Page 10

Slowly, over the next few days, my strength comes back to me. Though I tell Nora not to talk to Xeran again, I get the sense that she wants to. That she might talk to him while she’s out, fetching me a glass of water or making more soup.

One day, she arrives with a book I’ve never seen before, but I don’t ask about it. Mostly because I don’t want to know where it came from, and whether or not Xeran gave it to her.

Sometimes, when I sleep, my dreams morph into nightmares. Replays of that day in high school when everything went wrong.

“ Sera!” I hear Aurela’s shrill voice piercing through the air as she tries to find me. Valerie’s scream of fury. Maeve somewhere, her sobs quiet and heart-shattering.

It’s too dark to see anything but a faint crackle, the spark of light around the fifth member of our group, engulfed by flame.

When I startle awake, it’s to Nora already petting my arm, trying to calm me down, just like I used to do for her when she was a little girl.

Occasionally, I hear other voices in the house, muffled and male.

It sends a thrill of anxiety through me, even as I know Xeran would never do anything to hurt us, and wouldn’t let anyone in the house to hurt us.

He would just keep us here against our will.

On the fourth day after our encounter in the woods, I’m back on my feet, shuffling down the hallway to stretch out my aching, stiff legs.

I stand at the top of the stairs, staring down into the house, wondering if Xeran is here.

It’s quiet, and Nora is napping in our room, so I slowly creep down the stairs myself, holding tightly to the railing when my knees threaten to give way to the weight of my body.

The living room is dusty, only a single chair cleared of the grime.

The dust floats through the air—likely a combination of regular house dust and daemonic ash creeping in through the cracks of the house over the years.

The windows are streaked with gray, like someone tried to wipe them off quickly, realized it was harder than they thought, and left them worse than they were before.

Without ever having come here in high school, I can still look around the living room with its high ceilings, leather furniture, and massive stone fireplace and know what this place could look like.

I feel the potential here, along with the weight of the past, as I imagine the Sorels lounging in the living room.

Maybe Xeran sat on this rug once, reading in front of the fire.

“Should I tell Xeran you’re skulking around in his living room?”

I jump so hard, I nearly fall over the coffee table. When I right myself, Lachlan Cambias is laughing in that posh, collected way he does, like he’s the only person in on the universe’s inside joke.

He’s tall and athletic, just like he was in high school, with a head of sandy blond hair that screams summers in Cape Cod, or wherever it is rich people go.

I know from social media that he skis fanatically in the winter, and his body shows it.

He’s a little slimmer and leaner than Xeran, a little shorter, but no less physically capable.

While Xeran is from a classic, long-running family name in this town, the Cambiases are a little newer, but somehow manage to carry just as much weight.

Their ridiculous amount of wealth might just have something to do with it.

“Say whatever you want,” I finally snap back at him, knowing I’ve already taken too long to respond. The truth is that the sight of him is unnerving. Xeran and I were a secret in high school. I was, in no way, ever involved with his friends.

Which always made them more like specters than real people to me.

Lachlan gives me a look that says he knows something he shouldn’t, then shrugs and disappears back into the kitchen. For some reason, I follow after him, watching as he tips a matte black water bottle up under the kitchen sink, his brow wrinkling when he watches the water coming out.

Looking back at me, he asks jokingly, “Is this water going to give me cancer, Winward?”

I hate the sound of my last name, and I know that Lachlan is dropping it on purpose. To remind me of who he is, and who I am. What does he think about Xeran keeping Nora and me here?

For years, I’ve wondered if anyone has wondered about Nora’s parentage. But the pills have worked to make her scent strange and unknowable, other than its connection to me, and nobody has even cared to ask, likely assuming her father was some random man moving through town.

That’s what people think of me.

“Probably,” I answer after he takes his first sip.

He spits the water up onto his shirt, laughs, and looks at me in surprise. Not the quiet girl he remembers from high school. Not the behavior he’d expect from a girl coming from the most notorious family in town.

He probably expected me to get on my knees and grovel to him, or to go speechless at the sight of such a rich man. But for reasons I can’t explain, Lachlan has always put a bad taste in my mouth.

And I’m not a teenager anymore.

“Funny,” he says, wiping the water from his chin with the back of his hand. Just as he opens his mouth to say something else, the door opens, and Xeran steps through, his blue eyes shifting between Lachlan and me with a dark, serious intensity.

“Is he bothering you?”

It takes me a moment to register what Xeran asks. It’s so far from what I expect that my brain lags, bouncing between the two men, trying to reconcile everything—the memories of high school, them as teenagers, them now. The fact that they’re friends.

The way Xeran is looking at me.

Finding my voice stuck somewhere in my throat, I don’t answer him. Instead, I turn and climb the steps, heart thundering in my chest, recalling first the look on Lachlan’s face, then the look on Xeran’s.

Those blue eyes, so like my daughter’s, locked on me.

And the terrifying truth that somewhere, in the furthest reaches of my mind, I liked feeling his gaze on me.

***

By the time we hit the end of the week, I realize Xeran has been buying things.

Clothes appear outside our door—simple shirts and shorts in roughly the right sizes.

Towels materialize to replace the old, moth-eaten ones in the bathrooms. The grimy, squeaky cabinets in the kitchen host a variety of standard children’s snacks, most of which Nora has never eaten and has no interest in trying.

Still, the first time I open the door and see the colorful boxes with the cute characters, it does something to my heart—the idea of Xeran ordering the groceries, picking out snacks he thought Nora might like.

