CHAPTER SEVEN Torrance
“Hello?”
I heard the word, and it took me a moment to realize I was the one who’d said it. It had come out as some kind of automatic response to my returning consciousness. Like I’d been lost in a dark room and had heard the sound of somebody moving nearby.
“Hello?” I said again, confusion muddling my mind. The last thing I remembered was...
The tree and the snow and the explosions and the engines and...
They’re gone.
Where everything had been hazy a moment before, it all became clear, crashing in on me and shattering in sharp fragments. The fighting, the avalanche. The alien figure who’d clawed his way out of a stony sky, defying everything I thought I knew about space and air and atoms.
My eyes wrenched open as adrenaline rattled my limbs. I shook violently, teeth chattering as my eyes focused on... On...?
Him.
Cold air clawed down my throat on my gasping inhale. A face, mere inches from my own, filled my vision, broad and alien and vicious. A gaze like electric blue fire seared me. Stunned, I looked down and away. I shuddered violently when I realized just how close this creature was. He was holding me up, one massive fist scrunched around the front of my parka, the other at the side of my hood, holding my head in place.
I stared mutely at the fist holding my parka, blinking over and over, trying to figure out if he really did have glowing stars webbed all over his hand and bare arm, or if that was just some trick of my oxygen-starved brain. That arm connected to a bulging, muscled shoulder, leading into a bare, mostly human-looking male torso. Except that it wasn’t human. Because the skin was a deep, stony bronze colour, shot through with glowing blue veins of starlight, glittering points of light clustered like constellations everywhere I looked.
And the size marked him as non-human, too. No human man I’d ever seen had shoulders that broad, muscles that tightly packed on a towering frame. The only reason his face had appeared level with mine when I’d opened my eyes was because he’d been forcing my head back with his hand while simultaneously bending down to me.
That hand tightened, as if responding to my thoughts. He wrenched my head back again, my neck craning, until our gazes met once more.
A small, wordless moan tore from my throat. Even though I’d made the sound, I couldn’t quite name the source of it. Fear, maybe. Pain.
Or shock at the obliterating, savage beauty of his eyes.
They weren’t just bright and blue, like I’d thought at first. They were mostly a deep and inescapable black. The blue light I’d noticed came from the iris or the pupil or... Whatever the fuck it was. His irises weren’t round like a human’s, but more like swirling columns running up and down each eye. Blazing blue fury in a black abyss, twisting like tornados made of azure flame. The blue of his gaze was so bright it sent a dusting of light over the rugged slashes of his cheekbones and turned his thick white eyelashes into the colour of a sky I’d once known. A sky somewhere very far from here...
He was saying something to me, I realized distantly. I licked my lips, my exhausted gaze dipping to a broad, angry mouth. Fangs flashed as he spoke, his voice like snow roaring down a mountain.
“I don’t know... I don’t know,” I croaked, not understanding anything he’d said. My head pounded, and I still hadn’t been entirely convinced that this wasn’t some hallucination of a dying brain. Maybe I really was still buried under all that snow...
But his hands on me felt so, so real.
But suddenly, those hands were gone. My knees buckled. Luckily, enough of my weight was pressed backwards against the tree behind me that I slid down its trunk rather than face-planting into the snow. I collapsed to the ground, eyes fluttering closed as weakness made me dizzy.
But I didn’t have time to be dizzy or weak. He’d let me go for some reason, and I wasn’t dead yet. I had to get up. I had to run. Even if I had nowhere to run to.
I cracked my eyes open, then I jolted.
An angel.
For the tiniest moment, in my dazed state, I flashed back to the snow angel I’d made somewhere in this forest, conflating the thing I’d made with the image in front of me. But the one before me now was different. Larger than my powdery snow angel could ever hope to be, with a leathery black wingspan that nearly blotted out the sky. Like the skin on his front, his wings glittered with glorious explosions of blue lights and lines, like an entire universe had been woven into his flesh.
A mane of thick, straight white hair spilled between the wings, ending just above the waistline of tight, black trousers. A long, bushy tail, like a fox’s, was a flash of russet colour contrasting among the white and black and blue. A shift in the light, or maybe a shift in the way the alien held his head, made me notice he had two reddish, fox-like ears, too, poking out from between thick white strands of hair at the top of his head.
Not an angel, I thought, gritting my teeth as I started to rise, panting, to my feet. Not an angel, but a fox-tailed, bat-winged demon. An alien monster I had to get away from at all costs.
Steadying myself against the tree, I raised my foot to take a step.
My boot never hit the ground.
He moved faster than should have been possible, especially for someone his size, all coiled strength and agile muscle. His hands closed around my waist, his wings slamming downward until the world, along with my voice, was ripped entirely away.
The ground was gone.
All that was left was the white and the black and the wings. Red fur, webbed stars.
And the swallowing blue of his eyes.
CHAPTER EIGHT Wylfrael
The flight to my castle was mercifully short. I was in no shape for a long flight, even though the human female I carried weighed so little. I still wasn’t entirely sure why or how she’d ended up in my arms. I only knew that I could no longer stand about in the woods wasting time when I needed to check on the Sionnachans who lived here. Since I hadn’t killed her yet, and had decided not to leave her, it seemed the only option left was to bring her with me.
I can always kill her later.
But even as I thought the words, I knew that they were hollow. She was too small, too fragile, too brutalized by the snow. She’d come with the invaders, yes, but she’d raised no weapon against me. I wondered what my peaceful Sionnachan mother Sashkah would say, were she still alive to see me kill such a weak, defenceless female in my midst.
I needn’t have wondered. I knew what she would have said. It was something she’d told me many times throughout my life, whenever I got too brash or too angry or too proud.
Oh, Wylfrael, she’d murmur, stroking her hand over my hair, you have too much of the stone sky in you and not enough of Sionnach.