Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 90897 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 454(@200wpm)___ 364(@250wpm)___ 303(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 90897 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 454(@200wpm)___ 364(@250wpm)___ 303(@300wpm)
When she was done, she asked, “What?”
“Nothing.” He shrugged. “I just like looking at you.”
A shiver rippled down her spine.
It would be so easy to ignore all the warning signs and just give in to the attraction that had sparked between them from the first moment they met.
Yet Echo wasn’t sure she could handle any more complications right now.
“We should sleep.” She brushed past him and hurried into the twin bed.
Elijah followed her out after a few seconds and got into the adjacent bed. “Good night. Or good morning, really.”
“Good night, Elijah.”
Her senses told her he was still awake a few minutes later, but the pull of sunrise dragged Echo under, and she slipped into the dreamworld.
17
The need for blood was a mix between hunger and thirst. Unfortunately, Echo woke up with it when the sun set the next day. Her skin felt dry and sensitive as she readied in the small bathroom, her throat drier than the Atacama Desert, and her stomach clenched dully. Elijah seemed to sense a change in her mood and kept looking at her as if trying to work out what was wrong.
Echo didn’t want to tell him. She didn’t want to remind him that beneath her human facade lay a caged monster.
Just hold on, she told herself. They had another two days to get through and then she’d ask MacLennan if she could hunt.
That’s if he didn’t kill her and Elijah on sight for stepping on pack lands.
The need didn’t make her irritable per se, but she did feel on edge. In a desire to curb it, she ordered extra sides at the restaurant they dined in before crossing the English Channel in the Eurotunnel.
“Are you sure there’s nothing wrong?” Elijah asked as he paid for their meal. He was expounding a lot of extra energy to glamour himself and Echo whenever they were in public. Him being recognized would be the end of all their plans.
“I’m fine,” she insisted quietly. “Just eager to get to Scotland.”
“We’ll have to stop twice again, remember. I’m thinking we stop outside Darlington in the morning and then Stirling the next morning. Just to be safe.”
Echo merely nodded.
At customs for the tunnel, Elijah made the customs officer see passports when they had none. He muttered under his breath about “hating doing that,” but Echo didn’t bother reminding him their lives depended on it.
As Elijah drove onto the train carriage to park on the shuttle, Echo was distracted from her need for blood and the fact that she was slowly beginning to starve.
Because it suddenly occurred to her, they were about to travel under water.
A tightness banded around her chest.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
She told herself revealing her past was just a way to forget about the hunger gnawing at her gut. It had nothing to do with wanting Elijah to be reminded that she was once human. That she wasn’t just a monster who starved without blood.
“When I was fourteen, I was at boarding school in Canada. It was an all-girls’ school, but our neighbor was an all-boys’ school. On the weekends, we’d get together with the boys. A group of us went swimming in a nearby lake. There was a girl, she was a year older. She hated me because the boy she liked, liked me instead. I didn’t know it at the time. I thought she was trying to befriend me. She and three of her friends invited me farther out into the lake to hang out with them. When we were out of sight of everyone else, they grabbed me and held me under the water.”
“Jesus fuck,” Elijah cursed. “Evil little witches.”
“Just human, unfortunately. The boy she liked was suspicious about her taking me away. He and his friends had come after us. By the time they pulled me up, I was unconscious. He gave me CPR and saved my life. His name was Hayden.” She remembered him fondly, though Echo usually tried not to think about Hayden. He was part of the life she’d lost and could never get back. But it didn’t hurt so much to think of him now. Echo wouldn’t wonder at why.
“What happened to the girls who tried to drown you?”
“Slap on the wrist from the school,” she replied dryly. “Their families donated too much money to the school for expulsion or pressing charges. I got my revenge in the end. I dated Hayden for two years until my … until William found out and made me break it off.”
“It … it sounds like you cared about him.”
“I did. He was my first everything. But it had to end because I knew it couldn’t go anywhere. We had no future when William was planning to turn me at twenty.”
“I’m sorry.”
Echo turned to him. “I used to hate thinking about him because it reminded me of everything I gave up. But it doesn’t hurt anymore. Not everyone gets to have a childhood sweetheart. I’m grateful now that I had him for as long as I did.”