CHP12

Seneya stank.

The smell that came off of her was part deep fryer and all rancid.

Her face screwed up as she sat on crossed legs and stared at the fluffy tip of the tail before her and the rancid tin next to it.

“Well?” Kael said as he stooped to kneel before her, then sat in a sprawl. Seneya couldn’t hold her wings up, but Kael had thoroughly oiled them, and the feathers were pretty in their own way, a light silvery grey. They were more jarring than anything else.

“It smells so bad.” She choked the words out and stared with undisguised angst at the last of the oil.

“Take your wrist, put the oil on it, then rub it down over the feathers. Then use your fingers to straighten the vanes, and you’re done!”

He unlaced his wristband for effect and stroked over his own glossy black tail’s feathers.

She grimaced. “Just do it for me.”

“I did your wings. I tied your shirt. You can do your tail.” Her green eyes met his stubborn blue.

She reached for the tin with resignation and followed his lead. The duck fat smelled just as bad as when she’d touched her wrists to it earlier, and she tugged her limp tail to her to finish the feathers. It came second nature, picking the feathers apart, lining up the vanes, pulling the barbs together to lock. It hurt, but something about the preening of her feathers there calmed her in a way she hadn’t been soothed since she was a child and sucked her thumb. It was nearly chemical, endorphins spreading with every glide across her wrist.

“Good job,” Kael said, a half-smile strewn across his face. “I’m actually a little proud of you!”

Seneya froze and dropped her tail to the ground limply.

She sealed the duck fat as pressure laid over her nose and her eyes stung. She blinked and found tears spilling over her cheeks and splattering over her lap.

“What’s wrong?” Kael said uncomfortably, eyes darting about as he moved to a defensive crouch.

“Little starling?”

She sniffed as her shoulders bobbed and head shook.

“I don’t know,” she spoke in her cracking squeak of a voice. “You s-said you were proud of me and… I don’t know.”

His fierce face, dedicated in its composure, melted as he squeezed his eyes shut, voice choking in his throat. He swallowed, and it returned in a whisper. “Come here, little starling. You need to be held, yes?”

He moved over to her, hefted his hands beneath her shoulders, and brought her weak form to his chest. His thick arms wrapped around Seneya and held her to him. His hot breath played in her hair. She could hear his heartbeat thundering within his chest.

It felt good—the best feeling she’d ever known. Nobody had ever just… held her like this.

Every part of her should have been screaming when he reached out and when he drew her in, but Kael felt different. Kael wanted to be a father as much as Seneya wished to be someone’s daughter, and Sohken whispered that truth to her.

“You’ll stay here with me. I’ll care for you, and I’ll be sure to tell you when you do good and when you make me proud.” Though his words soothed her, she cried harder, still shaking against him.

He looked down as he felt the droplets collecting on his chest and winding their way down. A moment of discomfort flashed across his face, but he relaxed and held her, just letting it out.

“Little starling. This is okay with you, yes?”

She nodded and took a deep breath. She immediately regretted it. The scent of the duck fat overwhelmed her, and beneath that was a low lying, sharp, sweaty, and definitively unpleasant masculine odor.

She turned her head, huffed a breath, and found that it bounced in her throat. She tried to pull away from him, but he did not let go.

“I’m good, I swear,” Seneya choked politely as she struggled again, still caught in his massive arms.

“You sure?” he asked.

“Very.”

“Then just stay here a minute longer,” He patted over her head a bit.

She hesitated, trying hard to breathe through her mouth.

“I smell bad, don’t I?” His chest twitched with restrained laughter.

She heaved a heavy sigh of exasperation and pulled away from him with a distrusting glare. His grin stretched wide and playful.

Light danced in his eyes, and she couldn’t help but laugh with him, dragging herself away with a sigh.

“I’ll go splash around in the creek a bit later. I wasn’t expecting company,” he sniffed over himself a little and wrinkled his nose before shrugging.

Her mind wandered, eyes studying everything around her.

“I’m sure you have so many questions.”

“The.. voice thing. You heard it,” Seneya said carefully. She knew he had.

“I did.” He broke eye contact with her.

“Am I mad?”

He shook his head. “You’re more than you seem. You see what I am, and even among my own kind, I am strange. I bear strange markings on my ikris, as do you. We have tails that mark us as a direct line of powerful Seraphim. You’re not mad. You’ve got… how would I say… a hitchhiker,” he said as he tapped his head. “Not bad, but not good either. If you see it again, send it away until I know more.”

He offered her a hand as he stood, and she tried to stand on her own. However, she found moving her arms too much. It pulled muscles in her back that had been torn asunder in a multitude of ways.

The top he helped her into knotted around her neck and draped down like a bib before tying at her waist. It was more revealing than she liked, but judging by his own clothing, barely more than a loincloth and strange undergarments, that this was common in their society. The damp restrictive confines of the remnants of her jeans felt awful and itched.

She clutched one hand to her chest to hold the shirt flush to her skin, trying to maintain decency as she fought to get on her feet by herself.

She made a good start of it, and only by Kael’s forced hand did she accept help to limp back into the cabin.

“Come, let’s get you to bed.” He told her and helped her to lay on the couch, face down, groaning.

“Not the most comfortable, but it’s what you get out here unless we get you a bed. No need for a living room when I don’t have company that often,” he grunted before glancing around.

“You want me to live here with you?” Seneya sounded a little weary.

“You’re but a child. You’ve no idea what you are, who you are, and what you’re capable of. Better you stay here with me a while until we can get some sky beneath your wings, or better.”

