“Yeah, but Chelsea will want that shirt back,” David pressed. With a look at Tamani, he leaned down close to Yuki and whispered softly near her ear. After a moment, Yuki nodded, and he left the room.
“What about Laurel, did she hit her head too?” Yuki asked after a moment of awkward silence.
“You don’t remember?”
Yuki shook her head slowly. “Not really. I just remember smoke, and voices, and…” She paused. “Laurel fainted or something.”
“Yeah, I think she hurt something in the crash and just didn’t feel it till it was all over. Adrenaline, you know,” he said with a dark laugh. But Yuki didn’t respond.
David came back from the kitchen with a roll of paper towels. “Can I get some space?” he said pointedly to Tamani.
Tamani backed away, not sure what David was trying to pull here. Clearly he’d said something to Yuki to let her know he knew about her. Or at least about her non-human blood. And that was information Tamani had not been ready to share.
“Look who I found,” Laurel’s dad said from the doorway, clearly trying to sound cheerful in the face of having so much thrown at him. “She pulled up just as Chelsea and Ryan were leaving. Klea, right? Laurel’s told us, um, so much about you.”
Tamani wasn’t sure whether fear or intrigue was stronger as he turned to greet Klea for the first time. She looked exactly as Laurel had always described her; dressed all in black — mostly tight leather tonight — with cropped auburn hair and sunglasses. She exuded an aura of intimidation and Tamani imagined he could feel Laurel’s sentries moving in closer.
Tamani watched Klea and Yuki as inconspicuously as he could. In the two or three seconds before Klea softly said, “Are you okay?” there was a silent conversation between the two that he wished he could interpret.
“I think so,” Yuki said, nodding slowly. Tamani studied her downcast eyes, her tense shoulders. He had just spent three hours with Yuki — which included a car accident and troll attack — and she had never looked as frightened as she did right now. Because Yuki spent so much time on her own, Tamani had never considered the possibility that she could be Klea’s prisoner. Pawn, perhaps, but never prisoner. But watching her now…?
“She cut her head,” David said, and Tamani noticed that he was holding the soiled T-shirt carefully, but casually, behind his back. “Chelsea and I helped her clean it up,” he said, meeting Klea’s eyes and injecting a hint of purpose into his words.
Tamani watched Klea’s eyebrows raise just barely over the rims of her sunglasses, then she nodded. “Okay,” she said, clearly not responding to the words David had actually spoken.
As if feeling Tamani’s eyes on her, Klea turned to Tamani. “And who are you?” Klea asked, not bothering to hide her suspicion.
“I’m Tam,” Tamani said quickly, holding out his glove-clad hand. “Yuki’s date. You must be her host, uh, family?”
Klea looked at his hand for a long moment before shaking it as briefly as possible.
“I’m from Scotland,” Tamani added, letting his accent deepen just a little. “Yuki and I, we’re both foreign. Met on the first day. I…” He dropped his gaze, donning a sheepish expression. “I was driving. I’m so sorry.”
“Things happen,” Klea said dismissively. “I do need to get Yuki home though.” She started toward the armchair, but stopped as she passed Laurel. “Is she all right?” Klea asked, real concern in her voice.
“We were just waiting for you to come get Yuki before taking her to the hospital,” Laurel’s dad said quickly, his lie easy and natural.
“Of course,” Klea said brusquely. “I won’t keep you.” She helped Yuki up from the couch, one hand covering Yuki’s, pressing the paper towels to her forehead. “I’ll call and see how Laurel is in the next couple days,” she said, vaguely addressing the whole room.
“Sure,” Laurel’s mom murmured. “We do need to get her to a doctor, though.”
“Absolutely,” Klea said, prodding Yuki toward the door.
The door closed behind her and everyone in the room let out a soft sigh.
Except Tamani.
He ran to the front window and peeked out, carefully, watching Klea load Yuki into her car — a sleek black two-door model that looked, even to Tamani’s unaccustomed eye, extremely fast—and then drive off. Only when he saw dark, agile shapes whip under the streetlight, following them, did he turn his attention back to the rest of the room.
“David, what were you thinking?” Tamani demanded. “You totally tipped our hand!”
“It was worth it,” David said, pulling the shirt out from behind his back. “I got this.”
“I somehow think Chelsea would have survived without her shirt,” Tamani said. “Quite frankly, with the way she collects faerie souvenirs, I don’t expect to get my shirt back.”
“You don’t get it,” David shot back. “We’ve been trying to get a sample, right? This is covered in her sap!”
Tamani was speechless for a second. It was so simple, so obvious, so…
“Brilliant,” Tamani allowed grudgingly.
David just grinned.
“Mom?” Laurel’s voice was scratchy and weak, but they all heard her.
Her parents rushed to the couch and David leaned over the back of it, his face close to Laurel’s. Tamani forced himself to remain where he was, feeling even more an outsider than he had at the dance, watching Laurel spin in David’s arms.
“How did I get here?” she asked, disoriented.
“We brought you here after the accident,” David said softly.
Laurel lay back, looking a little confused. Her mom squeezed her hand and turned to Tamani. “What exactly happened?” her mom asked. “And none of this ‘we hit a deer’ stuff.”
David looked at Tamani, allowing him to make the call. But Tamani knew it didn’t matter; Laurel would tell them everything anyway. So he took a deep breath and told them the whole story, not leaving anything out.
“And she just collapsed?” Laurel’s mom asked when he finished, her hand soft on Laurel’s face. “Why?”
“I’m not sure,” Laurel answered, her words slow and deliberate. “Everything was over, and I was standing there, and then I had the most excruciating headache ever. I… I guess I blacked out.”
“Are you sure you didn’t hit your head in the wreck?”
“I don’t think so,” Laurel said. “It didn’t feel like that. For a second, it was just… pain. And a roaring sound in my head. And pressure. Then nothing.”
Her dad looked up at Tamani. “Can trolls do that?”
All Tamani could do was shrug. “I don’t know. It’s never happened before, but I seem to be running into that problem a lot lately.”
“My potion didn’t work on them,” Laurel said. “It should have worked.”
After a moment’s hesitation, David asked, “Did you make it?”
Laurel rolled her eyes. “No,” she said dryly, “I didn’t make it. One of the advanced Fall students made it. I don’t know who.”
“Still, it could have just gone wrong, right?” David pressed.
“Fall potions can always go wrong,” Laurel admitted. She paused, remembering. “Yuki, she was hurt.” She spoke slowly, like even that was effort.
“Yeah,” David said. “Klea came and got her just a couple minutes ago.”
“Klea came here?” Laurel asked, trying to sit up. Her mom helped her, placing an arm around her shoulders. Laurel’s eyes closed for a second, as if she was in danger of losing consciousness again, and Tamani took an involuntary step forward before they opened again.
“There was nothing I could do about that,” David said. “But we gave her as quick an explanation as we could and got them both out of here. She… she knows that Chelsea and I know about Yuki. I’m sorry, I didn’t know what else to say.”