by Amelia Jade
“I don’t know,” she said, mashing her hands against her face, wiping away the tears on her cheeks.
Kiefer shuffled closer, and this time she didn’t move away. He sat down heavily next to her, and only then did she realize he was covered in blood.
“Kiefer, are you okay?” she exclaimed, her mouth hanging open.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said, waving off her fears. “It’s mostly from the big guy. I couldn’t avoid it dripping all over me. I got a few cuts and scrapes, a busted rib and a lot of tenderness in my face, but nothing serious, I promise.”
Peyton nodded jerkily, trying to calm herself from the sudden sense of panic that had overcome her.
I can’t lose you. I mean, I might not have any choice now that you know what I’ve done. But at least I know you’ll still be alive. But you can’t die on me, Kiefer Hartmann. I love you too much.
But now wasn’t the time to tell him how she felt. That she was absolutely crazy for him in a way that made zero sense, yet she just knew. She had to deal with the knowledge of her past actions first.
“How are you still here?” she asked, not wanting to bring up the question, but needing an answer regardless.
“What do you mean?”
“Kiefer, because of me, many of the shifters you know are dead. Dead. I killed them,” she said, her voice almost hysterical. “And yet you sit here with your arm around me? How can you do that?”
She was pleading with him, but Peyton needed to know. She was tired of not knowing everything. This though, this was something she could know. Something that he could tell her, and reveal the truth behind. She wouldn’t have to be kept in the dark over it.
“I’m here,” he said bluntly. “Because I care for you.”
“But how can you feel anything but hatred, now that you know the truth about me?”
“The truth?” he asked, barking out a laugh. “The truth I know is that you’re a good person. That you are just as horrified about what happened as I am. That you don’t have any of the sentiments the person who caused the war must have had. I know that you care deeply for others, and that you wouldn’t willingly inflict harm on me or my kind.”
He leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. “That’s the truth I know.”
She shook her head. “I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve you.”
“Maybe not,” he said with a smile. “But you’ve got me, so you’d better start learning to accept that.
“Besides, I find it hard to believe that you could ever have been that woman. I know head trauma can do weird things to a person, but this is just too profound a change. Odds are you weren’t ever that person. She was probably just a fake, a personality you created. Maybe you did it because you were running, or because you were wronged. Hell, maybe you were a triple agent,” he said, laughing.
But Peyton sat upright.
“What did you just say?”
Kiefer frowned. “I said that this person you’re recalling couldn’t have ever been the real you. That you never truly believed in it. That something was pushing you to do it.”
He opened his mouth to keep speaking, but her hand covered his lips, forcing him into silence.
“Wait,” she said, the word coming out harder than intended.
But her mind was elsewhere. There was something else going on. Something just at the edge of her brain. But she couldn’t quite access it.
“Damn,” she cursed, slamming a fist into her knee.
“What is it?”
“There’s something more,” she said. “I don’t recall much of my life yet, but I do recall being with the Institute, and working to destabilize Fenris.” Her voice choked up over those last words. “But there’s something else. I just can’t get it to come out. It’s even more frustrating than not knowing anything!”
Kiefer pulled her in tight.
“If only I could heal like you shifters could,” she complained helplessly. “I could heal my brain.”
She’d meant it as a joke, but Kiefer went still next to her, his muscles frozen. Peyton turned in his grasp, so that she could regard him.
“Kiefer…” she said slowly, unsure of what was happening. “Is everything okay?”
He didn’t respond at first, but just as she was opening her mouth to speak again, he shook his head.
“I don’t believe this.”
“Believe what?”
“It’s ridiculous,” he scoffed. “But I mean…” he trailed off.
“Kiefer Hartmann!” she said sternly. “You tell me what the hell is going on right now.”
He looked at her, and she set her face, keeping it impassive as she regarded him. Whatever she’d just said had triggered something in the big bear, and she wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.
“Listen, this is…” He sighed and shook his head and started over. “There are coincidences, and then there is…whatever this is.”
“You’re confusing me,” she told him. “Just spit it out.”
Kiefer frowned. “Okay, so you’re aware that shifters take mates. We find one person, and we spend our lives with them.”
“Like getting married.”
He shook his head. “No. It’s deeper than that. It is much more of the literal ‘other half’ theory. When we find this person, that’s it. There is nothing else we need in our lives but them. It’s hard to describe it.”
Peyton stared at him. Was he trying to say what she thought he was?
“Anyway, you met Allix earlier. She’s the one getting married to Captain Luther Klein?”
“Right!” Peyton said, then frowned, her eyes darting to the rear of the shop, beyond the battered steel door.
“Yeah,” Kiefer said, sighing heavily. “She’s one of the two back there that took a tranquilizer dart.” He shook his head angrily. “I am going to be in so much trouble for that.”
“Are…” she hesitated to ask.
“Yes, they’ll be just fine,” he said, waving a hand around. “It was just standard shifter tranquilizer, nothing crazy. I already checked them out. It’s just going to take time to wear off. There’s literally nothing else I can do for them.”
