Page 31 of Her Reborn Mate

“It’s like when you take revenge from someone, and you want to prolong the revenge-taking part of the process, you take something belonging to your enemy, and you make it your own. That’s what a revenge token is. In wars, soldiers sometimes take their opponents’ guns as revenge tokens. Sometimes, a person will wear his enemy’s clothes as a token of revenge. And in your particular case, you’ve decided to make Lawrence’s car your own,” Vince said, grinning at me.

“Well, it would be a damn shame to let this excellent automobile go to waste,” I said, putting an end to the matter.

When we had traveled through the forest after the battle, there had been no signs of any vampires in the vicinity, making it seem that they had momentarily fled their nearby home in the cove. It made sense that they’d leave, given how brutally they had been thwarted and how mercilessly their leader had been killed in battle. But something was not right. Even with the vampires gone, it was quiet all around. Too quiet. As if there was something heavy in the air weighing down the sounds. Like some evil presence still lingered nearby.

“Vince, where do you think Maurice has gone?” I asked after a long pause.

“There’s no way of knowing for sure. The last we saw of him was him running out of the forest. My two cents? He’s run away somewhere far off so we can’t catch him. But that would be giving him too much credit. He’s got ties in the town. So, if he hasn’t run away, he’s bound to be bunkering somewhere close by.”

This did not appease me as I had expected. Maurice was a man of methodological evil. He calculated everything precisely. He must have calculated this outcome as well. As such, he would have a contingency for this possibility. The question remained—where was he?

But it was not the right time to worry about this. We had just entered through the commune gates. The men rushed to their women and children, hugging their kids, kissing their wives, and holding their loved ones close. The air in Grimm Abode was one of relief, celebration, and joy.

As I was left alone at the gate, I scanned the crowd hoping to see Alexis somewhere. With my powers back, I could feel my senses heightening. I could see and hear better, but neither of those faculties was of any avail to me right now. Alexis simply wasn’t here.

I tried to get her out of my mind, but the lingering sensation of some oncoming danger never left my thoughts. Something was wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. To distract myself, I walked around the commune, greeting the women, playing with the children, and giving words of encouragement to the men who had been with me in battle. Even still, my eyes strayed here and there, hoping that Alexis would appear out of some corner and confront me, talk to me, have a verbal spat with me, and then finally utter the words I was dying to hear. That she had forgiven me and that she believed me. That she knew that I loved her.

I even passed her house, hoping to see a light or two coming from the window. But her home was, unlike all the other houses in the commune, covered in darkness with not a single ray of light coming from inside.

“Will!” Vince came running up to me, his face red. “The women and children are telling me they were escorted here by Alexis. She had come here after all.”

I could not contain my glee upon learning this. I immediately grabbed Vincent by his shoulders and squeezed him. “Well, where is she?”

“See, that’s the thing. The women said that she guided them back to the commune and then went back into the forest to help with the fight. But I’ve been asking around, and no one has seen her since,” he said.

Worry replaced my newfound glee in a manner of seconds as I joined Vincent in search of Alexis. At first, we scoured through the entire commune, but upon finding no signs of her there, we headed back outside to the forest.

It was only after we had combed through the entire trail and clearing that both of us gave up in defeat and came to the unanimous conclusion that Alexis had only come here temporarily.

“She must have seen that we won the battle, and then she must have left,” Vincent said.

I said nothing. Sitting on the trunk of Lawrence’s car, I closed my eyes and tried to tug at my bond with her, hoping to get some reply in return, some semblance of communication.

It broke my heart when all I heard back was pure silence.

Chapter 13: Alexis

I stood by the water, my feet submerged in the sand, my eyes on the blue horizon where the moon touched the dark wavering sea. I told myself that I could not go back. Behind me, I could hear the sounds of the men talking loudly and boastfully as they left the clearing and exited through the forest. I could have joined them. Will was in that crowd, along with Vince. This could have been a better reunion than the one I already had with Will. This time around, I’d have said nicer things and would have been softer to him.

I had eventually, after a long walk that started from the commune and ended on the beach, decided not to rejoin the pack. Admittedly, I was a mess of emotions, all over the place and with zero coherence. Yet, this time around, there was good reason for my choice not to rejoin the pack.

It was a simple realization that I had rejected Will when he was down. He had just re-emerged from his grave with no shifting abilities. He saw that the world around him had fallen. Maurice had regained control of the pack, and I was nowhere to be found. When he somehow found me, I was beyond coarse with him.

Now, when he had regained power when the pack had emerged victorious against the vampires, and when Ralph had been killed, and Maurice had been made to run off, Will was in a very powerful position. It would make me appear as nothing more than an opportunistic bitch if I went back to him and accepted him.

Besides, there was the entire element of me not believing him. I still thought that he had said Ariana’s name for a reason, and it wasn’t the reason that he had given me.

So here I stood, on the beach, thinking of my recourse. I still had most of the money that Izzie had given me. I could go back to her and beg for my job and apartment back. But if there was one thing I wasn’t, it was a beggar. I would rather eat dirt and live under a bridge than go back and grovel for something. The irony of both situations—Will’s and Izzie’s—being so similar was not lost on me.

Yet there was another reason I was out here, on the other side of the forest. I wanted to see what had become of the vampires. The ones who had survived must have escaped, but they would have been foolish to run back to the cove. Now that they knew that Will was back and had killed their leader, the vampires must have had no recourse other than to leave the cove. Could it possibly be that after all this time, the reign of the bloodsuckers was finally over?

I was still in disbelief. There was nothing more that I badly wanted to see other than the cove, completely stripped down from the inside. Once I had gotten enough of the view of the moonlight and the beach, I put on my shoes and headed to the cove. Maybe if I’d report back to the commune with news that all the vampires had fled the cove, they would receive me with some warmth.

“Don’t run in circles around the same thing over and over, Lexie,” I said out loud, frustrated at my inability to come to terms with the fact that I was not going to go back. “Home is where the heart is, and it seems your heart’s not in Fiddler’s Green.”

I made a valid point now that I thought about it. My heart wasn’t in Fiddler’s Green. My heart had been ripped out of my body and squished down to a pulp in Beckett Tower when Will had died in front of me. Somehow, miraculously, Will had resuscitated himself. But I had not been able to resuscitate my heart. As of right now, any emotions that I felt were very muddled and distant, as if they were the ghosts of the emotions that I had once felt back when my heart was still alive.

So, the question remained—if my heart was not in Fiddler’s Green, where was it?

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