Page 24 of Her Reborn Mate

“See, that’s always the trouble with leaving your past behind. It catches up with you. What you’ve got to decide is, are you going to let that past drag you down, or are you going to stop looking into the rearview mirror and start moving forward in your life? That’s the only thing that you have to think about. If you go back, they’re going to find a way to keep you back. I don’t think a girl like you is going to like that. I think that you’re a fighter. It’s about time to start fighting for the right cause. The right cause being your right to your entire existence. You don’t owe anybody anything. Why run back to the same people who made you run away in the first place?” Izzie said, taking the bottle of whiskey away from me. “And you’re cut off. No more drinks for you the rest of the night.”

All I knew was I had to do something quickly. I had already wasted half an hour here, trying to drown the screaming sounds coming from my mind. In that while, what might have happened?

“Do you think I can leave just for tonight?” I asked.

Izzie pursed her lips and scowled at me. “You’ve already stretched the very limits of my hospitality. You’ve stayed in my apartment. You’re working at my bar. You’ve taken half your first month’s pay from me. I can’t be more lenient. If you go away tonight, don’t think of coming back.”

“Why are you saying it like that?” I asked, shocked.

“Because this ain’t a fucking halfway house for runaway women. I ain’t running a charity here. You shouldn’t have made all those promises if you didn’t intend on staying here,” Izzie said sternly.

I briefly nodded, then left the bar and headed upstairs. At the very least, this could be considered a small win. I had come to this bar empty-handed. I was leaving with more than a thousand dollars. This was not an intended hustle, but it was good that it happened.

Besides, I had bigger fish to fry than worry about my allegiance to Izzie.

I packed some spare clothes in a bag, took an extra pair of sneakers from the kleptomaniac’s collection, and packed everything else that I had come to own in the last few days.

Once that was done, I decided to give Izzie the Irish goodbye and leave without saying anything. It was better this way. Whenever I had a spare thousand and five hundred dollars, I’d wire them to her with a little on the top for her troubles.

Now that I was out in Bangor, standing near the turn signal with Uber opened on my phone, I had to answer the question: Would I go to Fiddler’s Green, or would I leave Bangor so that more assassins and vampires won’t come my way?

“Where to?” The driver in the minivan pulled up to me and asked.

“I haven’t decided yet,” I said. “You came earlier than I anticipated.”

“Well, then. Let’s cruise while we decide where we have to go, shall we?” the driver asked.

This was it, the second crossroad.

Was my journey going to take me out of Bangor and further West, far away from Fiddler’s Green? Or was I finally going to give in and go back to Fiddler’s Green and face the hell that I had so desperately escaped?

It all depended on Will.

What was my dilemma with Will? Did I not love him? Of course, over the past few months, I had fallen in love with him. I had sought a life with him, a life which we would spend together, far from the maddening crowd.

If we had succeeded that day in killing Ralph, Maurice, and Blair, we could have left Fiddler’s Green to Vincent’s care and journeyed somewhere where we could have started our new lives.

But we failed, and in doing so, we faced the worst parts of each other. I saw Will die and take Ariana’s name. He…well, he saw me in this defensive mode, rejecting him, becoming so uncharacteristically cold towards him.

Could I come to forgive him? Believe his version of things and accept that he did love me?

It was hard. And harder was the thought of going back to the graveyard of all my worst memories.

There was a great hidden joy in the prospect of running away. I could pay the driver a bit more to drop me off at the bus station, take a Greyhound to Colorado, stay there for a while, and maybe do some part-time gig for a month before moving westward. I could see Ohio, Chicago, Boulder, San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles. Change my name, reinvent myself, kill Alexis Richards, and leave the werewolf life behind.

Oh, what sweet promise, what redemptive freedom therein lies in the promise of escape.

“So…have we decided where we want to go?”

“Yes,” I said, having made up my mind. “The bus station, please.”

Chapter 10: Will

If I could shift into a wolf, I would have been able to travel from Bangor to Fiddler’s Green within half an hour. But that was an impossibility and a rather scary one. I was headed into dangerous territory. It wasn’t just vampires and Maurice that I had to worry about; I was concerned with the safety of all the pack members who had been dragged to the culling fields.

But thankfully, Lawrence’s Lexus proved to be a worthy ride. Having no regard for his car, I drove it like a maniac, occasionally fighting the impulse to crash it so that even in death, Lawrence’s soul would feel the humiliation of my wrecking his precious car. Oh, how I hated the man. What gall he possessed, wooing my mate like that under false pretenses, then attempting to assassinate her when her guards were down. Poetic justice, irony, the turning of the tables—whatever it was, having Lawrence’s rotting corpse in the trunk of the car made me feel satiated. Unlike the perverted satiations that I used to feel, this was a very rational satisfaction brought along by my psyche’s realization that I had killed the person who had dared approach my mate.

And now I was driving his car at 120 miles per hour. The road, thankfully, was smooth and straight, and at this dark hour of the night, there were no patrol cars to hinder me as I raced along the Penobscot river and headed into Fiddler’s Forest. I drove as if the devil was on my back.

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