Through the Fire (Daughter of Fire Book 1)

by Michelle Irwin

  “You awake?” I asked quietly.

  “Yeah,” he said in a voice thick with sleep and tinged with desire.

  I opened my eyes and glanced up at his face. I caught him staring at me with such a tender expression that my breath caught in my throat. His breathing sped as a slow smile spread across his lips. “I’m having such a hard time,” he admitted softly.

  My heart clenched at his words, which were in direct contrast to the love radiating from him. “With what?” I asked.

  He blew out a shaky breath. “With trusting that this is real. I’ve imagined it so many times that it’s hard to believe you’re actually here.”

  I twisted in his arms and pressed a kiss against his chest. “Believe it,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere without you.” Not again, I added in my head.

  “What was it like for you? You know . . . after.”

  I scoffed. “Harder than you could imagine.”

  I hadn’t meant the words with any malice, but he flinched beneath me in reaction to them, or possibly the regret they caused him.

  I pushed myself up off the bed. “Don’t do that,” I admonished.

  He frowned.

  “I told you how I feel about ‘what-ifs.’ We’re here now, together, that’s what matters.”

  I pressed my hand against his chest; his heart beat a steady rhythm against my palm. “This is what matters.”

  He looked away from me, his guilt obviously still working through his system. I wrapped myself around him again.

  “So when did you . . .” he cleared his throat. “You know.”

  Lifting my head a little, I got a better view of his discomfort, which I found endearing. “When did I what?”

  He dragged his hand through his hair. I figured it was his back-up nervous tick because his neck was pressed against the pillow. “When was your first time?”

  I dropped my head back to rest on his arm. I’d known the question was going to come up before long, and I only hoped Clay could understand the choices I’d made. “About a year after you left.”

  He shifted beneath me obviously, not happy with the topic even though he’d been the one to raise it. “Did you love him?”

  I shook my head. “He wasn’t anyone special, just some guy. It was a very dark time for both of us, and we kind of began to rely on each other. We were both lonely and, well, one night we were drinking away our sorrow when one thing led to another. I just wanted to feel loved again.”

  “What happened?”

  Wrapping my arms around Clay, I said, “I was stupid. I showed him . . . what I can do.”

  Clay frowned.

  “He called me a freak and threatened to call the police.”

  I held onto Clay in a way that anchored me to reality and reminded me that I wasn’t in that place any longer.

  “There was one other, one who didn’t care about my heat or the strange things I can do.”

  He rubbed my arm reassuringly. “Tell me about him?”

  “We probably could have had a chance at happiness, if I’d stayed,” I said quietly, knowing that as hard as it was for me to talk about that time in my life, it must have been equally as difficult for Clay to hear it. “His joy for life was infectious and with his large family, he might have been able to keep me safe. But one day I realized I couldn’t lie to myself anymore. When I was with him, I couldn’t get you out of my head. He saved my life, and I thanked him by walking away.” I looked up at Clay, hoping that he’d understand the things I needed to tell him about Aiden. “In some ways, he was probably perfect for me.”

  “Why?” Clay lifted his hand up and rested it underneath his head.

  I missed his touch instantly. “He . . . he wasn’t human either.”

  “He wasn’t human?” Clay rolled away from me and sat bolt upright. “What was he?”

  “Does it matter?” I asked. The shift in his emotions left me uneasy. We were talking about ancient history. Who, or more specifically what, Aiden was had no bearing on anything anymore.

  “It matters to me.”

  “Fae,” I said quietly.

  “You were mixed up with fairies?”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  “It is a bad thing,” he snapped.

  “It was a Seelie court,” I said. He had to know the difference.

  “As if that fucking matters,” Clay sneered.

  I couldn’t help but take his attack personally even though it was aimed at the fae. It was a judgement on my choices when it came to Aiden. “He was kind to me, his whole court was nice to me; they welcomed me and treated me like one of their own.”

  “Fae aren’t friendly, Evie,” he snapped.

  I flinched against the harsh, bitter edge to his words and pulled out from his slackened arms. Shifting away from him, I pulled the bed sheet over me and ran my fingers through my hair.

  “They aren’t nice. They tortured my sister for years. They did things to her that no child should ever have to experience, and they did it for what reason? Fun?” His voice was edging toward hysteria.

  “That wasn’t my experience,” I retorted. Regardless of my love for Clay, I had to defend Aiden and his family. After all, the fae had taken care of me when I didn’t have the wherewithal to take care of myself. Whatever Clay’s opinion of them, and despite how it had ended with Aiden, my memories of my time with the fae would always be fond ones. First they had saved my life, and then they’d saved my happiness—by helping me find Clay. “Aiden helped me when I wasn’t interested in helping myself. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be here with you now.”

  Even from my position perched on the edge of the bed, I could hear his teeth grinding together. I twisted around, willing him to put his prejudice down to the way he was raised and move on. I may have owed the fae everything, but I couldn’t let loyalty to them cost me Clay.

