I can feel waves of her anger roll toward me as I leave without another glance backward. But mixed with it is something else that interests me more—fear. Not for herself, but for somebody close to her.
Someone she doesn’t want me to know about.
Tempest moves beneath me, muscles flexed and powerful. As we pick up speed, a breeze ruffles my hair, too scruffy and long.
In the distance, dark clouds hover over the Starborn, dark and menacing. Like always. Like every day since my first.
Tempest tears across the valley, feeling it, too. Channeling the energy from the distant mountains, the thickness always hanging in the air.
Beneath my button-down shirt and duster, my tattoos pulse. Not uncomfortable, but more heated. Enough for me to register it as a new sensation.
“Damn mountains won’t ever give up their secrets,” I mutter to myself, riding into the afternoon gusts that smell of sage and distant rain.
As I near the Wakefield Ranch, my throat tightens and pulse throbs. Memories wash back over me. Not of Ancients taunting from the mountains—Sentinels some call them.
No, this danger lurked much closer… in Raven’s Ridge. Where people like Alistair Wakefield made hunting Wildbloods an art form.
For the good of the town. For the good of humanity… and its purity.
Because people like me—the ones whispered about around campfires—are amalgamations. Blasphemy.
Something else rides under these thoughts now—low, insistent. Not tied to memories. Instead, something new like the change in the mountains’ song.
Chapter
Five
KAEL
It comes like a cold sweat. An ache between blood and bone. A thrum buried beneath flesh and light.
First one throb. Then another.
Tempest feels it, too, head rearing back as if she’s been struck by lightning. My legs grip her sides, steadying her. A hand drops to stroke her neck.
“Shh,” I croon. “You’re good, girl. Steady now.”
My sidearm feels heavy in the ancient holster at my hip, and my leg presses back reflexively, feeling the reassuring long gun scabbard behind me. Just in case.
The air crackles. This place too alive for someone like me—the lifeless, though not yet dead—to enter.
Beneath a large cottonwood, the rocks sound different. Can’t explain how. Maybe not meant for me to hear. But I do anyway.
I dismount, boots grinding across reddish gravel. Then I kneel, pressing a hand to the ground and feeling what it remembers.
It aches with ancient redress. Wildblood hunts. My brother, Clemson, and his woman, Ruby.
And something else. More recent.
I bow my head, dig deeper into the vibration between atoms… until metal threads the air.
Not flesh and blood. Or the kind of thing that breathes. Something animated by ghosts… or whatever passes for them.
Something taken. Killed by things that don’t live the way we do.
My eyes rise to the distant Starborn Range, air palpable with the menace done here.
By malice? No.
