The Awakening: A Witch-Vampire Romance: Feel the Heat. (17 page)

“There
is so much that I don’t understand about this world, Gavin. So much that I need to be taught. That I need to learn.”

“I know, Ella
. You will. You have me for that. You will have me always. Forever.”

“He told me forever also
.” Tears finally start to streak down my cold cheeks, finally letting the hurt out.

“You have to forgive him for misleading you
, for thinking that you couldn’t get past what he stupidly did. He is a male. No matter the species. We make mistakes and think that we can’t come back from them, when all we have to do is trust in those who love us. They will always see us through. That’s what he needs to realize about you. Give him a day tops. He will find you,” Gavin insists.

“You know she meant nothing to him. Don’t you?”

“Yes,” I say reluctantly.

“
Will you see him when he comes?”

“Dunno,
” I mumble into the window I have my head jammed against.

“You will have to eventually. I have never
seen a destined pair with such a strong bond. He was scared, Ella. Forgive him his weakness.”

“I already have. I just didn’t think he would ever leave.”

We speed through the darkness of the night in silence. Gavin holds my hand, squeezing it every once in a while, as if to give me comfort. To let me know that I will never be alone again, Jaxx or no Jaxx.

“Where are we going
,” I ask after we have driven for a while.

“We are going to get my bike. Stowe our shit and get the fuck ou
tta dodge before any more trouble finds you. You have had enough. You need  time to rest and rebuild yourself.”

“Yes,
” I whisper in the positive to his plan.

“But where are we heading after we get to your bike?”

“I own a hunting lodge that no one knows about. It’s around a couple of hundred miles from here. It’s my home away from our father’s clan. No one knows about it, no one but you… now.”

I nod my head. All I want to
do is sleep, to forget this night.

“Sleep if you want
, Ella. I won’t tell Sebastian if you drool on his seats,” he chuckles and tries to get a reaction out of me.

I d
on’t respond, but I appreciate the effort. I love him for it, but I want to keep the numb feeling that has once again taken over. I don’t want to feel yet. I don’t know what I am going to do when Jaxx does come to find me. I know that I have already forgiven him for fucking someone else before he was with me. There is really nothing to forgive on that. The archaic beliefs of our people aren’t mine. What I am going to have trouble forgiving him for is leaving. Not staying and trying to fix this shit that had gone so wrong between us. You don’t leave when things get bad. You dig your feet in as hard as you can and you fight it out.

I eventually start
to drift. I glance over at Gavin thumping his fingers on the steering wheel as he drives, barreling down the road is more like it. I feel the darkness taking me, swallowing me whole. I want it. I crave the oblivion it offers, the emptiness where the hurt isn’t waiting to wrap itself around me, to strangle the remaining life out of me. My last thought is that he’d left.

He left me. He said forever. He had
lied
.

Chapter 13.

It has been four days. Four days since Gavin and I arrived at his home. Four days of not moving and growing ever weaker. Four days since
he
just up and left me. Four days without his smile, his touch, his embrace, his forever. It was all an exquisite mirage. A lie.

I know that
I am dying, but I can’t seem to even care. Gavin is growing continuously worried. I just can’t seem to find it in me to reassure him, not when I can’t even reassure myself that I want to go on.

Gavin’s home
is beautiful. All redwood and exposed beams. The room he gives me is gorgeous, of course. It is decorated in different shades of blue, ranging from the lightest blue of the sky to the darkest blue of midnight.

I
know that I am depressed. I am supposed to be using this time to train, but I can’t even move from the bed anymore. Gavin said it is because I am too young for my body and soul to deal with that much torture. That is exactly what it is. Physically I am disappearing into myself. My spirit was sucked dry the minute he disappeared into the moonlight. The moment he walked away from me like I was so much trash. He is done. And now so am I.

Literally.

Gavin has
been raging. So much anger and despair and I don’t know how to help him. My heart, what is left of it, is being twisted dry. To see someone you love in so much pain. I guess I know what he is feeling. I can’t stand by and watch him fade.

