Blaze (17 page)

He wouldn’t look at her, and as the better
part of an hour flew by, Kira knew it wasn’t just the fear of
Aldrich overhearing that kept Tristan silent. He knew she had been
lying. Kira only wished she could read his mind to see how much he
had already guessed. Or maybe he just knew that Kira was about to
tell him something that would change everything. Maybe he didn’t
know what it was. Maybe all he knew was that he didn’t want to hear
it.

Half an hour later, Kira’s phone buzzed. She
looked down at the lit up screen and read the message plastered
across it.

“In London! I’m sending you the address to
the conduit headquarters. See you soon.” A moment later, the phone
buzzed again and an alert popped up that said she has two unread
messages. Kira was too afraid of Tristan’s reaction to even touch
her phone. Luke’s address would just have to wait.

She stared straight ahead, out the window
towards a sign that said London was only 37 kilometers away,
whatever that meant.

Then, for the first time since entering the
car, Kira felt Tristan’s gaze land on her. She flicked her eyes to
the rearview mirror, meeting his, and something unspoken passed
between them. It was finally time to talk.

“Tristan,” Kira started, not knowing where
her words were actually going.

“Let me find a place to pull over,” Tristan
sighed.

He turned off the highway, taking the first
exit they came across. It led them down a winding road speckled
with old stone houses that eventually let to a bustling town
square. The sunny day had brought tons of people out of their homes
and Tristan continued driving past the crowd. After a few more
minutes, a small duck pond came into view. The area was deserted
and there was a spot in the shade, right by the lapping lake, that
seemed to have their names written on it.

Tristan pulled over, easing the car to a
stop and stepped out. Kira followed him across the grass and to a
seat underneath a white willow tree whose leaves seemed to droop
with Kira’s mood, stopping mere inches from the surface of the
water. Tristan held a branch aside, letting Kira inside the privacy
the tree offered until the two of them finally seemed completely
alone and distanced from the world.

“What’s going on?” Tristan asked. Kira
leaned against the trunk of the tree. Tristan was across from her
with one leg outstretched and one knee bent with an elbow resting
atop it.

She had only had an entire car ride of
silence to think of what to say and how to begin, but still Kira
was drawing a blank. “I,” she started and then stopped to stare
down at her interlaced hands. They were gripped tightly in her lap
and Kira eased her palms apart, stretching her sore fingers. She
needed to relax, otherwise she might lose Tristan before she really
had the chance to explain herself.

“Aldrich has a dungeon,” Kira said. It was
as good a place to start as any.

“Kira, I told you I couldn’t hear anything.
Do you think I would have lied about something like that?” He
asked, hurt by her distrust.

“Of course not,” she said quickly, aching to
reach out and comfort him. But Kira tried to stay focused. “I saw
it, with my own eyes, but there was no way you could have heard
anything,” Kira started the story and continued to tell Tristan
everything she had discovered that morning—the hidden passage, the
spy holes around the entire castle, the use of soundproof
glass—until Kira got to the part about the prisoners. She told him
that she healed the three conduits and the human, and then began to
talk about the vampire she had also found locked up.

“Pavia,” he interjected when Kira started to
talk about her powers. Tristan looked up, slightly shocked. The
words seemed to surprise him as much as they surprised Kira after
so much silence. “Her name is Pavia. Aldrich was looking for her
even when I was with him,” he said, finishing the thought. And then
Tristan fell silent again, without a word about anything that
mattered, so Kira kept talking.

But she hesitated when she reached the part
about the male Punisher’s words, about his accusation that she was
falling into evil, that she was already turning. Kira couldn’t
bring herself to say any of it out loud, so instead, Kira said that
she got afraid Aldrich would find her and decided to run away to
find Tristan, to tell him everything.

And then Kira too became silent, listening
to the rustle of leaves and waiting for Tristan’s reaction.

