Taste a Thousand Deaths (Marionettes of Myth #3)

Chapter Twenty-One

Elliot, Jason and Ave didn't pack into the Mustang until late afternoon, early evening, when the dingy sky had already begun to darken into night. Elliot hadn't expected an early start, not when Ave took so long to rouse herself from the depths of Toivo's bed, and then she had to slather herself across him before they finally departed the house.

Yet, it seemed as if, for every step Ave and Toivo took toward one another, Kali and Jason took one step back. Every time they spoke with one another, their relationship seemed to evolve into something that contained more pins and needles than anything else. The 'crush' mentality had all but dissipated, despite how Jason clung to the novelty of the idea.

Because if he let it go, then he admitted that he'd been left behind.

And that was why he was in the Mustang with Ave and Elliot. Because they were in the right places in their lives to make sure that's where he stayed. Right between them.

They swung by the apartment so that Ave and Elliot could pack and Ave could take care of the cats and Elliot could smother the Chihuahua with attention. In all of the commotion, she'd been left behind, all alone.

They were terrible parents.

And even worse, they were leaving her again.

Per usual, the window was left propped open. Ave texted her parents, begging them to continue to feed the animals and let the dog out while they were gone. But when she looked outside and sucked the air in through her nose, Elliot knew it wasn't her mom and dad she thought of.

They stopped at a nearby gas station to fill the Mustang's tank and pack away provisions. Ave and Elliot both made sure Jason had enough synthetic, and Elliot watched as she plucked things like spicy jerky and Sriracha chips from the metal shelves—inorganic, processed things that would make her parents and Toivo cringe. With extra cigarettes and a last confirming text to Toivo, they headed out.

Elliot was her copilot, and Jason slouched in the backseat with the map from the Coalition spread across him like a blanket.

Strange how they could treat this like some sort of vacation.

Strange how they could forget that this was a trap.

Ave's hellish driving whisked them haphazardly from the city, down detours in place of the major overpass reconstruction, and soon even the suburbs faded into sprawling hills of brown, dead grass and forests of skeleton trees and evergreens. It was barely five in the evening, and already the sky was almost dark as pitch.

The car had mostly been silent for the first half hour or so of the ride, until Ave chanced a peek over her shoulder at Jason. The dim lights off the console illuminated her face, her eyes as reflective as any demon's. "So, let's say we don't die and we do find your father. What are you going to do once you have him?"

The map crinkled in the back as he sat forward between the two chairs. "I don't know, leave him on the side of the road, I guess."

She suffered from a bout of giggles, probably not the smartest thing when she'd turned their car into a land rocket.

Elliot shrugged. "We can give him some of Ave's jerky, maybe a cigarette. He'll be grateful enough."

"It's probably a lot more than he expected," Jason said. "I don't even think he knows I exist, so we can just tell him we regularly plow through cults and free the oppressed, or something."