“I don’t,” he snapped. “When I look at you, I promise you I see it all. The good and the bad, the light and the dark. And you’re still the best person I know.”
My heart twisted at his words and I reached out to pull him into a hug. “You’re the best person I know, too,” I murmured.
Seth fell still, his hands still on my chest as an achingly long moment passed between us.
He turned his head against my neck. His lips brushed my skin and I froze.
My heart pounded as he moved his mouth up my neck slowly, his hands gentle against my chest as my skin tingled where he touched me.
His lips brushed against the soft skin beneath my ear and I swallowed thickly as he pressed the lightest kiss against the corner of my jaw.
My free hand moved to clasp his waist as my fingertips brushed against his skin and he groaned beneath his breath as his mouth moved along my jaw, scratching at my stubble in a way that made my flesh prickle.
My heart was hammering wildly and the breath I inhaled caught in my throat as his mouth brushed the corner of mine and a shiver danced through every inch of my body.
He moved again and I found myself looking into his eyes, less than nothing between our lips as he hesitated.
“Seth…” I breathed, not really knowing how I was going to finish that sentence.
His eyes widened then darkened and for a moment I was sure I found pain in them before he locked it away again.
“Sorry,” he murmured. “I shouldn’t have…sorry.”
He pulled back an inch and my grip on him tightened for half a second before I let him go.
He frowned at me like he wasn’t sure what that meant and I shifted uncomfortably as I looked at him.
“Maybe I should just go,” he said slowly, his voice rough as he looked at me with regret in his eyes.
“Maybe,” I repeated as he backed up another step and he bit his bottom lip.
“Are you…okay now?” he asked hesitantly.
“I…yeah, I’m okay,” I agreed.
He gave me a tight smile and turned away, dropping his sweatpants and shifting in the same movement.
He moved to the door, using his paw to open it and tossing one last glance back at me before he tore out of my room.
I watched him go with my heart in my throat and moved to close the door behind him.
My skin still tingled where he’d touched me and I was struck with the desire to call him back. But I didn’t.
A frown tugged at my brow and my mind turned over and over as I tried to make sense of the way my heart was pounding out of rhythm.
I fell back onto my bed with a shaky breath and let my eyes fall closed. What the hell just happened?
A Wolf howled mournfully beyond my window outside and a tingle ran down my spine which had nothing to do with what I’d done today and everything to do with my best friend’s visit.
Seth:
Dream Team meeting in King’s Hollow. Now. No excuses bitches.
I read over the message in our group chat as I finished up an Arcane Arts paper in my room and released a huff of frustration before replying.
Darius:
I can’t be held responsible for what I’ll do to Caleb if I have to spend time in his company at the moment.
Caleb:
I’m so fucking sorry, dude. But I get it, I’ll just stay away.
Seth:
No! I’ve got a team bonding exercise in mind which we ALL need to be a part of. It’s been twenty four hours. Caleb said sorry, Tory is fine now. I just saw her splashing around at the lake with her Ass buddies...
He added a short video to the group which showed Roxy in a tiny black bikini perched on Milton Hubert’s fucking shoulders as she wrestled with Geraldine Grus who was on Justin Masters’ shoulders too as they fought to get each other to fall in the lake. They were screaming and laughing as they played, but my gaze caught on Darcy who just sat on the beach watching them with glazed eyes. The clip ended just as Geraldine spotted Seth and started yelling at him for being a lecherous lupine and his laughter filled the speakers as he ran away.
He must have filmed that a few hours ago because a storm had rolled in since then and the day had turned decidedly grey and miserable beyond my windows.
Max:
Why the fuck is Grus always hanging around with that pompous Justin prick?
Seth:
I heard their parents are in talks about arranging their marriage…assuming he can’t bag himself a Vega…
A deep growl escaped me at that suggestion and I pushed away from my desk as Max started sending all kinds of colourful insults about Justin over the chat.
