A whirl of emotions crossed over Jason’s face as he stared at me. I didn’t want to look at him. I didn’t want to see his frightening blue eyes staring at me like he could see my every thought and desire. I didn’t want to be affected by his messy curls of blond hair. I narrowed my eyes and put my hands on my hips.
It was safer to look fierce. I’d done vulnerable once with Jason, and he’d left me sitting in the cold. Literally.
Chad gave one last look at Jason before turning his gaze to me. “I’m going to go rouse the other Wolves. We have to get out of here.”
I grabbed his arm. “Don’t kick them.”
Luna and Autumn might be Wolves, but they were girls. I didn’t like the thought of Chad kicking girls….
He nodded, his eyes glistening with amusement. “I’ll find another way.”
I suddenly hoped I hadn’t made things worse.
Jason stood, his gaze following Chad’s movement. When Jason spoke, it took me a minute to realize he addressed me.
“I never thought I’d see you again, Rachel.”
“Yeah, well….” I shrugged like it didn’t make a difference to me one way or another. I hoped I was good at acting. “I didn’t exactly plan to save you from death either.”
His head whipped around so fast to look at me I was surprised it didn’t fly off his neck. I took a step back. He was a Werewolf—one who claimed not to kill people—but that didn’t mean that it wasn’t smart to exert some self-preservation.
Really, how well did I know him? It was possible everything he had ever told me was a big fat lie.
He cocked his head to the side. “You know what? Now that we’re standing here, how about you tell me why you did it?”
His blue eyes were fierce, none of the warmth from earlier in the year was displayed anywhere. Jason’s trademark optimism seemed to have been replaced with anger and hate, at least for me.
“Why I did what? Save your life? I guess I thought I owed you one for saving mine, even if your motives were horrendous.”
Behind him I could hear the other Wolves waking up. I hadn’t paid attention to what Chad had done to rouse them, and it was too late now to intervene.
“No, Rachel, I’m asking you why you abandoned me. Why you went back when I was offering you forever?”
My hands shook at my side. I took a step forward. Forget protecting myself, I wanted to rip his eyes right out of his face; I wanted to punch him—hard—in the stomach.
Instead, I let myself shout. “Why I abandoned you? I waited the whole day. The whole damn day for you.” My vision was red. I’d heard that expression before—seeing red—but I’d never understood it, not until now. “Don’t you dare pretend you didn’t use me from moment one to get what you and your father wanted from me. How dare you? You’re the one who made me promises you had no intention of keeping.”
Chad wanted my attention. “Rachel, sweetheart.”
I had no energy to focus on what he wanted. All of my thoughts, all of my emotions were on getting this off my chest, something I clearly needed even though I never thought I’d get the chance.
I stomped my foot. “Was it fun? Did you have a big joke about it? Did you make bets on how quickly I would succumb to your charms so I would do whatever you wanted?”
I took another step forward and gave into the instinct that pushed at my soul. With all of my strength, I shoved Jason backward and to my utter delight, despite the fact that he was a Werewolf, I managed to move him. He stumbled for a second before he righted himself.
“You guys won. I fought your father’s battle. But guess what? I’m not the same girl you screwed around with. You can’t hurt me now.”
Jason’s face had gone blank. I had no idea what he was thinking. The anger I had seen in him earlier was gone. Now he just seemed like a guarded shell of himself. I didn’t care, didn’t want to know what he thought. As far as I was concerned, he had no right to feel anything but shame.
“Let’s go, Chad.” My whole body felt like it vibrated. “We need to get out of here and leave these Wolves to their own destiny.”
I couldn’t look at Jason anymore. It was too hard. Even as I screamed at him, I remembered how he had taken care of me after I had been nearly killed by the Vampire. I remembered how he’d been at the abandoned house when we’d been warm and snuggled up together. Of how he carried me through the snow.
That’s the problem with memories. They can lead you down paths better left alone. They’d played, hurt, and disappeared. I might make a lot of mistakes, but I tried not to make them twice.
“Rachel.” Luna’s voice tried to get my attention but I didn’t turn around.
I couldn’t look at her. Maybe it was rude, but she and Autumn had been complicit in what happened.
“Rachel,” Luna called more forcibly. “Our father told us you chose to go back to your people. That you wanted nothing more to do with us. Is that not what happened?”
I stopped walking. I shook my head. Somehow I wasn’t surprised. Andon Kenwood was a confessed liar. He’d been perpetuating a lie against his whole family since they’d woken up from their so-called dream state and the world had changed but they hadn’t.
Jason and his sisters were adults. They weren’t any less culpable for what happened just because they chose to buy into his nonsense.
I turned around even as Chad tried to move me forward. I could feel the tension radiating off his body. He was worried we would have to fight and we didn’t have a machete to cut off their heads.
I had no intention of physically fighting them. None. But that didn’t mean I was through.
Luna had asked the question, but it was Jason I addressed. It was to him I held the most bitterness, the most need to strike out.
