Something Witchy (Mystics & Mayhem) (21 page)

He didn’t have to try to strangle me to get me to play along with the whole newlywed thing when we checked in that night.  I didn’t even blink an eyelash when he compelled the clerk—mostly due to the fact that she was really pretty and she was looking at him like she was considering the best way to slip her number into his hand along with the room key.  I mean, really!  She was flirting with a married man!  Okay, a man
pretending
to be married, but still!  She had it coming!

“Is this room better for you?” Nathan asked, looking a little guilty, when he threw open the door and the only scent that greeted our arrival was the smell of clean sheets and Lysol.  “I’m sorry about last night, Em.  I didn’t think about the smoke.”

“Yeah, this is much better, thanks.”  I looked away from him, feeling strangely shy.  “Do you want to check the bathroom before I take my shower?”

“No, I trust you,” he said, taking me by surprise.  I looked up at him, confused, but he just winked and tapped my nose playfully.

“Why?” I asked before I could stop myself. 

But then I
remembered
why.  He trusted me because I had a locator chip on my neck like some kind of criminal on house arrest.  Only, mine was permanent.

“Never mind,” I said sadly, already headed for the bathroom.  Before I could reach the door, though, he stopped me with his hands on my shoulders.

“I don’t expect you to forgive me, Em,” he whispered against my hair.  “I don’t even expect you to understand, but I did it to protect you.  I know it seems harsh and a little extreme, but I swear I will never use it unless you’re in danger.”

“We’ll be in Washington tomorrow, then you’ll be gone, so I guess it doesn’t really matter does it?” I asked him, pulling away and walking toward the bathroom again.  I paused with my hand on the doorknob and blinked back the tears in my eyes before I turned to look at him again.  The look on his face was so unbearably sad that they just sprang right back up, though.  “Think of it this way, I’ll always have something to remember you by.”

“Is that all you’ll remember?” he asked with a sad smile.

“No,” I breathed, letting myself into the bathroom.  “No, it’s not all I’ll remember.”

I would remember everything about him for the rest of my life—and he would forget about me as soon as I was out of sight.

I took a shower and changed into another one of Nathan’s shirts with that truth tearing me apart.  When I walked out of the bathroom to find him gracefully sprawled across the bed, channel surfing in true guy fashion, I just smiled sadly and told him to scoot over. 

Climbing into that bed with him, though, was even harder than it had been the night before.  The new, more intense, awareness I had of him had my nerves humming like I was standing on a power line with a couple hundred thousand volts running through it and nothing to keep me from frying except a flimsy coat of rubber. 

“Monster movie?” he asked with a smile and a wink as he came across a horror movie marathon and let the remote drop back to the bed.

“Sure.”  I shrugged, trying to play off the fact that I was gauging the distance from me to him and wondering how I could make the space between us disappear.  “What’s playing?”

“Fright Night,” he said, making me laugh.  “What?  You can’t beat a good vampire flick, right?”

We spent the next hour and a half rooting for the vampire to eat the main character together and making fun of how cheesy Hollywood made vampires out to be.  By the end of the movie, I was fighting to keep my eyes open.  When he pulled me close as I was dozing off and wrapped his arms around me again, I didn’t protest.  I just turned over and curled against his chest and let the sound of his breathing sing me to sleep.  I was honest enough to admit, at least to myself, that that was where I wanted to be, anyway.

“Sweet dreams, Em,” he breathed against my hair.  “I’m so sorry my dreams are all I can give you.”

The heartache those words caused followed me into my sleep.  And when the real world faded away and the dream world kicked in, I didn’t care whose dreams I had as long as he was in them with me.  If that was all I was ever going to have, I wanted them to last forever.

Confessions

When I woke up the next morning, the guy I had been so charmed by the day before was gone.  In his place was a grumpy, monosyllable-growling bear.  He growled at me.  He growled at the desk clerk when he turned the room key in.  We stopped for coffee on the way out of town, and he growled at the girl behind the counter because she didn’t make my coffee exactly like he told her to.  Then, he growled at me again when I apologized because he was being an ass and told her I would take it like it was.

By the time we got back in the car, I was sucking in seething breaths through my teeth to keep from screaming at him.  Seriously, what was his deal?  Where had the sweet, funny guy from the day before gone?

“When will we be at your friend’s house?” I asked, forcing myself to sound pleasant, when we were back on the road and speeding toward our destination.

“This afternoon,” he snapped, not looking at me.

“Okay, who the hell pissed in your blood bag this morning?” I snapped back, fed up with his attitude.  He gave me an annoyed look, but didn’t answer.  Rolling my eyes, I muttered, “Fine.  Whatever.  Let me know if the guy I met yesterday shows back up.”

An hour passed, then two, and I spent the time trying to figure out what had happened between him pulling me into his arms and me waking up that had turned him into a complete jerk.  Then again, maybe the guy I had caught a glimpse of the day before had just been an act, just another play from the play book.

And I had fallen for it hook, line, and sinker.

“Are you hungry?” Nathan growled around noon, still not bothering to look at me.

“No.”  By that point, my mood was as bad as his and my tone had taken on the temperature of permafrost.

“Are you
ever
hungry?” he yelled, throwing up his hands like I was too frustrating to deal with.  “We’ve been on the road for three days.  You didn’t eat the first day, you barely ate anything yesterday, and now you’re not eating at all again!”

“I didn’t eat the first day because just being around you made me ill,” I shouted right back, beyond fed up with his shit.  “I hardly ate anything yesterday because I thought I had met this really great guy who gave me butterflies, and I’m not eating today because being stuck in the car with a complete dick is not conducive to a healthy appetite!”

“I think I do like you better when you’re unconscious,” he grumbled in response.