Seth:
Well lucky for you guys, my plan will make both Roxy Vega and Geraldine Grus so fucking happy that they’ll definitely wanna bang you.
Caleb:
Nobody says bang anymore, asshole.
Seth:
I’m bringing it back. So fuck you. Also, just get your asses to the Hollow now or I’m going to have to come beat your pretty faces in. Don’t make me invoke the power code…
I groaned as he wielded that stupid fucking power code shit. We’d come up with it when we were seven and super excited about the idea of us ruling the world together one day. Basically, if one of us invoked the power code, we all had to show up. No excuses. I’d tried to get him to change the fucking name of it at least eight hundred times over the years, but he wouldn’t. Fucking power code.
I yanked my shirt off and dropped my pants before throwing my floor length window wide and taking a running jump out of it.
I shifted and sped across campus to the Hollow with the rain pinging off of my scales. It was a miserable day which suited my mood just fine.
I arrived in no time, my claws digging into the wooden rooftop before I shifted back into my Fae form. I glanced over the edge of the roof at the drop to the forest floor and my gut knotted with anger as a blur of motion caught my eye.
I opened the hatch and dropped inside, grabbing a pair of jeans and boxers from the trunk at the side of the room and pulling them on just as Caleb shot into the room.
We looked at each other for a long moment and a growl echoed in the back of my throat as Max and Seth walked in.
“Enough!” Max snapped. “Tory wanted to play that damn hunting game and Cal warned her it was a terrible idea. They learned their lessons yesterday and now we just need to move on.”
I growled again and Caleb looked down at his boots.
“What we need,” Seth said with a cocky little grin. “Is to go on an adventure together.”
“What adventure?” I grunted.
“One that I’ve been working on, oh so fucking hard. It’s gonna make Tory real happy. And probably Grus too because she’s all for Mission: Defy the Stars,” he added, tossing a wink at Max.
“Really?” Max asked, running a hand over his mohawk as he tried not to grin.
“Yeah. Does the name Zane Baxter mean anything to you?” Seth looked my way excitedly and I frowned.
“Roxy’s ex. The one who left her to drown in that car wreck,” I muttered. If that asshole had lived in Solaria, I’d have ruined his life a long time ago.
“Yeah…you wanna go pay him a visit?” Seth waggled his eyebrows enticingly and my spine straightened as I looked at him with more interest.
“How the hell did you find him?” I asked.
“I’ve been taking little visits to the mortal realm for the last month, Coercing humans left right and centre to hand up the info on him. The fucker didn’t have anything official linking him to his current residence because he’s started himself up a nice little criminal empire, but I found him.”
“Why?” I asked. I mean, I was all for going and messing with the fucker but I didn’t get it.
“Because you wouldn’t just do a strip tease or sing her a song like a normal lovestruck idiot so I had to think outside the box. And deep down, I think that a girl who the stars chose to be your perfect match must really want a badass k
ind of gesture over chocolate hearts and flowers. So I say we go kick the little gangster’s ass for what he did to her and you can cut off his balls and put them in a box for her…or just take a photo, whatever you think she’d like best.”
“Probably the balls,” I said with a dark chuckle as I grinned at him.
“So it’s a yes?” Seth asked enthusiastically.
“Fuck yes.”
I opened up the chest and grabbed a pair of boots, a black T-shirt and a leather jacket from it and Seth howled as the four of us headed out. Max took a bag of stardust from the emergency stash we kept in the desk as we went and I moved to walk with him as Caleb followed beside Seth. We’d get over this, but at the moment I couldn’t look at him without wanting to beat his face in, so I was glad I had a different asshole to focus on instead.
We strode across campus and slipped through the gap in the shield that Lance had left, my skin prickling as I recognised his magical signature and the Guardian brand on my arm burning with a desperate kind of ache.
