She crept quickly in the smoke form all way to his camp and reformed in the center of camp. Quinn was sitting by the lean-to and brushing Scout. Shade growled at her sudden appearance. Quinn’s ice-blue eyes narrowed on her, and she felt suddenly very afraid.
“You know not to be here unless invited,” he snarled.
“Don’t kill me,” she said in a low voice, adrenaline pumping through her. She’d encroached on his territory. She was more worried about the wolf inside Quinn being upset than the man he appeared to be. Shade and Scout were brutal fighters, she had witnessed that. She could get away if he lashed out, but it would forever damage any budding friendship they might have had. “Hear me out.”
“Hurry,” he snapped. Both wolves growled. While they liked her, Sawyer knew they would always be loyal to Quinn, first and foremost.
“I think I can help you,” she whispered, holding out the books, “and I want to.”
The roll of magic through the earth beneath her feet made the blood rush from her head. She watched the earth crack open in faults around him, accidentally letting one of his log seats fall into the earth. Even the vegetation around her seemed to become a dangerous prospect, growing at a rate that she thought was only capable of being achieved by a Legend, the Druids.
“Quinn,” she hissed. “Stop. This.”
His answering, defensive snarl was deafening. She saw it in his eyes, the shame she hadn’t expected but should have. He knew he wasn’t normal. He knew he was too powerful, too wild for the rest of the world.
She’d walked into his sanctuary and brought the world with her, making it unavoidable.
“It doesn’t have to be like this,” she whispered, stepping closer. “Let me help.”
“No,” he growled. “Leave.”
She had two options. Leave and maybe never have the courage to even speak to him, or stay and risk a very painful death. At least Quinn was wild enough to make it quick.
“I’ll stay right here,” Sawyer said firmly. “Until you hear me out. Then you can decide. But I will not be scared away by a temper tantrum.”
The earth rolled again, nearly taking her off her feet. She stumbled but stayed standing and glared at him. He’d done that one on purpose. She moved as the ground underneath her cracked open. He could have pulled a trick like Talyn would have, pulling her into the earth, but he wanted her to leave, not be stuck there.
It was a tense minute or so. Quinn finally walked closer, a stalking figure. He stopped right in front of her, and she looked up to meet his eyes.
“Say it, then leave,” he growled.
“What does Vincent make you read?” She asked, wanting to confirm her theory.
“Literature. Plays. That sort of nonsense,” he growled, a light of confusion entering his eyes. “Stuff required for the tests. I don’t understand most of it.”
“What if I taught you to read with something you’re genuinely interested in?” She showed him the books again and sighed. She threw the two physics books into one of the cracks he’d made. The other four were all about plants and animals. North American vegetation, birds of the Northern Hemisphere, extinct animals from the Ice Ages, domestication. These were things Quinn would hopefully be interested in. “You might know all of this already, which will help you. You’ll just learn how to read it off the page. And it’s more advanced than what Jasper is teaching you, which probably held you back. I think this may help you. Give you incentive to learn more and find reading less arduous and stressful.”
He maintained his hard glare and looked down at the books.
Silence dragged on. And on. And on.
“I’ll read them myself,” he growled, taking the books from her. She let him. If he wanted to try on his own, that was good. When he hit something that he didn’t understand or had a hard time with the text, she hoped he would come to her. It was a start. It was something she could do for them.
“I’ll go,” she whispered.
“Please,” he snarled.
Before she turned away, she noted how close he held the books to his body. Shade and Scout hadn’t moved the entire time, but now both were trotting over, much calmer than before.
The books would be too hard for him; she’d done that on purpose. He would need help, and while that seemed cruel of her to do, she needed him interested in the text enough to want to learn. That want had to outweigh the difficulties of reading.
She walked slowly back to the house. The moment she was out of the woods, she took a deep breath, and her body began to shake.
“Holy shit,” she groaned, doubling over and losing her lunch.
