Chapter 4
Chapter
Four
KAEL
The feed store bell rings when I enter, boots clomping toward the register.
Mags. Hasn’t aged a day, though she’s taken pains to blend in since the last time I saw her. Her red hair streaked with bleach, a cane propped against the desk in front of her.
The store smells of sweet grains and animal medicine. Newfangled remedies we never relied on back in the day.
I pause at an aisle, taking in the labels.
“Antibiotics. Vitamins. Probiotics. Makes you wonder how a single, solitary animal survived before this day and age.”
“Kael Guthrie,” she huffs, lavender eyes rounding.
“Still here.”
She shakes her head, the creases in her forehead deepening. “If there’s any man I thought would end up in boot hill, it’s you. Lucky bastard.”
My hand goes reflexively to my abdomen, absent-mindedly rubbing a thumb over the cluster of round, raised scars. “Not lucky. Cursed.”
“To walk the Earth? Do with time what you please? There’s not a human in this town who wouldn’t give their life’s savings and half their belongings for more time.”
“Time,” I say, grimacing. “Not what it’s made out to be.”
“Maybe you need to use it differently,” she replies with that easy sass of hers. Always been this way.
I set the foil-wrapped Wildblood artifact on the counter with a thud, eyes narrowing. “Want to tell me what happened to this?”
“Where’d you get that?” she asks, straightening.
“Burned out cabin in the winter pasture a week ago. Broken. Useless. And yet the mountains still pulled me to it. Pulled me here, too.”
She shakes her head, eyes not meeting mine.
“Maybe start with last week’s storm?”
She swallows too loudly.
“Awfully strange one,” I add, tugging at my beard in thought. “Haven’t felt the hum like that in…” I shake my head, mind wandering back. “Not since Clemson still walked this planet.”
“Clemson.”
It comes out like a throb. One of our own. One too many to lose. Though what reason he’d still want to be here escapes me.
“Passed his grave the same day I found this. Funniest thing. The hum of the mountains keeps telling me I need it now. Broken or not.”
“Hybrid dampener. Meant to suppress. Always good to have on hand.”
“It doesn’t just suppress. It interferes—with anything tied to resonance,” I say, impatient with her lack of understanding. “Scrambles the signal. Bond, tech… anything that runs through the hum. When it works. But don’t now, and I aim to find out why.”
“You touched it?” she asks, pulling back the metallic fabric carefully.
I nod once.
“What does that mean for the rest of us?” she asks. Younger than me, though ancient in this community, there’s not much Mags doesn’t know. Still, her naivete, whether real or fake, surprises me.
My jaw tenses. “Means men like me shouldn’t ride into towns like this.”
The corners of her mouth soften. “I mean, the mountains. Why are they telling you something new?”
I rub a hand over my face. “Hell if I know. Won’t get caught unprepared, though. I know how that goes.” A cold sweat breaks out on my forehead, memories washing back over me I don’t want.
That’s when I notice it. Something unreadable in Mags’s face that I can’t ignore.
“What aren’t you telling me, Mags?”
She squeezes her hands in front of her as if she has a choice. “Discipline, Guthrie. I’ve told you all along. Don’t need a dampener if you cultivate it. And a mind like yours… I can only imagine what you’d be capable of.”
“Don’t lecture me.” I step closer, clearing my throat. “Magdalena Redfern… you will tell me everything.”
“It’s just,” she stares at her toes, all the vim and vigor gone. “Something I heard earlier today. Already spreading through town like wildfire… that there were some strange happenings at the Wakefield Ranch.”
Wakefield. Haven’t heard that name in decades.
I grunt, face hardening.
“That was a long time ago,” Mags reminds.
But the smell of smoke still burns my nostrils. The pleas for mercy unheeded and unanswered. Wildblood hunters, from a time and a place when survival still mattered.
I shake my head, shoving the past back where it belongs. “What kind of strange happenings?”
She leans closer, voice dropping. “A bull mutilated and left bloodless and organ-less.”
The floorboards squeak beneath my boots. My jaw tightens. “The Ancients?”
She shrugs. “Don’t know.”
“But you do know something… more than you’re saying. Don’t make me drag it out of you.”
Mags gasps, stepping back. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“You couldn’t stop me.”
“But you’d stop yourself,” she fires back, cheeks going red and her eyes flashing.
I let out a low sigh, chest rumbling softly. “Doesn’t matter. None of it does.”
“Then, why are you here?”
My eyes flick back to the object on the counter. “Maybe your blood’s diluted enough to live without that. But for me…” I shake my head. Not saying what I should.
It’s a death sentence.
“It’s all about mental discipline.” There she goes again. The same argument for more than a century.
I shake my head, turning away. She doesn’t know what it’s like for Wildbloods like me. The first ones. The purest ones.
Those who don’t bond. We brand.
“No rest for the wicked,” I drawl.
“Sounds like you’re volunteering then?” she asks too hopefully.
“Volunteering for what?”
“To find out what’s going on at the Wakefield Ranch.”
I wheel back around, my duster flapping in the air. “Swore I’d never go back there. Not while I’m breathing.”
She nods, face going solemn.
“But maybe,” I say, crossing the distance back to her. “Just maybe this little errand will give you enough time to come clean. Realize there’s nothing you can hide from me.”
She lifts her chin in challenge. “You gave up on this town a long time ago, Guthrie. I don’t expect any different from you now.”
“Only you do. Wakefield… Lord help me.” I shake my head, shoulders hunching forward in resignation.
“Just need you to scope out the location of the bull. Look for signs of what happened.”
“So we can rest uneasy in our beds waiting for the mountain to break? For the Ancients to decide it’s our guts they really want?” I snarl.
“Isolation has done you no good, Kael. You’re even grumpier than I remember.”
I frown. “Maybe not. But my isolation has done the world good. That’s enough.”
“You can’t live apart forever,” Mags says, voice softening. Her eyes relax as if she’s empathizing.
“Stop it,” I grunt. “I make my own decisions. You make yours.”
I turn to leave, crossing the distance to the door. The bell chimes high-pitched and cloying. “That means when I get back, you fess up.”
I can feel waves of her anger roll toward me as I leave without another glance backward. But mixed with it is something else that interests me more—fear. Not for herself, but for somebody close to her.
Someone she doesn’t want me to know about.
Tempest moves beneath me, muscles flexed and powerful. As we pick up speed, a breeze ruffles my hair, too scruffy and long.
In the distance, dark clouds hover over the Starborn, dark and menacing. Like always. Like every day since my first.
Tempest tears across the valley, feeling it, too. Channeling the energy from the distant mountains, the thickness always hanging in the air.
Beneath my button-down shirt and duster, my tattoos pulse. Not uncomfortable, but more heated. Enough for me to register it as a new sensation.
“Damn mountains won’t ever give up their secrets,” I mutter to myself, riding into the afternoon gusts that smell of sage and distant rain.
As I near the Wakefield Ranch, my throat tightens and pulse throbs. Memories wash back over me. Not of Ancients taunting from the mountains—Sentinels some call them.
No, this danger lurked much closer… in Raven’s Ridge. Where people like Alistair Wakefield made hunting Wildbloods an art form.
For the good of the town. For the good of humanity… and its purity.
Because people like me—the ones whispered about around campfires—are amalgamations. Blasphemy.
Something else rides under these thoughts now—low, insistent. Not tied to memories. Instead, something new like the change in the mountains’ song.