Scarlet Tempest, #1

by Juniper King

  My lips screwed into a scowl as my entire body stiffened. I was rarely insecure about my body when compared to other women, at least not in the usual way other women might feel insecure, but seeing her presenting herself like that sent a wave of anger through me. It reminded me of Denise and her disgusting, overt attempts to seduce Aksel.

  The idea of stealing from this shop came a little smoother now. I grabbed everything from jeans and shirts to socks and underwear.

  “Oh, you would look amazing in this, it would really bring out your eyes,” the woman’s voice carried through the store.

  My eyes flicked up. She was holding a button up shirt over his chest, a deep purple that certainly would bring out the green in his eyes.

  Eyes that were currently shouldering down at her.

  I could see her shudder when his fingers brushed hers as he took the shirt. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but I could certainly insinuate from the blush that lit up the woman’s face.

  I crammed a sweater in my bag with more force than necessary.

  She led Aksel to the changing area, which gave me a chance to move to that side of the store to grab some men’s clothes. I had no idea how to shop for men, but I grabbed some plain looking clothes of varying sizes.

  The changing area was a series of curtained off cubicles in the back corner of the store. I looked up from my thievery and saw Aksel step inside, giving the woman a quick wink before he slid the curtain closed. As soon as the curtain had closed, she promptly began fluffing and adjusting herself in the mirror.

  My jaw hurt from how hard my teeth clenched together.

  Aksel stepped out from behind the curtain a moment later. The shop-woman exclaimed something, her smile beaming. She reached up to adjust the collar on his shirt, brushing her hands across his shoulders and down his arms. She kept moving down his torso adjusting buttons, her fingers moving further and further down his abdomen.

  The look he gave her, a look similar to the one he had given me last night, made me want to rush over there and slap him. Or yank her back by her hair.

  I crammed one last pair of jeans into my bag and stormed out of the store. Aksel was free to flirt with whoever he wanted, but I wasn’t obligated to watch.

  Why was I even jealous? I had already been rejected. He could flirt with whoever he wanted. Just accept it and move on!

  I stomped down the main thoroughfare, putting some distance between us, the heavy duffle bag strap biting into my shoulder.

  Aksel was attractive, sure, but it wasn’t like I had any actual feelings for him, it was just lust. That and lingering feelings from him saving me on multiple occasions. I was being irrational, overwhelmed by my own hormones.

  My attention finally came back to the streets of Rochdale, where people were looking at me and whispering. I cursed under my breath, my face and neck growing warm. I had been so preoccupied with other thoughts that I’d completely forgotten I was still walking around in an oversized, men’s shirt with no shoes. I must look ridiculous. I looked around for an alleyway to duck into so I could change. Or at least hide until the guys came back.

  As I scanned the area, my eyes fell on a young woman with shoulder length black hair and a red jacket in the distance.

  The same red jacket she’d asked my opinion on when she’d bought it last spring!

  Jess!

  I dropped the bag off my shoulder and took off down the street, weaving around a produce cart and dodging a woman and her child. My feet pounded on the cobblestone street, my eyes laser focused on Jess. I bumped into someone but kept running through the sound of their shouting at my back. I sprinted at full speed, air sawing through my lungs. She rounded a corner—I won’t lose her!

  I flew around the corner, losing my footing and landing on my knee. I ignored the pain and shot back to my feet, closing the distance between us. I reached out and grabbed her wrist.

  “Jess…” I panted as I pulled her around to face me.

  “Hey!” A pair of rich brown eyes stared back at me, brows furrowed and mouth pulled into a scowl. She looked a few years older than Jess and a few inches taller. Even the jacket was different upon a closer inspection.

  I let go. “Oh… I-I-I’m sorry… I thought… I thought you were someone else.” Tears began to well in my eyes and I could barely get the words out of my mouth. The excitement and adrenaline I’d felt only moments ago rushed from my body, leaving me cold and hollow.

