“You knew I would.” He said just as softly, his heart breaking just a little more at the momentary softness in her voice.
“Knowing anything doesn’t make me any less grateful for your sacrifice for me.” When her eyes finally flicked up from the ground, she saw Orlando and Candra standing together, holding each other. Her hazel eyes burned with tears. “And I’m sorry for hurting you the way that I did.” Too many people had died because of that choice. A choice that had led her out into the woods where she shouldn’t have been.
“You could have told me.” Nick said as the anger started to bubble back to the surface in his voice. “I would’ve hated it, and I would’ve tried to convince you out of it, but you still could’ve told me. You could’ve done me at least that much of a courtesy if you felt the way you said you did about us.” By the time he was finished speaking he was growling, and Aura knew him well enough to recognize the tone in his voice. It was a slow, abiding kind of anger. The same kind he had felt toward the Council all their lives, and the kind which now, on a much, much more personal level, he was directing at her.
“I was on my way to tell you.” Aura reasoned, still calm. He would only get more angry if she fed his anger with her own. “I didn’t plan for anything to happen. After that night, I wanted you. I just wanted to be with you. But I couldn’t deny what I felt for Orlando.” Even though every drop of that emotion didn’t matter anymore. “I was going to tell you, talk to you.”
“Well, a lot of things were going to happen that aren’t going to happen anymore, it seems.” He looked back at the field of bodies where their people were picking through to find their fallen comrades and separate them from the mass of Council fighters. “We’re certainly not going to be a part of the Council. Not after all this.” He looked back at her with a sad expression on his face. “And maybe you should’ve stayed in England after all.”
Aura nodded and stood up as she crossed her arms and her vision blurred with fresh tears. There were no seats on the Council for them, and no reason for her to stay with the pack. Especially not after everything she’d caused. “I suppose I should have.”
“This isn’t over.” Nick said as he looked around one more time and then glanced back at Aura before looking away, unable to bring himself to watch her cry the tears he’d caused. “They’ll keep coming. Now that this has started, they won’t leave us alone.” He looked back at her with another sigh. “And I need people around me that I have a reason to trust.” It wasn’t clear if he included Aura as someone he could trust, or someone he didn’t. Someone called his name at a distance and he nodded to them before looking back at her. “We’ll talk when we get back to Spain.” Nick said without waiting for further conversation, and headed off to see to his duties.
Aura watched as he walked away, more tears fell from the tone that he had left ringing in her ears. He wanted people he could trust, and she knew he didn’t count her as one of them. She deserved his bitterness and anger, but that didn’t mean it hurt any less.
II
Orlando and Candra filed into the back of one of the vans, keeping to the back seats where the windows were most heavily tinted. When the other wolves saw them get into the van in question, everyone left it alone, leaving the two of them on the very back seat with two more rows between them and the driver, one other Guard member in the passenger seat.
Orlando wanted to talk to Aura, to explain what was happening, but she was nowhere to be found. He couldn’t leave Candra alone in the middle of all the rest of the wolves who were all just as terrified of her as she was of them, but it didn’t stop him from looking around fruitlessly for where she had gone as the convoy got under way.
When Candra sat next to Orlando, she wouldn’t even look at him since her eyes were glued to the window. For a long time she didn’t talk, but as the sky got lighter and lighter, her body shook with visible fear of the sunrise. “You have to make them stop and let me out.” Candra said in a whisper so as not to alarm anyone. “I have to shift. I can’t stay like this.” Candra was almost begging to be let out so that she could get away from the brightening sky.
He held her a little closer and tried to take more power from her, though the temptation to use it only grew the more he took from her. Even so, he knew she knew what she was talking about, and he shouted up to the driver. “Pull over. Just for a minute.”
Candra got out of the van quickly as it coasted to a stop, then looked up at the sky as though it was going to fall down on her. She whimpered a little, but she was more concerned about shifting, and so she pulled off her shirt quickly to do so. When she heard Orlando come out of the van as well, she covered herself up and the sky was momentarily forgotten to the superior anxiety of Orlando being near when she was undressing. “What are you doing?”
“You said you had to shift.” He took off his own shirt, and threw it back through the open door of the van. “I didn’t figure you wanted to be alone for the whole ride home with nobody to talk to.” He had
