Ignited

by Corrine Jackson

  The way he treated me demanded honesty. “I feel something for you, Gabe. I’m confused and scared and this seems all wrong, but I feel something.”

  He pulled away, enough to see my face. “It’s Asher, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said with regret. “So many people have been hurt since this all began. Asher more than most. I won’t go behind his back like this. He and I may not be together, but it feels wrong to sneak off with his brother.”

  “So we tell him,” Gabe said.

  I brushed a strand of hair off his forehead. “Do you think this is the time to do it? With everything that’s happened? I can’t hurt him like this.”

  “So that’s it? We give up and walk away?”

  “Yes,” I whispered around the ache in my throat. “It’s the right thing to do. And you’re a good man, Gabriel Blackwell.”

  “You don’t fight fair. If I push, I’m a bastard.” He stepped back, his hands falling from me. “Go, okay? Before I prove I’m not good at all and try to convince you to change your mind.”

  I slid off the counter to stand on shaky legs. He turned his back on me as I walked to the door and reached for the doorknob. I didn’t want to go. I thought again of the way he’d supported me last night, never arguing with my need to go, but holding me when I reaped the aftermath of opening that stupid package. A small voice warned me that I would be missing out on the possibility of something amazing if I walked away.

  My eyes squeezed shut, and I took a chance, throwing myself into the wind. “I’ll stay.”

  “What?”

  “After we find my father, I’ll stay.” Gabe spun me around to face him, and his eyes were lit with so much hope that the ache in me eased. This decision felt right.

  “Do you mean it?” he asked.

  I nodded. “We’ll find my father, and then we’ll have time to figure out what this is. But we have to tell Asher when the time is right. And we don’t do this.” I gestured to us and the room. “Okay?”

  Gabe ran his hand down the length of my braid, looping the end around his finger. “Okay. I’ve waited this long. I’m not going anywhere.”

  His hand fell away, and we stood there, staring at each other with silly grins while our world shifted. It wasn’t until later, when I’d crawled under the covers in my bed alone, that I realized what had changed. I was exchanging a future on the run for something entirely unknown. It should have scared me, but all I felt was hope.

  Gabe and Lottie had told their Protector friends that they were taking the weekend to visit Asher in Paris. That gave them Saturday and Sunday to relax at home before diving back into the Protector scene. This whole process moved so slowly, and the arrival of that package had changed things. My grandfather knew he could get to me through the Blackwells, and we needed to figure out what to do next. Plus, there were other Protectors to consider. If we weren’t careful, we could set the whole lot of them on us, and there were too few of us to fight back.

  On Saturday, we decided to eat lunch on the rooftop terrace to celebrate a small break in the rain. After being locked up in the house, it almost felt like a party with everyone pitching in to help. Nobody mentioned my grandfather’s latest threat, as if we’d all agreed to leave it alone and enjoy the moment. Asher and Gabe had dragged a table and chairs out of storage, and Erin and Lucy had teamed up to make lunch for everyone. I set the table with china—old and expensive, I suspected—and silverware—made of real silver—that Lottie had brought out. No one seemed to care that our party food consisted of small bites of sandwiches and piles of crudely cut up fruits and vegetables. The girls had tried their hand at tea sandwiches, small finger sandwiches stuffed with cucumbers and fancy cheeses. Rather than looking dainty, the ragged edges of the crust-less bread looked like they’d been hacked at with a butter knife, and the flattened centers showed the indentations of fingertips where the chefs had held the sandwich for slicing. Nobody teased Erin and Lucy, though. Our group had finally begun to gel together, and I studied everyone with quiet satisfaction. We almost seemed like a family.

  Asher helped Erin carry the food out, and he managed to save a bowl of fruit when he stumbled. I heard Erin mutter, “Did you feel that?” followed by Asher’s, “Yes. I’ve never hit a girl, but I suspect I’d feel that, too.” She just laughed, and I gazed at her in surprise. How far had she come to laugh in the face of a threat from a Protector? She trusted him, I realized. It hadn’t taken him long to affect her. Asher had that way about him, as I knew from experience.

