Chapter 41
EVER
I’m not doing this!” I grab Atom’s fists, trying to free my shirt. I don’t want it to be me.
“Yes, you are!” He looks up at me, buckets of worry in his eyes. And something else… confidence. “You have the control. You have the last of Ametrine’s essence.Youcan stop this.”
“That’s ridiculous.” My heart tips on its side, the realization hitting me: my father is the god of death, and I carry the essence from the creator of life. No wonder I’m so unstable. How am I supposed to balance that? “I can’t even control myself.”
The plants continue their upward climb, passing my chest, up over my head. And up and up.
“I’m telling you!” Atom yells, his arms slipping around my waist. “It’s the only way!”
I look up at Eli. “I can’t stop it.”
“Makeher stop! Control her. She hasn’t learned yet,” Atom begs, giving no explanation on how he knows such things about us.
“This has nothing to do with me,” I say, still staring up into Eli’s face. But I’m begging for that to be true.
“It’s all you,” Atom cries. “Every disaster. You’ve been doing this since you stepped foot into Sonnet months ago. You killed that girl with the ice. You covered the realm in snow. You destroyed the arena and flooded the passages.” He breathes heavily, looking up at me with soft eyes, an apology in them that I don’t want to accept. “You cause every storm.”
Atom squeezes me tight, but I have no breath left, no feeling. How could he accuse me of that? I don’t even know him.
He shoves Eli. “Get her out of here!”
Eli’s dark eyes move rapidly side to side, still anchored to mine. Analyzing. Calculating. Processing. No. He can’t believe this. His lips twitch, then I’m lifted into his arms, pressed against his chest. I hug him tight, my legs around his waist.
“Stay here and watch the kid,” he yells, then carries me through the growing teva, the heavy green and purple blooms flopping down far above our heads.
Clover and spice burn my nose. The stalks slap my back over and over, the wind howling in my ears. Eli holds one arm under my bottom and cradles his other hand behind my head. I hide my face and shout into his chest. “I didn’t do it!”
He doesn’t respond, running at an impossible speed. We finally exit the fields. The open air is a shock. I expect him to put me down, but my back slams into a tree.
He holds me against the trunk with the press of his body, his eyes raking over my face with a hunger I don’t know what to do with. Seconds pass. I lose count. Then I’m holding him just as tight as his hands work at my pants, pulling them off my ass then grabbing both cheeks tight. Our heads are almost at the same level, the hot air of our lungs the only thing between us.
Heat blasts through me in an instant. I’ve been teetering on the edge with the urges from linking. If we hadn’t had a child with us, I’d have stripped down in the passages and climbed on top of him, threat to my life or not. I push my hips into him, my chest. “Eli, what are you—”
“Helping. Shut the fuck up and kiss me.” His lips don’t wait for me to do the kissing. Or even for me to swear back at him. He slips his tongue inside so easily, as if it were coming home after a long day. And I welcome it, kissing him back, trying as hard as I can to forget everything else.
His tongue is warm, soft against mine, yet forceful. I hold the back of his head, taking those perfect curls into my fists and making sure he can’t escape this moment. Because I don’t want it to stop. I don’t want to go back to dead mothers and strange kids. To missing Kelter and out of control plants. I want to stay here. With him. With his hands on me.
We fall deeper into the kiss. Warmth settles in my core, pulsing. Wetter and wetter. Rain filters through the treetops and splatters on ourheads and shoulders. Eli breaks our kiss and looks behind him at the teva fields. I peek over his shoulder.
“It stopped,” he says, panting.
“That’s why you kissed me? You thought it was me doing that, and you could distract me?” That low down heat rises to my chest and tightens. The rain strengthens, pouring down onto us, filtering through the branches above.
He gazes at the sky. Rain trickles down his neck before he looks at me again. And smiles. “No. I just get hard watching you control nature.”
“I’m not controlling it!”
Lightning strikes above us, thunder rolling in after.
He leans close. “Say it again, little Never.”
“I’m not!”
The sky flashes again. Once. Twice.