“Your father is a liar. He told me he would wait a week for me to come back. That was after he abandoned me to a cavern filled with Vampires and Werewolves. I suppose he thought I was dead. Maybe it was less cruel to tell you I’d left.” I shrugged, feeling numb all over. Only Chad’s strong arm kept me in the moment. If he let go, it felt like I might cease to exist all over. “He lied about a lot of things. I know about some of them. I guess I could tell you, but that would be petty.”
“He’s our father and our Alpha.” Jason took an angry step forward. Chad, not letting go of me, changed his stance so that his body blocked mine from Jason’s. They both stood silently for a second. Finally, Jason spoke again. “Are you calling him a liar?”
“I am.” I nodded. “And you’re a fool if you don’t know better.”
Jason growled in his throat, which made Chad laugh.
“You know, Jason.” Chad said his name like it hurt him to utter it. “My father is a great man. The best Warrior who ever came out of Genesis. It’s hard to live in his shadow. But one day I woke up and decided I could be my own man. That’s called growing up. It’s kind of pathetic you never did.” I wasn’t looking at Chad’s face as I stood behind him but I could hear the sneer in his voice. “I actually owe you one, man, because if you hadn’t left her sitting in the dirt waiting for you, she’d be with you right now instead of with me. And I’m the luckiest guy on the planet.”
I tugged at his arm. I was done. I needed to get out of there before my head exploded. He took two steps backwards before he turned and took my hand.
We didn’t run. I can’t imagine Chad running from anything. But we didn’t walk slowly either. We moved at a fast pace that I seemed to set. It didn’t matter.
When we’d travelled to what I thought was a safe distance, I came to a stop. Leaning up against a tree, I tried to catch my breath. I could run for miles and we’d been walking. I shouldn’t be hyperventilating, except I was.
Chad pulled me into his arms. He murmured nonsense words and I let him. I tried so hard not to be needy, but with Chad I always seemed to fail. Why was that? I closed my eyes.
“I meant what I said. I consider it the best thing ever that he did that to you.”
I sniffed. ?
??I still blame him. Even if he didn’t know.”
“Good.” He was silent for a second. “This may seem asinine that I say this, about him, but it’s really not his fault. I mean he’s kind of pathetic that he’s so entrenched in his father’s untruths, but he clearly didn’t know you sat in the cold waiting for him. He turned two shades paler when you said that.” He shook his head. “What the hell am I doing? Why am I standing up for the guy?”
I laughed as my heart rate slowed down. “Because you are forever telling the truth. You can’t help it.”
“I lied for you that day back at the Warrior meeting. I knew you wanted to be with Tia.”
I pulled back so I could look at him before I kissed him square on the lips. “Thank you for being you.”
“I know you loved him a lot. For whatever reason, you really fell for him.” He sighed. “Some day you’ll love me with that intensity.”
I squeezed his arms hard. “Listen to me, Chad. I was caught up. That’s all it was.”
I lied.
While I didn’t feel the need to go around telling tall tales, I didn’t have his constant need to tell the truth either. Right now, he needed me to say what I was going to say. “I had this idea that it could be Jason and me against the world. Like some kind of weird, screwed-up fairy tale. You and I make sense, Chad, like we were always supposed to be.”
I pulled him up against me again to hold him close. Closing my eyes, I wished that every word I said to him had been absolutely true. It should have been. I loved him. But I had loved Jason, too. Like the way you love the clear sky after a rain storm, or the dawn after a night of destroying the Undead. Jason had been a new beginning, a chance to have a different life than I’d ever imagined I could have. Jason had meant freedom to me.
With Chad’s love I was surrounded and secure, but I was exactly where I could have predicted I would be. I was a Warrior. I protected Genesis. Someday, if I were lucky, maybe we would marry and have Warrior babies I would have to send out to fight the monsters in what was, apparently, the monster’s version of a hunting game with us as their favorite prey. I shivered at the thought.
“Chad, how far from Genesis are we? How far did we travel?”
He sighed. “Just under a hundred miles.”
I digested this information as the sky fell to darkness around us. “We aren’t getting to Liberty. There’s no way we’re walking all that way, collecting Warriors and walking back.”
He nodded. “You’re right. The best we can do is turn around and go back. It’s still going to take us a week to get back.”
“By the time we get there….”
I shouldn’t have said it aloud. The thought was out there now. By the time we got there, with no car and no chance of increasing our speed, the battle would likely be over. We weren’t there to help and we weren’t bringing back reinforcements.
The thought made me want to sink to the ground.
Chad ran a hand through his dark hair. “Listen, here’s what I think. It’s dark. We’re alone out here. I have two wooden objects that will work as stakes. I took them from the room we just burned down. You take one.” He handed me a splintery piece of what looked to be a chair leg. I accepted it, gratefully as I tried to smile.
“Thank you.”
He nodded. It was obvious from the way he furrowed his brows that his mind was elsewhere.
“What are you thinking?” It occurred to me after I asked that maybe I didn’t want to know. Chad really didn’t get worried. If he was, I might actually panic.
“I haven’t slept in days.”
That was right. I’d gotten rest in the car when I’d been angry with him and I’d taken the pill. He never had.
I knew what we had to do. “We need to move. Go somewhere, hole up for the night. I’ll guard you while you rest.”
