Page 44 of Visions of You

"What went wrong?" he asked.

"I'm not sure," Keegan said. "Maybe I got overconfident."

"Could you be missing something about your other vision as well?" Jaron suggested.

"That's what I'm trying to figure out," Keegan said, gesturing at the notes and star charts strewn all across the room.

Jaron picked up one of the star charts. "How does this help you?"

"Honestly? I'm not sure that it does, but I'm willing to grasp at straws." There was such an open and honest quality to his words that Jaron felt disarmed.

If only he knew what it was that scared Keegan so much…

His lack of information made him helpless.

"Shouldn't we be tackling this issue together?" he asked. "As a team?"

Keegan's lips drew into a thin line, which somehow made him appear even more tired. Jaron almost regretted that he'd asked, except that he'd had to. "No one can help me with this," Keegan said as if that was a fact.

Whatever 'this' was, Jaron hated it.

"So what do you expect me to do?" he asked. "Stay away? Because that's out of the question." He'd found his mate, and his dragon would never let him abandon Keegan, no matter what Keegan saw in his visions that was so horrible.

"I know you won't stay away." Keegan sighed, but there was no great emotion behind it. "I don't want you to stay away. I just need to find a solution for both our sakes."

"What kind of solution?" Jaron sat on the bed next to Keegan, half-tempted to reach out and draw his vampire into ahug. Keegan tried so hard to look like he could handle everything by himself, but Jaron knew that wasn't true.

"The event in my vision is fated to happen," Keegan said with grim confidence. "So I need to find a way to change fate."

Change fate…

Yeah… right.

"Is that all?" Jaron asked, faking easy confidence for his mate's sake.

"Yeah." Keegan gave him a weak smile. "Sometimes the future is written in stone."

"Stone can be smashed."

"Not easily."

Jaron puffed out his chest and unfurled his wings. "I'm a dragon, hear me roar."

The image he presented must have been so absurd that it got Keegan laughing.

Good.

"I don't care what fate says," Jaron insisted. "I'll face any obstacle with you."

"That's ironic."

"How so?"

"Because that's also fate's doing," Keegan said. "You want to be with me because we're 'fated mates'." He made air quotes around the words.

"Is that how vampires see it?" Jaron asked, genuinely curious, because that wasn't exactly what he'd been taught on the subject, and maybe he could get Keegan around to his way of thinking.

Keegan frowned at Jaron's question. "Is there another way to look at it?"