“So what does that mean? You love me but you need your mistress on the side?” Aura was angry but she was also emotional and irrational. She barely made it out of a Council prison alive, and now it felt like no one cared that she was alive anymore. They went to save her and then both Nick and Orlando turned away.
“Stop it!” He finally shouted at her, and a few lightning bolts actually shot from his fists to scorch the ground on either side of her. “I didn’t ask for this! All I want is our lives to be back the way they were. Back to that day.”
Aura just cried harder and pulled away from him slowly. “I want that too. I want you, Orlando. I made a choice that almost cost me my life and now cost me my best friend.”
“Then why are you walking away?”
“Because you will never look at me like that, you will never want me like that. I will never be able to satisfy you like she can. I’m not a fraction of the wolf that she is.” Aura glanced in Candra’s direction and felt even more defeated.
He took a step back at those accusations and just stared at her with his completely black eyes. “You are the wolf I fell in love with. Not her.”
“Tell me what to do, Orlando.” She begged with a whimper as though she had been physically wounded. “I love you.”
“I don’t know what to do. Or what to tell you to do. I just have to work this out. Get my head on straight.” He explained, but he was just as much at a loss. He knew he couldn’t continue on without Candra, not now. Not after the connection between them. But his emotions weren’t tied to Candra the way they were with Aura.
Aura looked down at the ground and then back up at him. “I’m not going to do this to you. It’s not fair.” Aura went up to him and she kissed his cheek gently, her tears wetting the side of his face. “I’m not going to make you fight yourself for me.” Everything changed in a flash of literal lightning after Orlando found Candra. It was nothing she could fight, despite what she felt.
He put a hand to the other side of her face as she kissed him, and held her there with him for a moment. His thoughts were still spinning with everything that had happened, his body humming with power the likes of which he had never known was possible. He knew himself well enough to know that he wasn’t thinking straight, like a wolf on the Fulness pushed to lunacy by the pull of the moon. He had just as much a chance of resisting Candra’s presence as he did of remaining human on the High Night. “I wish I could.”
Aura wrapped her arms around him and hugged him before she gave him a kiss with much more meaning and passion in it. It was a kiss goodbye, before they ever got started. One night of passion was the pinnacle of their relationship. They had no chance to explore anything more. “What am I going to do without you?”
Orlando wasn’t ready to give her up. Not by a long shot. So he held her tighter, and wouldn’t let go even after she started to pull away. “I’m sorry. I’ll never be able to say that enough. Even if I live five hundred years like the stories say I might.”
Her heart was breaking in ways that she didn’t know was really possible, and so she just held onto him until she had to pull away to save what was left of her sanity. As she did, she met his eyes. “I’m the one who’s sorry. If I hadn’t gone out, if I had gotten out, then I could have been with you. I could have, we could have…I’m sorry.” Aura felt the full weight and responsibility for everything falling apart, and she knew she had to pay the price.
He kissed her again and then finally let her go, though he was leaning on the fencepost leading into the compound as he did. “None of this is your fault.” He couldn’t look at her after the kiss, though. He turned around to walk back toward the trees, already feeling the irresistible pull towards Candra, no matter what his heart tried to say.
III
Several days went by in mourning, but after a week, all the recovered bodies received proper burials according to their element. They’d lost a few wounded fighters since the fallout, but nearly all of the injured seemed to be recovering. The compound was a tense and quiet place, every available set of hazel eyes looking to the perimeter for the reprisal they all knew would come.
After the mourning period came to an end, it was only a few days before the very gates that guarded their home were approached by a Skyborn. The woman approached with confidence, crystalline blue eyes shining in the afternoon sun, but all the guards who watched her wondered what kind of death wish she had. No one came to the gate at first to meet or acknowledge her, but she pushed for someone’s attention. “I am here on behalf of the Council!”
Still no one answered her for a few minutes, forcing her to repeat herself several times before Nick stepped out at the head of a dozen guards. He still looked ragged by most standards, but the chains and bands that wrapped his body glinted in the sunlight, made of steel and gold. When he spoke, his voice was almost friendly. “Do suicidal impulses run in your family or is it just you, messenger?”
“Just me.” The woman said without emotion or hesitation. “Will you hear my message?”‘
“Step inside.” Nick said as he
