I grip my tattoos, feeling their pulse across my bare chest. Pain. Tension ratcheting toward a breaking point.
If she knew what she does to me. How uncontrolled she makes me. But I can’t let her know, because next time, I won’t stop.
My throat tightens. My heart hammers behind my ribs. God, I need her.
More than air. More than water.
Like she’s a second skin I could fit beneath.
But what would she become? And worse, what might we awaken?
When I go, I won’t look back. It’s better for her that way. But for me, it’ll be unbearable.
I cradle my head in my hands, staring up at other worlds. Wondering which glittering orb my people came from.
Distant thunder rolls across the Starborn Range, where the Sentinels first set up camp. Where they remain, I’d wager.
“See those hills, darlin’?” I say to Tempest. “My father came from there, feral and mean. Centuries of loneliness bearing down on him until he cracked. Couldn’t take anymore. Caved to temptation and destroyed my mother.”
No fairytale ending. Just violence and taking.
The tattoo pulses beneath my flesh, a mark from birth, the curse of satisfying otherworldly lust with human flesh.
“But was that it?” I wonder to the stars. “Lust alone or something else?”
Tempest snickers, ears flicking.
“I’ve spent my whole life apologizing for that crime, Tempest. One I never committed. I suppose it’s no different than humans, bearing the original sin of Adam and Eve. A generational curse. An abomination. I thought I was better than my father. That given half the chance, I wouldn’t do the same thing.” I sigh low, mind wrapping around the thought.
But now I know more disciplined men have already fallen.
Ash, of all people. The emblem of restraint… unlike me.
I close my eyes for a moment, letting my thoughts wander far away to hazelnut curls hung in a loose braid over one shoulder. Pink cheeks smattered with freckles. A button nose and dancing brown eyes that look like sunshine in human form.
One taste. My fingers find my lips, tracing over them. One.
But I’m not like Ash. And I don’t have Mags’s discipline. I’d wreck Eliza if I ever touched her. That look in her eyes, the simmer behind it, says she’d welcome destruction.
Tempest’s tail swishes, her teeth cropping verdant cheatgrass low.
I lift my head, eye my mount. “Should leave tomorrow, old friend. Better that way.”
But my mind still races with all the loose ends I haven’t finished tying up. Unmended fences on the south perimeter. Chicken coop in need of patching and reinforcing from countless bobcat attacks. Irrigating pastures, baling hay, weed control.
“I could stay ten years and never make a dent in the list.” Tempest doesn’t answer. Neither do the mountains.
Not your place, Kael. You weren’t made for staying anywhere.
But wandering forever? That’s hardly a plan.
Cursed blood. Cursed lineage. Should end with you… and Ash.
The thought hits hard. A wedding in two weeks. I should stick around to stop it. But another day with this woman, and I’ll break. I know it.
Somewhere between sleep and awareness, a vision hits me of a tongueless cow with no organs, no blood. Splayed beneath a tree, stiff and recriminating. Pointing to every sin of the first ancestor, the one who took too much.
I awaken with a start, perspiration lining my forehead and chest. Overhead, a shooting star streaks past. I watch it gain speed, evaporate into unending dark—unending space. The symbol from the field flashes in my mind.