She’d faced death many times in her life. Most of those times, she was a witness or the deliverer of it.
Only once before had she been the near-victim. Quinn, in the woods, living in the same house as her, scared her more than Axel and the Ghosts ever could.
Power like that. It was unthinkable in a normal Magi. Quinn might behave strangely, thinking strangely, but at the end of the day, he was a normal Magi. He wasn’t a Legend whose ranks included Druids, Vampyrs, Dopplers, and so much more.
It made her wonder just how powerful Druids, like his mother, really were. Luckily, they were normally peaceful.
Her legs shook as she started walking again. Elijah stood on the back porch, pale as a dead man, his arms crossed. And for the first time since she’d met him, absolutely furious.
“Are you mad?” He growled as she got closer.
“No, but you are.” Two different definitions of mad, she knew, but she felt it was worth pointing out. “He took the books.”
“Excuse me?” Elijah roared, stomping to her in the grass. “You do not get to go out there and fuck with him, Sawyer!” Elijah pointed to the woods. “I don’t care what you’re trying to do! I don’t care if Vincent or anyone else thinks it’s even remotely okay! You hurt Quinn and I’ll fucking do my best to end you if he doesn’t.” He ended in a dangerous snarl.
“He took the books,” Sawyer said louder, with a growl of her own. She didn’t really know what else to say to him. She didn’t know how to bring Elijah back down from an anger she had never witnessed.
“He could have killed you! And damn it, he would have felt guilty for it! Because you—"
“He took the books!” Sawyer finally roared, cutting Elijah off.
There was a moment of stunned silence. Was this her first argument with the cowboy? He was so easy to get along with that she could barely stay mad him for capturing her. She also hadn’t had the mental energy to be angry at the time. She was too busy guarding her secrets and trying to figure out how to get out of the entire situation.
She had found the one button to not push with him. She filed it away to think about later, along with a heaping pile of other shit she still needed to process when she was ready.
“What’s your game, Sawyer?” he asked quietly, as other footsteps could be heard. The back door swung open and closed. She didn’t look over to see who was there. When she was done here, she was going to get out as fast as possible.
“I can teach him to read,” she mumbled, swallowing. “I’ve taught children—"
“Quinn isn’t a child,” Elijah replied back, a little defensively.
“No,” Sawyer agreed, “he’s not. But that doesn’t mean the same techniques won’t work. None of you are teachers. I had an idea, and I was going to make it happen. I can do this because I have before.”
“You aren’t even educated. Leave it to us,” Elijah snapped, turning away from her and leaving. That comment hurt. It stung like a son of a bitch. She looked up to the porch and saw Vincent and Zander standing there.
She looked back toward the woods.
This meant something to her, but it was so much more than giving something back to them. Something in her resonated with Quinn now like it did with kids she’d helped. She ended up not needing the pictures, so she took them out and looked at them just for herself. They once had needed her. She ran a finger over H
enry’s face and held back the tears.
“Sawyer,” Zander called out. There was a sharp bite to his words. They didn’t trust her to do something nice for Quinn. They had told her she couldn’t embarrass him but nothing else. That hurt more than she’d expected it to. She couldn’t blame them. “Come inside.”
It also pissed her off.
She turned slowly to the three of them on the porch and glared. She walked to the porch holding the pictures in her hands.
When she got to them, she shoved them into Elijah’s chest.
“Tell them that I’m not good enough to help,” she snarled viciously. He took the pictures from her, and she dove between Zander and Vincent to get inside before either could stop her.
She beelined for the gym. She needed to hit something. She needed to hit something hard.
She stumbled at the bottom of the stairs, the angry tears filling her eyes.
She was an uneducated, killing machine. She couldn’t be trusted to help in any other way. She pulled off her top as she moved toward the punching bag. Someone else had been hitting it earlier; she could see where the recent blows had landed since it was an older bag.
