"Is your power getting stronger?" he asked softly, a hint of fear laced through his voice. The titans had always been afraid of her abilities, afraid of how different and how unknown they were. But Jax never had been before.
Pandora snapped her gaze around, meeting his green eyes. "So what if it is?"
He held her attention, trapping her for one prolonged moment as his lips wobbled, holding back words just aching to get out. And then he released a long, slow breath, turning his attention back to the road, silent.
"What?" she demanded.
But Jax didn't flinch.
He's hiding something, she thought. Something that has to do with me.
"Jax," she said, reaching for his shoulder. But the moment she latched her fingers on to his skin, he hissed in pain, flinching. Pandora furrowed her brows, confused, as she leaned closer, and he had no choice but to let her.
When she pulled his shirt away from his neck, her jaw dropped. A deep purple bruise stained his brown skin. Farther down, she noticed blood seeping through the cotton, a small open wound.
"Jax, I don't understand," she whispered, setting his shirt back gently. "Your skin isn’t supposed to break. It’s supposed to be tough like mine, untouchable. You're supposed to heal. Titans are supposed to heal."
"Just leave it alone, Dory," he muttered, refusing to look at her, refusing to meet her worried eyes.
"But—"
"No," he interrupted, angry now, but she wasn't entirely sure why. Before she could challenge him, he changed the subject. "You want to talk? Why don't we talk about the fact that you turned your back on me, on everyone and everything you'd ever known, to become this? To become someone who's being chased down and hunted every second of the day, someone who never has a moment of peace, someone who doesn’t even consider the consequences of her actions, who runs into danger headfirst without thinking, who doesn't give a rat's ass about her own life?"
Pandora gritted her teeth. You stop caring about how many people want to kill you when you've got nothing to live for, no one to live for. But she didn't say that. She couldn't.
And it didn’t matter anyway, because Jax barreled forward, not letting her interrupt. "I'd hoped that when I found you, you'd at least have done something with your life. I'd hoped you'd maybe gone to school, trained to be a vet like you always said. I'd hoped you were happy, that you'd found some peace, that you'd carved out a place for yourself in a world that never seemed to understand you. But if I'd known you were going to turn out like this, I would have—"
"What?" she finally broke through. "You would have what? Left me alone to my miserable life?"
"No," he whispered, closing his eyes for a moment, taking a deep breath. "I would have tried to find you a lot sooner."
Pandora swallowed. "What do you mean?"
He gripped the steering wheel tight, twisting the rubber, as he stared hard into the horizon. "I haven't been searching for you for four years. I told the order that I was, but I lied. I only really started looking for you a few months ago."
"Why?"
"Because, Dory," he said, sounding more exhausted than she ever remembered hearing him. "I wanted to give you a chance to live. I wanted to give you a chance to make all those dreams you always rattled on about come true. I wanted you to do something with your life, anything, before I had to drag you back to a place I knew you hated, a place where you never felt you belonged, where you always felt trapped, where…" But his throat caught, and he trailed off, leaving that last thought unsaid.
Pandora paused, licking her lips. There was something she still wasn't grasping, something she didn't understand. "Why do they want me back so badly?"
Jax clenched his jaw tight, holding, holding, holding. And then every muscle in his body relaxed in a single moment, as though every part of him had given up, had stopped fighting. "Why do you think?" he murmured, finally flicking his gaze in her direction. But underneath his voice, Pandora could hear his heart beating wildly in his chest, betraying the weight of his words, the heaviness of things left unsaid. "You’re the director's daughter. Did you really think they'd let you go so easily? Did you really think he would?"
Pandora turned her gaze back to the window, crossing her arms as she rested her feet against the dashboard. She didn’t want to think about her father, not for a second. So instead, she let her head fall back, closed her eyes, and waited for sleep to take her.
Chapter Twelve
Pandora waited, sitting in the damp grass, back pressed against the wooden rungs of the ladder leading to the top of their tree house. Hours before, she had fallen to the ground, delirious as she raced to find Jax, to find the one person who would understand, the one person who would never betray her the way everyone else had. And when she'd seen the tree house dark and empty, she'd tripped in her shock, stumbling to her knees. Without the energy to climb, she'd simply flipped over in the dirt and used the ladder as a backrest, waiting.
Because he would come.
He had to.
He would never do this to her.
They would. But not Jax. Never Jax.
So she waited, eyes staring into the shadows created by the moonlight, searching for his body with every sound, every shapeless shift in the trees. And with each passing moment, she whispered to herself.
He's coming.
He's coming.
He's coming.
Rocking back and forth, pulling her knees into her chest as the tears started to fall, she whispered those words like a prayer.
But then moments turned to minutes.
Minutes to hours.
And she knew he'd come but not for the reason she wanted him to. But she couldn't leave without seeing for herself, without being sure he'd made his choice. Because a small part of her still hoped he'd chosen her.
And then he was there, a black blur shifting through tree trunks, tan skin set alight by the silver starlight streaming through the branches. He stopped fifteen feet away, unsure. Pandora stood, shaking, as she looked deep into his eyes, his beautiful green eyes, and for the first time didn't recognize the soul hiding inside. She didn’t need to see more, didn’t need to hear the words tumbling from his lips, didn't need to touch the tattoo freshly carved into his skin, branding him—a permanent reminder of his choice, of his betrayal.
