Page 65 of Revelations

What did that mean?

Seconds away from giving herself completely and in every way possible to a dark guardian…

We are never-ending.

No! No! No!

Her body screamed as she shoved Kael away with all of her strength. “No!”

She struggled to her feet and turned to run but slipped in the mud. He grasped her arm to steady her before roughly twisting her around to face him.

She flinched, expecting to see fury. Instead, the rims of his eyes were reddened with unshed tears, his lips pressed tightly together.

Fighting an instinctive need to pull him to her and never let go, to somehow erase the hurt etched into his expression, she forced her arms to remain at her sides. Instead, all that she could utter was, “No.” The word stabbed her heart with a jagged blade.

Kael let go of her arm. His forehead creased in ragged lines, as he closed his eyes with an almost imperceptible nod.

Free, Greylyn ran like she had never run before. No direction in particular; just away.

Chapter 16 – Call of the Wild

When Greylyn finally came back to her senses more than an hour later, she realized that her car and her t-shirt were many miles behind her at the bar. She had been sprinting through the forest topless!

At least the only signs of life had been animal ones, nothing human. Bats flew overhead and a lone owl screeched, but otherwise, everything was quiet. Not even a single cricket chirped. There had been one tiny sparkling light at the base of an overgrown willow tree that had caught her eye a couple of miles back. Fairy? Pixie? Overwrought imagination?

Her chest constricted more tightlywith apprehension the closer she got back to the bar. It was pitch-black and her sense of direction, usually impeccable, was off-kilter. Craning to peer up through the dense tree canopy at the stars to reset her inner compass, all she saw were flickering lights. They were not stars, but something akin to lightning bugs swam through the leaves.

The blinking lights suddenly stopped, but in the “on” position. One by one, they appeared to line up side by side. Once assembled, they slowly moved in the direction from which she had come.

Expecting the lights to go dark again at any moment, Greylyn chose to follow. Perhaps they were elementals, there to guide her on the correct path. Too bad they hadn’t intervened earlier. It would have stoppedher from making such a fool of herself. Maybe she would still have her shirt.

Not once did the lights waver during the entire walk back to the bar. By this time, there were no cars in the parking lot. No sign of Kael. For that, she was grateful. Her horror at what she had almost done had only grown during her marathon run and bloomed stronger on the walk-of-shame back.

His words echoed with each step she took…We are never-ending.

What the hell? Never-ending?

Without bothering to locate her shirt, she marched over to the Camaro. She turned back just in time to witness the lights quickly dissemble and scatter in all directions.

“Thank you,” she called after them.

Her foot punched the gas pedal, and it did notease up until hours later, when she drove up in front of Thomas’s modest home on the far western side of South Carolina.

Being a professor at a small college in the South did not pay all that well, in comparison to the larger, more prestigious institutionswhere teachers drove Mercedes and BMWs and lived in posh gated communities. Thomas barely made ends meet, drove a sensible used sedan, and rented a small cabin in the woods with a tiny creek running at the back of the property.

She hoped that he would be away when she arrived, considering her scandalous condition, but no such luck. The creaky wooden door flung open as soon as she pulled the Camaro to a stop.

Thomas emerged with a huge smile on his face. “Hey, there, darling! About time you…” He stopped mid-sentence as she swung her legs out of the car. “What the hell?!”

Taking a step back, his hazel eyes stared. “Grey, normally I’d be overjoyed to see you half-naked at my front door, but…you look horrible!” His nose scrunched up. “And what’s that god-awful stench?”

“Thanks a lot! And here I thought you’d like an early birthday present.” She tried to sound lighthearted and teasing, but the scowl on his face was evidence he was not buying it.

Grabbing her overnight bag out of the trunk, she casually strolled past him into the house. “Got company?”

Thomas kept his place tidier than most single males she knew, but the litter of pizza boxes, half-empty soda bottles, and other miscellaneous trash indicated that he had lapsed on his housekeeping duties.

“No. No. Just been too busy booking our vacation travel plans. I’ll clean up before we head to the airport in the morning.”

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