  We all took our seats, with Lucy and Lottie at the heads of the table. Erin and Asher sat on one side, and Gabe and I sat on the other. Gabe was careful to keep his distance, true to his word of the night before. There would be time for us to figure out how we felt, but that time wasn’t now.

  “What have you all been doing while we’ve been gone?” Gabe asked.

  “Remy has been training me,” Erin said.

  He glanced over at me in surprise, and I smiled. “She should be able to defend herself.”

  “Of course she should,” he agreed. His gaze turned thoughtful. “In fact, we should work on your training, too.”

  I groaned. It was one thing to work with Erin, but training with Gabe was different. I spent more time flat on my back on the mat. My ears burned when that thought replayed in my mind. At least, Gabe seemed to have missed one of my embarrassing mind hiccups. He passed me a plate of sandwiches and smiled with a hint of naughtiness. Or not.

  I cleared my throat and tried to stem the urge to hide under the table.

  “He’s right, Remy,” Asher said, distracting me. “What you’re doing with Erin is great, but it doesn’t test your skills. You need to train against a Protector.”

  I glanced around. “What do you say, Lottie? Here’s your chance to take me down. Want to brawl?”

  Her narrow shoulders shuddered in distaste. “Um, no. My luck, I’d end up bonded to you and be stuck listening to your thoughts for the next decade. Thanks but no thanks.”

  A snort sounded from the opposite end of the table. Lucy grinned at Lottie. “Not likely,” she told her. “That’s not how things work for Remy’s kind.”

  A sense of unease crawled up my back. Lucy knew that I’d bonded to Asher, then Gabe, and that my bond with Asher had broken, but I hadn’t told her that I differed from other Healers in that way. Before me, the Blackwells had never heard of a Healer bonding with more than one person.

  “How do you know?” Asher asked her in a quiet voice.

  She chewed on the end of a slightly smashed sandwich before answering. “That book I’ve been reading, the one Remy stole from Alcais—it talks about it.”

  Erin’s brows shot up, and I winced. Awesome way for my friend to find out that I’d stolen from her brother. “I’m sorry,” I told her. “He was acting suspicious and . . .” My voice trailed off when she laughed.

  “Can I call you Captain Klepto? Pretty please?” To Lucy, she asked, “Can I see it?”

  My sister ran into the house to get the book and returned a moment later. She handed it over, and Erin studied it, flipping the leather-bound volume over in her hand. Her smile faded into a thoughtful frown.

  “I remember this from Franc’s library. If I recall right, a Protector wrote this, though I have no idea how Franc ended up with it.”

  She passed the book back to Lucy. “I’m not sure why Alcais would have had this. It’s full of extremist crap. Protectors advocating killing off babies born with both Healer and Protector blood. I couldn’t get through it. When I first saw it in the library, I remember thinking it was total mythology. We had never heard of anyone like you, Remy, except in stories.”

  “The book is about a lot more than that,” Lucy said. “It says there were others like Remy. Listen . . .” She flipped to a page and read out loud. “Children born with the blood of both Healers and Protectors should be feared. These half breeds have shown a propensity to grow in power as they age. More to the point, we suspect they will gro
w into a power that could endanger all of our kind and should therefore be exterminated before they destroy us.” She looked up at me. “Do you think that power they’re talking about is the way you can hurt people?”

  “No idea,” I said.

  That passage had made my stomach knot when I read it, imagining babies being killed because some bastards were afraid of what might be—the mythical power of the half breeds. In my mind, I gave the author the finger for referring to my kind like livestock. The book hadn’t described what our power was, and I’d been unable to continue reading after it described myriad ways to dispose of the “half-breed babies.” That my grandfather had owned such a book made me sick, and I wondered how much of it he believed.

  “It could be talking about how she can heal immortality. But that would assume they knew that Protectors could become immortal. Does the book mention that?” Asher asked.