She ran.
Without once glancing back, she disappeared into the darkness of the night, racing through the forest and pulling her shadows around her, hiding her body from the light. All she heard was her heart pumping, her nose sniffling, and her feet pounding farther and farther away.
The terrain turned blurry, no longer the woods and the mountains of her home, shifting too fast for her to make out, as though she were moving too fast for the world to keep up.
"Run, Pandora," a voice whispered in a silky tone as smooth as the liquid black of a starless night.
She turned her head to find another person was with her in this blurry world, running by her side, just as fast, but his face was calm, smiling gently, not the teary red mess she knew hers must be. His golden hair barely shifted in the breeze as her blonde waves smacked her in the face, whipping in the shifting air. And his blue eyes glowed, eager and excited.
"Run," he said again, smile deepening.
Sam, she thought, the word coming through the fog. "Sam?"
"Keep running, and don't ever look back," he told her. "Don't forget, I'll always be able to find you. And I will, as soon as I can."
And then he was gone.
And she was alone again, in this world that wasn't real, shifting too fast for her to understand, for her to process. Her feet continued to pound as she mindlessly ran and ran, not stopping, not looking back.
Until she smacked into something, a body, still warm, burning hot compared to the icy cold invading her veins, stealing the life from her limbs. And without even glancing to see if it was a boy or a girl, fangs she didn’t realize she possessed slipped out, and she bit, drinking in the heat, sucking the fire int
o her heart, more and more and more as her tired legs continued to race forward, not stopping, never stopping, never—
"Dory!" Jax shouted, shaking her shoulder roughly.
"What?"
She gasped, sitting up, out of breath as she rapidly blinked, trying to clear her eyes, trying to see the real world zipping by through the window her forehead had been pressed against.
"You were screaming," Jax said, voice alarmed. "One minute you were sound asleep, and then you were screaming."
"I was?" she asked, still foggy with sleep, confused.
He turned toward her, pulling his gaze from the road for a second. "Do you still have nightmares?"
"No," she said quickly then paused, brows furrowing. "Well… I don't know."
"What do you mean?"
She shrugged. "I never knew I even had nightmares until you told me, until you started waking me up by tossing rocks at my window or calling my name. I guess I could still have them, but no one's been around to let me know until now."
"Do you remember what it was about?" Jax asked.
Pandora shook her head, trying to hold on to the tendrils of a memory, but they slipped through her fingers. "I think maybe you were a part of it, and someone else. And there was blood. At least I think so, but it's all so blurred."
He frowned, turning his attention back to the empty highway. Pandora blinked again, swallowing as she sat up and dropped her feet from the dash, wiping the sleep from her eyes. The world was black aside from the two beams of light stretching out in front of the car. She'd been sleeping for hours.
"Where are we?" she mumbled, yawning.
"Somewhere in North Carolina."
She swallowed, then chewed on her lip before asking, "And where are we going?"
Jax looked at her out of the corner of his eye, just for a moment, before staring resolutely ahead. "Florida."
She could have told him no. She could have told him to turn around. She could have started another fight with another unsatisfying ending. But instead, she held her tongue and stared at the halo created by the headlights, watching the road flash by.
Did she want to go to Florida? No.
Did she want to go to the conduit base? No.
Did she want her vampirism to be cured? No.
Of course, none of that mattered to Jax. He was a man. He was stubborn. He was her former best friend and long-ago love of her life. So obviously, he thought he knew more about her needs than she did. And when it came down to it, she'd rather humor him for as long as she could and then disappear at the last possible second, especially when the other option was to fight with him for two days and then do the same damn thing. Like she'd said to that conduit girl in the graveyard—men were so much easier to manipulate when they thought they were in control.
So she dropped her head back against the seat, determined to stay civil—at least for a while. "So," she started casually, remembering their earlier conversation, "if you haven't been chasing me for four years, what have you been doing?"
Jax sighed. "Tracker stuff, titan stuff. The usual."
"Ooh, interesting," she said mockingly, rolling her eyes. Come on, Jax. Work with me here. "Care to elaborate? I'm trying this little thing you might have forgotten how to do. It's called having an actual conversation."
"Well," he said, voice tight, "since you never got initiated, I'm not exactly authorized to tell you what I've been doing. It’s confidential unless you're a full member of the order."
Pandora blew a heavy breath through her lips. Give me something, Jax, anything. I just want to get to know you, adult you. She tried again. "Okay, forget titan stuff. What about life? What about everything else?"
He tightened his grip on the wheel, but for the first time, his reaction didn’t seem about her. Not really. "Work is my life, Dory. There is no other stuff."
"Oh, come on," she challenged, sitting up, tired of the games. "You can't say all that stuff to me you did before, how you're so disappointed that I didn’t chase my dreams, so angry that I ended up the way I did, and then tell me you did the exact same thing. What about your music? What about that dream?"
Jax swallowed, green eyes darkening a shade. "I don't play anymore."