She didn’t bother with gloves or hand wraps, bare knuckles slamming into it. At one point she screamed. She hit the bag hard enough that it popped a small hole, and sand fell to the floor. Frustrated and pissed off, Sawyer roared, still trying to hit it.
When she couldn’t hit the empty bag anymore, she sank to her knees in the sand and cried.
She was sick to her stomach with the thought that Elijah might be right. Maybe she wasn’t good enough.
It was dinner time when she got up and moved to clean up the mess she had made. None of them had come to bother her. Not a single one. For that, she was thankful.
She needed a broom or something. She needed a few trash bags. She would find those near the kitchen, where they were all probably sitting.
She schooled her face into cold, unfeeling disinterest. Vincent might use it more often, but she was also a master of putting it all away, every shred of emotion and thought. She’d done it for every assassination she’d ever accomplished. She climbed the stairs out of the basement. She could smell whatever someone was cooking but ignored her stomach. The day had been much too eventful for her, so she wasn’t going to eat with them. She probably wouldn’t eat breakfast with them the next day.
If she never saw them again at this point, it would have been too soon. Fuck them.
She knew where the cleaning supplies were kept—in a closet the old lady used. Sawyer brushed passed Jasper to get to it. He just watched her. She could have cloaked but one of them would have noticed, and that wasn’t trouble she wanted.
She continued to ignore him as she took what she needed back to the gym.
It took her over an hour to clean up the sand and the ruined bag. She swept up every piece of sand she could find after using the dustpan to shovel it all into trash bags. Sawyer didn’t leave a single shred of evidence that she’d broken the punching bag; only its absence would give it away.
When she went to lift the three bags of sand, she groaned. She once again had two options.
“Ask for help, or sublimate all of it with me and probably hit burnout,” she mumbled to herself. “I’m feeling a bit stubborn.” She ended in a soft growl.
She got her hands wrapped around all the bags’ ties. Then she sublimated, reeling in pain at the energy she expended for the task, but she had to hold it as she raced up the stairs and to the front porch.
She released the moment she could and collapsed to her knees. Using her powers all day, then physically wearing herself out, hadn’t been the best idea.
“Fuck.” She gasped, still reeling a little. She’d never burned through her Source that quickly. She still had what felt like a drop in the bucket to keep her from hitting burnout.
“Sawyer?” Jasper called out from inside. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” she snapped. Wasn’t that cliché? She winced, knowing her words and tone were totally at odds. Which meant he was just going to ask more questions.
“Are you?” Jasper sounded worried. “You didn’t eat. You came up but then went back down to the gym.”
“I broke the punching bag,” she growled.
“Why didn’t you ask for help?” He huffed, opening the front door to actually look at her. She glared at him.
“Because fuck all of you, that’s why,” she snarled.
“What?” Jasper frowned at her and seemed shocked.
“Ask your fucking buddies,” she hissed, standing up. “I’m going to shower and sleep. Goodnight.”
She moved around him, squeezed through the door, ignored Zander standing in the hall, and made it back to her room. She stopped at her desk and cursed quietly. Elijah probably still had her pictures. She would get them back tomorrow. He wasn’t stupid enough to ruin them.
He’d be a dead man if he did.
6
Elijah
“Quinn won’t come back in tonight,” Elijah growled out softly, leaning back in his office chair. “He’s going to sit out there and brood because of her.”
“She wanted to help.” Vincent sighed. “And you are getting overly-defensive over a friend who doesn’t need that from you anymore. You should apologize to her.”
Elijah knew that. He knew it the moment Sawyer shoved the pictures at him, the ones sitting on his desk now. He’d known it when she walked out of the woods alive. Quinn brought out something possessive and protective in Elijah. And whatever set Quinn off, set Elijah off.
Not because they sometimes had sex or slept in the same bed on occasion. No, Elijah just wanted to protect Quinn because he was Quinn. He was unique and completely untouched by so much of the harsher aspects of humanity. The cruelty of humanity, the rigid ideals of it. The things that had marked Elijah’s upbringing.