“I was an idiot,” he said softly, his words
almost lost to the wind. “A complete idiot to think that Aldrich
could have changed so much.” He looked up at Kira with a pleading
expression. “But you have to understand Kira, he has this way about
him. I don’t know what it is, but it makes you want to forget all
the bad things he’s done. My life with him was horrible, but there
were some good things and that was what he made me remember.” A
shudder passed through his body, visible even to Kira. “I don’t
know how I could have forgotten all the horrible things he made me
do.” Tristan stared down at his hands, frightened of the memories
they held.

Kira hated herself at that moment. Tristan’s
features were quickly clouding over with the same self-loathing
that darkened his face the first time they had met. He was
retreating back into that horrible place Kira had pulled him out
of, and she couldn’t let him go back. After all, Kira was the one
who in a way urged him into believing Aldrich. She was the one who
lied, who let him believe that she wanted to become a vampire, that
Aldrich could be their salvation. If she had only told him her
doubts from the beginning, Tristan never would have fallen into
Aldrich’s trap.

“Tristan,” Kira croaked, her voice tight
with shame.

“No, Kira,” he said, looking up at her with
a small spark of hope in his eyes. “We’ll just use Aldrich and then
let him go. After he turns you, we can just leave. We’ll take your
mother and run away. He’ll never catch us, not with three to one
odds.” Tristan finished, excitement bubbling back up into face with
the idea that not everything was lost.

“She’s not my mother,” Kira said hastily.
The time for lying was past. She should have mentioned that fact
from the beginning, but it had slipped her mind when she started
talking about the dungeon.

Confusion brought Tristan’s brows together
and he shook his head, running his hand through his hair. “Kira,
how can you even say that?”

“I’m sorry, Tristan,” Kira said and reached
for his hand. “I’m so stupid. I should have started with that. My
real mother is dead—I’m sure of it. That woman is just a vampire
that looks a heck of a lot like her.”

“Kira,” Tristan said sternly, “I know it
might not be what you wanted, but she is your mother. I mean, I saw
that photograph in your locket. She looks exactly like her.”

“I know,” Kira said gently, understanding
his confusion. Kira had felt the same way at first, until she saw
hatred stirring behind that woman’s eyes. “But I read Aldrich’s
lips in that room, he said she was three hundred years old. She
can’t be my mother.”

“I think you misunderstood what he was
saying. It’s not that easy to read lips,” Tristan said, trying to
comfort her. But Kira’s patience was wearing thin. She knew Tristan
wouldn’t want to hear what she had to say, but he needed to
understand.

“I didn’t misunderstand, Tristan. She is not
my mother.”

“Then how does she know everything about
you? How does she look exactly like your mom?” He asked,
challenging her.

“I’m not sure,” Kira said truthfully, “but
you need to trust me when I say that that woman is not and never
was my mother.” Kira was breathing heavy when she finished talking.
She hadn’t realized that her voice had molded to stone—harsh, rigid
and demanding.

Tristan wasn’t moving. He was watching her.
His eyes were staring straight into her own, unmoving and
unblinking. Kira looked away, focusing on his hand tightly
clenching his knee and the muscles in his arms that were taut,
stuck in a flex. His hair moved in the breeze, catching Kira’s
glance and drawing it back up to his face, which had become even
paler than usual. His lips were drawn in a tight line, barely
visible. A fleeting thought entered Kira’s mind. She may never kiss
those lips again. And fear that that thought might be true made her
meet his stare, which had gone from hardened and angry to hurt and
betrayed.

“It was all a lie,” he whispered, waiting
for her to deny it.

But she couldn’t. Kira couldn’t even move.
She felt paralyzed.

“You never believed she was your mother. You
never thought that a conduit could turn. You never…” he trailed off
into silence, unable to finish the thought. His gaze flitted over
her features, jumped from her hands to her lips, from her hair to
her feet, but never back to her eyes. His mind was catapulting
ahead of his senses, taking him right to the truth and Kira sat
ridged, unable to provide the solace he was looking for. His eyes
were becoming frantic, moving faster than Kira could process, fast
enough to make them water, until they stopped, right on line with
her heart.

It was absolutely silent. The branches on
the tree stopped moving, the wind stopped churning, the ducks in
the pond stopped quacking, the water stopped rippling and even
Kira’s heart stopped beating.