"Why?" She gasped, staring at him. Almost every memory she had of Jax was tied to music, to watching the effortless way he moved his fingers across the strings, how he got entirely wrapped up in the song, how he closed his eyes when the words became too emotional, too raw, and he had to pretend he was somewhere other than the real world just to get through. She couldn't imagine him without his guitar, a gift from his father, a talent both men shared. And when she and Jax had nurtured those childish dreams of running away and starting a new life together, music was always his escape, his future, his what-if.
Pandora had once been his certainty. Music had once been his dream.
How had he lost them both?
"Why, Jax?" she asked again, softly, sadly.
Brows tight, he darted his gaze in her direction, his eyes piercing with their intensity, saying what his lips could not. "I just didn’t have anything to sing about anymore."
Pandora looked away, fiddling with her fingers. "Well, what about your parents? What about your friends?"
"I don't know," he murmured.
"Jax—"
"Look," he interrupted, "I'm going to make this simple. I wake up, and I work, and I go to sleep. That's about it until I came to find you. I haven't spoken to my parents in a year, and I haven't been back to the enclave in about three. I travel a lot, which doesn't leave much time for friends, and I try not to stay in any one place too long."
Pandora stared at him, chest tight as she listened to the heavy thunk, thunk, thunk of his heart, the sad, isolated way it was beating, painful in its monotony.
I'm not the only one who's been running, she thought, hearing him take a deep, uneven breath and release it just as unsteadily.
"Is it all my fault?" she whispered.
"No," Jax said gruffly, and then he paused, not breathing, letting everything about his body calm down. And then softer, he repeated, "No." He looked at her with the ghost of a smile across his lips, murmuring a phrase they used to say to get out of a fight. "You take half the blame, and I'll take the other."
Pandora's lips curved up hesitantly. "Deal."
His smile widened for a moment before disappearing entirely. "I tried to stay at home for a while, but I just couldn't. Staring into your dark window every night, knowing your room was empty, knowing you weren't coming back? You became the ghost next door, and I had to get out. I had to leave. So they told me to find you since I was a full tracker and we were so close I'd have a better shot than anyone else, but I didn't want to find you, not right away. I wanted to give you a chance to live, so I traveled instead, saying I'd picked up on traces here and there, saying I was following you, when really, I was wandering aimlessly from one titan enclave to another. I went to Spain to see the enclave where my dad grew up, to China, to Egypt, to Chile, to enclaves all over the world. I helped them if I could, doing side jobs, waiting for time to run out, waiting until I'd have no choice but to finally track the one person I didn’t want to find."
Pandora lifted a brow, pretending to be insulted.
Jax laughed, an airy, vacant sound. "You know what I mean. I don't think a day went by when I didn’t think about you, didn't wonder where you were or what you were doing or if you missed me, but what I wanted didn’t matter. It never has. And you wanted time, so I tried to give it to you as best I could. But…"
She picked up where he left off. "But my twentieth birthday was a few days ago, and if this titan wants to be initiated into the Order of Othrys, wants to inherit her full powers and become a full member, it has to happen after her sixteenth birthday but before her twenty-first? That about right?"
Jax shrugged, voice hollow as he spoke. "We don't make the rules. We just live by them."
Pandora chewed her lip, not sure how far she wanted to take this convers
ation. But as per usual, she chose the more difficult path. "Did my father tell you to get off your ass and stop wasting time? Did he know what you were doing?"
Jax nodded, forcing the words out. "Something like that."
Pandora collapsed against her seat, closing her eyes as the image of her father's face fluttered up from the crevice she'd smashed it into. Penetrating dark-brown eyes. Thin, hard-set lips. Deep, grooved wrinkles. Receding hairline, black peppered with gray. He hadn't been an old man when she'd left, but he'd looked like one, aged by the stress of his job, by the pressure to lead the American branch of the order. Everything had always been about the job, about the enclave, about following the path laid out and never deviating.
Everyone has a fate, he used to say, and God gave me mine because he knew I was strong enough to take it. And then he'd look at her, eyes soft for the merest moment before hardening up once more, always keeping her at a distance, always keeping the job first and his own child second. You too, Pandora, he'd say, voice as rigid as his posture, always calling her by her name, never sweetie or my little girl or even Dory. You'll handle whatever comes because you're a Scott, and we were born to be strong enough to do what needs to be done.
And if it was a particularly bad day, his eyes would go blank as they watched her, just for a second, hardly enough to reveal what he'd been thinking. But Pandora could read him. She'd always been able to, even when she didn’t want to. And in those rare moments, she could tell that he was looking at her and seeing her mother—not a Scott, not strong, but a weak woman who'd killed herself when Pandora had only been a toddler. She understood that he was watching her with doubts, remembering she was only half Scott, and the other half still had the potential to be oh so very disappointing.
I guess we both know which half I turned out to be, she thought, pushing the image of her father from her mind, trying to shove the pain away, trying to bring back the icy calm of the undead. But her heart still hurt, too much for even an empty vampire to ignore.
"For what it’s worth," Pandora said, opening her eyes and staring into the dark road ahead, "I tried."
Frost (Midnight Ice Book One) Page 14