The Last Starborn

Chapter 2

He had not expected her to be so calm.

He had expected fear, or denial, or that particular human response where they talked faster and faster and louder and louder to drown out the thing they could not explain. He had been prepared for all of that. He had prepared speeches.

Instead she had looked at his healing wound with the focused attention of someone taking inventory and then she had told him to let go of her, and he had—immediately, without thinking about it—which was not something Cael did. Not something any Alpha did, on instinct.

He let go because she asked him to.

He turned that over in his mind as he sat in the too-small hospital bed in the too-bright room that smelled of antiseptic and, underneath all of that, something that made something deep and territorial in him go very, very quiet.

She smelled like rain before a storm. Like ozone and iron and something old and mineral, the scent of deep earth and deep sky at the same time.

She smelled like his.

He had been searching for eight months. He had followed traces—old records, whispered rumors among the remnants of the supernatural world, the faintest thread of a scent on a wind that had changed direction three times. He had been stabbed in an alley four blocks from this hospital by something that should not have been able to track him.

Watching her.

He thought of her face when he had said she was not human. That fractional stillness—not surprise, not offense—something closer to recognition. She knew. On some level, she already knew. She had built her entire life on top of that knowledge and buried it so deep it had become foundation rather than secret.

He had broken something tonight without meaning to.

He was not sure, as he signed his discharge papers with a name that was only half a lie, whether that was his fault or fate’s. With the Starborn, the distinction had always been blurry.

✦ ✦ ✦

He waited outside.

Not in a threatening way—or so he told himself. He sat on the concrete wall across from the ambulance bay and watched the sky go from black to charcoal to the first thin grey of pre-dawn, and he waited because he was not willing to leave without knowing she would be all right.

She came out at five-forty-three, bag over her shoulder, keys in her hand, looking like someone who had not slept and had no interest in anyone noticing that fact. She saw him immediately.

She stopped. Looked at him with those dark eyes—calculating, assessing, preparing.

“You are still here,” she said.

“I wanted to make sure you got to your car.”

“I am a grown woman with a key fob and a can of mace.”

“Yes. But the thing that stabbed me is still in this neighborhood.”

That landed. He watched her recalibrate, the way her chin tilted up slightly—not backing down, but taking in new information.

“What is it?” she asked.

“A Hunter. Old kind. Pre-treaty.”

“What treaty?”

He looked at her. She looked at him. The grey light of a city morning sat between them.

“There is a lot you do not know,” he said.

“I am aware of that.” Her voice was dry. “That is not usually how I like to start my mornings.”

Despite everything—the stab wound, the eight months, the weight of what he was carrying—he felt the corner of his mouth move.

“I can explain everything,” he said. “All of it. Where you came from. What you are. Why they are looking for you.” He paused. “Why I am looking for you.”

Something flickered in her expression. Not hope—she was too controlled for something that readable—but something underneath hope. The shape of a question she had spent years not asking.

“And what do you want in return?” she said.

He had not expected that either. Most people, on being told they were not human and that ancient things were hunting them, did not immediately think to ask about the cost. This woman, apparently, did.

“I want you to come home,” he said. “Not to me—to your people. The last of them. They have been waiting a long time.”

She was quiet for a long moment. A car passed on the street behind her. A pigeon landed on the wall three feet from him and reconsidered.

“My shift starts again at seven,” she said finally. “I am going home to sleep for one hour. If you are serious about explaining—” she reached into her bag and produced a small card with a number on it— “text me. We can meet somewhere public. Somewhere with witnesses.”

She walked to her car. He watched her go.

He looked down at the card. Then up at the sky, which was going from charcoal to something that was almost, tentatively, the color of a new beginning.

Eight months of searching.

He texted her before she had reached the end of the block.