Page 34 of Brutal Alpha Beast
“I don’t scent anything familiar,” Ellis says curiously while looking around.
Ellis and I weren’t exactly on the best of terms before those monsters came for us out of nowhere, but still, I feel bad about getting us lost. If I had just done what he said and run, we wouldn’t be in this situation.
He already thinks I’m aspy, and I’m sure this has only made things worse.
“I’m sorry,” I mumble. “I thought I could take them, but I didn’t feel fast enough running.”
He shakes his head. “It’s fine,” he says. “I shouldn’t have been so forceful; it was probably the panic that misfired the spell.”
I’m not sure whether we’re only talking about the spell, but either way, there’s a peace that settles among us. A calm energy that feels like a truce, despite us being completely and utterly lost.
“Were you thinking about anything in particular when you fired, a place from your past, maybe?”
My past. Not something I’d ever choose to think about willingly. Especially not in his presence.
“No,” I say. “I was thinking about destroying those things.”
“They’re what Sawyer and Lacey had to fight, aren't they?” He says. I turn to look at him. I notice the way that the rain has flattened his copper hair and how that accentuates his hard-edged bone structure. I notice the mixture of tiredness and subtle disassociation that transforms his face.
There are a few little red scratches on his face, one by his jaw, the other on his forehead. Something about the way he looks makes my stomach flutter.
“Yes,” I whisper. “The curse is getting worse.”
He doesn’t have a response, and as we walk in silence, the doom and gloom of our future hangs above us like a bad omen. The curseisgetting worse, and we have no idea what we’re going to do.
“Are you cold?” He asks me.
I hug my arms across my chest to keep myself from shivering too much.
“No,” I say, quietly. “I’m fine.”
I feel his gaze on me as I say this, and I’m certain he doesn’t believe me. My teeth are practically chattering, but he lets it go.
We walk a little more, my feet and thighs burning, and somehow, we’ve migrated closer to one another so that we’re practically touching.
In usual circumstances, I’d have moved away, but I have just about enough energy to keep walking, let alone the defiance to show him my disgust.
Soon, it begins to get dark, and at least the rain has fully stopped.
“Maybe we can try a different direction?” I suggest. The forest feels as though it's stretching on until infinity, and I can’t think of a spell that I can use to find our way home. But I know we have to try something; this walking feels pointless.
Ellis clenches his jaw, looks up at the sky, and then back to me.
“No,” he says, his eyes weary. “We should stop.”
It’s not until Ellis says we should stop that I discover how truly exhausted I am. For example, I’m too exhausted to protest when he says, ‘Here, sit.’ I oblige, sitting my ass down on a softer-than-I’d-imagined tree stump.
I’m also too tired to protest when Ellis starts busying himself with grabbing supplies and wood. Usually, I’d protest him doing anything remotely traditional and husband-esque like this, but now is not the time to start a fight or complain.
Even I know that.
“You think we’re safe out here?” I ask him, gazing up at the moon, which is glowing in front of a wispy layer of cloud.
I can’t stop thinking about those monsters—as a witch, I’m in tune with energy, and thinking back to the darkness that they had gives me the absolute creeps.
“Can’t be sure,” he says, “I don’t know where we are, but I’ll work on building some basic traps and a barrier for us out of the materials that I can find. It won’t be foolproof, but it’ll at least alert us if someone or something is coming.”
“I’ll help you,” I say, standing up.
