The Awakening: A Witch-Vampire Romance: Feel the Heat. (16 page)

“You are too good for anyone
, Ella.”

“Awww! I knew you were sweet.” I snuggle into his side.

“Shut it. Don’t tell anyone,” he mock growls at me while ruffling my hair.

I laugh. Jaxx
is back down quickly, carrying a duffle much like Gavin’s with him. “Road trip,” I shout, then start laughing, pumping my arm in the air.

“Dork
,” Gavin pokes me in the side, making me jump.

Chapter 12.

We stop at my uncle’s house for me to pack up what stuff I have before we hit the road. I’ll be calling my uncle Dan later on to tell him that I am heading up north to take a look the boarding school I will be attending.

Another lie.

Jaxx has been silent since we left his house. My teasing him with sexy panties while I was packing didn’t even get a rise out of him.

“Jaxx
, seriously, I’m tired of the damn silent treatment. Either spit out whatever is bothering you or turn around and take us all home,” I snap at him, finally at the end of my rope.

He huffs a breath and turns
toward me as he drives.

“There’
s nothing wrong, Ella. You are imagining things,” his voice is laced with exasperation.

“Oh fuck! You did not just go there
,” Gavin yells from the backseat, chuckling.

“I have tried to coax it out of you by being sweet.
Now I’m fixing to pull a bitch,” I tell him in a testy tone.

Jaxx slams
on his breaks and swerves the Lexus to the side of the road, then jams it into park. I am holding onto the dashboard for dear life, shaking and breathing hard.

“What the fuck
, dude? Her best friend was almost killed in a car accident last night! And you pull that shit,” Gavin shouts from the backseat.

Jaxx jumps out of the car and starts
to stomp down the side of the road, heading nowhere. I look back at Gavin and shake my head. I don’t know what is up his ass, but I am fixing to find out.

“Stay
. I’ll go,” I tell him as I slam my door and run to catch up with Jaxx.

“Are you going to tell me what I did wrong now? Or are you going to sulk for the rest of the trip
,” I inquire when I finally catch up to him. He keeps walking so I snatch his arm and swing him around toward me.

“Jaxx!”

“You didn’t
do anything wrong. Okay? It’s me! I didn’t tell you something about my clan, about me and I’m afraid that I might lose you when you find out,” he screams out into the night. His voice is full of anger, anguish, and what must be a major load of frustration.

“Wha
t could be so bad that you would think that I could walk away from you over it?” I am completely dumbfounded.

“I don’t want to tell you. Please
, Ella, just let it go. Please don’t make me get into this on the side of a fucking road.”

I
am pretty much seething now. You don’t drop a bomb like that, allude that he knows or did something that could end us, or could make me put an end to us and then just walk on like nothing happened. Like nothing had been said.

“Fuck, no!
You tell me right now or I make my own way back home with my brother and he can train my ass alone. I don’t need this shit. I have had enough stress the last few days to last me a lifetime,” I argue.
Hmmm this is what fighting with a boyfriend is like.

“I lied to you
, okay? Is that what you want to hear? I lied to you about being celibate! Our first time won’t have been
mine
,” Jaxx tells me, his voice filled with anguish.

I st
and there, completely still. Mute. I don’t know what to say to that. I mean, with someone his age you would think that he’s had lovers before, many of them, but to lie about it? The fact that he’d lied about it is what hurt the most. Why lie at all? I wouldn’t have held it against him. I was new to the True Witch race. I don’t know all the rules. The rule that said you were celibate until you met your destined. He didn’t have to completely crush me by dropping that bomb on me.

“Who
is she? Or was she? Are you still in contact with her,” I ask in a quiet voice after a moment.

“SEE
,” he shouts the word at me.” This is why I didn’t want to talk about it. The questions! Fuck this!”

“No
,” I say in a dead voice. I can barely see his face in the moonlight, but I can see how twisted it is. Whatever else he is keeping from me is even worse than being with some random girl once just to scratch an itch.

“Tell me,
” I demand, but I don’t scream at him. I don’t shout. I just keep my voice in a monotone state. Not showing any emotion at all.

Jaxx drops down to sit in the grass that lines
the interstate. He slams his elbows onto his knees and his head to his hands.

“Her name
is Valkyrie,” he tells me softly.

“She is a prominent member of my clan. We’ve known each other since we were barely able to walk and we were always together growing up,” Jaxx says and then he pauses.

“Don
’t stop there, finish it,” I force out, feeling my heart contort inside my chest.

He nods.

“
Everything started innocently enough, a brush of a hand, a peck on the cheek. I always knew she wanted more from me, but I never gave her any signs that I was receptive, I swear,” Jaxx says, looking into my eyes and then he looks away as he continues.

“Then I got drunk one night, about a hundred years ago. I was d
epressed that I hadn’t found my destined mate yet. I was deep in my cups and she seduced me. I woke up the next morning in a strange bed with her naked, and draped across me. I told her that it would never happen again. I meant it. I knew that once I found you that you would walk among the people of my clan. I didn’t want you to feel like you came second to me in any way or form,” he pleads with me to understand.

I hold
up my hand and stop him there. There is something that I have to know. I can tell how important it is now, that you are supposed to save yourself for your destined. He had explained that very well.

“How many times
,” I ask. I feel like my throat is closing up.