  The stranger’s eyebrows softened. “Are you okay?” Her hand touched my shoulder and I pulled away like I’d been shocked.

  “Yeah—Yes. I’m fine, thank you. I’m sorry to have bothered you.” I turned around and quickly rounded a corner to an even smaller alleyway.

  I made some distance between me and the woman before I crumpled to the ground, my back against a stone building. I pulled my knees against my chest as tightly as I could, wrapping my arms around them and releasing a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

  “Selynna!”

  I jumped.

  Aksel’s steps pounded down the alleyway, the anger evident in his gait. “There you are, what the hell are you doing here, I told you not to run off—” The more Aksel yelled, the harder it was to keep the tears at bay. “What happened, are you alright?” He crouched in front of me, brushing a lock of hair from my face to get a better look. All the anger from only seconds ago had melted from his voice, which only succeeded in making me angrier.

  “I’m fine,” I barked, pulling my head away and accidentally bumping it on the stone wall behind me. I scrunched my face to keep myself from sucking in a pained breath.

  “You’re not fine.”

  “What do you care?”

  He sat down beside me, letting my discarded duffel slide off his shoulder. “I would have thought by this point you knew I cared.”

  For some reason that hurt even more.

  “Just… leave me alone.” I buried my head in my arms. “That shop woman is probably eagerly awaiting your return, anyway.” My sarcasm might have been lost within the crooks of my elbows.

  There was a pause after my words. I was curious what expression Aksel was making, but I couldn’t bear to lift my head out of my comforting safe space.

  “You thought…” His voice was quiet and thoughtful. His hand touched my arm and I flinched. “Selynna.” He gently pulled my arm away from my knee and placed a finger under my chin, lifting my face up to meet his. “I have no interest in that woman. You know it was all an act.”

  I stared into his unblinking eyes as they penetrated my gaze. But he’d looked so interested in her, so sincere. Even though I’d known about our plan ahead of time, it just looked so real. All I could remember was my fury at seeing her touching him—his scorching gaze looking down at her.

  “Is that why you’re crying?” he asked.

  Did he think I was a child? Moping around and crying because I couldn’t have him? I looked down. “No,” my reply mousey.

  Aksel released my chin and nestled beside me on the wall, wrapping an arm around my shoulder. He didn’t say a word in response, he just sat quietly, waiting for me to tell him at my own pace. I exhaled heavily and allowed my head to fall on his shoulder.

  “I thought… I thought I saw Jess—my best friend from Woodburne. I thought maybe… maybe she’d gotten out of the fire, too.” A tear rolled down my already wet cheeks.

  Aksel inhaled, but before he could say anything in response, the patter of bare feet running down the adjacent alleyway caught our attention. Ayre jogged around the corner. “There you two are, what the hell are you doing back here?” He took one look at my face and his fair complexion became pale. “Selynna, what happened?”

  The worry in his voice sent another wave of prickles through my eyes.

  “She thought she saw her friend from Woodburne,” Aksel answered for me.

  Hearing the words from someone else’s perspective made the whole situation sound silly.

  Ayre’s face twisted into a f
rown as he turned away and scratched at the back of his head. He joined us on the ground, placing his hand on my knee. I let my legs slide down to lay straight.

  “You friend Jess… what was she like?” I felt Aksel’s voice rumble through my ears. I picked my head off his shoulder and leaned back against the wall.

  My lips split into a smile as I thought of her. “She was… inspiring. And kind.” I paused, thinking how one could really condense the unbridled flame that was Jess into just a few words. “She was really outgoing, she could make friends with just about anyone. I was stunned when she came up to me after our shift one day and invited me out for drinks.” Well, more like dragged me out against my will. “To this day I still can’t believe I let my guard down around her so quickly. She was just that kind of person.” I chuckled to myself. “That night, we both got a little too drunk and danced together. There wasn’t even a dance floor in the place.” I could feel the tears falling from my eyes. “Jess loved to dance,” I choked through the tears. “We had always talked about going to Elora, or some other big city, and trying out one of those dance clubs that we’d heard about.”

