Chapter 9 - Soren
When Aurela comes to again, I’m tending to the cut on her arm. It’s seeping with the sticky black stuff from that thing. I have no idea what it was—some sort of cryptid—but I know better than to let that residue linger. It could make her sick or cause her arm to fall off without intervention.
“Hey,” I say softly, taping off the bandage and moving into the kitchen to get her something to eat. She’s pale, breathing hard, and I can’t stop thinking about the way she killed that thing.
Aurela is stronger than I thought.
I return with beef jerky from the stores and a little cup of trail mix. There are preserves in the pantry, but I’ll need to go hunting if I want meat to cook with the tomatoes and other vegetables.
“Thank you,” she says weakly.
That surprises me, considering the way she talked to me just before she passed out.
I would never try to hurt the people in this town. And fuck you for even thinking that of me, Soren Riggs.
Still, the sound of my name coming from her lips makes a shiver run the length of my spine, sending shockwaves through the rest of my body. But this time, there’s a tinge of shame attached to it.
“I believe you, Aurela,” I murmur, watching her as she takes a bite of the beef jerky and immediately follows it with water, coughing at the salt. It’s the meat my grandpa cured, and if I know him, it’s definitely saltier than necessary.
“Sorry,” I say. “It’s probably pretty strong—”
“It’s good,” she cuts me off. “Thank you.”
“I believe you that you didn’t start the fire,” I start again, staring down at the quilt on the bed. “But I didn’t know what to think when I found you out there with her. Didn’t you see the missive Xeran sent out to the pack?”
She shakes her head, and I suck in a shuddering breath. The thing is practically ingrained in my head at this point.
“He said, to make it clear that if anyone is harboring Tara, they will be executed. If they make contact with her and don’t immediately tell us, they will be executed. If he finds out a single member of this pack is connected to her, or these fires, in any way, he’s not going to show mercy.”
Aurela’s pale face pales a little further, and I can’t believe it took me this long—and two escape attempts on her part—to tell her why I brought her up here.
“Nothing was on purpose,” she says, her voice small. “Not back then, and not now.”
I sit up, blinking at her. “What do you mean, back then?”
With clear suffering written all over her face, Aurela lifts her quivering chin and meets my eyes. “I was part of the group involved with the fire all those years ago, Xeran. Actually…Tara and I were best friends.”
The breath I suck in is so sharp that it makes me cough. I’d always suspected that, somewhere deep down, but hearing it from her now is wholly different. How did I not know this? How did Xeran not know this?
“My parents put a lot of money and effort into covering up my involvement with it,” Aurela says, and unlike last time, when she was threatening me with her family, there’s a tinge of shame in her voice.
“I let the others take the fall for it—let Valerie run off, let Maeve and Phina have to go before Holden Sorel. I should have said something, should have been honest, but I didn’t understand what happened. And I was so, so scared.”
My mind is spinning, making it hard for me to process any of this. Aurela was best friends with Tara, whom I never even saw around school. She was involved with the fires back then.
“Does Lachlan know?” I ask.
Aurela shrugs. “Valerie obviously knows—she was there. So Lach probably knows by now. I just don’t think he would say anything. It’s not like he would want to ruin my reputation.”
“I can’t believe he didn’t tell Xeran.”
“Maybe he did,” Aurela says, then, to my surprise, she lets out a little laugh. “Or maybe he didn’t. We can’t all be such strict rule followers, Soren.”
“Ha,” I manage, and for a second, it almost feels like it used to between us. Friends, maybe. Something more. Those moments in high school when I felt closer to Aurela than I had with anyone, ever.
“For years,” she says, “there’s been…a pull.”
I raise an eyebrow at her, thinking she’s going to talk about the pull between the two of us, the obvious link from me to her. The thing that has kept me from thinking about any other woman since the night I told her we couldn’t be together. That I didn’t want her.
Since the night she confessed her feelings, and I told her I didn’t feel the same.
“It’s like…” Aurela lets out a breath, her gaze going a little fuzzy, staring out somewhere in the distance.
