Page 25 of Kidnapped Rejected Mate
Her hand clamped down on my arm, and I felt the sudden, dizzying pull of what she was doing. Tapping into my magic, taking it away from me. It felt like losing blood, my mouth going cold, my vision going hazy.
“Stop.” I tried to pull my arm away, but she held tight. We grappled to our feet as I tried to get away from her. “Stop.”
“You can’t pull away,” she grinned, and I felt, for the first time, that I didn’t know her that well after all. Bringing her face closer to mine, so close I could smell something distant and rotten under the light, cloying cover of her perfume, she said, “If you won’t give it to me, I’m going totakeit.”
I gasped, body surging with adrenaline, feeling as if I didn’t pull free from her at thatexactmoment, I never would.
But I was me. Weak. Frail. Tired and hungry.
Except, after joining the Foods Club with Soren, I’d been getting stronger. And Tara had shown me how to use my magic.
She might have thought I was weak, but I wasn’t.
Tara laughed as the air around us filled with the heavy, leaden weight of daemonic energy.
Then, I snapped my arm away from her, jerking back hard and planting my foot in her side, sending her careening toward the edge of Silverville.
Everything happened in snippets. I fell back. Tara fell away from me.
Then, there was the terrifying sound of rocks cascading away from the ledge. Tara plunged over it, disappearing from view.
“Tara!”
I was afraid of her. I loved her. She was my best friend, and she was gone.
That is, until she reappeared, laughing, hovering just over the cliff’s horizon.
“Really?” she cocked her head, eyes squinting at me. “You thought you could get rid of me that easily?”
“No,” I stammered. “Just—stop—”
But she didn’t stop. She landed heavily in the grass, crossed over to the spot on the earth, and placed her palm on it, calling up a pure stream of daemonic energy.
Then, with a crack like lightning, her entire body went up in a brilliant flash of blue light.
Chapter 13 - Soren
I forced myself to sleep outside the cabin in an effort to keep myself away from Aurela, to do the right thing. But a sharp tugging in my chest wakes me from a deep yet fitful sleep. It comes with the sense that something is deeply, horribly wrong.
When I raise my head, I know without question that she’s gone, no longer in the cabin—and I can see the distant blaze of a fire on the horizon. I’ve grown to recognize the sight of that light in the sky, just like I know the turns leading into Silverville.
My body responds before my mind can. Because I was sleeping outside, I was already in my wolf form, and I remain in it as I dart through the trees, heading toward Aurela as fast as I can, the tugging in my chest and thick trail of her scent guiding me in the right direction.
How does this keep happening? How could she have gotten out of the cabin without me noticing? She must have been using her magic, or I would have woken up.
I don’t like the idea that she’s good enough with her magic to get past me without me even noticing. The flames rise up on either side of me, reaching into the sky, licking up the trunks of the Douglas firs, the Ponderosa pines. Trees tourists see from the windows of gondolas and trains, lit like birthday candles along the Rocky Mountains.
My lungs burn, the pads of my paws starting to smart against the hot, scalding soil beneath my feet. Aurela’s scent gets thicker, my heart starting to pound in a rhythm I suspect is relatively close to hers, my body syncing to hers when I grow close enough.
When I come upon her, she’s in the middle of a clearing, her body slumped, the fire reaching out toward her like it mightscoop her up and rock her to sleep. It’s just like the other night—she’s in a clearing, the trees around her ablaze, her shadow flickering over the ground like it’s animated, and her still body is but a vehicle for the shadow’s movements.
I don’t have my pack, my extinguisher,anything. My only tool right now is my wolf’s form. I have nothing I can use to save her but this.
The fire seems to spread faster than usual. Maybe because it’s not usually this far up in the mountains, and most of these trees—save for the ones I’ve treated around Gramps’s cabin—have never experienced this kind of heat before. The daemon fire catches easily, even considering how recently the rain came through.
Normally, a storm like the one that caused the mudslide would make everything damp enough that the fire wouldn’t spread like this. The bark and leaves would be hydrated enough to avoid catching like flash paper.
But this isn’t normal fire. It’s daemon fire, which means it spreads in ways we don’t totally understand. There’s something about the energy beneath it, writhing in the flames, that creates the fire daemons, allowing the blaze to burn as hot as it does.
