“Fuck you.” Ben flew away, leaving René in the shadow of the oak tree. He wanted to punch René’s teeth in, but in his gut, he knew it wasn’t because the man was annoying or grating on his nerves.
It was because he was right.
31
Ben was waiting in her caravan when Tenzin returned from the dinner hour in the clearing.
“Hello.” She hadn’t been expecting him after she heard him fighting with René, had instead assumed he’d brood for some time.
“Hey.” Ben stretched his neck back and forth. “Ran into René on the way over here. Got sidetracked.”
“Yes, I heard. Does he still have all his limbs?”
“As far as I know.”
“I did not have sex with him.” She was distracted, disturbed by the scent of Vano on Ben and the faint scent of Ben’s blood. Had he been wounded in his argument with René? Why did he smell like Vano? “René did stay in my trailer. He was telling me what he knows about Fynn, and the sunrise caught him.”
“Yeah.” Ben wrinkled his nose. “I can smell him in here.”
“He was in the bed.” She sat across from him at the table. “I haven’t slept in a while.”
“Stating the obvious,” he muttered.
He didn’t know. Ben could have no idea that she had been sleeping nearly an hour each day the first six months after they’d exchanged blood. Then it had faded away like a beautiful, forgotten dream. “Why are you here?”
“You losing patience with me?” His shoulders were tense.
“Is that what you’re trying to provoke?” Tenzin wasn’t losing patience, but she was mentally tired. “You want to fight.”
She hadn’t been able to fully meditate with René in her trailer. She didn’t trust him that much, even if he was young and seemingly dead to the world. She knew she could rouse him if she needed him to be useful, which was the only reason she’d allowed him there in the first place.
Meanwhile, her emotional parries with Ben had been trying. He frustrated her because he had no idea what he wanted. Normally that wouldn’t bother her, but for the first time in centuries—a thousand years, perhaps—she didn’t know what she wanted either.
There was no balance between them anymore. Neither one could anchor the other, and she had come to depend on that anchor.
She was a creature of the moment, trying to imagine a future that depended on another person’s whims. Ben could embrace her, offer his love again, and agree to pursue this strange new adventure with her. Tenzin was ready for that.
Ben could also cling to his anger like he appeared to be doing in this moment, resent her, and cut her out of his life for the next hundred years. She had every confidence he’d come back to her eventually, but Tenzin had truly hoped it wouldn’t take that long. Life without him was far more tedious than she wanted.
Ben was angry about something, but he wasn’t saying what it was.
“Tell me.” She picked up a stack of notes she’d written during the day while René slept.
“What?”
She set the notes down again. “Tell me why you’re angry this time.”
“This time?”
“Yes. You’re always angry, but this time it is about something specific.” Was it Vano? His foolish obsession with René?
“Did you take the goblet?” he asked quietly.
“No.” Though she wanted to. She really, really wanted to.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Is that supposed to surprise me?” She picked up her notes again. “You often do not believe me. You said you got a rubbing off the citrine goblet, but you never showed it to me. Is it in your trailer?”
“What do you mean, I’m always angry?” He stared at her intently.
“There is no hidden meaning, Benjamin. You have been angry since the moment I met you, and that anger has never waned.”
He blinked. “That’s not true.”
“You hide it well, but it’s always there.” She paged through her notes, avoiding his eyes. He was a predator now—a part of him had always been a predator—and she didn’t feel the need to provoke him.
“You’re just making shit up now.”
Tenzin sighed. “You can lie to yourself, but I am trying to be more honest with you, so don’t insist I lie to you too.”
His hand slammed down on the table and his anger spiked, filling the air around them.
Tenzin carefully set down her notes and raised her eyes. “Do not threaten me.”
His amnis shimmered like heat off a desert plateau. “If I’m angry, it’s because you took the most important choice in my life away from me.”
“No.” She shook her head. “That is not why.”
“Fuck you!” He stood and walked away from the table, but there was little room to move, even in a larger-than-average travel caravan.
Cursing was unusual for Ben. At least when he was arguing with her. He was balancing on a very thin edge.
“Benjamin, immortality does not change who we are; it only reveals it.” She drew a careful breath. “You were angry when you were young. You were angry as a child. You were angry as a man. Now you are angry as a vampire. Do not blame this on me.”
Violent energy rolled off him in waves. “I do blame you.”
“I know you do.”
“So why the fuck did you do it, Tenzin?” His rage exploded, the anger mixed with sorrow as his eyes turned glassy and red. “You took away the one person I needed to get through this.”
His pain made her physically hurt. It brought her back to the night she’d flown over the ocean with his dying mortal body in her arms. The memory of rage and desperation threatened to reach up and choke her, but she forced it back.
It is not about you; it is about him.
“I’m here,” she said. “I never went anywhere.”
“But you ruined everything.” He gripped his hair in both his hands. “Because even if I’m okay with this now, I can’t trust you again. And
