She looked like she was ready to fight with him, but then her eyes went pained. “How do you do that? How do you love me so much even when you’re upset with me?”
He blinked.
“Like right now, you’re freaked out. You’re all worried about me and scared. But I can feel that you still have so much...” she shook her head in disbelief, “love for me. How do you do that?”
“That’s how love works, Scar. It’s unconditional and constant. You were the same way. In your past lives. Even when you hated me—even when I broke your heart,” his chest tightened for a moment, “I could still feel your love for me. Love is something that just…doesn’t go away. It never dies.”
She looked at him with pain and hurt and heartbreak in her eyes. “Promise?”
His heart cracked and the doubt in her voice . He gingerly touched her cheek.
“You could die—“
“I won’t.”
She let him run his fingers across her cheekbone and down to her lips. He cupped her face and looked into her eyes as his thumb ran along her lower lip. “I will love you forever,” he said, desperate to chase the sadness from her eyes. “Don’t ever question that.”
She looked lost and scared as she stared up at him and he felt hollow inside. What wasn’t she telling him?
“Touching again, I see.” Nate entered the room with a large, overflowing duffle bag. “Clearly, life is not a priority for either one of you.”
Tristan reluctantly pulled his hand away from Scarlet’s soft lips and stepped back.. “Did you get what we needed?”
Nate set the duffle bag on a table on the center of the room and started unpacking a plethora of bloody weapons, several bags of blood—presumably from his medical stash upstairs—and the map to the Fountain of Youth.
“Yep. I made a copy of the map. You know, just in case we do decide to negotiate with the mad witch from hell.”
“We’re not negotiating,” Scarlet snapped.
Nate raised his hands up defensively. “I know. I’m just being prepared. Like a boy scout. Or a coupon mom on Black Friday. So anyway, copy of the map? Check. I also grabbed the sturdiest weapons from the shack.” He looked at Scarlet. “Real creepy, by the way, how you stole Tristan’s blood in your last life and made yourself an arsenal in a haunted cellar.”
“It’s not haunted.”
“I don’t care. It’s still creepy.” Nate put the blood bags on the table. “Since you two are determined to use bows and arrows out there like Robin Hood’s band of thieves—“ he looked at Scarlet and smiled, “Thieves. How fitting—I’ll let you guys start coating arrows in Tristan’s blood,” he pointed to the bags, “and I’ll gather the rest of the camping equipment we’ll need and the bear spray.”
“Bear spray?”
“Yeah.” Nate nodded. “To ward off any angry bears. It’s a thing.”
Scarlet’s eyes grew huge. “Do you think there will be bears there?”
Nate shrugged. “I don’t know. But I love how you’re obviously more scared of bears than Ashmen and witches. It bodes well for you on this trip. Peace out, lovers. I’m off to find some long underwear. Try not to make any babies while I’m upstairs. You’d think I wouldn’t even have to say that, but seeing as you two were halfway to Babytown when I walked in here—“
“Just shut up and go pack,” Tristan said.
“Ooh, feisty.” Nate shook his head at Scarlet. “Tristan doesn’t like it when I talk about you guys having sex.”
“Neither do I. Geez.” Scarlet was blushing as she shooed Nate from the room.
Nate exited and Tristan and Scarlet spent the next half hour lacing arrows in blood and not making eye contact.
Nate had said “sex” and now the whole room felt like a sauna of forbidden tension. Just for that, Tristan was going to decapitate one of Nate’s Star Wars figurines. It was happening.
Scarlet cleared her throat for the third time since they’d been alone.
“What’s up?” Tristan dipped an arrowhead in the bowl of blood they had set up on the table between them.
She sighed “Can’t you just think about sex like a normal guy?”
He blinked. “Excuse me?”
“How are you not thinking about sex right now?”
“You don’t know what I’m thinking about.”
“Yeah, but I know what you’re feeling. And you’re feeling…happy. Where’s all the desire and want?”
He picked up another arrow. “Are you seriously mad at me right now because I’m not having lustful thoughts?”
“No. I’m just confused. I mean, I’m thinking about sex. But you’re over there coating arrows in blood and thinking about God knows what—“
“Star Wars figurines.”
“What?”
“That’s what I was thinking about.”
She blinked in confusion. “Star Wars figurines make you happy?”
He smiled and went back to the arrows on the table. “No. You make me happy. My happy feelings are because of you. My desire and want feelings—which I have plenty of—are also because of you, but I have those contained right now because I’m trying not to overwhelm you with emotions.”
“Oh.”
“Trust me,” he grabbed another arrow. “You don’t want me to think about sex when you can feel my emotions. It’s very intense. I could barely handle it with you and I had five hundred years of practice.”
She shot her eyes to him. “What are you trying to say? That I’m some kind of baby? I can handle it.”
He shook his head and smiled. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Try me.”
This was a dangerous game, but since only his life was at stake…
“Okay.” He shrugged and started thinking about sex. With Scarlet.
He watched as she stood frozen and the color drained from her face as everything he felt rolled into her. Then bright red color returned to her face and she looked like she might catch fire. He kept his eyes on her as his feelings stayed in the hottest parts of his being.
She looked at him with hungry eyes and moved her mouth to speak but no sound came out. He watched her breathing grow heavier. She dropped the arrows she held and stared at him.
He changed his pattern of thought and tried to calm his emotions so she wouldn’t do anything she regretted.
Once his thoughts were back on happy non-sexual things, he glanced at Scarlet, who was still frozen in place with red cheeks and parted lips.
“Scar?” He leaned to the side to look in her far away eyes. “You okay?”
She mouthed something and nodded, then tried again. “Yeah.” Her voice cracked. She was staring at the wall with big eyes. “I’m, uh…I’m good. I’m great.”
He went back to the arrows and smiled. “Told you.”
Scarlet blinked a few times and looked at Tristan. “We definitely need a chaperone.”
Heather frowned at her pink dress—now stained with blood from her busted nose—as she sat kitty-corner from Gabriel in the back of one of Raven’s evil kidnapping vans.
Of course the witch had a sinister black van with taped off windows and no back seats.
Of course.
Heather didn’t know where they were headed but the road they’d been traveling on for the past hour was super bumpy and whoever was driving the black van of doom—she couldn’t tell since she and Gabriel were partitioned off from the front seat like this was some kind of creepy limo—wasn’t making an effort to drive smoothly.
Gabriel was staring at her again.
He’d been glancing at her like a guilty puppy ever since Raven had clocked her in the face, and it was all Heather could do not to snap at him to quit looking at her like she was a broken doll.