“Okay,” she said, sitting back into the wall in relief. “Now, continue.”
“Anyway,” he said, blinking rapidly as he refocused his mind. “Both of them,” he said with a gesture to where the two women were sleeping on the ground out of sight, “were human.”
Peyton’s eyes narrowed slowly. “Were?” she asked cautiously, picking up on the slight emphasis on the word.
“Yes. Were. They are no longer.”
She blinked. What? What the hell were they then if they weren’t hum—?
“Oh.” She said in a very small voice as his implication hit home.
Kiefer nodded heavily.
Then she sat up straight as the whole implication of where he was going with that registered.
“Are you saying that you think I’m your mate?” she asked breathlessly.
Kiefer turned his entire massive frame so that he could look at her square-on. His hand sought out hers and she didn’t object to it this time.
“Peyton Raine. There is no think. Maybe there was at first, but the more time I spend with you, the more I see just how strong a person you are, the more I have become certain. I do not think you are my mate. You are my mate. The one. The only one.”
He took a deep breath in. “I love you.”
The words just sort of hung there.
Peyton stared at him. Her mouth never moved, but nor did her eyes waver. They barely even blinked.
Something inside of her broke.
“Kiefer,” she began. “I…” her words failed her.
How did she tell him? How could she say “I love you” without knowing that the real her loved him. This Peyton, the one sitting across from him, was crazy for the bearded bear-man. But she had but a fraction of her mind, of her memory. And in those memories, she was clearly somebody completely different.
&
nbsp; Would that Peyton still care for, let alone love, Kiefer or a bear shifter in general?
“Shh,” he said. “I understand.”
“You do?” she asked in surprise.
He nodded, reaching out and bringing her close. “You’re worried about your memories. About the effect having them might have on you, and your feelings for me.”
“How the hell do you know that?” she asked in astonishment.
“I can see it,” he said with a sad smile. “Here,” he said, touching her cheek. “And here.” He brushed a finger against her lips.
Peyton nodded. “Kiefer, you should know, that this Peyton? The one I am now? She loves you. She’s crazy for you, she wants you, to be with you. It seems insane, but I can’t imagine my life without you in it anymore. It’s a deeper thing than I’ve ever felt before. Not just happy to see you, but devastated when we’re apart.”
“You don’t have to say this,” he said, but she hushed him down.
“Actually I do. Because I have no idea what’s going to happen. If I manage to regain my memories, I might regain my old personality too. And then I might forget how I feel about you now. So no, I had to tell you. I couldn’t live with that regret.”
He nodded.
“So,” she said, finally broaching the as-yet-unasked question, though the suggestion had been there. “Do you think changing me into a shifter will heal my mind?”
Kiefer looked away at last.
“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I have no idea. But there’s something else you should know.”
“What’s that?”
“If, and I do mean if, I Turn you, you will always be joined to me. No matter how you feel.”
Peyton caught the emphasis on the word Turn, realizing that was the proper terminology for what they were discussing.
“I see.” She thought about it. “That means if I revert to old me, the shifter hater, then I’ll have to put up with an inexplicable attraction to you?”
“And I to you,” he said unhappily.
“Well, that would be awkward.”
Kiefer snorted at her understatement. “Awkward, depressing, heartbreaking. You name it, if it’s not a happy emotion, it’s what I’d be feeling if I lost you.”
Peyton shuddered at the heaviness in his words, and the ring of truth contained within them as well. That was a big weight for her to carry on her shoulders. He was letting her make this decision herself, and he would live with whatever the consequences were.
“What do I do?” she asked softly.
Kiefer shook his head. “This isn’t my decision, my love. It’s yours.”
Peyton closed her eyes in thought. She couldn’t screw this up.
Do I stay as I am, and hope that I can live with what I’ve done by Kiefer’s side, but with us never complete by the sounds of it? Or do I take the leap, link myself to him, and hope that we don’t end up hating each other despite it?
There was no easy path that she could see. Nothing with a light above it that told her what to do.
I hate adult decisions.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Peyton
Pain.
She awoke in agony, screaming bloody murder until her throat was raw, and then some more. Every inch of her body was in brutal agony, her senses assaulting her brain, nearly rendering it mush, unable to do anything.
With a concentrated effort, Peyton managed to open her eyes. A bleak landscape greeted her.
The sky was gray.
The air was gray.
The ground was gray.
She rolled onto her side from her back in preparation to sit up. A cloud of gray debris exploded into the air as she did. Peyton looked down to see the ground itself wasn’t actually gray. It was coated in a layer of gray…what looked like ash.
The pain dulled, until it became more localized in her neck. She could breathe more easily as it receded, and this allowed her to focus. That was when Peyton realized the air wasn’t gray either, but the same ashy substance was actually drifting down from the sky, making it all seem gray and bleak.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked.
