so hard to explain to the little girl why he wasn’t coming back. “Yeah, well, that was a long time ago,” she said with an easy grace, obviously trying to put them at ease. “Not that I’ve ever managed to outgrow the scrawny thing. I may be taller, but I still look like a toothpick.”
“Naw. You’ve grown into a beautiful young woman. I bet you have all the boys chasing after you.”
“Hardly.” She laughed. “But it’s sweet of you to say so.”
“Is everything okay?” Jillian asked, irritated with herself for the tiny flair of jealousy she felt at their easy camaraderie. “You know I don’t like you leaving Shadow Peak on Challenge Nights. It isn’t safe.”
Sayre nodded. “Yeah, I know. But I had to make sure you were okay.”
“I’m fine. How did you find me?”
Sayre’s cheeks flushed, and she ducked her chin. “It wasn’t hard, Jilly. You were broadcasting pretty loudly.”
Jeremy arched a questioning brow in Jillian’s direction. “Sayre’s still growing into her powers,” she explained quietly, “but they’re already very strong.”
“Obviously,” he murmured, staring, and Jillian knew he was wondering just how strong her own powers had grown in the past decade.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Sayre said cautiously, flicking a nervous glance toward Jeremy, “but I wanted to let you know that Eric was waiting at your house. He heard about what happened at the clearing and wanted to come looking for you. It wasn’t easy, but I, um, convinced him to head home and let me check on things. I told him you’d call him later.”
“Eric who?” Jeremy questioned, at the same time Jillian whispered, “Hell.”
“Eric who?” he repeated, the words sharper this time.
“Um, Eric Drake,” Sayre said too brightly, wincing when she caught sight of Jillian’s glare.
Jeremy’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Why would Drake be waiting at your house for you?”
Jillian opened her mouth, then snapped it shut. “Not to sound rude, but that really isn’t any of your business.”
“Wrong answer,” he said silkily. “I’m making it my business.”
“I’m not doing this in front of Sayre,” she warned him in a quiet voice.
“All I want is an answer to my question.” Jillian could hear the silent for now tacked onto the end of his statement.
“We’re…friends.”
“You and Drake?” he rasped, his tone full of disbelief and the hard, biting edge of anger. “Since when?”
“A few months now,” she explained awkwardly, alarmed at the way he stumbled back a step, his expression little more than a hard mask, giving nothing away. But his eyes were like a window into his soul, and she knew the idea of her with Eric caused him pain. For years, she’d thought she’d take satisfaction in seeing him hurt, but she’d been wrong. Instead, his pain cut at her like a knife, jabbing and sharp, while shame pooled thickly in her belly.
“Why?” He didn’t need to say more. She knew exactly what he meant.
Her hands fluttered nervously at her sides, and she wished she was wearing jeans so that she could hide them in her pockets. “We started working together on a few of the new reform committees for education and housing. We ended up spending so much time together that we’ve become…close—”
“If you two are so close,” he interrupted, taking a step forward, hands planted on his hips, “why wasn’t he there tonight?” His lip curled in cruel sneer, but she could see the burn of a darker emotion in the deep, smoky green of his eyes. Jealousy burned harder than anger or fear or arrogance, blurring the edges so that only the source flared through, sizzling and sharp.
Jillian lifted her chin. “I asked him not to come. And he respects my wishes.”
“I’ll bet he does,” he snorted, the rude sound making her teeth grind.
She shot a meaningful look at her little sister. “Maybe it would be better if we finished this argument some other time, Jeremy.”
“Yeah.” He grunted under his breath and started to move away, then paused, his expression intent as he stepped closer and leaned down to whisper in her ear. Then he pulled away, gave Sayre a friendly nod of goodbye, and headed back into the forest.
Sayre walked quietly by Jillian’s side as they made their way back to Shadow Peak, until the silence finally became unbearable. “You want to say something?” Jillian huffed, too on edge to be reasonable. “If so, please just spit it out and get it over with.”
Her sister’s slender shoulders lifted in a shrug. “Not really.”
“Come on,” Jillian groaned. “I can feel it, Sayre. After the night I’ve had, I don’t have the energy to drag it out of you.”
“I just… You’re fighting it, aren’t you?” Sayre turned her head, staring at her with solemn eyes that saw too much for a seventeen-year-old. “You love him, Jilly, but you don’t want to. I think you want to give him another chance, but you’re too afraid.”
“It doesn’t matter what I want. There’s too much history between me and Jeremy. A future between us would be impossible, so it’s best if we just stay away from each other.” Though avoiding him was going to be hard to do, considering it looked as if they were going to be working together, but she kept that thought to herself.
“But he’s your mate,” Sayre murmured, lifting one delicate hand to drag softly through the changing leaves on the low-hanging branches, sending them tumbling from their perches. They fell a short distance, before being swept up in the chilly wind and carried away…and Jillian wished her troubles could be dealt with so easily. Just brushed off and swept away, floating out of existence like a cloud. “That means you’re meant to be together,” Sayre added. “Nothing good can come of fighting it.”
“And one of the things you’ll learn as you get older is that things don’t always turn out the way they’re meant to.”
Sayre made a soft sound of frustration under her breath. “Maybe they would, if we were brave enough to fight for what we wanted.”
Despite the headache pounding through her skull, Jillian grinned. “You sound like an idealist, Sayre. I hope you never grow out of it.”
It took her a moment to realize that her sister was no longer keeping pace at her side. When she stopped and turned around, she found Sayre standing beneath an ethereal beam of moonlight, her slender frame vibrating with tension. Her usual easygoing smile had been replaced by a pinched look of temper that had Jillian blinking in surprise.
“Stop talking to me as if I’m a child, because I’m not one anymore. I know you don’t want to admit it, but I’m growing up, Jillian. I’m growing up and I have a brain that’s fully capable of functioning. I can form my own opinions and beliefs, and I can see more than others. I can see what’s really happening between you and Jeremy, even if you won’t admit it. And I know why. I—I know about mother.”
A soft breath jerked out of her lungs, and Jillian shook her head as if to clear it. “What?”
“Mother told me, when I turned sixteen. She wanted me to understand what had happened to her so that I would know to be careful.”
“What did she tell you?” Jillian asked, wondering what strange cosmic event had occurred in the universe tonight to throw her world into such chaos. She’d been on a steady, even keel for so long, allowing herself to feel so little—and now she felt battered by emotional waves, struggling to stay afloat in an endless, surging sea of commotion.
“All of it, Jillian. About the Lycan she fell in love