I shook the horrible thought from my mind. No, as wretched as Halo was, he would never hurt Angel. He would die a thousand deaths before he let that happen. That was the one respectable thing about him.
But he committed a crime. A terrible one. And for that, I could not forgive him.
A headache throbbed against my skull. I was sick and tired of these thoughts, this same reel of images and memories played over and over again for the past four centuries. I was exhausted.
I faced the facts. Halo and I would never work out. We would never love each other again.
But Angel needed me. She needed both of her fathers. And to help her, and to stop whatever Silas and his suspicious contact had in mind for my ex-mate and my daughter, I needed Halo.
Swallowing my pride, I stood back up. Halo was weak from being chained up right now, on top of his magic being drained. He couldn’t shift, and couldn’t have gone far.
A shriek ripped through the air. Birds scattered from the treetops in a dark cloud.
It was Halo’s voice.
Instantly I bolted towards the sound of the noise, scrambling over rocks and dry shrubs. My heart clenched with fear as I barely stopped myself from hurtling over the edge of a small crest.
“Halo?” I called anxiously.
“Down here,” the miserable reply came.
I glanced down the drop. At the bottom of it lay Halo, his golden hair covered in dirt and twigs but otherwise appearing unharmed. With an exasperated sigh, I carefully climbed down the side of the drop to his side.
“Didn’t watch where you were going?” I remarked as I helped him to his feet.
“Shut the hell up,” he muttered listlessly. “I swear to the gods this was not here four hundred years ago.”
He winced as he tested out his foot and I automatically put my arm around him to help him stand. “Plates shift. Things erode. Landscapes change.”
Halo continued to frown at me but the blinding rage in his expression from earlier had fizzled away. He carefully placed his foot down, winced again, and sighed as he let it hover above the ground. “I guess so. I hope the people have changed, too.”
“You’re injured?” I asked, then after a moment asked again, “Do you mean the people of Cinderhollow?”
“Yeah. To both. My foot’s fine. It’s my ankle that hurts more. I’ll probably be fine after a rest,” he mumbled. Sighing heavily again, he added, “It’s been a long time. There’s no way it’s the same way we left it. It can’t be.”
I frowned. Halo didn’t sigh that often unless he was injured. I remembered the time he tripped on one of our dates, fully embarrassing himself. He laughed it off, but his breath soon grew short and he continued to sigh as if he was upset. I realized later, when he shed his clothes for the night, that a painful and bloody scrape manifested on his knee when he fell. He had kept it hidden and ignored it so as not to ruin our evening.
“Kass?” Halo said, prompting me out of my thoughts.
“Sorry. What were talking about?”
He groaned now. “Nothing, forget it.” There was none of the previous edge to his voice. Now he only sounded tired.
“Can you walk, with my help?” I asked.
“I think so.”
Nearby was a shallow alcove underneath the sudden drop. It was out of the elements, and a decent place to rest. I half-walked, half-carried Halo towards the alcove and sat him down on a fallen log.
“Weird,” he said, brow furrowed. “Kass, look at that.”
I followed his gaze to a pile of charred wood a few feet away. The burnt flakes still smelled like fire and smoke.
“That looks recent,” I remarked. “Someone must have been here.”
“Silas?” Halo said, and I heard the faintest edge of anxiety in his voice.
“No. Silas went in the other direction. Besides, he was never the most…in-tunewith nature. I doubt he could light a fire if his life depended on it.”
