The Alien Cowboy’s Mark (Aliens of the Starborn Range #2)

Chapter 1

Chapter

One

KAEL

Heat waves rise from rusty patches of clay, punctuated by yellow cheatgrass and mint-colored sage.

The air presses against my skin—hot for July, too thick. Like the cloudless sky forgot how to break into thunder.

The air tastes metallic. Wrong.

Familiar in a way I have no wish to remember.

Where Tempest steps, grasshoppers scatter, tiny bodies snapping into motion. Cicadas thrum in the distance, a thousand rattles without the bite.

I rub the spot on my gut where ancient scars linger. Hate never meant to be forgotten.

A ruined cabin comes into view. Tempest hesitates, hooves stamping. Dust lifts in slow, ruddy columns.

“Easy.”

I nudge the ebony mare forward, though the hairs along my arms have already risen.

Broken paddock. No horses. Fresh shoe prints in the soil—two sets, one lighter.

They left in a hurry.

Last night, when the mountains hummed wrong.

An insect buzzes past my ear as we stop beneath a pine. Charred wood. Broken glass. The aftermath of something that doesn’t belong here.

I slap my neck, drag my palm away, and stare at the flattened horsefly. Tempest tosses her head, tail snapping as more flies gather.

Sun don’t do much this time of day. Not even keep bugs at bay.

At the cabin’s edge, I dismount.

The ground tells its story—chaos cut through with a kind of precision that doesn’t belong here.

My hand settles against a rough-hewn log split clean through. No axe did this. No saw.

The vibration still lingers. Something moved through here. Something that has no place in this world.

Inside, I step carefully, avoiding broken glass and rusted nails. Metal glitters against blackened floorboards warped into soft, misshapen lumps.

A growl rises low in my throat. “Fucking Ancients.” Haven’t had cause to say that in decades.

The words don’t fade. They hang, refusing to be swallowed by the wreckage or the forest around it.

Tempest whinnies, sharp and uneasy.

“Yeah,” I mutter. “You feel it.”

I kneel beside what used to be a table. Papers scattered. Old maps. Ranch claims. Mining claims.

Humans drawing lines around something that was never theirs to begin with.

I never saw the point.

Owning land means dealing with people. People mean complications. And I don’t do complications.

“Better alone,” I grunt to myself. “No one to lose that way. Safer, too.”

My thumb brushes a scrap of parchment. Ink lines claiming ownership of something older than the paper itself.

Then I see it.

Half-buried beneath the rubble—a crushed box and a strip of metallic foil. Too fluid. Too soft. Not human.

I scan the debris, pulse already rising.

There should be a pull. Something that sinks into bone and blood. Something that quiets what lives beneath my skin.

But there’s nothing.

Not even a flicker.

Tempest doesn’t react. No tension. No fear. She just tears at dry grass like the world hasn’t shifted under our feet.

That’s wrong.

Beneath ash and splintered wood, I uncover the rest, metal fused with stone.

A Wildblood artifact. A dampener.

The mountains have been whispering it since last night… I shouldn’t be without this thing.

Because something has changed. Something in me is more dangerous now.

It should respond. Suppress. Force everything inside me back where it belongs.

But it doesn’t do any of that. It just sits there. Cold and dead.

Hell if I know why, but I’m going to find out.

My stomach knots. Cold sweat beads along my spine. Because this thing was never meant to fail. It was built to keep me contained.

I wrap the artifact in the cloth and shove it into my saddlebag. Tempest doesn’t so much as flinch. Instead, she keeps her head low, busy between the half-filled trough and emerald grass shoots hiding in shadow.

“No startle. No protest,” I mutter.

The tattoos along my chest and arms pulse. Heat gathers beneath the skin.

And the vibration of the mountains is stronger now.

I always feel this so close to the Starborn Range.

But this… is something different. Deeper. Older. Powerful in a way language was never meant to measure.

“Mags might know,” I say under my breath. “If she’s still around.”

I swing into the saddle and guide Tempest onto a path barely worth calling one. More a game trail than anything.

Hooves scrape against cheatgrass and gravel. Scrub brush and thick manzanita bushes claw at her hide and my legs.

“Easy,” I tell her.

She flicks an ear, skin twitching.

“Been through worse.”

When the brush grows too thick, I tie her off and continue on foot. My well-worn leather boots sink into the silty, sun-baked earth.

The medicinal smell of sage and pine mix in the heat as I move toward a grove of white-barked aspens. Verdant leaves whisper in the afternoon breeze.

At the clump of granite boulders scattered like bones, I sit. The grave hasn’t held up well. The wood is dark with age, edges splintered, but the marks I carved are still there.

Clemson.

One scarlet ant climbs frenetically across the rounded swatch of wood, effortlessly dipping in and out of the grooves.

Time takes everything. Everything but me.

Leaves me here to remember it.

I press my palm to the earth. Cool beneath the surface. “Been too long to recall, brother. Hope it was still worth it.”

Same words. Every time.

I stare at the name.

“Maybe you were right.” My hat comes off. Head bows. “Time don’t mean much when it never ends.”

Nothing to mark it. All the same vague flavorlessness.

Still, I haven’t changed my mind. “Staying… putting down roots gets you killed.”

But living like this ain’t much of anything either.

Maybe then Clemson was right after all.

The hum cuts through again. Sharper. Closer.

More insistent, like it could crawl beneath my skin, mix with the swirls of light hidden beneath my button-down shirt.

“Something’s different, Clemson.”

No answer. There never is.

I tilt my head, listening to something that isn’t sound.

A vibration with teeth. My flesh shivers and pulses. Deep. Wrong.

I swipe a hand across my forehead, wiping away rivulets of sweat.

“Too long for this Earth,” I mutter. “Like a fox without a hole to rest its head.”

Tempest brays from the trees like she’s warning me about the one thing I can’t escape, the foreverness of this unending loop.

“Coming.”

I push to my feet, pressing my palm once against the ground.

Hard.

“Goodbye and good riddance.”

His last words to me.

Mine now. And maybe the only ones I’ve got left.