I was hardly sleeping, my studies were suffering and in all honesty I just felt like I was existing in this bubble of hopeless nothingness which I couldn’t see an end to. If Xavier and my mom didn’t need me, I wasn’t really sure why I’d even get out of bed in the mornings. Sometimes I got so angry at Lance that I punched myself just so he’d feel it wherever the fuck he was. Why couldn’t he have just stuck to the plan? What did he really think he was achieving by fucking up his entire life?
Self sacrificing fuckwit.
Seth took the pouch of stardust from Max with the smuggest damn look on his face that I’d ever seen and a moment later we were swept away through the stars.
My stomach swooped as the twinkling little bastards surrounded us and we tumbled through them for longer than usual as we crossed between the realms before they finally spat us out in a back alley in some city suburb in the mortal realm.
I drew in a shaky breath as I was suddenly freed from the shackles of my bond to Orion. The connection was still there, but it was dulled by the realms dividing us to the point where I could hardly even feel it anymore. And after weeks of aching for him to be close to me and sleepless nights dreaming of holding him in my arms, it was more than a fucking relief. He’d probably be panicking right about now, thinking I was dead as his connection to me was muted and a twisted sense of satisfaction filled me at that idea. I hoped he was suffering for putting me through this and then I felt like a total douchebag for thinking that. No doubt what he was going through was a hundred times worse.
“Fuck, I should have thought of this before,” I groaned, rubbing a hand over the Libra mark beneath my leather jacket.
The only relief from the bond I’d managed to find until now was dipping into the depths of the shadows and I didn’t like to do it too often. They fed too greedily on negativity and I knew they’d consume me if I started to use them as a crutch. I should have realised sooner that the mortal realm was the perfect place to escape to. Though I wouldn’t have chosen this particularly shitty neighbourhood. There was trash all around us in the alleyway and the scent of stale piss hung in the air.
“That’s the foster home the Vegas were living in when Tory met him,” Seth said as we stepped out of the alley and he pointed across the street to the run down house.
I frowned as I spotted a kid sitting on the porch, smoking a blunt and scowling at us.
“Are you smoking again Brent?” a woman shrieked from inside. “I’ll whoop your hide if I catch you!”
The kid quickly stubbed out his smoke and pushed the door open where the sound of more screaming reached us as she laid into him.
“Have new people moved in there now?” Caleb asked uncomfortably and Seth shrugged.
“Erm, no. Same registered owners. They have five foster kids at a time and err, I guess they go for the loud kind of discipline,” Seth said as we all surveyed the house.
It was…a fucking dive. The white paint was peeling and one of the windows was half boarded over. There was trash everywhere and one of the old wooden chairs on the porch had collapsed. It looked like my idea of hell. Though I supposed I’d grown up in what could arguably be called a palace and I hadn’t been happy for much of it, so maybe I didn’t know shit.
“So, I had a fucking job of it finding the asshole, but I basically tracked down the high school the girls went to then used my charms to ask around about him and after the third guy practically pissed himself at the mention of his name, I Coerced the answer out of him and found out Zane Baxter is a gangster. Sounds like he’s gotten an even worse reputation now than he had when Tory was screwing hi…dating him.” Seth cleared his throat and I folded my arms as I waited for him to get to the point. “Anyway he doesn’t live in the house she used to walk past on her way to school anymore but after a bit of digging I found him.”
“That’s how she met him?” I asked in a low voice. “He saw her walking past his door and just pounced on her?”
“I dunno man, I did some asking around and that’s the story I got from one girl, but there’s no way in hell Tory would confirm it even if I’d asked. If you really wanna know then just ask her about it when we get back.” He shrugged at me and I rolled my eyes.
“Like she’d tell me.”
“Maybe she would,” Max said. “You could just ask and see.”
“I can’t even be alone with her, so how would that work?” I grumbled.
“Try texting, idiot,” he shot back and I frowned at him as the others sniggered like that was so fucking obvious. And maybe it was.
“Or calling,” Caleb added. “You’re not together if you’re just talking on the phone.”
“Video chat,” Seth added with a dirty grin. “You could totally have video sex.”
