Page 59 of Kidnapped Rejected Mate
Soren at the very edge, fighting against fire daemons.
And he’s not alone. When I see my parents there beside him, I suck in a breath, but quickly control my emotions.
My parents are here. Even after everything that happened with them rejecting Soren, with the four of us walking out of that house, they came to fight for me.
Because they do love me. No matter how fucked up they are when they try to show it.
And that gives me hope for the future.
“No,” I amend, looking to Tara. “You’re not my daughter. You’reme. You’re a little part of me that I didn’t mean to let go of. That I let it get way bigger than it should have. And when I let you free, you messed with everyone else. You hurt people. You never should have existed in the first place.”
This time, Tara doesn’t hold back, throwing everything she has directly at me, her screams echoing out over the water. Spikes of ice, balls of daemon fire, blasts of energy, and wind. She tries to pull me down into the water, throw me back against the cliffs, hold me in place like I did to Lach and Soren and the others.
But none of it works, because I already know what she’s going to do before she does it. I’m centered, calm. My people are here with me this time. I’ve not been left alone to deal with everything that hurts me.
I roll through the air, almost feeling giddy with the release of this encounter. Of finally knowing what she is.
Knowing that I’m strong enough to defeat her.
And knowing that this is the last time she’s ever going to hurt someone I love.
“Are you smiling?” she demands when she finally stops, coming to a halt just over the edge of the cliff, her entire body shaking as she stares at me. The flames are growing around her, pushing everybody on the cliff back, toward the line where the trees once stood, but now there’s nothing but fine silver ash. “Whyare you smiling?”
“Because this is over,” I whisper softly, moving toward her, lifting my hands to put them on her face.
“Aurela!” Soren screams from somewhere on the cliff, and I close my eyes, pushing out toward him with a feeling of calm, trying to calm him down, to soothe him. Distantly, I can see that someone is holding him back from coming this way.
“It’s not over,” Tara says, her voice ragged, her hair limp and falling over her forehead, the blue of it duller than it was just ten minutes before. “It’snot over, Aurela!”
“I’m sorry,” I whisper back to her, finally making contact with her skin.
She closes her eyes, her body shaking. With grief. Maybe with terror. I’m not quite sure. All I can hope is that after all this, she’ll be put to rest.
Because she is done taking from me.
Following my instincts and keeping my hands on her face, I tug. All this time, she’s been tugging at me, ushering me away and out to her, but now I’m the one calling her back home.
I’m not going to let my fear control me. Not going to let the anger and rage consume me. Tara is not going to be the one in control, starting fires and causing more destruction because I was a scared, hurt little girl.
She cries, shaking in my arms, and I realize I’m hugging her, her face against my chest, her body shaking against mine. She feels soreal, like a true shifter or human, blood coursing through her veins.
“Shh,” I murmur, something searing inside me, not painful but still unpleasant, as I continue to hug her, the daemon fire still swirling around us in a wispy, blue flame-cloud. “It’s okay, Tara. I’m sorry for everything.”
The last thing she says to me, before everything goes black, is, “I’m sorry, too.”
Chapter 31 - Soren
I sit at Aurela’s bedside with the ring box in my hand.
“Anything?” Gramps asks from the doorway. I just shake my head, not looking back at him.
It’s late afternoon, and she’s been unconscious for nearly an entire day now. When she touched Tara, floating above the cliff, I thought she was going to die. To burn alive then and there.
But she didn’t. She disappeared into the flame, and when the blue orb around the two of them finally disappeared, only Aurela was left there. Tara was completely gone.
And then, Aurela plummeted.
Shae was the first to scream, then I shifted, running with Frederic as fast as we could toward the edge, even though there was no way in the world we would get there in time to keep Aurela from hitting the beach below. Our only hope would be that she was far enough out over the water to keep from hitting the ground too hard.
