“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “It surprised me, is all.”
Skye clicks her tongue. “Okay, but how about when something else goes wrong?”
“What do you mean?”
She makes a circular gesture with her hand. “You know, when I mess something else up, or our progress with the Wi-Fi network or the protection spell gets derailed. Will you blame me for it? For a lot of reasons, I’m the most convenient scapegoat.”
Trust Skye to get right to the difficult part of this conversation.
“You weren’t a scapegoat,” I hedge. “It was just a case of logical deduction. You asked your sister to send you the things you left behind. She did that, and a tracker arrived along with your stuff.” I shrug. “It wasn’t a big leap to think that the device was yours—or that you were complicit in bringing it here.”
Her cheeks turn a deeper red. “But that’s just it. If I wasn’t a witch and an outsider, would you give me the benefit of the doubt? Itoldyou, right at the beginning, that I’d never seen the thing before.”
What she’s talking about is trust, of course, and I want to give it to her. But every time I lean in that direction, I am faced with the fact that I was chosen to be the leader of a clan of sea dragons. Their well-being and safetymustcome above everything else: any personal feelings, friends, or lovers. If I fail in that, I’m not worthy of holding that title at all. And maybe the community would be better off with someone like Devlin Ward at its head.
No.
My mind rebels immediately. Never that.
He left the village last night and took his fishing boat. It’s a fairly new one the clan helped him buy—and he still hasn’t paid off the loan. If it means I don’t have to see him again, I’ll make sure we cover that deficit in another way.
I am worried about finding someone else to take his place. In a village as small as ours, every adult, and often teenager, has their role. We have several more boats moored in the bay, but they’re only little ones, not enough to bring in enough food for the entire clan that mostly lives off fish. I’ll have my hands full with clan business, and I can’t get distracted.
“I don’t know,” I answer honestly. “I know you had nothing to do with that tracker. But I need to protect my people.”
“And that means pushing me away.” Skye’s words are a statement, not a question. She ducks her chin and folds her arms over her chest.
Yes.No.
“I’m not pushing you away. But there’s no point in pursuing something that could never lead to anything more. My clan needs an impartial leader, and I can’t be that for them if I’m entangled with you. I don’t want to lead you on. It wouldn’t be fair to either one of us.” I make my voice as cool as possible. “Our business relationship is all I can offer you.” I need to impress this on her, or she’ll keep chipping away at my defenses until they crumble, and I can’t afford that. Not now, not ever.
Skye presses her lips together, and for a horrifying moment, I think she might cry. She pulls herself together, visibly putting up her walls. The warmth disappears from her brown eyes, and her face goes pale.
“Okay,” she says. “You win. I’ll keep you updated on my progress.”
Then she turns on her heels and stalks up toward the Lodge. She disappears from sight behind a cluster of dark rocks, and the sound of the waves swallows her footsteps soon after. I imagine the lingering scent of her being blown away by the sea breeze and take a deep breath to clear my mind.
There. It’s what I wanted, what I needed to do. I can focus now on protecting the village from outside threats as well as bringing together the people who followed Ward in his idiotic quest to remove Skye. I have work to do, and I’ll need all my wits about me to succeed.
But there’s a bitter aftertaste in my mouth, a reminder that I didn’t tell her all the truth. Skye said I won, so why don’t I feel like a winner?
Seven
Skye
The conversation with Aiden—ourargument, if it can be called that—weighs on my heart. The memory of his frustrated expression is present in everything I do that day and the next, and I can’t shake the feeling of being unwanted. Again. I thought we were past that, but obviously not.
Jack and Ty sense that something happened, and they ask questions I can’t answer. Do I know what’s going on between us? Nothing, that’s what. The man has decided he can’t be with me because it’ll look bad for him as a clan leader. And I get that. What’s worse, I respect his decision to put his people first, because a good leader should do that. But I won’t throw myself at someone who doesn’t truly want me.
Except I wanthim. It pisses me off so much that I allowed myself to fall for him. Despite all the warning bells, his actions toward me were just kind enough that my brain has convinced itself that he cares.
Well, he doesn’t.
What I hate the most is that this is affecting my relationship with the two men who genuinely want to be with me. So I pull myself out of the funk by force and prepare dinner for them, cooking instead of Ty for once. We spend a lovely evening snacking on elk meat empanadas and watchingStar Wars: A New Hope, which Ty has never seen before despite the fact that Jack is a massive, nerdy fan of the franchise.
It’s at night that the doubts creep in again. Not just about Aiden, but the fact that I endangered the entire clan by bringing in the box my sister sent. I haven’t spoken to Aiden about it—I haven’t spoken to him at all these past two days—but we need to get to the bottom of it. The boxes were here in Amber Bay long enough for the GPS device to send out the coordinates before Aiden smashed it, I’m sure of that. It’s unclear what the witches will do with the information.
There’s one bright side to the whole debacle: Alice has no reason to believe that I’m living with sea dragons. Nothing in our communications since I left San Diego has been about that. She would likely have concluded that I was working for humans. Sea dragons aren’t even supposed to exist anymore, because witches eradicated them in the last bloody skirmishes in the twentieth century.
