Affinity

Chapter 10 - Nathan

Nathan stormed off from the waterfall soaking wet and seething with anger and frustration. He wanted to get away from the confusion and the argument, but most of all he was desperate to get away from her. He felt like a fool for having stayed as long as he had for a witch who he should have regarded as little more than a waste of his time and energy. She was a Celandine spirit witch under the guardianship of Nicholas Verden and promised to the fortress. He should have realized she would be untouchable.

Still, he had been unable to prevent himself from seeing something there, from thinking that she might be different. And indeed, she was different. But the only differences that seemed to matter to her were the same ones that mattered to everyone else: race and stature.

She had made it insultingly clear that she was different from him, even better than him. But she was no different at all from everyone else in this world who had rejected him for not fitting in, everyone who perpetuated the post-war tension, everyone whose wealth and position mattered more to them than kindness. It should have been no surprise. Her rejection stung, but if he was honest with himself, he shouldn't have expected anything else. He had no business involving himself in the affairs of witches, especially smart, witty, attractive ones who played with his too-human-for-his-own-good emotions with their deeply mysterious eyes, soft porcelain skin, and perfectly kissable lips.

He cursed into the wind as he blew through the thickening forest. He certainly shouldn't have kissed her. He should have controlled his impulses and forgone the foolish notion that she reciprocated his developing affection enough to see beyond the boundaries she claimed to protest and finally decide to take a risk on something. It had been an ambush of desperation. It had been a mistake.

He slowed his pace and came to a stop, his jaw tensed and his teeth clenching. When he finally forced himself to stop reflecting on what he should or should not have done, he remembered the fact that she had failed to reveal the whole truth of her pending duties at the coven, and his anger flared up again. Her disclosure was the one thing that might have allowed him to forgive her for everything else, but she had chosen to keep her secrets rather than trust him with them. While she had warned him that it wasn't safe for him in Paris, she hadn't confessed the exact job she would apparently be carrying out.

In his hours of tailing Lexander and sometimes other coven members as he discovered them, he had learned that Aaralyn was set to lead a raid on the nearby Atilla nest the following night. Theirs had been one of the first nests to grow frustrated with the tightening of the hold the witches had on the vampires, and their open protests of the hunting boundaries were no small secret in his world. There was an ever-increasing number of nests that were following suit, using the Atilla as models for their own, oftentimes more violent, rebellions.

Nathan, too, agreed that the way the treaty was being interpreted these days by groups like the Celandine had led to unrealistic and unfair restrictions on his kind, so he understood the need to protest. It was true that the Atilla gave no regard to the hunting boundaries, but they had not hunted humans or witches for centuries. Their protests had always been of a mostly peaceful nature. Skipping over boundaries just for animal blood was not an offense that merited a full-out ambush.

There had been no serious crimes committed, at least not real ones. He couldn't speak about the false evidence of fictional crimes that the Celandine might have planted to gain permission for the raid. He was far from certain that the fortress authorities were even aware of the raid with all of the off-the-books aggressions the witches had been committing lately. If he was a betting man—and he most definitely was on occasion—he'd lay down the last of his stolen coins that this raid was most certainly off the books. After all, with the vampire elders presiding over the council alongside the key witch covens, it was highly doubtful that the Elders would condone such harsh punishments against their own kind.