“Don’t be. You need to know you can count on me. And you can.”
“You can count on me too.”
“I already know that. You’re one of the few beings on the planet I trust.”
He shot her a warm look before his gaze returned to the road.
After a few hours they fell into comfortable silence, only talking now and then.
They stopped at a couple of service stations, once at the halfway point of their journey to grab something to eat at a twenty-four-hour café.
“How is the blood situation?” Elijah whispered to her across the rickety old bistro table.
“I’ll need some by the time we hit the Highlands. Perhaps MacLennan will let me go hunting.” At Elijah’s raised brow, she chuckled dryly. “For deer.”
“Poor deer.”
“I won’t kill it. Just take a little.” Echo wrinkled her nose at the thought. Animal blood wasn’t her favorite. For multiple reasons. She hated frightening them for a start.
Echo began to feel slightly antsy when they were a few hours out from sunrise. Thankfully, they arrived in Calais with plenty of time to spare.
They found a cheap hotel not far from the Eurotunnel.
“I brought tape.” Elijah pulled it out of his backpack as they strode into the small room with twin beds.
Together they taped the curtains closed over the window.
A slight awkwardness fell between them as they readied for sleep. As they stood side by side at the bathroom sink brushing their teeth, Echo almost smiled at the weird, domesticated scenario. A fae-borne and a vampire brushing their teeth together before bed sounded like the start of a joke.
Elijah seemed to sense her amusement and grinned before he spat. He watched her as he wiped his mouth.
When she was done, she asked, “What?”
“Nothing.” He shrugged. “I just like looking at you.”
A shiver rippled down her spine.
It would be so easy to ignore all the warning signs and just give in to the attraction that had sparked between them from the first moment they met.
Yet Echo wasn’t sure she could handle any more complications right now.
“We should sleep.” She brushed past him and hurried into the twin bed.
Elijah followed her out after a few seconds and got into the adjacent bed. “Good night. Or good morning, really.”
“Good night, Elijah.”
Her senses told her he was still awake a few minutes later, but the pull of sunrise dragged Echo under, and she slipped into the dreamworld.
17
The needfor blood was a mix between hunger and thirst. Unfortunately, Echo woke up with it when the sun set the next day. Her skin felt dry and sensitive as she readied in the small bathroom, her throat drier than the Atacama Desert, and her stomach clenched dully. Elijah seemed to sense a change in her mood and kept looking at her as if trying to work out what was wrong.
Echo didn’t want to tell him. She didn’t want to remind him that beneath her human facade lay a caged monster.
Just hold on, she told herself. They had another two days to get through and then she’d ask MacLennan if she could hunt.
That’s if he didn’t kill her and Elijah on sight for stepping on pack lands.