  Lucy shook her head.

  “What does this have to do with the way Remy bonds?” Erin asked.

  “There’s a section in here that describes it,” Lucy said.

  Asher and Gabe both looked at me and I grimaced helplessly. I didn’t remember reading anything about that. Maybe it had been in the part of the book I’d skimmed.

  “What does it say?” Asher prompted Lucy. “You know, female Healers and Protectors used to bond all the time. What made you think Remy couldn’t bond with Lottie?”

  That sense of unease returned, and I set my fork down.

  “Well, they don’t exactly love each other. Sorry, Lottie. No offense.”

  “None taken,” Lottie said.

  “What does that have to do with it?” Gabe asked. “Bonds aren’t about emotions. They’re about compatible power, each person’s energy helping the other’s to strengthen.”

  Tension radiated from Gabe and Asher. Both men had leaned forward in their seats and stared at her with intense expressions. Lucy finally picked up on it, her confusion palpable as she tried to understand why this mattered to them so much. I swallowed around a lump of dread and folded my hands in my lap, waiting for what I guessed was coming.

  She spoke in a halting voice, her eyes flicking to me with worry. “Um, Remy’s bonds are. About feelings, I mean. The book says full-blooded Healers and Protectors bonded against their will, but Remy’s kind are different. Some never bonded at all, and others bonded more than once, but always their emotions were involved. Let me see if I can remember exactly what it said . . .”

  No, Lucy. Please don’t say it.

  She paused, thinking, and then snapped her fingers. “Right! I remember now. The book says that they seemed to form bonds ‘according to their hearts.’ ”

  Lucy’s announcement met with a weighed kind of silence. Her gaze bounced from Asher to Gabe to me. A flush of realization swept over her face when she saw my face and the sorrow I couldn’t hide. Too late she understood why this mattered, finally connecting my circumstances with Gabe and Asher to the state of our bonds. Our eyes met and hers were filled with apology.

  The table shook when Asher rose in a hurry and bumped it. A glass tipped over, spilling water everywhere. Everyone stared at him in shock, but his entire focus was on me. His enraged action had even surprised him, and he breathed in quick gasps. I’d never seen so much pain in his eyes, and it killed me to be the one causing it.

  “I don’t know why I’m surprised,” he said. “I knew it. From the moment I saw the two of you together in Blackwell Falls last September, I knew you cared about him more than you wanted to admit.”

  I shook my head in denial. I hadn’t known. Not then. My hands clenched in a painful grip. Asher and Gabe had said that I was controlling the bond somehow, but I hadn’t believed them. It had been one more thing I hadn’t understood and shoved away into a box because I couldn’t deal with what it might mean. My heart betrayed me, becoming a reckless thing that did whatever the hell it wanted and hurting others in the process. It didn’t matter that I’d been honorable. No, my damned bonds behaved like a lie detector telling everyone around me what I felt before I even understood it myself. It wasn’t fair. I bit the inside of my cheek to fight back the tears.

  “Asher, calm down,” Gabe said in a soothing voice, placing a hand on my shoulder. “Remy has always been true to you. You know that.”

  Asher laughed and the sound of it grated my heart. “Except when she bonded to you. And now she’s yours. The proof is written all over you two.” His gaze fell to Gabe’s hand like he knew that his brother had offered comfort after hearing my thoughts. “I’m outta here. I’m not going to stick around here to watch you two getting together.”

  He shoved his chair away from the table. He made it as far as the conservatory before Gabe stopped him by gripping the lapels of Asher’s jacket. “No, it’s not safe. We have to talk.”

  Asher didn’t struggle. He looked at Gabe’s hands and then at his face. “You know you can keep me here against my will. I’m too weak to fight you now. I’m asking you to let me go. Don’t do this to me in front of her,” he said in a proud voice.