  I guess we would never get the chance now.

  At some point Aksel’s hand had started kneading my shoulder, and Ayre had been rubbing my leg.

  “Jess was the reason I started using my magic again,” I admitted.

  “Why had you stopped?” Aksel asked. To a Super, the idea of choosing not to using magic was probably pretty strange.

  “When I was a child in the orphanage, I was… scolded. Magic made me different and frightening. And disposable.” Both of their hands on me moved in an aggravated way, a twitch or a pause in movement, but I continued. “Jess was the first person who really accepted me for who I was. She didn’t just look past my ears and history and ignore it, she accepted it as part of me, and she still wanted to be my friend. She showed me how important it was to be myself—that I wasn’t a freak just because genetics had screwed me over. She showed me that differences were what make people special, not scary.” I took in a deep, shaky breath, trying to will my emotions back into captivity.

  “She sounds like a great woman. But I think she was the lucky one, having someone as compassionate as you for a friend.” Ayre said, his hand running up and down on my knee.

  Ayre was somehow always able to get even the smallest of smiles from me. I leaned back onto Aksel’s shoulder, placing one hand on his outstretched knee, and the other on Ayre’s hand. They didn’t have to say kind words to console me, or give me this healing time, but they did. And that’s what had made them so special to me in such a short amount of time.

  11

  Over the next seven days, we had gotten into a steady rhythm of living out in the wilderness. After a quick breakfast in the early morning, we would pack up and walk for most of the day, stopping only a couple of hours before sunset to hunt and reset the camp for the coming night.

  After we’d left Rochdale, Aksel explained our next step should be to go to Korinth where we could find some guy named Kue, a Super who would almost certainly know who put the bounty on my head and how to find them. Sounded simple enough. The only catch was Korinth was about fifteen hundred kilometers away on the opposite coast of the continent and, with no money for horses, the only way to get there was on foot.

  Luckily, Aksel and Ayre worked as the perfect travel team, building up the campsite every evening and tearing it down every morning, seamlessly working with and around each other. I realized I would have gotten in their way, having only ever camped a handful of times in my life, so during those times I made myself useful finding firewood or washing dishes and clothing in the nearby stream.

  Though we had bought some dried rations in Rochdale, Ayre oversaw hunting for more substantial meals. I wasn’t a vegetarian, I didn’t mind the flayed fish, but watching him skin those poor little forest critters had almost made me lose my appetite. Until the second night when the smell of meat cooking over the campfire had just been too delicious to ignore.

  The tent Ayre had bought—or possibly stolen given the situation—was not large, but it fit the three of us. Barely. When I’d asked why he hadn’t gotten a bigger tent, or hadn’t gotten two separate ones, he made the good point that everything we bought would have to be carried on our backs. Solid logic aside, that didn’t change the fact that when I’d seen the small set up the first night, I was adamant that I would not be sharing the tent. But it was either cuddle up with the two Supers, or sleep out in the woods with no protection from the elements or animals. Even I wasn’t stubborn enough to choose the latter.

  Every morning the ache in my legs deepened, enough that hauling myself up out of a sleeping roll was becoming a form of torture for my poor muscles. Aksel had suggested we continue avoiding the main paths that merchants and mercenaries used, just as a precaution, but that meant trekking through dense underbrush, rocky terrain, and hiking up steep inclines. Horrible for my habitually lazy body, but perfect for my new hiking boots.

  Ayre had taken the time to pick them up for me while we were in town, his exact words being; “I hope they fit. You’re going to wear me out if I have to keep healing your feet every day for three weeks.”

  Even tied tight, they weren’t a perfect fit, my feet looked big and clunky, but they were beyond perfect for a couple weeks of hiking.

