Page 7 of Kidnapped Rejected Mate
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When I finally make it to the bar, Kalen is the only one left sitting at our booth in the corner. He’s nursing a beer, and when he looks up at me, it’s with a knowing expression.
“Shit, sorry,” I mutter, sliding into the booth. “Everyone else take off already?”
“Yeah,” Kalen says. “Holden is still fussy with wolves’ tooth. Lachlan went home to say goodnight to Levi, and Felix said Maeve has been down bad with morning sickness, so he doesn’t want to leave her alone for too long.”
I’d say it’s disappointing to see the group fall apart like this, everyone splintering off into their own lives, but it’s not like we all really hung out a lot before Xeran came back to town, anyway. After that first summer after high school, and after Xeran’s uncle dissolved the firefighting squad, we didn’t really have a reason to get together. And things were bad enough that it felt better just to keep to ourselves.
“Too bad,” I mutter, and I don’t even have to signal the bartender for a beer before it appears in front of me, her winking in my direction.
“Dude,” Kalen says when she walks away, her hips swinging side to side. “Why don’t you do something about that?”
I take a drink of my beer, raising an eyebrow at him over the side of the glass. “Something about what?”
“She’s clearly got a thing for you,” Kalen says, nodding toward the bartender, who’s bending over a table, her ass hugged nicely by a pair of black leggings, her hair cascading over her shoulder. “Why don’t you ask her out?”
I can’t tell him the truth. The same reason I’m not promising my Gramps that I’ll find a mate here soon. Because Iknow there’s no other woman on this planet who’s going to work for me, and it doesn’t feel fair to even try.
“Not tonight,” I say instead, taking a long drink of my beer. “I need my sleep.”
“Sure,” Kalen laughs, bumping his glass against mine. “Here’s to sleeping through the night, huh? No fire call would be nice for once.”
“Cheers,” I say, and even as we half-heartedly clink our beers together, I know, hoping for a night without a fire call is simply wishful thinking.
Chapter 4 - Aurela
When I wake up, I’m choking. I blink against the stinging in my eyes.
Directly above me, through the hazy air, I can just barely make out the twinkling of the stars. But the sky is quickly being concealed by the thick, blanketing smoke that hovers in the atmosphere.
“Thisis what I’ve been waiting for.”
It’s a voice I recognize, floating around me, twinkling and amused. When I close my eyes, I see her. Tara. My best friend from high school. The girl who made me feel like I could be something other than the image I projected.
My back throbs with pain, and when I spread my hands out on the grass to push myself to sitting, the soil is hot to the touch. This time, when I open my eyes again, I’m able to sit up, but everything in my body hurts.
I’m out in the middle of the forest—I realize it when I look around and see tree trunks, then higher to find the leaves themselves ablaze, alive with the hypnotic dancing of blue flames.
Daemon fire. Hotter than a house fire or regular wildfires. The blaze that consumed nearly half the town back in high school, and continues to return, year after year, swallowing the forest up and leaving no time or space for something new to grow in its place.
At first, I think that I’m just imagining Tara, like I have been for so many years. But when I swing my gaze around, I see her.
I thought she was dead.
But she stands next to one of the trees, leaning against it casually, wearing a pair of tight dark-wash jeans and a cropped leather jacket, showing off her lean stomach. Her hair is just like I remember it—choppy and blue. The coolest thing I’d ever seen when I was a teenager.
Back then, I would have given anything to try a fun color on my hair. But my mom thought that was tacky.
“Why don’t you want to try some highlights or lowlights?” Mom had said. “What about layers? There are a million things you can do to make your hair look more exciting before you go for something tacky like that.”
I’d walk up and down the aisles at the store, running the sample hair between my fingers, wondering what it might be like to make my hair green or orange. If a drastic move like a hair change would keep me from fading into the background.
In high school, I was so skinny that sometimes I felt I could back up against the wall and nobody would even know I was there. Thin as paper.
“Hey, Aury,” Tara says now, swinging her leg out and walking toward me.
The entire scene makes my brain buzz, flashing between whatever is happening now—some sort of bad dream?—and what happened back then. The person I was back then, when I knew Tara.
