Cursed stars, these humans were hideous. I’d been to many worlds and seen many beings, but I found the human visage particularly revolting. The broad, shiny black shell of a single eye stretched across the entire upper portion of his face, and he had no nose or mouth that I could see, just a disturbing stretch of white hide.

But...

I could hear that breath much more clearly now. Breath that was coming from where a mouth or nose could be reliably found on many species.

More clothing?

Frustrated by the riddle, I tore at the white, not caring if it really was skin and I was ripping half this creature’s face off. But it wasn’t skin. It was protecting skin instead. And the eye was not an eye, but yet more protective gear. I realized that when I saw the white edges around the black shell pressing harshly into pliable skin, as if it was not naturally meant to be there.

I ripped the black thing away as well.

And froze, harder and more motionless than the trees around me.

Being so repulsed by the human, I’d expected ugliness to continue after tearing away these outer layers. But what I found was something altogether... different.

The human’s face was small, delicate, smooth grey-ish white skin curved over shell-like bone. Her features were placed very similarly to my own, but were smaller. Softer. A slim little nose and a plush, blue-tinted mouth above a pointed chin. Her bluish lips parted as she took a strained breath, revealing two rows of white, blunt teeth. Curling eyelashes fluttered as she tried to focus her gaze – a gaze unlike any other I’d ever seen. White, with rich amber, brown, and black in the middle. Like Sionnachan honey drizzled over snow.

I realized I’d started thinking of the human as she and her instead of him. I’d encountered enough races across the cosmos to know that gender and biology could vary vastly. But she shared enough characteristics with species I knew well that made me think she was a female. And even without that experience, the analysis that consisted of holding her up against other women I’d met, I still would have figured it out. If I’d only encountered other stone sky gods and had never seen a female in my life, I would have known she was one. It was primal. Instinctive. A wordless recognition that flared in my belly and my brain, as vivid and inescapable as the blinding burst of the sun on this very tree just a moment before.

“Wake up, woman,” I hissed, holding her head firmly so that when her snow and honey eyes finally did open all the way she had nowhere to look but at me. “Wake up and tell me exactly what you think you’re doing in my world.”

OceanofPDF.com

OceanofPDF.com

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.