Authors: Charlotte Stein
RawHeat (9 page)
As though…what? As though she was going to go up and knock
on the door? Ask them to let her in with her werewolf boyfriend?
She let her hand drop from his.
“What? What’s wrong?” he asked, but she knew why. He didn’t
get it. He just didn’t get it.
“I’m not going to a fortress, Conn.”
She could see his breath coming out into the air—so
beautiful. In fact, all of him looked beautiful in this strange new light, with
the shadows painted across his face and the red showing dark and bleak around
his perfect mouth.
“We’ll make it easily. Every wolf in the area is—”
“No. No more humans. No more rules. You want to go there
and…then what? Never see each other again? Or maybe I can take up with a
scavenger crew and come out into the open every month, meet you on the edge of
the forest. Something like that?”
“Serena…”
He glanced away at nothing.
“Don’t you love me? Don’t you want to be with me?”
When he snapped his gaze back to her it was dull, suddenly.
And she could see even through the shadows that he’d set his jaw.
“After a certain amount of time I’d just let them capture
me, and then—”
Oh good Lord, he couldn’t be serious. She wouldn’t let
herself believe that he was serious.
“Are you insane? What if they didn’t actually capture you?
What if they killed you?”
“What if the wolves kill you? Huh? What if I keep you out
here with me and one day I wake up to find you gone?”
It was the first time she’d ever heard him raise his voice,
and it made her insides jump. But he looked so sick with it, so helpless in the
face of this sudden death trap of decisions…she couldn’t hold it against him.
“This is the best we can do,” he said, though she knew he
didn’t believe that. He seemed uncomfortable inside his new clothes for a
second, and when she finally responded he shook his head, tightly. As though he
knew exactly what she meant.
“You know it’s not.”
“No,” he said. “No.”
He sounded firm, but he was already losing the battle.
“You know that I’ll never go to a fortress, or another
underground. You’d be signing my death warrant anyway if you took me to one of
those places, because the human race is done. This is it. It’s over.”
He kept shaking his head, but now he just looked
irrationally stubborn. It should have been her clinging on, but somehow it was
him. He had hold with both hands, and he wasn’t letting go easy.
“And even if it wasn’t…I don’t want to be human anymore.”
He put his hands over his face. “Please don’t say that.
Don’t say that.”
“I can’t be human anymore. I’m not…
inside
. They mean
nothing to me and I mean nothing to them.”
When he dropped his hands, she understood why he’d covered
his face. The anguish there twisted something inside her.
“You’ve no idea what you’re asking. The pain alone is…”
He glanced off at some unimaginable point, but this time he
came back faster. She could see the idea taking root in him, like some terrible
poison he just couldn’t help wanting to drink.
“As bad as the pain you’ve just gone through? As bad as
nails in your shoulder and broken bones and chopped-off fingers?”
“It’s not the same.”
“No, it’s not. I
choose
this. Everybody screaming
back there—none of them get to choose. When they wanted to shove me in the
incinerator, I didn’t get any say in the matter. But I get to choose this. I
get to be with you, if I want to.”
She knew she had him then. She could see it in his
expression, as it slid from tight and tense to that faint disbelief she saw in
him all the time. It had happened when she’d first kissed him. It had happened
when she’d first said she loved him.
And it happened now, right here, amidst the trees. Warmth
seemed to flood through his every feature, so sweet and good she wanted to just
go to him, then—though she held back. He had to make the move, if this was
going to work.
He had to let her know that it was okay.
“You’d really do that to be with me?”
Close
, she thought. Almost close enough.
“I’d do anything to be with you. Even something as dumb as
letting myself be captured by humans, you massive idiot.”
When he smiled, it was like the sun breaking through a
cloud. Or so she’d heard.
“Anything?”
“Anything.”
“And you know I’d do the same for you?”
She thought of the nail, twisting in his flesh.
“I do.”
“I love you, Serena,” he said, but he put his hands in her
hair as he did so. And she could feel his mouth suddenly hot against her
temple, her cheek, working ever downward toward the place that took a bite
best.
“Don’t worry,” he said, as she stared up at the glorious,
light-streaked sky. “I’ll keep the scar small.”
Epilogue
She looked on everything with her wolf’s eyes now, the
memory of her human ones like a gray blot in the mist. Like nothing at all,
like a dream of things she once knew, now gone forever.
Her wolf’s eyes saw everything. A flicker of animal through
the darkness that wasn’t really darkness, the curve of her best one’s face as
he turned to her and said things in his good
good
voice.
I can smell the hunt
, he’d say, and then they’d run
and run in their almost animal bodies, leaping over things in a way she’d never
been able to leap as a human, watching as the forest blurred by in streamers of
green and black and beautiful.
The world was a forest now, and it was all theirs. All
theirs. Every day they ran to the edge of the rocks that overlooked the newly
growing trees, on the graves of something old. And the wind would blow in her
face and toss her ever-growing hair back, and the scent of her brothers and
sisters would roll up at her in a wave.
They foraged and hunted and played in the valley below, and
the moon came up full and bright, and everything was good. Everything was good
when she looked out over the end of the human world, and the beginning of
theirs.
Oh yes, this was the beginning of theirs.
About the Author
Charlotte Stein has been writing for over ten years, and
perving on hot dudes for even longer than that. However, it’s only recently
that she’s had the courage to pair the two together and pen some critically
acclaimed, steamy-hot erotic romances. She lives in Brit-land with her very own
hunk of manbeef, and their imaginary dog.
You can find her at
www.themightycharlottestein.blogspot.com
,
usually in the middle of rambling about nonsense, squee-ing over her totally
unexpected life as a writer, and generally lusting after seriously sexy men.
Charlotte welcomes comments from readers. You can find her
website and email address on her
author bio page
at
www.ellorascave.com
.
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