Page 6 of Into the Fire: After

I couldn’t hold my tears back any longer. My body, worn and starving and still over-sensitive post-heat, cried out with every wracking sob, but I couldn’t stop.

My quiet Caine, my sweet Brooks, my gentle Lin.

My Brea. My mate.

All of them, bites or not, my mates.

So I lied, told Brea I was too tired and weak to go looking for help so that she’d leave me in the cave, chilled fingers curledaround her knife, giving the guys another day to show up and extinguish this fire of grief in my chest.

When concocting that genius plan, though, I hadn’t thought about the fact that I would be cold, wet, naked, and alone for who knew how long while waiting for Brea. Not to mention hungry.

The heat pangs may have quit, but the hunger pangs were little ogres in my stomach, rubbing their hands and eager to ruin my life.

Night fell again. Every sound made me wince and jump. Which sucked, since the forest was far from quiet. Whistling wind, skittering critters, the occasional crack of thunder and the constant ping of dripping water. They all felt dangerous, predatory.

Taryn Maddox, ladies and gentlemen. Trembling at the thought of roaming squirrels.

At some point in my hysteria, I drifted to sleep.

I dreamed that I walked back to the boys’ apartment. Dream-Me covered all five hundred eighty miles in the span of a wink and stood on the doorstep. Night outside. Night inside.

My hand pushed open the door. It looked the same.

How could it look the same?

DidIlook the same?

No. I couldn’t look the same. I wasn’t the same.

I stepped through. My feet didn’t move. My body floated past the kitchen, the sofa, until I reached Lin and Brooks’ room. That beautiful room where Caine had finally let down his walls for me. Where the five of us had eventually lain and dreamed together, side by side. Even Caine, on the floor, head lolled against the side of the mattress.

All our scents were here.

Burning palo santo. Toffee and cream. Pomegranate. Blackberry. Blood orange and cinnamon. A weirdly beautiful potpourri I wanted to bury myself in.

So I did.

Crawled onto the bed. Curled into as tight a ball as I could beneath the covers, pulled them over my body. Waited for the others to find me.

A cracking stick tore me from the vision like a gunshot.

Not a dream. Live and in the flesh.

Loud. Too loud. Too close.

Heart pounded.

Heavy footsteps outside the cave. Big feet sloshing through sodden underbrush. Those weren’t squirrels, not in this downpour.

That was human.

I should move. I should stand, ready to spring forward with Brea's knife. Because after losing all my mates, I wasn’t going down without a fucking fight.

You want me? Better be ready to bleed because that’s the price of admission, assholes.

Yet I sat, heart pounding, Listening to the growing footsteps. My heart was so loud in my ears it almost blocked the sound. And still, I didn’t move.

Oh god if they’d all died for nothing, if they’d protected me with their lives only for me to sit frozen like a damned deer in headlights, I’d never forgive myself. Hell, maybe I deserved to be—