Her memory was hazy, but that was nothing new to her. She could vaguely recall having been somewhere, with Kiefer. How had she gone from there, to here? Peyton thought and thought, but her brain never provided the answer.
“Okay. Well, let’s at least figure out where the hell I am then,” she muttered, climbing to her feet.
The ash on the ground was already halfway up her shin, and the area around her body quickly filled in once she moved.
At first, unable to see where she was going, Peyton did a slow shuffle step. But the ground proved to be uniquely flat and without features, so eventually she gave up on that, and just started walking.
The entire sky was one standard color of gray, and the ground flat as could be. Her visibility was perhaps a hundred yards, no more. So she wasn’t sure where she was going. The movement of her legs through the ash left a trail, but the fast-falling ash was erasing it almost as she watched.
It’s also climbing higher up my leg. Another few minutes and it’ll be past my knee.
In the distance she heard a rumble.
Peyton spun to her right. That was the first noise she’d heard since arriving, besides any she made herself.
“Hello?” she called, but the ash in the air quickly broke up the sound of her voice, not allowing it to carry far.
“Fine,” she said angrily to nobody in particular, turning to fully face where she thought the sound had come from and heading off in that direction at a faster clip.
The ground rapidly began to slope upward as she walked. The ash around her never diminished. In fact, unless she missed her guess, it was actually starting to fall faster. Before long her knees were covered and it was starting to flick up and cover her upper thigh.
“This is getting ridic—”
A violent trembling of the earth knocked Peyton from her feet, burying her within the ash as she slightly tumbled back down the slope. The shaking continued, until a deep-throated roar overwhelmed it.
She managed to climb to her feet as the noise grew louder.
A wave of heat blasted ash from the air and slapped at her skin, singeing exposed hairs and giving her the mild tingle of a sunburn.
Peyton didn’t notice.
As the sky cleared for a moment she caught a glimpse of what lay ahead, and her knees threatened to give out under her, spilling her back to the ash for a second time.
The ash quickly obscured her vision, but not before Peyton had seen the brilliant orange-white wall of volcanic lava rolling down the hillside toward her.
“Oh,” she said in a very small voice as the air began to grow hotter.
Underfoot she swore she could feel the approach of the thick, viscous liquid as it flowed straight at her.
“Right. I think now is the time to run,” she said to herself in a rather calm voice.
Her feet didn’t move.
“Move, dammit,” she swore.
The muscles in her left leg trembled as she struggled to lift it free. With a great sucking sound, her shoe finally slopped free of the ground and she put it in front of her. Another monumental effort saw her right leg move next. It was slow going, but she kept up the fight.
The wind picked up, superheated air blowing the ash away from her, and swirling it up off the ground into miniature cyclones. Peyton saw to her horror that the ground in front of her as far as she could see was beginning to melt.
The lava must be flowing underneath as well, melting the ground I’m walking on.
Unless she could pick up the pace, Peyton knew she was dead. The heat from the ground was growing more intense and she was starting to feel it through her shoes.
Slop.
Slop.
Slop.
The sound her feet made each time she pulled them free provided Peyton with a sort of rhythm to keep herself moving by. She never looked behind her, even as
her back began to warm, the underside of her arms and backs of her legs heating up, as if the sun were beating down on her vigorously from behind.
But still she never stopped.
Left foot. Right foot. Left foot. Right foot. Left. Right. Left. Right.
Over and over again she repeated it. Her steps never grew harder, but they never grew easier either.
Her back was beginning to hurt as the heat grew, and she could feel her skin start to blister as the air grew hotter. Breathing began to hurt as her lungs protested. She couldn’t handle much more of this. Another ten or fifteen minutes and Peyton would begin to either burn up, or her breathing would become too hard and she would pass out.
She needed an escape.
Looking around wildly though, she realized there was no escape. She simply needed to keep going.
For as long as I can. Maybe the lava will run out of steam and stop flowing, allowing me to get away. But there is nothing but land and ash around me. So my only option is to press on, and not give up.
Determination set her jaw and Peyton moved forward once more, maintaining that same pattern, never letting her rhythm get out of hand.
The temperatures soared beyond anything she’d ever experienced before. Her clothing began to burn up, the material simply disintegrating as she walked, leaving her barefoot and naked, her entire body assaulted by the approaching heat storm that the lava was generating.
But still Peyton forged on, one hand in front of her eyes to help block the wind from hurting them, so that she could see where she was going. Her feet became sore and blistered in seconds without the protective layer of her shoes, but she didn’t stop.
A blast of wind scoured all the remaining hair from her body, burning it to a crisp and scattering it to the wind, but still Peyton moved her feet.
Left.
Right.
Left.
Right.
Do not stop for anything. If you fall, get up. You aren’t dead yet. You can make it out of this.
She stumbled and her left hand flew out to the side to balance her. An extra strong gust of wind picked up a small piece of superheated debris and blew it right through her hand. Peyton screamed as she saw the neat little hole all the way through her palm. Such was the heat of the debris that it had seared the skin closed behind it.
