The realm we pass through is filled with alternating stretches of countryside and city, with the dense urban areas growing up out of the landscape like great towering forests of concrete and brick and glass and metal. Lights and colors and cars and people. A world filled to the brim and spilling over.
I don’t know if it’s a good thing.
They are marvels, these metropolises, but as I stare and stare out the window, some part of me craves the simplicity of a mountain peak or shaded forest.
Perhaps this is just how humans live, though. Certainly, there are some demons who prefer the bustle of the city to the quiet of the wilderness, but even our largest cities aren’t like this.
Seren narrates the sights as we drive on, explaining things likesuburbsandshopping mallsandfast-food restaurantsandpublic transit.
It’s all a little too much for me to follow or fully retain, but I like the sound of her voice and this glimpse into her realm, even if all it does is overwhelm me.
After a few hours, we reach the outskirts of the city she calls Boston, and she explains that, too, telling me she booked accommodations in the heart of the city where we can start our search for the wielder.
“I still don’t know exactly where we’re going,” she says as we sit nearly at a standstill in traffic, the cars around us so numerous they’ve clogged the road entirely. “But I know someone we can talk to who might give us an address.”
“It’s a good start,” I tell her, trying not to be too obvious as my eyes trace her face.
I’ve been watching her carefully since we left Beech Bay, since she called on the magick that set us on our path to Boston.
It was an impressive thing to behold, to feel, how much raw energy she harnessed to give us an idea of where we needed to look for the heart.
But it took a toll on her.
In her shaking muscles and the sweat on her brow, in the way she was pale afterwards, clinging to my hand as she settled back into her body.
She tried to shrug it off in that oh-so-Seren, cavalier way she has, but I’m not buying it.
My witch is powerful, strong, and capable, but she’s also been through hell the last couple of days. She can’t be in any fit shape to use that much power without consequence.
Not that she’d listen to me or anyone else about it, and not that we have any time to waste with the hunt still in full swing, but I hated seeing her do that to herself.
All of it makes me antsy. The drive and what waits for us in Boston. My mate pushing herself harder than she should. All the unknowns about what we’ll face in the city and what we might face afterwards if we get a clue that will lead us to the heart.
Truthfully, I’ve been off-kilter since even before we got into the car and left Beech Bay.
This morning was a mistake.
Not because I wish I could take it back or I didn’t enjoy making Seren come on my tail. Quite the opposite, actually.
It was a mistake because I can’t stop thinking about it. I can’t stop hearing all the noises she made behind my hand. I can’t stop scenting her on me,all over me, and it’s distracting me to no end.
Beside me in the driver’s seat, Seren sings along to the music coming from within the car’s complicated mechanics, hair whipping around her in the air coming in through her cracked-open window. She looks as if she hasn’t got a care in the world, as if she isn’t being eaten up from the inside out by the memory of what we shared this morning.
Until she catches my eye.
It doesn’t happen often, but when her gaze slides from the road ahead of us to meet mine, it’s filled with wicked knowing, with desire, with the same thread of insanity that’s kept me in chaos since we parted with the heat and the dampness of her still coating the end of my tail.
And just like that, I’m reminded what a mistake it was to let myself get carried away. To letusget carried away.
How am I supposed to focus on anything else?
How am I supposed to concentrate on the hunt, on keeping her safe, on keeping my head up for any threats withthis terrible, wonderful distraction haunting my every waking moment?
With those thoughts hounding me, I turn my attention back outside the window and watch Boston materialize around us. From outlying areas of the city filled with increasingly dense clusters of homes and buildings, all the way to the heart of the city itself, filled with concrete and cars andskyscrapers, as Seren calls them.
She navigates the car through narrow streets, then pulls it into an underground chamber of some sort, bringing it to a stop in a long row of other cars and turning off the ignition.
“Well, we’re here,” she says, watching my face carefully. “You alright?”
