Page 19 of Moonstriker (The Summertide Chronicles #4)

Chapter 19

Kit

He was so fucking stubborn.

My brain wanted to paste the “insufferable” label on him, but it wasn’t...that was, I understood why he was forging ahead even when he was obviously still groggy from the seizure. It was just fucking annoying that he wasn’t thinking things through.

I considered offering to help him somehow, to carry his pack or...whatever, but there was no need to put it out there. I knew Aubrey barely at all, but I already knew how he’d react to an offer of support.

Sounds familiar , Nikka offered, oh so helpfully. Who else do I know who’s stubborn as hell and insists on doing every single thing on his own?

Ugh. Damn rock, always pointing out facts, like they mattered or something.

Funny how I’m always a rock when you’re mad at me , she mused. I wonder if Aubrey will call Slate a pile of dirt when he’s angry with him .

I almost choked on my tongue at the idea. As powerful as she was, Nikka was the size of the top joint of my index finger, and she could only affect a single person at a time. Slate was a whole fucking volcano. Who would ever call him names, even relatively benign ones?

Aubrey will , she answered, blunt as ever. It’s just like you and me. Maybe someone else would be afraid of me, but you’re not. Lots of people are afraid of stones like Iri or Soz. But their holders can’t be afraid of them, or the relationship wouldn’t work in the long term. I know Iri had some trouble early on with Rain, because he found her intimidating. And how do you react when you realize that you intimidate someone?

I sighed, nodding to myself. I don’t respect them as much.

Exactly.

Well, I supposed, if anyone seemed able to match a mountain for stubbornness, Aubrey might well be the guy. He was obviously dizzy or something, because every half dozen steps or so, he made a weird wiggle with one leg, like...no. He wasn’t groggy or dizzy at all.

He was in pain.

Aubrey was hiding a fucking limp.

Gods damn it. An injury was the last thing we needed right now, and it was all my fault for not paying close enough attention to him. For letting him fall when he’d had that seizure. And now he had to suffer in pain because I hadn’t been fast enough.

“Should we rest?” I asked.

He didn’t even answer, just gave me a grunt and kept walking. It was fair, since we’d been walking less than half an hour, and offering to rest was probably a little insulting. Except that he was injured, so he shouldn’t be walking at all, let alone hiking a barely there trail over a slippery bed of pine needles on a sometimes downright steep grade.

It was only fifteen miles, but it was a hard fifteen miles, uphill the whole way.

I swallowed down my irritation and further offers of rest, and resolved to just keep an eye on him in case he stumbled. I was already worried about another seizure, so a broken ankle would just be the icing on that shit cake.

I really would end up carrying him the whole way, which...I could probably do, but it was going to be hell. Maybe he wasn’t as tall as Frost, but he was over six feet, and with those muscles, he had to weigh two hundred, easy.

Ugh.

So I kept going, just behind him, watching his every move like a hawk. When he started clenching his jaw, I couldn’t tell if it was in pain or in annoyance with my hovering, but he didn’t say a word.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity of silence between us, the sun started to slip behind the horizon, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

“We should stop for dinner,” I announced, and it sounded loud and too-bright in the silence of the mountainside, echoing up the rocks above us, even with the thick pine trees all around. Birds flew from nearby trees at the unexpected noise of it. I tried my best not to cringe at it all.

He slowed and turned a glare on me, so I pointed to where the sun was touching the horizon. “It’s going to be dark soon. We can’t continue in the dark, since we might walk right off the side of a cliff. So we should find a place to stop and make camp now.”

He turned to look at the sun like maybe I’d been lying about it going down, his lips pursed in irritation, but finally, he nodded. “Fine. I suppose.”

He supposed .

Fuck, he might be more stubborn than me.

I didn’t know whether to be annoyed or impressed.

On the other hand, he was going to have to be able to out-stubborn a mountain to properly bond it. I supposed that made sense. If anyone was going to be able to manage a feat like that, it was him.

I quickly located a spot with enough clear space for a campfire and two sleeping bags, without too many rocks on the ground to dig into soft sensitive bits in the night, and motioned toward it. “Right there works.”

We’d made it less than half as far along the trail as I’d hoped before stopping time, but in this moment, that couldn’t matter. We could only get as far as Aubrey could make it. Trying to force it when he was hurt was only likely to hurt him more, and then we’d end up taking even longer.

As much as his face was set with determination, and he’d refused to acknowledge his pain while we were moving, the relief on his features when he sat down, leaning his back against a thick tree trunk, was palpable. His whole face went slack and eyes slipped shut, and he took a deep, slow breath, then another.

For a second, I thought he’d fallen asleep, just like that. Then, without opening his eyes, he asked, “You said there are sleeping bags on these things? It’s freaking cold up here, so I hope they’re warm.”

I wasn’t sure exactly what to say to that, since...well, I thought they were warm, but I was a Moonstriker. I’d grown up in the frozen north, where we thought the temperature water froze at was nice and brisk, and we didn’t call it cold until you got down to “will lose fingers by going outside without gloves” temperatures.

I’d have offered him his own sleeping bag as well as mine, but again, I didn’t think that would be well-taken.

Also . . . what ?

I’d have offered him my own sleeping bag?

Since when?

I didn’t even like the guy, why would I offer him comfort at my own expense? I didn’t do that for anyone other than Frost, Ember, or Rain. Or Fawn, I supposed. Maybe Adair.

Ever.

It was . . .

