The Lost Souls (The Holy Trinity #2.5)(38)

Biting her bottom lip, Carrie tilted her head to one side and hummed. “Umm…about three or four hours if you’re driving.”

He looked off into the distance. If they couldn’t find transportation, that meant they were in for a five-or six-day walk, and that was only if they walked nonstop at a decent pace with little to no breaks. Factor in Skins, and Marko was starting to feel shitty again.

“Hey,” Carrie said, turning to face him. Slipping her arm around his back, she rested her cheek on his chest. “We’ll be fine. We’ll find Trinity, we’ll find your clan, and…we’ll be fine.”

He didn’t need to rely on their connection to know she didn’t wholly believe her own words. He could see it on her face.

She was terrified.

And so was he.

But she was hopeful and that, in turn, made him hopeful.

Taking a deep breath, he squeezed her tightly before releasing her. “Let’s go, fat? mea, we’re losing daylight.”

“One more look,” she said, turning back to the farm.

He shook his head. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Why do you want to stand here and stare at my piece-of-shit trailer?”

Slanting her eyes in his direction, Carrie smiled. “Because I spent the happiest days of my life in that piece-of-crap trailer.”

At first, Marko wanted to laugh at her constant refusal to curse, but then as what she’d said actually registered in his brain, he found himself grabbing her and crushing his mouth to hers, feeling a hell of a lot more than just like for her.

“Where the f*ck did you come from?” he muttered against her mouth.

“Elderton,” she said simply, pointing to the east. “And I never want to go back.”

? ? ?

Carrie was pregnant. She was seventeen, sort of married to a twenty-nine-year-old man, and pregnant with his magical Gypsy baby. Strange didn’t even begin to cover it.

She wasn’t going to even try and touch upon the soul mate status. She understood what had happened—at least from Trinity’s point of view. Carrie knew everything the poor woman had gone through, courtesy of the piece of Gerik and Trinity’s soul inside her. But she wasn’t under the illusion that she even remotely understood how magic or nature or anything Gypsy-related worked.

Trinity had magic too, and judging from her memories, she’d hardly understood it either. The women who had possessed the soul before Trinity were nothing but a mass of tangled memories. There were so many, too many to sort through and try to come up with an answer that made any sort of sense.

The only knowledge Carrie could garner from the ones who’d passed before was that magic seemed to be as natural as breathing to every single one of them, except for Trinity, and now…her.

So, for the most part, Carrie kept her distance from the foreign soul inside her with one exception. Marko.

Their connection, although not their own, was a heady thing, and she couldn’t get enough of it.

Of him.

Of them.

It was also a cause for concern. What would happen to them if they lost the soul? Would they no longer feel this way? Now that she was pregnant, the thought of losing what she and Marko shared was terrifying.

And because she scared, she didn’t want to leave their trailer. She didn’t want to search out Trinity. She wanted to stay put where she knew they would be safe and, more importantly, together. And yet at the same time, she wanted…no, she needed to find Trinity. Trinity was inside her, a part of her. She had become Trinity in a way, experiencing everything that Trinity had—the loss, the pain, the fear, none of which Carrie could ignore.

“Fat?,” Marko whispered, pulling away from her mouth. “Stop. Regardless of what happens, we have to find her.”

She smiled sadly at him. She knew he’d heard what was really bothering her, not in words but in a much purer form of communication.

She also knew that it hadn’t been Marko who’d answered, not wholly. It had also been Gerik. Gerik had to find Trinity. It wasn’t Carrie’s face or body that Gerik wanted to see or touch. It was Trinity’s. And it wasn’t Marko who Trinity wanted. It was Gerik and…Xan.

Xan was…

For starters, he was hotter than anyone Carrie had ever dreamed up inside her head. He was tall and tanned, and his stature oozed physical strength. With his long black hair, divvied up into tens of thin dreads, his poignant shadowy eyes, and his striking cheekbones, he was darkly beautiful and terrifying in his intensity.

Marko was intense at times, but neither he nor Trinity’s Gerik could match the way Xan had looked at Trinity, had touched her, had made love to her. And Trinity had been so very, very in love with him.

Actually, Trinity was in love with both men, Gerik and Xan. She didn’t love one more than the other. The woman’s feelings for both men were horrifyingly equal. Carrie had never before thought it was possible to love two people with the same intensity, the same desperate wanting, the same…everything. But it was—at least for Trinity.

It was almost too much for Carrie to handle, even though the memories weren’t her own.

Carrie just wanted to be in love with one man—Marko. She didn’t want to be confused by the memories of a lost soul shared with a woman she’d met only briefly.

She didn’t want anyone else’s uncommonly complicated love life inside her. But she didn’t want to lose Marko either.