He made a c
all to my father’s clan this morning, asking for help. To say that they were astonished to find out that Gavin has a twin is an understatement. They will be arriving tomorrow, but even I know that it will be too late by then. I will have moved on into the everlasting darkness by then.

Gavin even trie
s reaching out to Sebastian, but he has gone off the grid. Much like Jaxx, just thinking his name makes me shudder. I live in a constant void of pain. I have begged Gavin repeatedly to end me, but he refuses every time that I ask. I knew that he wouldn’t when I asked, but it was at a moment when the pain became too much. I couldn’t take it anymore. I can’t take anymore now, but I am holding out for him, hoping he will come back to me, so that I might get a chance to say goodbye. To tell him that he left me for the wrong reasons. He had no reason to leave. My love is eternal. Never breaking. Especially over something or someone that doesn’t matter.

“You have to fight
, Ella. You can’t let yourself wither away like this,” Gavin begs me endlessly.

“Even like this, when you are withered and weak, y
ou are still beautiful. Twisted. But still my beautiful sister.”

Gavin
is speaking to me again. He does it quite often, but I can’t answer him, even when he rages at me. I am locked deep inside a void, a void so dark that even the smallest hint of the light left inside me has been snuffed out like a weak candle.

My room has so many holes in the walls. Gavi
n’s rages are getting worse. He prays by my bedside most nights, days, mornings, and minutes. He is hoping and begging for something that will never happen.

Destined Mates
are not supposed to be separated.
He
knew this. He
knew
this. He left me to die. I realize that now, but I still love him more than my own life. I have forgiven him for everything.

I
can hear Gavin on the phone once more.

“She’
s fading Celian. Her skin has turned grey, her hair is falling out by the handful, she has lost so much weight that she is a husk of who she once was, and her eyes. My Goddess, I think she is blind. They are almost completely true white now. There is barely a whisper of the former vibrant jade that they once were.”

I listen
hard, but he is quiet for a moment, listening to whoever is on the phone. Celian, he’d said.

“No I can’t get her to speak. I don’t
even think she can. She has been silent since we arrived here. Besides when she begged me to end her.”

Pause.

“Is the clan still coming?” Gavin waits for an answer in silence.

I
can hear him pacing the wood floors.

“What
do you mean, ‘something has happened and you can’t make the trip’?”

Pause.

“No, I can’t bring her there! If I move her she might die!”

Silence and more pacing.

“Yes four days. I think at first it was voluntary. Now she can’t move
, let alone tell me anything that she’s experiencing.”

More silence.

“She isn’t one of your fucking science experiments to come and study old man! She is your Goddess’s damned grandchild!”

I c
an actually hear yelling from the other end of the line.

“Please. Help us,” Gavin
begs our family.

And
then suddenly I can hear the person on the phone.

“You are weak. Just like your father. If you are begging for the life of someone you just met
, then you have no place in this clan. Your mother’s line must have been defective to create such parasitic offspring.” My supposed grandfather has hung up.

I hear Gavin throw his phone across the room
and start to sob. My heart breaks a little more. It isn’t like my stoic brother to beg anyone. I need to help him somehow. With the last of my reserved energy I concentrate on the person he was just speaking to. I focus my mind’s eye on him. It feels almost like instinct is driving me. I start to hear someone, or something. I need to do something to help Gavin. And that means that I have to help myself.

I
start to hear faint thoughts coming from someone that is not Gavin. The person is scared and so very dark. He has the darkest soul that I have ever encountered. The thoughts I can hear inside his head are getting stronger. I can now hear them as clearly as if they are my own.

Am I developing yet another one of my gifts?
I think.

I wonder
if I speak through this strange connection, if he will hear me.

“I can feel you. I can hear your thoughts
,” I say through the strange connection I have formed.

The person I
am speaking to inside his head is startled. I can feel his physical responses also.

“You’
re wrong about my brother and about me. I can see your soul. I can read your thoughts. Feel your fear. You are the one who is weak. You always have been, haven’t you?”

“Who
is this? What gives you the right to steal into my head,” he finally deigns to respond to me.

“M
y blood is my right. I can see now what truly happened to my father. Why my mother had to separate us. Your hatred and jealousy knows no bounds. You wanted her for your own and she spurned you. You sick fuck!”