  “Look, it doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s in the past.”

  “You’re not the only one with a past,” he growled as he rolled away from me.

  “I know there were others for you too,” I said, as my tears threatened to steal my voice. It was evident in every move he’d made, every place he’d touched.

  “You don’t want to know how many times I tried to screw you out of my system.”

  A sob rose in my throat. I wanted him to stop tormenting me with his past as punishment for my choice, but I was struck motionless by a morbid sense of curiosity. I couldn’t turn to face him, or ask him to stop. Every detail was important regardless of how hard it was to hear. I closed my eyes as he continued to talk.

  “For the longest time, I wanted to do what was right for my family. Even though I couldn’t regret the fact that you were alive, I did feel guilty that I’d betrayed them.” With each word his tone turned softer, as if his speech was reminding himself of the reasons we were at the hotel together. “Then I felt guilty for leaving you like I had. I can’t lie; I struggled with it. I tried so hard to stop thinking about you, but I just couldn’t.”

  He crawled out from under the sheet and moved closer to me. As soon as he was close enough, he wrapped one arms around my waist. He planted a soft kiss against my shoulder, his hair brushing against my neck as he did. The instant I was in his hold, my anger and hurt dissipated. I relaxed against him in the darkness.

  “I worried whether or not you were safe, whether you’d been caught. Even whether you had enough to eat. Then I felt guilty for thinking those things. I tried to convince myself that I couldn’t love you—that it just wasn’t possible because we’d only known each other for such a short time.”

  Guiding us back down until we were lying side by side on the bed, he rolled onto his side and wrapped me in his hold.

  “None of the girls felt right. They all felt cold and distant. I wanted the warmth I’d felt during our first kiss.” He kissed my neck softly. “I wanted you.”

  “You have me,” I said, snuggling back against his body.

  “And I’m never g
oing to leave your side again. I promise.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  DESPITE THE danger, Clay and I stayed in the hotel for the rest of the next day and for one more night, only leaving after a newspaper with details of a fire that destroyed two conference rooms at the Hawthorne was delivered to our hotel room. As soon as I saw the headline, I grabbed the paper from the edge of the bed next to where Clay was sitting.

  The number of casualties was the first thing that caught my eye.

  “Fifteen people,” I gasped as I read the headline. I turned quickly to the main article and breathed easily when I saw that the three girls I’d encountered in the bathroom weren’t among the deceased.

  “Fifteen witches,” he corrected quickly—as if what they might have been was justification for their deaths.

  “You still don’t get it do you?” Regardless of what the Rain thought, they had been people and they were murdered.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked, his eyebrows creasing into a frown.

  “How do you know they were all witches? How do you know they were evil?”

  “Dad did his research. Despite what you might think of him, he’s not a bad person.”

  “Not a bad person?” I repeated in disgust. “Is this you talking or the ‘retraining’ you went through? I can’t listen to you defend him,” I said as tears stole my voice. “It hasn’t only been evil creatures that he’s killed.”

  His face fell into a frown as my words made their mark. “I’m sorry, Evie,” Clay said. “I swear that’s not what I was trying to do. I don’t agree with everything he’s done, or what he’s still doing. He’s made some monumental mistakes, but he’s done them for what he believes are the right reasons.”

  “Don’t do that,” I said. “Don’t justify things for him.”

  “It’s just hard. Being part of the Rain, believing all the things they taught me, it’s been such a big factor in my life. Sometimes I don’t know how to turn off that part of me.”

  He looked so desperate for forgiveness that I couldn’t stay mad. In the hours since our reunion, I’d seen enough to know that despite occasional slips into his old mindset, he was consciously trying to see more of the world than his family’s narrow viewpoint allowed.

  Covering the distance between us, I wrapped my arms around him to offer him some comfort. “I don’t expect you to change who you are, but you need to understand my side of this. I’ve been pushed into a war I don’t want anything to do with, just because of the way I was born. My life is in danger every single day, not because of anything I’ve done, but because of my ancestry.”

  He pulled me closer to his body and rested his head against my chest.

  “I hate ultimatums, but unfortunately, you will have to choose between me and your family. They killed my father; they still want to kill me. That will never change, so you can’t have both of us in your life—it just won’t work.”

  “I know, Evie and trust me, I get it. It’s just going to take time for me to adjust.”

  “Time, I have.” I kissed his cheek softly, knowing that despite his best intentions, it wasn’t going to be easy for him.

  As soon as we’d finished packing, we walked to the bus depot as fast as we could without drawing attention to ourselves. I pulled my hoodie low over my face and avoided all cameras. Over the next few weeks, we traveled by bus, train, and taxi, staying no more than a few days in any one location, until we were halfway across the country.

  While we traveled, he repeated his promise to stay with me again and again, trying to assure me that we could have a normal life. Each day he had a different plan for our future—a different city we would live in, a different life we’d lead.