“Yeah, well I think I liked you better when I thought you were a ghost,” I snapped. 

He stared at me for a few seconds, then his lips started to twitch.  A few seconds later, his eyes had lost that icy look and had started to sparkle. 

“I swear, if you start laughing I’m going to stake you with your gear shift,” I muttered, throwing myself back in my seat and crossing my arms over my chest. 

So, of course, just to tempt me, he started laughing.  The entire time I was staring at the gear shift, wondering how hard it would really be to pull it off and stab him with it. 

“I’m sorry,” he said when he finally managed to quit laughing at me.  “I’m being an ass.  It’s just, the closer we get to Shea…” he stiffened suddenly and went quiet.

“Shea?” I repeated, jerking upright in my seat.  “Do you mean Shea O’Hare?”

No, surely not.  He couldn’t mean he was taking me to my
grandmother
?  But her name
was
Shea, an old Irish name that you didn’t really hear that much anymore, and she
did
live in Washington.  But, he wouldn’t really be taking me to my Grams… Would he?

“Yeah,” he mumbled, looking kind of embarrassed.  “Shea and I have been friends for a long time, ever since I helped her get rid of a coven of pretty nasty vampires that moved into her territory.  It wasn’t the brightest move on their part, seeing as Shea is one of the most powerful bandraoithe I’ve ever known, but being immortal doesn’t guarantee intelligence.  In return for my help, though, she promised to find someone for me.”

My Grams was a
witch
?  Whatever.  Grams baked cakes and made jelly and had taught me to make my own soap.  No way was she a cackling old hag with a wart on her nose.

“She is,” Nathan said softly, giving me a sympathetic look.  “She’s a blood witch, Ember.  And so are you.  The sooner you accept the truth, the better.  Trust me, denying what you are doesn’t change a thing.  It only makes it harder to accept it in the end.”

“I’m
not
a
bandraoi
or a
witch
, blood or otherwise,” I muttered.  Okay, so I was weird.  I would be the first one to admit that, but I wasn’t…

Damn, now why did I have a sudden urge to check for warts?

“Did she find who you were looking for?” I asked, preferring Nathan’s problems to my own.  Yeah, it was kind of crazy, and I knew I would have to face reality in the end, but it was the best form of evasion at the moment so I took it.

“Yes, she did,” he said woodenly, staring out the windshield.  “Before she would give me any information, though, she asked me to check on her granddaughter for her.  I thought it was a strange thing to ask, but she said she and your mother had had a falling out years ago and she couldn’t do it herself.  The shameless, interfering old harpy even shed a tear as she fed me her lies.  And, fool that I am I fell for them.”

“She
didn’t
lie,” I said shortly, irritated that he was talking about my sweet, gentle grandmother that way.  “They
did
have a major blow up eight years ago.  Over
me
.  I haven’t even been allowed to call her since.”

“Really?” Nathan asked, looking unsure.  “What happened?”

“I told Grams about my ghosts,” I told him, shrugging.  “She then made the colossally stupid move of calling my mom.  It didn’t go well.”

Actually, that was an understatement.  ‘Not going well’ would have been my mother coming to get me and putting me in the car without a word and not looking back.  Unfortunately it hadn’t gone quite that way.  Instead, my normally calm and collected mother had screamed and yelled and acted like a nutcase.  And when I had screamed to stay, she’d told me to grow up. 

And that was exactly what I’d done.  At the mature age of
ten
.

“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching for my hand.  “I didn’t know.  Shea didn’t really explain it to me.  But, Em, she knew what she was doing when she sent me to you.  She knew, and I can’t forgive her for that.  Not for what it’s going to do to me, but for what it’ll do to
you
.”

I waited for him to explain, but he didn’t.  Instead, he squeezed my hand, then pulled his away and placed it back on the steering wheel.  I felt that loss of contact like he had ripped away part of me. 

He was just as bad as the demon he said he was trying to save me from.  No, he was
worse
than Jack. 
Way
worse.  Because he was more beautiful than Jack, inside and out, and I wanted him so much that I couldn’t see straight.  And he used that against me every chance he got.

For a long time, neither one of us said a word.  Then, I remembered he hadn’t answered one of the questions I had from the day before.  In fact, it was the only question he hadn’t answered.  I chewed on my lip as I tried to figure out to bring up the subject.  Judging by the road signs we were passing giving the distance to Grams’ house in Red Rock Bay, I guesstimated we had about an hour.  That was plenty of time to pull the story out of him.

“Will you tell me what happened?” I asked softly, knowing he was always listening to my thoughts. 

I didn’t need a clinical play by play, but I did want to know what had happened to make him a card carrying member of Club Fang.

“It’s not a pretty story, Ember.”

“I didn’t think it was.”  He looked kind of surprised when I reached for his hand and held it between both of mine.

“Do you have any idea how wonderful that feels?” he asked, staring at our hands where they rested in my lap.  “I miss that, you know.  Being warm, I mean.”

“Are you never warm, then?” I asked, allowing him to stall for a few more minutes.  His face went as hard as stone and he looked away before he answered.

“Only when I feed from a live donor,” he said stiffly.  “Other than…” His eyes flickered to the scarf around my neck and I saw him flinch.  “I haven’t done that in a very long time.  That means I’ve been cold for a while.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.  He didn’t really feel cold to me.  Cool, maybe, but not cold.  I could see how he would see that differently, though.  Being warm was just another thing he had lost when he had become what he was.  The absence of that warmth was a constant reminder.

What possessed me to do what I did next, I don’t know.  I just wanted to make that bitter look on his face go away, I think.  Or maybe I wanted to make him feel as warm as he made me feel.  Whatever the reason, I made the decision to put myself out there and take the chance of him shooting me down and breaking off a chunk of my heart in the process.