Elijah didn’t like that the job they did slowly spoiled that in Quinn. None of them did, but Quinn refused to stop, too. He had found a purpose in the modern world, and he wasn’t going to let them stop him from trying to fulfill it.
“Elijah?” Vincent called to him. Elijah shook his head.
“I should apologize to her,” he divulged. “I said some things I shouldn’t have.”
He should have never stabbed a knife into her education level. She was probably smarter than the entire team in some ways.
“Yes, you did,” Vincent whispered, looking back down to his book.
They sat in silence for a long time. Vincent read his book on… something, Elijah couldn’t read Italian, while Elijah just stared at four children in photos. All of them had to be younger than seven or eight. Henry was an obvious face. The kid might as well have been a clone of Vincent or Axel at that age.
“Zander, what the fuck was she talking about?” Jasper snapped.
“Elijah yelled at her for sticking her nose in Quinn’s business,” Zander hissed. “Do you blame him? She went out there and nearly got killed. She definitely pissed off and hurt Quinn.”
Elijah stood up and stomped over to the door. He swung it open and looked at the arguing duo in the hallway. Jasper turned a glare on him. The air swirled around them, kicking up dust from dark corners of the house.
Well, this was a shocker. He’d expected Zander to be furious earlier, and he hadn’t been. Instead, Jasper was.
“She’s trying to help,” Jasper snapped, jabbing a crutch in Elijah’s direction. Elijah had to stop it from hitting him in the balls. “She’s trying to do something good, you fucking prick. For all she’s ever been, she’s trying to do something genuinely nice for someone here, and you fucking chastised her for it.”
“Jasper,” Zander groaned, “are you really—”
“Shut the fuck up, Zander. You don’t get to stand here and say that you want her back in your bed while letting someone tear her down,” Jasper growled.
Elijah kept his mouth shut. Secrets were coming out now. Back in his bed? Why would Jasper impl
y that about Zander?
“And you, Cowboy,” Jasper turned back on him. “She’s alive, which means you need to chill the fuck out. Not only do you undermine her with that shit, you undermine Quinn’s progress. He needs to learn what an acceptable human response to something is, and you need to stop enabling him to lash out with his power. He could get innocent people killed, and we all know this, including him.”
Elijah winced again. Golden Boy wasn’t playing around this time.
“Vincent, are you going to back me up here?” Jasper snapped, looking around Elijah to their CO.
“I’ve been telling him to go apologize to her,” Vincent called back softly, keeping his semi-distracted air about him.
“Get that done,” Jasper hissed. “You all stand there and say I’m not giving her enough of a chance, then you pull this shit. Fucking hypocrites.” Jasper crutched away quickly, and like Sawyer earlier in the day, just phased straight through the door without a thought.
Elijah looked at Zander let out a deep breath.
“I thought you would be pissed off at me,” Elijah mumbled.
“I am, asshole,” Zander growled softly, turning to glare at him.
“You should have said something earlier.” Elijah groaned, heaving a sigh after it.
“Yeah, but I wanted Jasper to get mad.” Zander’s glare turned into a devilish smirk. “At all of us, in defense of her.”
Elijah frowned at him, unsure what he meant.
“He needed to recognize that she’s trying,” Zander whispered. “Not just hear stories of her trying, but actually see it. See that she’s not just an assassin or thief. See that her helping isn’t always violence and midnight runs to the hospital with broken people. And I needed him mad enough to say something about it.”
“You sneaky shit.” Elijah gasped. “What’s your game? Also… back in your bed? What was that about?”
“Ah.” Zander winced this time. His neck grew a bit red.
“Sawyer and Zander slept together once as teenagers,” Vincent called out from behind Elijah. Elijah’s eyes went wide. “Apparently, she lost her virginity to him.”
A Heart of Shame Page 7