“Death.” Ethan’s eyes glowed. “You know there is no other choice, Timber. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” I croaked. “You know what happens when a demon dies without its soul.”
“We are still offering them a choice, whether or not they take it, is completely up to them,” Ethan reminded me. Hell, sometimes I hated vampires.
“Fine.” I sighed. “I’ll lead you to Bannik, Hope does her thing, and maybe if we’re lucky Alex won’t kill everyone!” I said it all with fake enthusiasm.
Cassius whispered in my head. “Have a little faith.”
Hope
MY HEART HURT for him.
It was like I could feel his pain, the rejection of his family, the way that he eve
n sometimes felt rejected by the immortals because he was the last remaining siren, because he never truly understood what he was or how he fit in with everything.
Always alone.
Always.
Until Hope.
Somehow, when he’d fallen to his knees, and that giant flash nearly blinded everyone it had been like he’d slammed every last memory he’d ever had into my brain and pressed play.
Alone.
Always.
Until Hope.
I had to believe that he wouldn’t hurt me — that a part of him loved me still — and wanted to protect me. And yet, at the same time, I berated myself for being that girl, the girl who convinced herself that she was a game changer, that she was different. When I was nothing at all, not really.
In the past, I had been elf royalty.
Which basically meant I once had been a complete and total shut-in — and hopeless with plants, much to my parent’s dismay, since elves were supposed to have a green thumb.
I had no special power to speak of.
But I did have really pretty blood — strong blood, or so I was told, blood that would help our race carry on through the centuries.
Protect her at all costs. I could still hear my parents saying this phrase over and over again wherever I went.
And a part of me realized, the reason my mother sent me away that night when Alex was supposed to be protecting us, was because a part of her felt a shift with my friend Mary. Mother had a gift for sensing darkness, and what she must have sensed scared her so terribly that she sent me, unguarded, to a hotel lobby to look for an archangel who didn’t even like us half the time, let alone anyone else.
Alex had loved me.
But he was afraid his love would destroy me — he was afraid that it wasn’t real that he would wake up from the dream to find that I was just like everyone else in his life who had claimed to love him. He thought my body wanted him — that I was confused and that one day I would get tired of him. One day I would walk away.
They always do. His thoughts screamed.
They want my body.
Never my heart.
His heart would not survive it. Maybe that was why he was so convinced that if we were apart for more than twenty-four hours either of us would die, maybe it was his subconscious reminding him of something.
Regardless, I needed to concentrate on the present, not the past.