“Shut up,” I growled, but I couldn’t entirely hide the grin on my face either. Maybe I was fucking dumb. It just seemed like such a step back to start messaging or calling her that it hadn’t really occurred to me, but maybe it should have.
“Come on,” Seth said, leading the way down the street as the woman inside the foster home finally stopped yelling. “And don’t forget we can’t use magic here, at least not in an obvious way.”
“We know,” Caleb replied, rolling his eyes.
We walked eight blocks through the rough area, drawing attention in our expensive clothes, though we must have been intimidating enough to stop anyone from trying to rob us.
“That’s the high school they went to when they lived here,” Seth said, pointing out the sprawling collection of huge grey buildings beyond the chainlink fence. It looked fucking depressing.
“They used to walk here alone?” Max asked in a low voice. “With no magic?”
I pursed my lips as I looked around at the streets. This neighbourhood wasn’t just rough, it was fucking gangland. It was the kind of place where bad shit happened to nice girls and no one gave a fuck about it. The city of Alestria was like this in Solaria and the place was so lawless that Father and the other Councillors basically just left it to gang rule. Though I guessed with his Storm Dragon in his pocket he believed he had control over it anyway. How the hell had the Solarian princesses ended up here?
“Errr, yeah, I guess. Maybe add it to your list of Tory questions,” Seth said with a shrug as we passed the school and headed on.
The further we walked, the more I began to notice marks spray-painted on the walls and doors of the houses. A black circle with a red skull in the centre. Ominous.
“Why didn’t we just stardust closer to our destination?” Max muttered.
“Because I didn’t wanna come here until now so I didn’t know it to stardust in. This guy is a total fucker. He’s like insanely dangerous…for a human. I didn’t want him to see me and get wind of us coming,” Seth said excitedly and I exchanged a smirk with Cal before remembering that he was on my shit list.
Sure enough, the further we went, the more eyes I felt on us, though so far no one dared approach. Max subtly constructed
an air shield around us in case of gunshots but when it came down to it, we were going to do this like mortals. Mostly.
We finally turned a corner and Seth stopped beside a fence which ringed a large house with a load of pretty savage looking bikes parked outside it.
Gang members sprawled across the yard, their eyes falling on us as we looked their way. There were gang tattoos on each of them, the skull sitting in the circle, and more than a few of them loosened guns from holsters.
“Are you lost, boys?” a big fucker called out as he looked at us from the steps leading up to the wide porch.
“I’m looking for Tory Gomez’s ex,” I said in a low voice, using the name she’d gone by in the mortal world as I looked him dead in the eye.
His eyebrows rose in surprise at that name and another dude rose from a lawn chair as he looked at me. He was broad, covered in tattoos and had a pretty face which didn’t really tally with his whole gangster vibe.
“Which one?” he asked with a smirk. “I used to date her. That girl was a fucking wild one.”
“Not him,” Seth muttered and my spine prickled at the fact that there was more than one of her fucking exes here. How many did she even have?? And was I a total fucking hypocrite because that pissed me off?
Probably.
“We’re looking for Zane Baxter,” Caleb added.
“Are you here to collect the bounty then? Because I don’t see her,” the big guy said, pushing off of the steps and fingering a hunting knife which hung from his hip.
“Bounty?” Max asked.
“Well…I guess that’s not the right word. The boss only wants to talk to her, not hurt her,” he chuckled and the rest of the goons joined in. “That girl and her sister just fell off the radar like ghosts when they left their last foster home.”
“And why does your boss give a shit about where his ex went?” I asked, moving closer to him with the other Heirs at my back.
“Because I wouldn’t exactly call her my ex,” another voice called and I looked up as the door to the house opened and a huge guy stepped out onto the porch and looked at us. “I asked that girl to be mine and she said yes. I don’t remember releasing her from that commitment.”
Zodiac Academy 5: Cursed Fates: An Academy Bully Romance (Supernatural Bullies and Beasts) Page 59