He was tall, towering over Yukina with broad shoulders and a wide chest that pointed to a life devoted to training.
Despite his size, he was trying not to seem dangerous—and doing a bad job of it.
Selene suspected that the reason for that was his eyes. They were the first thing you noticed about him. A gold that was striking against his light brown skin.
He watched Selene with the kind of intensity that said he was trying to peel back her skin to study what lay under it.
“See something interesting?” he asked.
Selene played with the handle of her cup. The revelation of secrets was a delicate thing.
Too much and you risked destroying the very thing you hoped to help. Too little and nothing ever changed.
Selene needed change. They all did.
Very well. A hint then.
“I knew a boy with eyes like yours once.” Selene pretended not to notice the subtle tension that entered the man’s stance or the way everything about him sharpened.
The man tried to stare Selene down, a predator in that moment before it struck. “And what happened to that boy?”
Selene occupied herself with her cup and the liquid inside, done with this topic for now. “Some stones should be left unturned.”
Yukina and the man exchanged a quiet look before Yukina took the lead in the conversation once again.
“You’re very different from her.”
“No one is like Kira. She is unique.”
“You sound admiring.”
“Do I?” Selene swirled the liquid in her cup. “Perhaps that is because I am. She is the best of us.”
“There are more then?” Yukina asked, as if she didn’t already know after Selene’s hint earlier.
“There are.”
“Why won’t they return to us?”
Selene couldn’t tell if the ache in Yukina’s voice was real or not. In a sense, it didn’t matter.
The forty-three were aware that the Tuann yearned for those they lost in an event they called the Sorrowing. It was a time when hundreds of their children were taken from them and hundreds more of their people were killed.
It was a devastating blow for a people who reproduced extremely slowly. The mental bonds the Tuann made with their loved ones made it doubly so. When those ties were severed in such a traumatic fashion, it caused the slow decline of those left behind.
Those Tuann who couldn’t recover perished as they faded away from sorrow.
Selene was sure it felt like a dream to discover not all of those children had died. It was a gift the Tuann would never walk away from. They didn’t realize the cost their former children had already paid for survival. The nightmares they still lived with.
That hell had tempered the two youngest, Kira and Jin. Like phoenixes, they’d risen from the ashes of their beginnings.
The rest of the forty-three weren’t so lucky. They were broken.
Monsters—better left alone.
Selene feared the Tuann wouldn’t accept who the forty-three had to become in order to survive—or what was done to them.
Perhaps because of their long lives there was a rigidity to their social structure. And the stolen children would never be bound again.