“Just the once and I don’t
even remember it,” he whispers barely loud enough for me to hear.

“You lied to me! WHY?
You could have told me the truth. I would have understood. I was raised by Norms. Most people my age have had multiple partners. You didn’t have to pretend that I was going to be your first,” I shout even louder. I laugh suddenly. “You are still in contact with her. You look so ashamed. So why are you still talking to her?” I am too blind by shock and hurt to understand what he is saying to me.

“When was the last time you fucked her
,” I scream, my throat hoarse.

He loo
ks up at me with tears in his eyes.

“Just that once
,” he roars at me.

“B
ut once was enough to ruin me, to ruin what we could have built together.” He sighs, blowing out a long breath.

I slump forward and start
to retch. Nothing comes up since I have eaten very little lately. “In our-” I stop. “I mean, your bed? Did she have you in your bed? Did she take you where you sleep entwined with me every night?? Your
destined
?”

“NO
,” he explodes, jumping to his feet, trying to touch me.

I pull away
quickly as if his touch would burn me.

“I would never
do that! I never took her in our bed! That is sacred!”

“And staying celibate isn’t? Lying to me isn’t?” I stop
mid rant. He has been in a funk since he got off the phone with someone about the cabin we are traveling too.

“Who owns the cabin that you are taking us to?” His face twists and I know my answer. “Is that where you would meet? To fuck her,” I snarl at him.

“Yeah. Your silence
tells me enough.” I am not crying now. I feel too frozen inside. Like someone took a dull spoon and gutted me, hollowed me out.

“I don’t talk to he
r. I don’t even think about her,” he pleads with me.

“I haven’t
seen her in more than a century. Her father owns the cabin. It has nothing to do with her,” he implores me to understand.

“You were going to take me and my brother to a place where we could run into someone that you broke one of the
greatest taboos of our race with,” I roar at him.

Jaxx
isn’t the man I thought he was. He is a liar. Everything about us has been a lie, a callous lie.

“Does
Sebastian know? Did he keep this from me too?”

Jaxx just shakes
his head in the negative. He stands still as stone, searching my face for something. Whatever he sees there, he doesn’t like. He looks like he has found the answer that finally breaks him. He turns his back to me, finds a shaft of moonlight, reaches for it with his gift, then dissolves it into mists. He leaves me alone on the side of the highway. I wonder where we could have possibly gone so very fucking wrong.

When he disappears from view I lose
it, slumping to the dirt, I break. Shattered. Nothing is holding me together now. I have nothing left. I am empty, a husk that a weak breeze can even blow away. All I can think is why?
Why did he lie? I would have understood, just as I told him. I would have found a way to work around this. He left me,
I think.
After dropping this shit on my lap. He just left.

M
y head falls to my knees and I start to slam my fists into the concrete beneath me. I scream bloody murder at the top of my lungs, all the pain and torment making itself known and echoing off the nearby trees.

One moment I
am alone, sitting in the road screaming out my pain for the world to hear. Then the next thing I know I am being surrounded by what looks like living black shadows. They are wearing what looks to be tattered darkened cloaks torn at the edges. I can’t seem to catch sight of a face on either of them. I have to cover my ears because they are making a screeching sound with each pass that is threatening to make my ears bleed.

Gavin had stayed in th
e car, letting Jaxx and I have some semblance of privacy while he dropped his shit sandwich into my lap. He stayed put until Jaxx left me here. Now he is pulling me into his arms and lifting me to his chest. Taking off, sprinting for the car.

“What are they
,” I scream at my brother as he sprints away from the screaming shadows following closely behind us.

“Wraiths
,” he grunts out. “There is no way to fight them off, they have no weaknesses. Those creatures are only attracted to a terrible sadness.” He looks me in the eyes and I know that they were drawn here because of me.

He
is carrying my clinging form to the Lexus where he practically throws me into the passenger seat. I quickly buckle my belt as he runs around to the driver’s seat and starts the car. He pulls a U turn and heads back the way we came from. I can smell the rubber from the tires burning against the black top.

“Will they come after us
,” I whisper to him.

“No, they only go after things weaker than themselves. They are the vultures of our world. We shouldn’t have to worry about them again.” Gavin checks the rearview mirror and lets out a long sigh of relief. We must have lost them. He seems quite pleased by that until he
looks over at me. I must look a hot mess because the pleased look on his face fades into one of anger mixed with a sadness of his own.

“Listen to me, Ella. People make mistakes. He must have thought that you couldn’t forgive this.” There is a quiet certainty in his voice.

“Doesn’t he know me at all, Gavin? I could forgive him almost anything. This shit happened before us. He didn’t even know me. Or even that I existed yet
,” I sigh out.

Gavin continues
to talk as he speeds down the barren highway.

“The bonds of the destined are unbreakable. You can hurt them.
You can stretch them taught, but they can’t be broken, but he has grown up in a True witch’s world. What he has done isn’t done. You have to understand that. It is the most taboo thing that you could do. I don’t know what he was thinking, but I do know what it is like to be tempted. She was a means to an end for him. That’s all.”

“I understand that
, but he left. He just left me there. Why would he leave if it wasn’t over?”

“That
is what you are not understanding, you can’t be away from one another. Especially since you haven’t went through the mating rights and consummated your relationship as of yet.. He can’t stay away or you and he will both weaken. You will eventually die if you are not together.”