A tickle at the back of his throat.
The snag under his ribs, reeling him in like a fish on the line.
He followed the tug, leading to the door of a tribesman’s hut—one he didn’t know beyond brief glimpses.Saer only recalled pale, gray eyes clouded by impending blindness, white hair, and wrinkled brown skin.
Saer entered the abode unannounced, stepping to the human’s bedside.The old man lay on his back, lips parted halfway while he dreamt.His worn breaths rasped in and out of his lungs.His skin ran hot with fever.Fever means sick.
Yet, a different kind of energy, separate from heat, surrounded the human.Blinking and squinting, like trying to distinguish white mist from gray fog, Saer saw the essence, tasted it at the back of his throat.He reached for the buzzing vapor, his hand passing over the sleeping man’s body.
It flowed straight through his fingers like slippery air.Visible but untouchable.Barely a breath away, but he couldn’t inhale it.
Yet, heknew.
This was it, wasn’t it?What his maker needed, what Lucifer asked for.This would allow him to return to Hell.
To hear Neyu’s voice again.
Saer turned his gaze to the human’s face.A hum filled his ears, layered upon the elder’s rattling breaths.
The old man blinked awake with tired, milky eyes.Running his tongue over the cracks in his parched lips, the man opened his mouth as though he meant to speak.
Saer didn’t say a word.He stood poised, all the muscles in his neck and back coiled tight, ready to lunge.
The hum in the room built itself into a rhythm, a music unlike anything Saer’d ever heard.His skin itched, invisible waves of energy standing his neck hairs on end.He reached a second time.Once more, it passed through him.
Frustration simmered behind Saer’s ribs, tightening his chest, quickening his breath along with the old man’s.The energy wasthere.What his maker sought floated around that room, and he couldn’t harness it!
Saer snarled and snatched at the essence once more.Again, his arms, hands, and fingers flew through it.Desperate, he turned to his heat sense and wrenched, thieving the man’s febrile warmth in the span of a breath.
As it had done to those first humans, the sick man’s lips darkened to dusky blue…and his mouth curved into a subtle but relieved smile.
The elder relaxed, and a final exhale whispered out of his throat.His chest didn’t rise again.
Silence.
The next instant, the room expanded, thenexplodedwith the energy Saer sought.It broke away from the old man’s body, blinding Saer.Crying out, he snatched frantically for it.He pulled with his heat sense but found no further purchase.Quick as it grew and burst, the disturbance faded away, like that day when he’d killed his first human after they attacked him.The memory played like a disgraceful tease in his mind.
Before long, Saer grabbed for nothing.He didn’t stop trying until far after.
The old man didn’t stir.Whatever energy he’d housed had gone.Frustration and fury bubbled under Saer’s skin, in his chest, a seething pressure behind his eyes.He was better than this.He wouldnotfail!
“Frenzied Hellsfire.”The biting curse left Pride’s lips in the first language he’d ever known—Lucifer’s language.It sounded rough and unpracticed on his human tongue, and didn’t ease his disappointment and defeat.
Saer gritted his teeth, then left the hut.
Tribesmen carried the body of the old man with respectful tenderness out of his hut the next day.The man appeared to sleep, but when Saer re-tapped his heat sense for warmth, he only sensed the bodies that transferred his lifeless husk.The elder’s blood, organs, flesh, and bones remained still and cold as the surrounding air.
Saer’s frown deepened, but he said nothing.People from the village looked on in observance, many with tears streaming down their cheeks.
Was this sadness a normal occurrence when faced with this end of life?Why so, when the phenomenon was inevitable for these fragile creatures?
A quiet sigh to his right reminded Saer he didn’t stand alone.
“Gaugii was old and sick.But it’s always weird to watch it happen.”Ruki spoke in a quiet, reserved voice.He didn’t cry, but a sadness lined the edges of his lips, all the same.
Understanding but half the words, Saer remained silent as he watched.That man, hours before, had been filled with heat and energy, that special element he needed to seize for his maker.He knew it.And he couldn’t harness it.
Who knew when the opportunity would arise again?The question weighed heavily on his shoulders, and he fought to keep himself from growling.Though, if he stayed angry, he could ignore how much his heart ached to see Neyu again.