  He wouldn’t look at me. Clearly, he considered Gabe the victor, and the humiliation changed the way he carried himself. His shoulders slumped, and his movements were jerky. Gabe struggled for a long minute, a muscle working in his cheek, and then he stepped back, letting his brother go. Without another word, Asher walked away, disappearing down the stairs. A moment later, the front door slammed.

  This was everything I hadn’t wanted to happen. I loved Asher, and I’d never wanted to hurt him. Instead, I’d devastated him.

  I shoved back my chair and rose, ignoring the stares of Lottie, Lucy, and Erin. Gabe stood in the conservatory, looking torn between crying and punching something when I approached him.

  “You’re going after him,” he said.

  “I have to. I can’t let him go like this, imagining that we . . .” I gulped.

  My mind shut down on the possibilities of what Asher might be imagining. The things he thought Gabe and I might have done while I’d still been with Asher.

  Gabe nodded. “Be careful. I’ll be here when you need me.”

  I took off at a run, hoping I’d know what to say when I found Asher.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Outside, cars and people surged down the busy street. I shoved past a man in a suit to catch up with Asher halfway down the block.

  He spun around when I said his name. “Damn it, Remy. Get the hell away from me!”

  He turned on his heel and charged ahead.

  I ignored his command and spoke to his back. “You know I was never unfaithful to you. You were everything to me.”

  The muscles in his shoulders tensed, but he didn’t slow. “I mean it. I don’t want to talk to you,” he said.

  That hurt, but I didn’t let it sway me. I couldn’t let him go off on his own like this. Aside from the danger, I couldn’t stand that he doubted how I felt about him. “When my grandfather’s men shot you, and I thought I watched you die, I wanted to die, too. And when they tortured me, I hoped they would kill me because it hurt too much to be alive without you.”

  He stopped so abruptly that I almost ran into him. The glare on his face threatened to burn me alive when he did an about-face. “How long did you feel that way before you bonded to Gabe?”

  “You can’t blame me for this. I didn’t plan it. Gabe was my friend and nothing more.”

  Asher’s eyes darkened. “Was your friend,” he repeated in a dangerous voice. “You admit something’s happened?”

  “The day we arrived in London. Gabe found out that we broke up and he asked me to give him a chance,” I admitted.

  “And what did you tell him?”

  “That I couldn’t hurt you like that.” Asher’s expression lightened infinitesimally. Honesty compelled me to barrel forward. “But I do have feelings for him. I realized it while he was gone these last few days. I told him as much last night.”

  Asher threw back his head like he would shout at the sky, but
he merely gritted his teeth.

  I continued. “I asked him to give me time. To give you time, Asher. Neither of us wanted to hurt you.”

  “Bang-up job you did, Remy. Finding out like this made everything better.” I cringed at the hate in his voice. “Go back to him, and stay the fuck away from me.”

  He struck out at me with his words and then walked away. Walked away like he had been doing for months, while I begged him to love me like a pathetic girl. The injustice of it made it difficult to swallow his rage.

  I yelled at his retreating back. “Right. I forgot that you were the honorable one in our relationship. The one who never lied. You said we were forever, Asher, but that wasn’t true, was it? Who lied first? Did you ever care for me, or was I just your ticket to feeling human again? Lucky for you, you hate it so much, and you can blame me for that, too!”

  A woman pushing a stroller on the opposite side of the street eyed me, and I flushed with embarrassment. I’d been reduced to screaming at Asher on a London street when he wanted nothing to do with me. For months, he’d had all the control, while I reacted to whatever he did. You could only run after a thing for so long before you tired of never reaching it.

  Tears blinded me as I strode back to the house. This had gotten so out of hand, and I couldn’t fix things. Feet pounded on the pavement behind me, and I whipped around. Asher’s body slammed into mine, and he lifted me off my feet. He kissed me hard, his hold on me fierce. I didn’t fight him, but I couldn’t kiss him back. We’d gone too far past that. Asher lifted his head when he realized I wasn’t responding, and we stared at each other at a loss for words. What did you say to someone you’d fallen out of love with?