“That would work if we had the car and you could sleep in it tomorrow but we have to walk our way back in the morning so I don’t think having you asleep on your feet is exactly going to work.” He grinned. “You weigh nothing, but I can’t carry you the whole way.”
I couldn’t help it. My mind betrayed me. Suddenly I was filled with images of being snuggled up against Jason as he’d carried me for miles through the snow. I shook my head and thanked fate silently that Chad couldn’t know what I remembered.
“Okay, then we’ll spell each other. You’ll sleep six hours, I’ll wake you and then I’ll sleep four.”
I smiled as I moved forward not giving him a chance to answer. I tried to sound bright and cheery when I spoke, not a natural state for me, but I hoped I pulled it off.
“Which way looks good to you?”
Neither of us had a clue where we were going. Truth was, wherever we walked it was bound to be full of bad news.
Chapter Eight
The problem with sitting around in the dark is that it gives you a lot of time to think. I exhaled the breath I realized I’d been holding and pulled the sleeves on my sweatshirt further down on my arms. It had been a nice day, warm and pleasant. But now I was cold.
Chad lay next to me on the ground looking soft and pliant in sleep, not words I would use to describe him when he was awake. There was nothing ‘soft’ about an alert Chad Lyons. I smiled at the image.
The moon was so bright it seemed to light up the forest around us like a lantern or a bonfire might at home. I stared up at it, waiting for a signal to tell me a Werewolf or a Vampire approached, but nothing came. All I could hear for miles around me was the sound of crickets chirping and the occasional noise of an animal running through the trees.
It was quiet here. Unbelievably quiet.
Chad sighed and moved closer to me. I didn’t know if he sought my comfort or my body heat, but either way it sent a thrill up my spine to be this connected to him. We’d never done this before, never shared any kind of real intimacy. I knew he would want me to sleep later, when it was my turn, but I wasn’t sure I would be able to. Knowing he sat around watching me as I watched him would be enough to keep me awake.
Warriors never slept at night. That was when we hunted and fought. Or, as it turned out, when we were hunted like giant deer for the Vampires’ amusement. A dull throbbing started between my eyes at the thought. I needed to not focus on just how horrendous a concept that actually was if I was going to make it through the night without a full-blown migraine.
A footstep behind me made me jump an inch in the air. I was on my feet two seconds later. Chad must really be out of it or really trust me to handle things because he didn’t stir.
As I stood still, I knew who was out there without ever having to see him. I wondered if it would always be that way. Somehow I would always just ‘know’ when Jason was around. Once upon a time, when he was messing around with my feelings, he would have said it was because I was his ‘mate.’ Now, I’d have to say it was because I was sick in the head and didn’t know how to hang on to anger long enough to hold an adequate grudge.
I moved forward a few steps to where I could see him but could still see Chad asleep on the ground. He was my first priority. In fact, I should turn around and make Jason stand by himself in the darkness. It would serve him right. Except I kept moving forward until I couldn’t go any further and still see Chad.
As I crossed my arms over my chest, like they could protect my injured heart from any more damage inflicted, I waited in silence to see what he wanted. Somehow, I didn’t think he had arrived at my campsite by accident. He’d tracked me, and that meant he needed something.
Jason stepped forward until he stood right in front of me. I saw him glance over my shoulder, and I knew he was checking out Chad. I didn’t bother to acknowledge it. I was too busy trying to keep my heartbeat steady and tears out of my eyes.
I probably shouldn’t have bothered. Jason was a Werewolf; he could smell my emotions almost before I feel them. I guess I just didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of witnessing them.
“Is he your boyfriend?” His voice was low, and he
spoke through gritted teeth.
Raising an eyebrow, I shrugged. “Did you track me all this way to ask me that?”
“No.”
I looked across the clearing at Chad. “Yes, he’s my boyfriend.”
“No.” He shook his head. “You belong to me.”
“Ha.” I covered my mouth to stop another outburst. “You have a funny way of taking care of the things that belong to you. I think you gave up the right to call me yours when you left me sitting in the snow.”
“Rachel.”
He looked down at the ground, and I watched him fist his hands. I’d never seen Jason like this. He was always so happy, so positive, so controlled.
Finally he continued. “I have to confront my Dad. I’m going to. I’ve picked up the pack’s scent. He probably doesn’t know we’re missing yet. We went hunting and we’re not due back yet.”
“I have no interest in what your father does, or doesn’t, know.”
His head shot up. “God, Pixie-girl, you are so hard now. What happened to you?”
I took a step back. “You happened.”
“No.” He reached out but I took another step before he could grab me. “If my father lied, for whatever reason, then I was misled and I made a terrible mistake, but I never wanted to hurt you. In a million years I would never hurt you. You’re my girl.”
The tears I hadn’t wanted to shed fell from my eyes in a silent assault to all of my tough-girl intentions. “I’m not your girl. I’m Chad’s girl, and if he catches you here he will take off your head, even if he has to knock down a tree branch to do it.”
His eyes shimmered in the darkness and I wondered if he was crying, too. Unlike Jason, I couldn’t smell people’s emotions.
“Would you be sad if he did?”
“I don’t want you dead.” I swallowed. “But I don’t want you near me.”