Avoiding his gaze, I summon the strength to finally put the inevitable out there. “I need to tell you something.” I force myself to meet his gaze. “About you and me… and it’s bad…. Something your father told me while I was at the Wastelands.” As soon as I mention his father, hatred mixed with vulnerability masks his face. “He told me that if you and I,” I motion between us repeatedly, stalling. “If we… if we feel too much for each other… fall in love then the star’s power will eventually fade and die and you and I… you and I will fade away and die right along with it.” Wow, that hurt more than I thought. A deep, tender ache begins to grow inside my chest, as if my heart is hollowing out.

He sits there for what feels like an eternity and I swear I actually can see when the lights go off in his eyes. “Well, okay then.” He gets to his feet.

“That’s all you have to say?” I follow after him as he strides out of the room, determined not to look at me. “After what I just told you.”

He pauses, turning to face me, eyes cold as the day we first met. “What do you want me to say?” he asks. “We can’t be near each other, so we won’t.”

“I never said we couldn’t be near each other. Just that we couldn’t feel…” The word was so hard to say, so foreign, never felt.

“Love,” he finishes for me. “It’s all the same.” With that, he walks away and this time I let him, wondering if he meant that when he was around me, he does feel love.

I let Alex be for the next few hours, figuring it’s probably for the best. Let him be irritated with me. Still, it’s hard being in the same room with him, knowing that all those intense, passionate, in-the-heat-of-the-moments were going to be no more.

“Is this really necessary?” I ask Alex the same question I’ve been asking him for a while. We’re in the garage, the doors closed, the window blocked by a shelf so the only light is coming from the ceiling and the only way to see what’s going on in here is by entering the garage, which is good, since if a neighbor or something saw the scene in front of me, they’d more than likely call the cops.

Alex shrugs and then cracks his knuckles. “Maybe.” It’s hotter than hell in here, musty, stuffy. He has his shirt off, sweat dripping down his chest, his jeans riding low on his hips, giving me a full few of the muscles carving his midsection.

It’s almost like he’s taunting me, ha ha this is what you can’t have anymore. So I try to stop staring at him and concentrate on what’s going on, but I’m not sure it makes me feel any better. Despite my loathing for Nicholas, seeing him tied up and being tortured is a bit difficult to watch. After Alex dragged him back to the house, he bound his hands with rope and then secured the rope to a beam that ran along the ceiling in the garage, pulling it tight enough that Nicholas is forced to stand on his tiptoes or hang from his arms. His lip is cut and bleeding, his skin is scraped on his side, and blood covers various parts of his body. His sandy blond hair is damp with sweat and his shoes fell off somewhere.

“Tell me what you know about what happened back on the beach,” Alex demands as he paces in front of Nicholas.

Nicholas laughs but it’s laced with pain. “Never.”

Alex cranes his arms back and without warning, punches Nicholas in the stomach. “You better talk or it’s going to get a hell of a lot worse.”

Nicholas grunts, his back curved from the impact. He breathes in and out before speaking again, forcing a light tone. “You know, it’s actually starting to tickle.”

Alex clocks him again, this time in the ribs. I cringe at the cracking noise, like bones breaking. “I could do this all day,” Alex tells Nicholas as he brings his arm up and slams his fist into Nicholas’s jaw.

This continues for what feels like forever and I watch, wondering if I’m any better for doing nothing. Just when I’ve come close to talking myself into leaving, the door opens up and Aislin enters. She has a handful of grapes and offers me some as if we’re snacking and watching a movie.

Still, my belly is empty and I gratefully take some. “We should do something,” I tell her, popping a grape into my mouth.

She looks at Alex as he takes another swing. “Like what? I hate to say it, but this needs to be done.”

“Isn’t there another way?” I ask, eating another grape. “Like maybe you could do a spell to get him to confess.”

She finishes off the last of the grapes. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Didn’t Alex tell you? I lost my spell book.”

“What? How?”

She shrugs, wiping her fingers on the sides of her jeans. “I’m not sure, but while you were passed out, I was sitting there looking through it and suddenly it disappeared. I have no idea what could have happened to it other than maybe another powerful witch did a Power of Possession spell and took it. Although what the hell they’d want with it is beyond me.”

“Maybe it has a spell in there that theirs didn’t.”

“Maybe, but I doubt it,” she says. “It was actually a pretty typical spell book, well at least from what I understand.”

An image of a blond haired girl with blue eyes, wearing gloves and a wicked grin, holding Aislin’s spell book pops into my head. The girl is with Laylen, talking to him like they’re old friends, laughing as she tosses her hair from her shoulder. But as quickly as the images appears, it dissolves.

“Have you heard anything from Laylen by chance?” I massage the sides of my head with my fingertips. I think I might be exhausted and in need of some mental rest.

Aislin shakes her head, folding her arms over her chest. “Not yet.”

“What about my mom?”

“No… Well, she checked in about an hour ago. Said she was in town and was going to keep looking.”

“I worry about her being alone, especially since she just got out of The Underworld.”

Aislin smiles sympathetically. “Don’t worry. She’s a Keeper and we’re taught to recover quicker than most.”

“Mentally recover?” I frown over at Alex with doubt. “Because it seems like he might be proving that theory wrong.”

“That’s just Alex.” She pats my arm in a friendly manner. “And trust me, this is much better than how he used to be.”

Alex continues to beat up Nicholas with no progress until finally I can’t take it anymore. I march forward and snag Alex’s arm before he can hit Nicholas again. His skin nearly scalds mine, mainly because the anger inside him is causing the sparks to crackle like fire. But I refuse to let him go and instead catch his eye. “Look, I know he’s annoying and everything, but still… killing him isn’t going to help us and beating him up isn’t getting him to talk.”

“Back off Gemma,” Alex says through gritted teeth as he scowls down at my hand on his arm.

I free his arm. “No.” I lean forward and whisper, “Look, I get that you’re pissed off at me for what I told you, but take it out on me not him.”

“You pity him.” He’s baffled. “Seriously?”

I shake my head. “No, I just hate watching all this pointless violence and I don’t want you doing something that’s going to make you hate yourself. Like kill him.”

“I wouldn’t hate myself if I did that,” he assures me., wiping the sweat from his brow. “In fact, I’d be glad.”

“Don’t do that,” I tell him, gently taking his hand. “Don’t put up that tough guy douche bag façade again and go back to being a douche.”

He stares at me intensely for a moment and I think I might be getting through to him, but then he’s glaring at me and yanking his hand away. “Don’t touch me.”

It stings just a little, but I think I know enough to understand that he might just be hurting and this is his way of dealing with it. So I just stare at him, because arguing is pointless. The longer it goes on, the more stifling things get. The more the electricity coils in places it shouldn’t. The more my fingers beg to touch him, rip the remaining clothes from his body.