  We talked about going overseas, but I didn’t have a passport and severing his ties with the Rain meant Clay didn’t have access to the connections he needed to get me one—at least for the short term. Not to mention the high incidence of security cameras at airports. The Rain was certain to be on high alert for Clay and possibly even me by now. Their reach was significant, and there was no way we could leave the country unnoticed. We were better off trying to hide under their noses than fleeing—at least for the moment.

  After what seemed like an eternity on the road, Clay managed to convince me that Detroit would be a good place to stop for a while, even though we both understood how dangerous it would be. We just hoped that between the decades of urban decay and the sprawling cityscapes the city was big enough for us to hide. Even if the Rain found out that we were in Detroit, finding our house among the thousands of abandoned properties would be next to impossible—or at least that’s what we hoped.

  Clay’s greatest desire was that we could settle down and live together like a regular couple. I just prayed for cover away from invading eyes. I told him that I didn’t think normal existed for me.

  “I don’t want normal,” he said in reply. “I just want you.”

  Although I would have been happy to squat in one of the abandoned apartment buildings, Clay wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted to give me every luxury he could—even if that just meant electricity and running water for the moment. His idea was for us to have a regular domestic life, even if it only lasted a few months.

  I reminded him that life with me could never be truly regular.

  He found an apartment he thought would be suitable and was as excited as a puppy as he led me through a rabbit warren of hallways to show me. He’d already paid two months’ rent in cash and was determined to make it work for at least that long.

  Ignoring the bloodstains on the carpet along the hallway and the rising damp on the walls, a bubble of excitement built in me that easily matched his contagious enthusiasm. A hope that we could actually make it work built inside me too. Maybe it wasn’t an entirely stupid idea; maybe, if I was willing to live in the slums, we could actually hide away with each other long enough to have an almost normal life.

  The neighborhood wasn’t great—most of the apartments around us were abandoned and the ones that weren’t were filled with less than desirable neighbors. In some ways, that worked in our favor. No one was going to ask questions, because no one wanted to have to answer them. I even doubted that most of our neighbors would dare go to the police—they were probably almost as wanted as I was. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the plan. It certainly wasn’t the worst place I’d stayed.

  I AWOKE with a whimper on my lips as dreams of the day I’d lost Dad haunted my night. Almost instantly, Clay was tucked around me whispering against the back of my neck, reassuring me that it would be okay. I twisted around to him and nuzzled into his chest as I fought back the unwanted tears that had sprung to my eyes.

  He stroked my hair for a few moments until all of the remnants of the nightmare had passed. Then he reached behind his neck before shifting his position.

  “I want you to have this.” Clay fastened the gold chain he’d always worn around his neck around mine. “I want to make new promises with it . . . for us and our life together.”

  The thick gold chain had a thin, circular pendant with an intricately carved dove engraved on one side and Clay’s name on the other. I touched my fingers to the rough surface. “I can’t take this, it’s a family heirloom.”

  “Consider it a good luck charm to chase the nightmares away.”

  “It’s your good luck charm though.”

  He brushed his fingers through my hair. “I’ve got everything I want right here; I don’t need any more good luck.”

  I couldn’t remind him that we’d built our “everything” on precarious foundations that could crumble at any moment. It was too cruel to mention. For three weeks, we’d managed to live normally in the small apartment he’d found, but we were constantly on alert for anything that was out of the ordinary. It wouldn’t take much for our pasts to come crashing into our lives again.

  Instead of ruining the perfect moment though, I leaned into his touch and continued to trace the lines of the scars on his ches
t.

  “What about this one?” I asked, running my fingers along a series of three-inch-long cuts near his left shoulder. It was a new habit of mine, asking about one of his scars each time we were in bed together.

  His eyes dropped to watch my fingers trace the marks. “Harpy. I was fifteen.”

  I stilled my hands on his chest and leaned down to rest my chin on them.

  “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever had to face?”

  Screwing his mouth up thoughtfully, he seemed to consider my question. “A wendigo. In Canada.”

  “What happened?”

  “About a year after I left y—” he paused and looked at me in such a way that his unfinished sentence was clear—after he’d left me and returned to his family, “—I had an assignment outside of Ontario. My mind wasn’t really on the job, for obvious reasons, and it almost cost us our lives. It was only that we’d all had so much training in how to deal with different threats that we were able to survive and get the upper hand.”

  “You’ve been doing this for a long time, haven’t you?” I was just beginning to understand how deeply ingrained his hatred for all things other had been. It was a wonder that he’d been able to see through it to save my life—and even more of a miracle that he’d fallen in love with me.

  He stroked the side of my face. “As long as I can remember.”

  “How many . . .” I trailed off, not entirely sure I wanted to ask the question or know the answer, but ever since his casual disregard for the fifteen lives lost on the night we’d reunited, I’d found myself wondering how high his death tally actually was.

  He frowned. “Too many. More than I can begin to count.”

  The look of consternation on his face indicated his thoughts had turned to his family again. I often wondered whether he missed them, but he always steered the conversation in another direction when I’d indirectly brought them up.