Chapter 17
Chapter
Seventeen
ASH
Iawaken to the hum in my head, cold clammy pain. Only this time it’s far closer… in the walls of the cabin.
Not fading, following me. The radio on the nightstand crackles. A burst of static.
My tattoos burn where the ink throbs. I sit up in bed, grip the sheets, focusing into the pain, the great purifier, the great solidifier.
I shouldn’t be able to feel the resonance up here so many miles away from Josephine. But maybe this isn’t about physical distance.
That scares me more than anything.
Soon, sweat drips, body aches, and terror grips me. “It’s not supposed to work this way.”
It’s supposed to fade. It should be weakening.
But as my thoughts grow darker, more desperate, it feels like amplification.
My lungs start counting on their own. Four. Hold. Six. Like my body remembers rules my mind can’t enforce.
I should be able to lock it down by staying disciplined. Staying away.
But since the kiss, it isn’t longing anymore.
It’s changed shape. A shape I no longer know how to contain.
I go to the window, drawn by the pull. Raise a finger to trace frost on the inside of the window like a warning. The sky over the Starborn Range glows faintly red. Almost… angry.
The air shifts, thick and heavy, my pulse synced with the distant mountains.
That’s when I hear the cracking in the walls, see splintered wood. Almost like the force I’m holding inside of me seeks to explode outward.
Volatile.
What I’ve fought my whole life to control—the part of me that doesn’t belong on this planet.
The wood groans as if something inside it remembers heat.
The hills whisper warnings. But I can’t listen. Won’t allow myself.
“You have to do this for Martin and Miranda.” I pause for a long moment, letting another throb of pain pass. “You have to do this for Mags and the council. And you have to do this for her.”
That’s when I go to the closet and fish out the box I packed earlier in my saddlebags. The one wrapped in a shiny metallic fabric, like woven foil.
My palm aches. Not the skin—the bone, as if it remembers the last time I touched it.
Nearly killed me then.
Maybe it’s meant to now.
It opens with a soft hum, revealing a metallic device. A final relic of another life, another world.
Once it suppressed the first Wildbloods. Kept them from feeling the resonance. Or at least made it bearable enough to fight.
For me, more human, more removed from Sentinel blood, it did something else.
A burning smell fills my nostrils. A blackened fence post split down the middle still smokes in my mind.
Martin and I saw the shine among the blackened rocks.
He touched it with ease, said it felt hot from the sun. But when I reached out…
All I remember next was Martin standing over me, face streaked with tears. And Mags, speaking ancient words over me as her hands hovered inches from my body, mending me back into existence.
Now, I need mended back to some kind of peace.
The air escapes my lungs like anguish.
I close the box, wrap it in the cloth. Then, I speak over it things I don’t understand. Things passed down through the generations without explanation. What Mags murmured over me that day.
Enough time for self-destruction later.
I stash it back in the closet, prepared to fight to the death to protect it. To protect Wildblood secrets.
Yet, I already feel the singe.
I stare at the box. If it’s the only means of containment… I won’t hesitate.
I’ll burn before I let it take her.
The hum tightens in my ribs.
Somewhere down the mountain… even now, I feel her fear—thin as wire, and just as sharp.