lie to yourself, but I am trying to be more honest with you, so don’t insist I lie to you too.”
His hand slammed down on the table and his anger spiked, filling the air around them.
Tenzin carefully set down her notes and raised her eyes. “Do not threaten me.”
His amnis shimmered like heat off a desert plateau. “If I’m angry, it’s because you took the most important choice in my life away from me.”
“No.” She shook her head. “That is not why.”
“Fuck you!” He stood and walked away from the table, but there was little room to move, even in a larger-than-average travel caravan.
Cursing was unusual for Ben. At least when he was arguing with her. He was balancing on a very thin edge.
“Benjamin, immortality does not change who we are; it only reveals it.” She drew a careful breath. “You were angry when you were young. You were angry as a child. You were angry as a man. Now you are angry as a vampire. Do not blame this on me.”
Violent energy rolled off him in waves. “I do blame you.”
“I know you do.”
“So why the fuck did you do it, Tenzin?” His rage exploded, the anger mixed with sorrow as his eyes turned glassy and red. “You took away the one person I needed to get through this.”
His pain made her physically hurt. It brought her back to the night she’d flown over the ocean with his dying mortal body in her arms. The memory of rage and desperation threatened to reach up and choke her, but she forced it back.
It is not about you; it is about him.
“I’m here,” she said. “I never went anywhere.”
“But you ruined everything.” He gripped his hair in both his hands. “Because even if I’m okay with this now, I can’t trust you again. And I needed to trust you, Tenzin. I loved you. You were my best friend and my partner, and nothing makes sense without you.”
His pain stabbed at her, sharper—keener—than her own. “I’m still here.”
“Everyone wanted to know” —he began to pace— “why doesn’t Ben want to be a vampire? What’s his hang-up? Why is he being so stubborn?”
Tenzin let him rage.
“Do you know why?” He turned and shouted in her face. “I didn’t want to be like you! Do you understand that? I didn’t want to be a vampire because I didn’t want to be cold and unfeeling and selfish. Like. You.”
Tenzin swallowed the hurt. Ben was young and his emotions were going to be erratic; his control was on a razor-thin edge.
“I am selfish,” she said softly. “And I can be cold. But I am not unfeeling. And being with you has made me less of all those things.”
His smile was bitter. “Oh, I’m so glad I could be part of your modern humanization program.”
She forced herself to speak. “I will never apologize for taking you to my father, but I am sorry that immortality has forced you to face the things you’ve been trying to hide from yourself. I know that is not easy or comfortable.”
“Fuck you. You’re so full of shit. You’ll blame everyone and everything else to avoid your own responsibility.”
“No. I have never done that.” She considered her answer. “I have never done that about anything as important as you.”
“You’re a liar and a thief.” He stepped away. “And I can’t believe I thought we could be… more. That we could get past you betraying me. Betraying us.”
“I am a thief, but I am not lying to you.” She swallowed the ache in her throat. “And I am here when you need me. Always.”
“I don’t need you.” He walked to the door. “And when this is finished, I want you out of my life. For real and for good this time. Just get the fuck away.”
Ben flew to the forest next to the camp, hovering in the night sky and letting the air soothe his anger. It whispered along his skin, petting him and reassuring him.
Angry? He wasn’t angry. Okay, he’d had a shitty childhood, but he hit the jackpot when Giovanni adopted him, and he’d put that in the past.
His temper leeched into the darkness; the air absorbed it, enveloped it, and whispered it away. He closed his eyes and imagined being curled in Tenzin’s loft in New York, her slight body pressed to his side, her low voice reading from a familiar story.
There was once a witch who desired to know everything. But the wiser a witch is, the harder she