Page 1 of The Star's Sword
Prologue
Samael
It’s the most beautiful of nights. The chill in the air is accentuated by the licking flames rising in the center of our circle, the willows surrounding the courtyard of the sanctuary watching over us like circling sentinels, their arms drooping in quiet defeat.
The sky is dark gray, the moon only wispy scraps spread across too many dark clouds of smog and smoke, too hidden to throw much light.
My compatriots are mere shadows, laughing and holding onto each other, drunk and tired. Cleo is beside me, the only one to ever matter. Everywhere else is a blank, dark space and only the place she occupies ever gives light. Comfort.
It’s been that way since I met her.
Which is odd, because I am a creature who can rarely feel fear. But when she’s next to me, the light she exudes makes the darkness I’m accustomed to all too engulfing, the warmth of her making the lack of her feel like a dark sky without stars or moon.
Something happens when you spend most of your life in the dark. Not just the dark shadows that haunt everyday lives, but the darkest places. The doorways through which others peek and then retreat, recoiling to the core as they run from a monster they can’t even stomach seeing.
My people live in those dark corners. My people live in dark holes.
Waiting for someone who isn’t afraid.
It is only that knowledge that keeps me solidly beside the only light I’ve ever known, when I know that I may be her darkness, which comforts her by suppressing her light, but I can never be her love.
Her mate.
A lifetime promise, from someone who doesn’t have a lifetime left.
I should have told her.
My hand slips into hers, and her fingers intertwining with mine feed life into me, turning me from something I thought dead long ago into the child I could have been. Someone who still lets the light in, who flinches at danger, who doesn’t make people uncomfortable.
But no matter what, I’ve never been able to make her uncomfortable for long.
And as she rests her head on me, and her spicy, fall fragrance wafts up from her hair, along with the unique, beloved scent of her sweat, from a hard day of training, I’m glad.
But I know I’m stealing minutes, days, hours. If she knew, would she have ever loved me?
Would she be holding onto me every day like this, if I told her how long it could last?
I tried to tell her not to love me.
I tried to tell her I couldn’t love her back.
I tried to tell her having a mate wasn’t in the cards for me.
I tried to tell her she would be the fulfillment of a prophecy, a star who can destroy all darkness, all of the corrupt matter imbued with too much power for too long.
I just didn’t tell her the cost of it.
I don’t know if I can ever forgive myself for that.
But to meet her was to know she was the end of everything, but also a beginning for me. The beginning of love and lightness, a crack in a long-rode storm.
So I just hope when the time comes, whether one of us finds the way to tell her or not, that she can understand that I don’t mind going back to the darkness.
One day of light was more than the child in me ever expected, more than the killer inside me deserves.
My people wait in the darkest places with evil encroaching.
So I clutch her hand tight while I still can, stare at the upcoming storm that only I can truly comprehend, and hold on.
