“How? How will she do that?”
Lucius finally looked up and met my eyes again.
“It is said that God wrote it on her very skin and that only the boy would be able to understand it, to decipher it.”
I felt the blood seep from my cheeks.
“Oh,” I said, my shoulders slumping forward in dejection.
I felt deflated. No, I felt crushed. For just a moment, I had experienced a rush of…something—pleasure, fate, inevitability—at the prospect of being destined for Bo, of being the one person in the history of the world that could help him. But there was nothing on my skin. I washed it and clothed it every day; I knew it intimately. There was simply nothing there.
“Well, if that legend is true, then I must not be Bo’s mate,” I said quietly.
Speaking those hurtful words aloud nearly brought me to tears. I looked down into the glass of bright yellow liquid, blinking away the moisture that had suddenly accumulated behind my lids.
“I guess that depends on how you look at it.”
“That sounds pretty clear to me. I think the girl would know, don’t you?”
Lucius merely shrugged again, watching me closely. Is that what he was trying to tell me? That there was someone else?
The mere thought of another girl being divinely mated to Bo made my stomach swim with nausea. The air inside the tiny cabin suddenly felt too warm and too thick to breathe, so I jumped to my feet and made my excuses. I had to get out of there.
“Well, I’d better get going,” I said, handing Lucius my still-full glass of soda.
“I need to go and try to get my friends out of the woods. I’d hate for them to be attacked, too.”
I walked toward the door, willing myself not to run—from Lucius, from fate, from the loss of Bo. Again.
“Too?” Lucius asked from behind me.
When I turned to look back, his face was only inches from mine. I hadn’t even heard him get up or make his way across the wooden floor to me. He was just…there. That was always a bit unnerving.
“Pardon?” He’d startled me, addling my already scrambled brain, a feat not particularly difficult by that point.
“You said you’d hate for them to be attacked ‘too’.”
“Oh, right.”
I’d completely forgotten to mention being attacked in my bedroom by a female vampire.
“Well?” It was Lucius doing the prompting now.
I shrugged, not wanting to make a big deal out of it, even though it still felt like a big deal. I just wanted to get out of there.
“Some vampire came into my room and attacked me.”
His jewel-like gaze hardened, focusing on my face with surprising intensity.
“When did this happen?”
“The other night.”
“What did he look like? Did you recognize him?”
“No, I couldn’t see anything, but I think it was a ‘her’ not a ‘him’.”
Lucius’s nostrils flared, as if he was attempting to smell something on me—
or in me.
“Lucius, I’ve gotta go,” I said, hurrying out the door and down the steps. As I walked, I dragged gasps of cool air into my lungs, determined to hold back the despair that threatened.
The legend is wrong. It’s wrong. It’s got to be wrong, I kept telling myself as I came to a stop just inside the tree line.
“Do you even know where you’re going?” Lucius called to me from the front porch.
I started walking again, tossing back over my shoulder. “Which way?” I had to ask; I had no idea in which direction the gorge lay.
“When you get to the boulder, go right and keep straight. You can’t miss the glow of the fire in the distance,” he called.
His voice had grown faint as I increased the distance between us, increased the distance between me and the nagging pain of the truth, or what might be the truth. I wouldn’t, couldn’t let myself believe it just yet.
As I navigated the darkened trees and treacherous forest floor, I found I could no longer hold the devastation I felt inside. Pain bubbled up from deep in my soul and poured down my cheeks in the form of tears. They flowed in tortured silence, dripping from my chin and peppering my chest with salt water.
I don’t know how long I walked like that. Time ceased to move around me.
I was trapped in a web of despair and I couldn’t see my way out.
When I saw the orangey halo of the fire bleeding out into the night, I stopped behind a tree, leaning up against it and wiping at my face, trying to collect myself before I walked on to crash a party.
As soon as I felt mostly composed, I walked casually up to two people I recognized that were standing at the periphery of the gathering.
“Hey, guys. Having fun?”
Mike Eversol and Shaina Dunn turned to look at me.
“Ridley,” Shaina said, leaning forward to hug me. “I thought you weren’t coming.”
I shrugged. “I’m just dropping by. I can’t stay very long.” I scanned the faces in the crowd, but didn’t see Summer. “Do you know where Summer is?”
Shaina turned to look out into the crowd as well. “Um, I thought she was over at the keg with Aisha, but I don’t see her now. I don’t know where she went.”
She turned back to me. “Sorry.”
I smiled. “No biggee. I’m sure she’s here somewhere. I’ll just ask around,”
I explained, backing away.
“See you later,” she said.
“Later, Ridley,” Mike chimed in.
I waved then turned to wiggle my way through the tight throng of bodies and weave my way around the fire until I’d arrived at the keg. There was no sign of Summer or Aisha.
I spotted Drew. As usual, he was never far from the source of alcohol. He was laughing at something Minty was saying, but when he spotted me, his smile faded.
If he hadn’t seen me, I’d have done my best to just avoid him. But, since that option was off the table and there was no polite way to not speak, I approached the duo nonchalantly and asked, “Hey, have you guys seen Summer?”
“Yeah, she—” Minty began, but Drew interrupted him.
“You here alone?”
“Yep.”
“Can’t get a date since wonder boy disappeared, huh?”
Bitterness radiated from him like cold air from an open freezer door. Drew was not so callous that he didn’t care that Bo had “disappeared,” nor would he maliciously wish for someone to be hurt or harmed; he was simply still sore from being dumped.