I avoid him as much as possible as I heal.

Xeran has been bringing the other guys around—one of his brothers, Lachlan, and two other guys we went to high school with. The second time I see them all together, out in the yard, training together, I realize what he’s doing.

He’s getting his firefighting squad back together.

Most normal parents wouldn’t have let their teenagers fight fires, but Xeran’s father, Holden Sorel, had assisted his son in the process of putting together a wildfire-fighting unit within the pack.

Wildfires were ravaging the entire West Coast, unrelated to the daemon fire, and Xeran wanted to do something to help.

So he and some of his friends got professional firefighting training, worked out together on the weekends, and deployed to the fires near us.

Sometimes in California, sometimes north.

The idea of sending Nora to fight a wildfire as an adult makes me shudder, let alone shipping her off as a teenager. But there is truth to the fact that as shifters, Xeran and his squad were much more equipped against the daemon fires than the humans desperately trying to fight them.

On the first day that I can make it up and down the stairs without completely losing my breath, I peek into what must be a laundry room and see a pile of towels, washed and dried but unfolded.

There are several baskets of clothes like that, and I realize Xeran has been so busy lately that he probably didn’t have time to do anything more than pull them out of the dryer.

Without thinking, I step inside, shoving a basket of shirts into the dryer to fluff. When Nora and I lived in the suburbs, I did laundry for some clients to help us get by. It was something I could do while at home and that, for the most part, the other people in the pack seemed to find acceptable.

I used to spend a considerable amount of time working with other people’s laundry, washing and drying, ironing, folding. So when I pull the clothes out and swap them with towels, beginning to fold, the motion is almost therapeutic.

As I fold, I think about how long it will be until I’m feeling well enough to come up with another way to get out of here.

The car is out. Walking through the woods won’t work. But maybe I could magic us away? I was able to move Nora when I was scared back at my parents’ house. Maybe if I got my magic strong enough, worked on my control, I could move both of us at once.

It would be a risky plan, but it could work. Maybe I could even move Nora first, wait a few hours, and then send myself after her.

“What in the hell are you doing?”

I jump, snapping away from the towel in my hand and turning to face Xeran, his hands braced on the doorway. For a second, I almost believe he knows what was going on inside my head. Could hear my scheming.

But that’s not possible.

“Seraphina?” he presses, but I’m caught up in the sight of him standing there.

It does something to me. He’s wearing a drenched black tank and a pair of athletic-fitting shorts, his hair sweaty and pushed back from his face.

There’s a tattoo on the inside of his left arm, but I can’t make it out from here.

Above all else, he looks strong . He looks like the kind of man who could carry you from a burning building. And something inside me aches to be carried for once.

“What?” I ask, finally finding my voice, glancing between him and the towel. “We needed some towels—”

“Not that. You were using—” he lowers his voice, as though someone might hear him “— magic .”

I blink, then glance at the towels below me. I was casting without really even trying, the energy flowing through my fingers. Giving the towels a clean line, folding them faster. Setting them down and flicking my wrist to manipulate them rather than going through the motions myself.

Just like I used to do when I did laundry for money. Just like I grew up doing, to help my mother with her mending and household chores.

“It’s faster,” I finally manage, shrugging one shoulder, trying to be nonchalant about it. The truth is that I didn’t mean to do it, or for Xeran to see it, but I’m so tired of constantly being told I’m disgusting just because I’m different. “It doesn’t hurt anyone—”

“Have you learned nothing ?” Xeran explodes, taking another step toward me, his eyes darkening as he looks down at me.

Everything about him is frenetic, his chest rising and falling, his jaw working like he can barely keep himself from attacking.

My heart picks up—a reaction to the threat of him, and nothing else.

“We all know you were casting back then—”

“You know nothing about what happened,” I snap back, taking my turn to interrupt him, to step toward him and poke a finger into his chest. His eyes flick down quickly, and for a second, I can picture him grabbing my wrist. Yanking me toward him. Making our chests collide.

And I almost crave it. A sick, twisted part of me wants the contact, wants to feel the strength of his fingers on my arm. A touch that I’ve been starved of for nearly a decade.

“So why don’t you tell me, then?” he asks, and if it weren’t for the growl in the back of his throat, I might actually think he was in earnest.

But he’s not. There’s a certain demand there. The haughty command of a man who was once on the path to being the leader of the pack.

“It’s none of your business,” I whisper, shaking my head at him. Somewhere in the pit of my belly, I feel the familiar warm tug, a swirl and a pull, and realize what it is.

The omega inside me reacting to him. To the man I believe to be my mate.

Panicking, I go on, the words flying out of me, “In case you forgot, you made it perfectly clear that you wanted nothing to do with me, Xeran. You ran away. Don’t walk around here like you’re the alpha supreme, demanding answers and rattling off commands, when you fucked off and let Declan take the position. ”

The second the words are out of my mouth, I know I’ve gone too far. It’s a gross oversimplification of a situation that I’m not even sure I fully understand. But the lingering hurt is there, the sense of betrayal that not only did he leave the pack, but he left me .

He hurt me .

And he made sure every single person in our school—in the community—knew that I wasn’t enough for him. That nothing would ever happen between us. And I was stupid enough to think that I might have had a chance.

“Seraphina—” he starts, the corners of his mouth turning down, but there’s another tug low in my belly, and I know that all I really need is to get some space.

So, I do what I’ve just accused him of.

I run away.