With that I disconnect
from his wretched mind. I feel sick and dirty. I want to rip my nails through my mind and wipe away all I had seen. Sick twisted old fuck is putting it mildly.

He
’d had my father, his only son and heir, tortured, trying to find information from him, answers that he didn’t know. Even after my mother and father had truly mated, he still wanted my mother, but my mother didn’t tell my father of her plans. She left in the dead of night and ran with me. The old man wanted to drown me at my birth. His hatred toward all females knew no bounds. When he couldn’t get the answers he was seeking from his son, he killed him, making it look like an accident. Then he tried to twist Gavin, tried to make my brother into a monster just like him. He didn’t succeed though. For that I am glad. I’d caught something that had to do with Jaxx also, but I didn’t have enough strength to search his mind further.

A thought occurs
to me. If I could talk to that foul soul through my mind, I wonder if I can reach my brother also. I concentrate on him, trying to push through his barriers. They are strong, stronger than his grandfathers are.

“Gavin,” I whisper into his mind.

I hear running. Then he
is here crouching beside me. He is kneeling at the side of my bed.

“Ella?”

I force my body to move and shift my head toward him.

“Help me,
” I whisper into his mind. The link is weak because of the strength I’d used to connect with our grandfather.

“Ella,” he sa
ys out loud again. “Goddess knows that I have tried. Please tell me what I can do.”

“Take
my hand. Share yourself with me,” I urge him.

“I wish I could
, but it doesn’t work like that. You can only heal yourself with Jaxx.”

I
t hurts to hear his name spoken.

“Please. Have to try. We are soul twins. Blood. Stronger than most anything.” I can feel the connection to him fading as was I.

Gavin takes
my hand into his own.

My body starts
to soak up his strength like a dry sponge. I can feel myself rejuvenating, my body filling itself outward, and gaining back my eye sight. I gasp out at how wretched my brother looks. He hasn’t slept in days. He looks so tired and is looking more tired by the moment. I shake my hand lose from his tight grip. I could suck him dry if I don’t break the connection.

“We are more connected to one another than we thought, brother.”

“Ella!” He grabs
me to him, holding me tight.

“How did you know that we could
do that,” astonishment is lacing his voice.

“We can
do anything together, Gavin. We are more than mere siblings. Sebastian told me that twins born of two True Witch parents are rare. So rare no one has ever heard of it happening before. We are different.”

He smiles
at that, crawling onto the bed and facing me. His arms are wrapped around me now and he looks like he is about to pass the fuck out. I am feeling stronger, but I have a long way to go before I am back to my old self. Then I have plans to make. People to find. Fences to mend and all that shit. I wrap my arms around Gavin and I think that we must look like we did when we had lain in my mother’s womb. Wrapped up, tightly entwined in each other.

“Forever,” he whisper
s to me. He still has a connection to mine. I can feel it now. That is going to get uncomfortable if Jaxx ever gets his head out of his ass.

Gavin chuckles at my inner thoughts
.

I lay silently beside him, wondering where we
are going to go from here. The horizon is a blank canvas. Eventually I hear him start to snore. I wrap my arms tighter around him and drift off into the first restful sleep I’ve had in five days.

Chapter
14.

I wa
ke with a start. There is someone banging on the front door. Gavin is still snoring away, so I untangle myself from my brother and make my way slowly down the hall toward the front of the house. I am moving at a crawl.

Goddess I hate being this weak
,
I think to myself. As I get closer to the front room the pounding on the door gets louder and louder. Whoever it is, they are determined, I can say that for them at least.

Gavin ca
tches up to me just as I make it to the living room. He leads me over to the couch that’s in front of the fireplace and makes me sit down.

“I have the house warded. No one can get in without my permission
,” he whispers to me.

“We can
do that? Wards and such?”

That’s some cool shit.

Gavin shakes his head. “You have so much still to learn sister,” he tells me in a voice like he still can’t quite believe how ignorant of my own world I am.

Gavin still looks haggard, he isn’t
at full strength. I stand back up and grab his hand.