  “Okay, here’s one for you,” I said, carefully stepping over an exposed tree root. “Would you rather live in a town, but never be able to set foot in a forest again, or live in a forest and never set foot in a town?”

  The hike had gotten boring and monotonous after just the first day. The guys hadn’t seemed to want to go into much detail about who we were meeting or why he might know who placed the bounty. They’d just said he dealt in information, whatever that meant, and it was better not to ask too many questions about him. But they assured me we would learn what we needed if we met with him.

  At this point, I trusted them to lead us in the right direction.

  On the third day of the hike, I’d introduced the guys to some games the kids and I used to play when we went walking through the park or camping on the beach. The first game we tried was easy, a game I’d played with Paige many times; ABCs, with the theme of course being ‘forest’. Aksel had almost lost at ‘J’, but after a minute or two of thinking he came up with ‘Juniper’. I lost when ‘Q’ came around and Ayre won by busting out ‘Quercus robur’, some kind of oak tree, he claimed.

  ‘Would you rather’ was Ayre’s favourite of the games we’d tried.

  He let out an exaggerated sigh at my question. “Ah, you’re killing me, Sel. Women don’t just wander out into the forest; that’s like asking me to starve myself. But I couldn’t live without the comforting tranquility of nature either, living in a town twenty-four-seven would drive me mad,” he mused.

  “You may as well ask if he would rather give up sleeping or breathing. Eventually either choice is going to kill him,” Aksel added.

  “You’ve gotta pick one,” I said with a smirk. I wouldn’t relent until he answered. The last question he’d asked me was; ‘Would you rather have your thoughts broadcast so everyone could hear, or never be allowed to wear clothes?’

  “Why don’t we take a break,” Ayre suggested, ungracefully backing out of my question.

  Without waiting for approval from me or Aksel, he slid his bag off his shoulders and made himself comfortable on a nearby fallen tree. He reached his arms into a languid, full body stretch, the hem of his shirt lifting just enough to see a slice of fair abdominal skin and a tantalizing V that drew my eyes down to the waistband of his criminally low riding jeans. Seriously, was that belt even functional?

  My stomach responded with an unsolicited swoop. Thank goodness the questions had been rhetorical, and he couldn’t actually read my thoughts.

  “That’s so unfair, you refused to keep walking unless I answered your silly question,” I folded my arms across my chest.

  “The answer was very i
mportant to me,” he smirked, like he really did know what I was thinking.

  I looked to Aksel for some backup, but he just shrugged, giving me one of his own smirks.

  With a harrumph, I walked over to the tree, dropped my pack next to Ayre’s, and took a seat beside him. At least this was a nice excuse to give my poor feet a break.

  Ayre took my wrist and guided me down to sit on the ground in front of him.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  He situated me between his legs and, without a word, began to massage the muscles around my neck and shoulders. His fingers were as skilled as the rumours had claimed, kneading the tension from my shoulders and invigorating my weary muscles. I moaned involuntarily. And we weren’t even doing what satyrs were best known for. His initial movements were long, lingering and purposeful, his fingertips tracing the contours of my shoulders and neck. Just the lightest of touches from him was enough to send shivers through my body, this was a full sensory overload. I let myself melt into his slow and sensual movements.

  “Here’s a fun one,” Ayre leaned down so his lips were almost touching my ear, the heat from his breath sending a fresh wave of tingles down my neck. “Satyr or deydre?” His voice was liquid heat pouring into my ear, seeping through my body all the way down to my curled toes.

  “Selynna,” I snapped out of my trance at the sound of Aksel’s voice. “Let’s use this break as practice time.” Aksel’s tone was harder than usual.

  “Okay.” My voice had a slight warble. I stood up, my shoulder muscles were relaxed and renewed, though I couldn’t say the same for my mental state.

  “Ayre, why don’t you go fill the canteens,” Aksel recommended.

  “Sure. Enjoy your practice.” He fished the canteens out of the packs and sauntered towards the stream as if nothing had happened.