“Coming,” I muttered. Flipping off Lucas behind my back, I made a dramatic show of trudging into the hall after Logan.
“Could you walk any slower?” Logan bit out.
“I mean, I could,” I quipped. “But since you’re like Grumplestiltskin on crack today, this is my quick walk.”