Time ceased, as if it too understood that
there would be no going back after this moment.

“You never wanted to turn,” Tristan said,
squinting as if he couldn’t even believe what was coming out of his
mouth, “you never wanted to stay with me.”

And the bubble around them burst.

But no, Kira realized, the world had never
stopped, just her heart which was at that moment breaking apart
like shattered glass, cutting her insides as it fell.

“I can explain,” she said weakly. Tristan
stood up to leave and Kira scrambled to her feet. She jerked on his
hand, stopping him.

“I love you, Tristan—”

“Clearly not enough,” he said, unable to
turn around and meet her eyes.

“It’s not about that, Tristan. I just, it’s
me, what I am. I can’t give it up,” Kira mumbled, hoping he
understood the confused and partial sentences coming out of her
mouth.

“It’s not you, it’s me. Really?” He said,
angrily turning around to meet her pleading stare. “I get it. You
don’t want to become a monster, like me.” He looked down at his
hands and savagely said, “A killer. A predator.”

“No,” Kira cried, clutching his face to keep
him from looking away. He knocked her hands off and stepped back.
She tugged on his shirt, needing to hold some part of him so she
knew he wouldn’t disappear. “It’s nothing to do with not wanting be
a vampire. I’m a conduit. I can’t give up my powers, my fire. It’s
who I am and I can’t let it go. If I turned, Tristan, it wouldn’t
be me turning. It would be someone else, someone dead inside. You
wouldn’t love me like that and you know it.”

“But I would have,” he said sadly, the anger
gone from his voice. He stopped pulling against her grip and looked
down at her, holding her gaze to let his words sink in. “And ten
minutes ago I would have said there was nothing you could ever do
to make me feel differently, but I would have been wrong.”

Kira shrank from him, not wanting to hear
the words tumbling from his lips. But now it was Tristan who was
holding her, preventing her escape.

“If you had told me the truth, we could have
figured something out. We could have worked together. I would have
never let you walk away from me. But you lied. You dangled our
future, all of my hopes and dreams, right in front of my eyes like
some toy for me to helplessly chase, all so you could fool Aldrich.
All so you could learn his plan. But what about me? Did you ever,
for one second, stop and think about me?”

You were all I thought about, Kira wanted to
say. But instead, deflated, she just whispered, “Tristan.”

Kira couldn’t deny the truth. She had known
she was being mean and cruel to him, but she had done it anyway.
Everything he was saying was true. Kira had known this was the
inevitable end to her lie: that he would never forgive her. And
even now that all the pieces had come crumbling apart, Kira
wouldn’t change her actions.

She didn’t want to be a vampire. She needed
to know Aldrich’s plan. And she needed Tristan’s help. Something in
her gut told her that this was bigger than their relationship. It
was bigger than their future.

“I know that no sorry could ever make up for
what I’ve done, but I’ll say it anyway. I’m sorry, so so sorry,
that I’ve hurt you. That was never what I wanted, but there was no
other way to fool Aldrich, to stop him from killing both of us the
second he thought we wanted to leave.” Tristan’s expression
softened for a moment, as though he understood she was telling him
the truth. But it passed and his features hardened against her
again.

Kira stepped closer to Tristan and he didn’t
move. She brushed his hair back with her hand, unable to fight the
pain in her gut that it might be the last time she ran her fingers
through his silky black locks. Her other hand came up to rest on
his cheek, while her thumb ran slowly over his bottom lip. Reaching
on her tippy-toes, Kira gave him one last soft kiss.

“I do love you, Tristan,” she said and this
time he didn’t look away. “And I’m sorry that it may not be enough
to keep us together when the whole world wants us apart. But this
thing with Aldrich isn’t about that. There is a reason he wants to
turn me. There is something he is planning that is bigger than you
and me, and we need to figure out what that is. I need you. I can’t
do it on my own.”

Tristan closed his eyes and let his face
relax into her hand while he breathed deeply. He knew she was
right, that Aldrich had something dangerous planned. And if Kira
knew Tristan, no matter how hurt he was, he wouldn’t be able to
walk away from doing the right thing.