It’s short for something.That’s what I meant to come out. But my body chose that moment to overheat and all I could think of was that I was glad to know the community group had moved on as I couldn't contain this next part at all.
My next thought was that we were about to find out how fireproof my stone man was.
“Run, run,” I whispered, reaching out and squeezing his arms to hold him tight, my words clashing with my thoughts as I gave him the singular truth I could to free myself from everything that might actually keep this enigmatic man who seemed to understand me close. “Someone else sets the fires. I am not the one you seek.”
He stared down at me, his yellow gaze oblique, unfathomable.
Just once, would it be so wrong to have someone be able to touch me? Someone who I can’t hurt?
The impossible plea. I knew, because I’d been begging the universe for that for over three thousand years. Why would it start giving me what I wanted now?
“Run,” I pleaded instead, staring up at him. “Go, now.”
He smiled faintly. “No, Steorra. I will stay.”
Hot tears tracked my cheeks, burning my skin even as he watched my flames burn through my skin with the sort of awe they all had in the beginning. Right before their screams began and I couldn’t control anything anymore.
But this time, I didn't get to hear his screams because yet again, I was nothing more than a pile of ash in a public space, and everything around me burned.
But like every Firestarter, I would rise again.
CHAPTER FOUR
DOLION
My Steorra left me staring at a pile of ash as the woman before me disappeared in a blinding flash. Stone shielded my eyes a fraction of a second behind her disappearance, long enough to feel her heat before she died right in front of me.
Again.
This was becoming a bad habit.
My heart beat at a frantic pace the moment my skin returned to its usual color, but by then my fiery star had returned to her regular hiding spot. A deep laugh rumbled through my chest as the community group returned from their walking tour in time to see the laughing statue. Several paused in their confusion and chattered needlessly, flashing me with hand help devices.
I winced at the extra light, and swore her giggle followed the group through the cemetery even as the shape of her seared into my arms, as though she still pressed against me. I’d come so close to pressing my mouth to hers that my lips ached for the missing contact. And hot on the heels of that little misdemeanor came the deluge of guilt dressed as a different face, one from a different time framed by golden ringlets and rosy cheeks.
“Minette,” I rasped, squeezing my fists tight and scaring the last of the locals who stared at me askance like I might rob them, or worse.
But the draw to the woman with the copper hair that glinted like burnished starlight in the fresh morning sun could not be ignored.Perhaps Sebastian has it right.A gargoyle’s heart could only beat while it was whole, after all. I had slept for three hundred years waiting for my brokenness to heal after the death of my beloved. Someone once told me that time healed wounds. Perhaps in a physical sense that might be true, the simple knitting of flesh and blood. But I’d never believed it in the metaphorical space, where a mental chaos or a sickness of the heart could simply be defined asfixedby the series of sunsets and sunrises over my ugly, twisted shadow.
Until, perhaps, now.
I waited until we were alone, the small crowd moved along on their tour of innocuous chatter and inane facts about the lives of people they neither knew nor would remember in the next moments when they changed to the lane beyond the crypt I watched. Then I crossed the path and knocked on the wall of her stained marble tomb.
“Are you coming back out today, my Steorra?” I murmured, keeping my voice low.
Her soft breaths were the only answer I received.
Alright. She could keep on hiding. I understood that need. My lips twitched as I traced the crack I knew she peered through at me, obliterating her light source for a moment before giving it back.
“Shall I return later for you, or will you find me?” I didn’t let her answer, wandering away from her crypt. She would create her own path. Something told me this girl sought her own destiny, though her words still rang in my head.
Someone else sets the fires.
I am not the one you seek.
As though she wanted to be the one I needed. Or perhaps that was a pithy fantasy my strung out heart craved in desperation for contact with another of my kind. Relief hit me that she hadn’t hurt children in a school or the other place that Tifa mentioned. But she wasn’t of my kind. No one here was. Of all the sorts I’d seen in the witch’s tavern the night before, or the statues where today, no one was like me.
Or like her.The soft thought whispered through my mind, unbidden. I wondered if Sebastian also found himself alone, or created a hive of vampires in my tri-century long absence. The thought soured in my gut as I refocused on the task at hand.