It was since he’d made that face at Titania when she’d suggested flying a doctor to the chalet for him. Since he’d insisted on going forward, not back to town after the incident on the road. Since he’d hurt himself and kept going, and I didn’t believe it was only because he was being a stubborn asshole.

Aubrey was...more complicated than I’d first decided, when we had met. He wasn’t just a stubborn asshole.

He still was one, though.

And I kind of liked that too, in the end.

After all, so was I.

In the back of my mind, Nikka gave a little sound like clearing her throat. Speaking of stubborn assholes...

You’re never going to let this go, are you?

No I am not.

I sighed, trying not to do it too loudly, lest Aubrey think I was annoyed with him, and we end up in another pointless fight when, as it turned out, Nikka had been right all along and I liked the bastard.

Damn it all.

It still grabbed his attention, those bright blue eyes flashing open and up to meet mine. Dammit, they were pretty, too. Not that I hadn’t noticed he was pretty before. He looked a lot like his father, who had been a hunk of grade A beefcake. I just hadn’t been interested in Oberon because he’d been the bad kind of asshole. Also, he’d been afraid of me. It was hard to find a man hot when he was scared of me.

I unclasped my pack and dropped it to the ground, then knelt down and started rifling through it. I was sure I’d included...there, inside the first aid kit, an elastic wrap bandage.

Pushing the pack aside, I scooted over to where Aubrey was practically collapsed, his back against a tree. He was watching me already, so I waved the bandage around.

His lips tightened, and I could almost hear the rejection of help he wanted to give. After a moment, though, he sighed and broke eye contact, glaring so hard at the pine needles beside him that I wondered if they might catch fire. “Probably not a bad idea.”

“Excellent,” I said cheerily. I tried not to be too insufferably smug about getting my way, because we didn’t need another fight about this. It was hard not to be a little smug, though. Smug was my natural state of being.

His glare told me I hadn’t been successful anyway.

I took his shoe and sock off, cursing myself for not making sure he was wearing shoes suited to hiking before we’d left the chalet. What a ridiculous oversight. The ankle didn’t look too bad. A little red and maybe a touch swollen, but like it was walkable. It made me feel a little better about his stubbornness. He hadn’t been insisting on marching on a broken ankle. Just a twisted one.

Was that a technical term, I wondered?

Still not a doctor.

I wrapped the thing up just like I would have done my own, then slipped the sock back over it. “I don’t have better hiking shoes for you, but there are some clothes—including socks—that I thought would fit you. Well, that Nikka thought would fit you.”

We’d spent five minutes in the superstore arguing about what size he was, and I’d given in and bought the larger size she’d been insisting on, since in the end, it was easier to wear clothes that were too big than too small.

In retrospect, she was probably right. He wasn’t quite as wide as his father had been, but Aubrey was a sturdily built guy.

Just your type , Nikka pointed out.

I rolled my eyes as I turned to dig through my pack again. I’ve slept with people of almost every type there is, Nikka. I don’t have a type .

Yes you do , she denied. If Knight hadn’t been another duelist, you’d have stayed with him. You like men like that best. Big strong ones who can hold you down. Because almost no one can. But who better to be stronger than you than a man who can bond a whole mountain?

I loved Nikka, really I did. But in that moment, I also hated her just a little bit.

I yanked the bag of beef jerky out of my pack and shoved a piece in my mouth. That got Aubrey’s attention, so I held the bag out to him. Gingerly, he took a piece, nodding to me. “Thanks.”

I wanted to react with my usual angry snark, but again, we didn’t need that. We needed to get along, at least well enough to see this through. And...I didn’t need to give him even more reasons to hate me. Not as long as I had to be climbing a mountain with him. “No problem.”

A moment later, he pulled out the bag of granola bars that I’d given him. He stared into it like it held the lost emerald city of legends, then bit his lip and held it out to me, like I should choose first.

Ugh. They were all bad, couldn’t I just leave them to him?

You can’t subsist on jerky , Nikka said sourly, giving me a little mental poke.

I can for two days.

But he’s hurt his ankle , she pointed out. It might be more than two days.

I fucking hated when she was right. I inclined my head to him, reaching in and taking a bar at random. They were all the same anyway.

He smiled at the thing. “Cherries. They’re my favorite.”

I blinked down at the bar, then put it back and picked a different one. He frowned, like it was offensive I didn’t want the bar. Dammit. “I don’t want to take your favorites. We might be out here a few days. You should be able to eat the ones you like.”

For a moment, he stared at me, like I’d spoken in a foreign language or something. Then he picked up the cherry one I’d put back and opened it up. “You don’t like cherries?”

I sighed, because I didn’t want to have the conversation. We’d been butting heads over nothing for days, and I didn’t want to do it anymore. Now that I’d realized I didn’t hate him, it was just tiring. “I love cherries. But I don’t like granola bars at all,” I confessed. “I like cereal, with milk. Granola bars are just cereal with no milk. It sucks.”

“But they have chocolate,” he said, holding it up and pointing to a stripe of chocolate. “Cereal doesn’t have chocolate.”

I raised a brow at him. “You just haven’t had the right cereal yet. We’ll get you some when we get back to civilization.”

He shrugged, took a huge bite, chewing and swallowing before speaking up again. “These are perfect for me. I like it without milk.” Then he frowned at the bar. “Not that I’m saying no. I...I like cereal too. Just—thank you. For these. I appreciate them, especially if you got them just for me, and you didn’t even want them.”

And that? Well damn him, that was almost sweet.