“Yes, Papa?”
“It is late. You should be sleeping.”
“But I’m not tired.”
“You had a difficult time. Your body needs to rest.”
“My body feels fine.” She bounced on the furs to demonstrate, making the firelight dance. “And I want to talk about the Star Lady. Did you see her stars, Papa? The ones on her neck and the rest of her body. They were so pretty. Like she swallowed moonlight and it got stuck inside her.”
His grip tightened on the net, and the cord snapped in his hands.
Moonlight.Yes. That was one way to describe it.
He could still see it when he closed his eyes—the small specks glowing against her pale skin, pulsing with colors that shifted and changed like a living aurora, betraying her emotions. He had touched that skin.
Just for a moment. Just steadying her before she fell. Just the brush of fingers when she’d handed Lilani over. It should have been nothing. A simple transfer of his daughter from stranger to father. Instead, it had felt like grabbing lightning.
Her skin had been cool—cooler than a human’s should be, closer to the temperature of the sea itself—but silk-smooth beneath his rough palms, sliding against his calluses in a way that made his nerve endings sit up and pay attention. And her scent…
He closed his eyes and inhaled slowly, trying to push the memory away. It didn’t work. It never worked. His Vultor senses were too acute, too persistent, too damned loyal to the information they’d gathered.
Cold sea and warm honey. Salt and sweetness. Clean and wild and utterly, impossibly female.
“Papa? Papa, are you listening?”
He forced his eyes open. Lilani had crawled closer while he was lost in his thoughts, her small face tilted up at him with concern.
“I’m listening.”
“You were making the face.”
“What face?”
“The sad face. The one you make when you think about Before.”
Before.His daughter’s word for everything that had happened before she came into his life. Before an impulsive night with a human female had turned into a nightmare. Before he’d been rejected by humans and Vultor alike. Before he’d been cast out of his pack and been forced to flee to the edge of civilization with a three-month-old child and nothing else.
“I was not thinking about Before.”
“Then you were thinking about the Star Lady.”
“Her name is Ariella.”
The correction came out before he could stop it,, and Lilani’s face split into a grin so wide it must have hurt.
“You do remember her! I knew it! Is she going to come back? Can she come back? I want to show her my shell collection. And my drawings. Oh! And the place where the crabs live, she would love the crab place, they have the big claws that go—” She made pinching motions with her fingers, complete with clicking sounds.
“She is not coming back.”
“Why not?”
“Because I told her not to.”
Her small face fell. “Why did you do that?”
“Because—” He stopped. How did you explain exile to a child? How did you make a six-year-old understand that the world was divided into categories—Vultor and human, pack and outsider, safe and dangerous—and that crossing those lines had consequences?
Because I am a Vultor and she is human. Because my kind does not trust her kind, and with good reason. Because my beast wants her with a hunger that terrifies me.