“Something was out in the forest. Begging me to come to it. And I think…I think it might have been Tara, after all this time. Maybe the other night, she was finally strong enough to summon me. Or maybe I’m getting weaker, I don’t know.
But I woke up with her, the fire already burning, and I have no idea how I got there. ”
It’s not much, but it will have to be enough. We’ve been gone for too long, and she’s right—at this point, her family is looking for her. Xeran is looking for me.
“We’ll sleep here tonight,” I say, eyes dropping to the wound on her arm. “And in the morning, we’ll go back down to town. You’ll have to talk to Xeran, tell him what you know. I’ll be by your side and do everything I can to make sure he doesn’t follow through on what he said he would do.”
Aurela swallows, shifting in the bed, then nods, sighing and running her hands over her hair. “I should have come clean about everything a long time ago.”
I don’t have anything to say to that. Instead, I go to the closet and gather a bedroll, spreading it out on the floor and making myself comfortable.
Tomorrow is going to be hard. We both need all the sleep we can get.
“Good night,” Aurela whispers from her spot on the bed, and it takes everything in me not to get to my knees and climb up onto that mattress with her.
But I don’t, and I won’t. She is engaged to another man.
“Good night, Aur,” I reply.
***
It’s not the crack of thunder that wakes me up, but the little scream and whimper that follows.
I sit up immediately, looking over at Aurela, realizing she’s sitting up in the bed, the blanket pulled up around her chest, balled into her fists.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, my voice coming out rough, unformed, still riddled with sleep.
“N-nothing,” she stammers, blinking and looking over at me, her eyes shining like little moons in the light from the storm outside. “Nothing, sorry,” she whispers, seeming to gain some control of herself. “It’s just—”
There’s another deafening boom of thunder, followed by lightning flashing through the window like a crowd of photographers outside, and Aurela’s entire body jerks like she’s been electrocuted.
“Aurela,” I whisper, getting to my knees to look at her over the side of the bed. Her entire body is shaking. “Are you—are you afraid of storms?”
“No,” she insists, but I can see in her eyes that she’s terrified right now.
Even though I know I shouldn’t, I reach out, putting my hand on her knee, trying to offer her a comforting touch. It’s over the blanket, our skin not actually touching, but I still feel the jolt. I feel some of her fear passing over to me, and I take it, dissolving it the best I can.
I grew up on this mountain, hunting this far up in the woods with my grandfather. It storms all the time up here, and I learned a long time ago to accept the boom of the thunder like the gentle rumble of a bus, lulling me to sleep.
“Hey,” I say, squeezing her knee and watching her eyes snap to mine. “It’s going to be okay.”
Then she does something I’m not expecting—she reaches out to me with her free hand, pulling on my arm and tugging me into bed with her.
Aurela is a skilled magic user. Maybe she could even take me on in a fight. But she’s not physically strong enough to pull me into this bed with her. I do that myself, hefting myself onto the little cot, wrapping my body around her.
Maybe it’s the fact that I’m still exhausted from waking up in the middle of the night, from everything that’s happened, the fight with that cryptid. Maybe I’m not thinking clearly, more preoccupied with how I’m going to handle Xeran and how he feels about all this.
Or maybe I’m just looking for any excuse to make it okay that I’m tucking her into my body right now, breathing in her scent, burying my nose in her hair. Having Aurela this close feels like committing a crime.
She is engaged. And I know what will happen if her parents find out we’re together.
But it’s like I can’t stop myself, like my limbs are moving of their own volition, maneuvering me against the wall, tucking her in closer to me. I reach up and release the cuff around her wrist, so she doesn’t feel any more trapped or scared than she has to be.
The next time the thunder claps and she jumps, I’m there to absorb the movement. She snuggles back into me, releasing a breath, and even though I’m the most comfortable I’ve been in a long time, I force myself to stay awake.
Because if I fall asleep, my hands might start to roam. Might start mapping her body, new and different now. Might start staking a claim on the woman I have always believed to be mine, even if I know it’s never going to happen.