She shifted on the couch and thought about what he offered.

“And I don’t have to go back with the humans?” She asked timidly.

“I’ve had dealings with them and our Enai. I’d offer to put you out of your misery sooner,” he scoffed.

“Enai?”

“There’s a nice starting point!” He sighed as he spoke, explaining to her their races.

Kael spoke of his tribe, the Acerrai, borne of the black seraph, with he a descendant in the direct line. There were two other tribes, split of the son and daughter of the first seraph and the warlord. Maybe, there might be more that they didn’t know of or some other kind that would mix with their own. After all, he’d never seen markings like hers.

There were the Enai, servants of man and Cerraien. They were recipients of ancient magics from their kind, given each a drop of a seraphim’s blood, to pass it down to their children, their children’s children, and so on. At the mention of this, Seneya looked at her hands. An image of a knife laid across her palm flashed in her mind. She rubbed over the lines of her hand in contemplation.

“Maybe I’m Enai and Phoenix?” She offered in suggestion.

“Impossible,” he said. “Enai are human at their core, and nothing about them is compatible with our fires in that right… Do you remember what your parents looked like?”

“Never met them.” She said, and his expression wilted.

“Tell me your story, little starling. This may help us.”

She went quiet, staring at her hands. “How much do you know about humans?”

“I practically live as one.”

Seneya raised a brow and looked over at him sprawled in his chair. Though he’d hidden his wings, his tail twitched idly at his side, swishing anxiously through a slit in his strange clothes. He stood over seven feet tall, sharp-toothed and pointed-eared. He stared at her with inhumanly blue eyes.

Practically…right.

There was no way someone could see him and think ‘human.’ Then again… She thought about her own ear shape. She’d always had a slightly pointed shape to them. She reached to feel them and drew her hand back with a gasp. ‘Slightly’ no longer described their shape.

“Those too, huh?” He noted with a sage nod, “Now back on topic. What about humans?”

“I turned up at a surrender point for children when they think I was about 3.” She reached over her shoulder to touch one of her limp wings.

“I had these tattoos over me, here, and here,” She said, rubbing at her shoulder. The remnants of a scar remained, something one of their kind would not have gotten. Kael leaned forward to squint at the strange shape.

“That’s not tatsuli or part of your ikris,” he noted.

“Tatsuli?”

“Dragon’s venom and silver. We use it to make our marks.” Kael extended his arms and rolled them over to show her the black sleeves that crawled up and over his elbows.

“Dragons?” She asked quietly.

“They’re rare, but yes.” His eyes lit with excitement at her curiosity. He liked to watch the motes of delight in her eyes.

He gestured towards her shoulder, though, and looked at the flesh as she leaned in.

“They were able to remove this one with a laser,” she said, pointing to the patch of scarred skin, lighter than the skin around it.

“I’ll help you cover it if you like,” Kael said with a grin.

She looked over his arms and legs, all the black on him. “Is that why you’ve blacked yourself out?”

“To cover scars? Nah. Takes a lot for a scar to stick around. Tatsuli is a tradition; it’s a reminder to us of the creator’s ink. The night sky is the venom and the silver the stars. It fades after a year or so, dwindles to nothing, so I just keep laying on more. I like it.”

“This, though, was not tatsuli.” He gestured towards her shoulder’s scar, not touching it.

He warned her before touching and kept his hands where she could see them. Most people didn’t, and it went a long way towards making Seneya feel comfortable.

Even still, she flinched when he reached out, and he noticed.

“It was numbers, I was told. They tried to take my wing tattoos, but they said the ink was too deep.”

“Not a damn thing you can do to remove ikris save for cutting the skin off. How did you get numbers?” he mused, sorry to find that humans wanted to take off something that meant so much to them.

“I have no clue,” She said with a shrug, “I just know it was there; they tried to remove it, scarred me in the process, then they sent me to a family to take care of me.”

“How did that go?”

She went quiet, and her mouth moved, muttering something beneath her breath.

“I didn’t do something right, and they sent me to another family, and then they didn’t like me, and I caused problems… I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to. I think they moved me every six months or so, and then things started to happen, and I tried to run. I didn’t plan things so well, and then they found me at the bus station. I waited a bit and took off a few days ago and just followed the spirit thing,” She said in a splutter of words, wiggling a finger at her head.

“I think that that’s just a symptom of something else going on. We have an effect on people. It’s something that exudes from us at a young age. When you’re nervous or uncomfortable, something leaks out of you, tells people to feel an emotion. We each are gifted with one. It works on us if you try hard, but it only hits humans and enai hard for the most part. Maybe you have one of those odd ‘leave me alone’ gifts.”

“Do you do it?” She broke her fretting to look up at him nervously.

“I do. I’m pretty good at it,” He said with a wicked grin.

“How does yours work?”

“Of all the things, it’s been described as Anxiety.” His eyes, the blue of them, seemed to glow with intensity as he leered over her, baring his teeth.

Seneya felt her heart skip a few beats as a vibration seemed to go through the air. As he said, she felt this keen unrest and desire to move—the need to run. Rather than ascribe it to anything he was intentionally doing, it felt like part of him.

She shrank down a little as he let up, and his eyes dimmed. He raised a brow in amusement.

“Captive audience. Most people take off running,” he chuckled. She shrank and fidgeted with her hands, tucking into herself.

Most of their kind acted so boldly and brash, but this little starling… Kael would have a hard time teaching her to sing.

“And you said I might have been doing something similar?” She huffed a sharp breath as she moved to sit up a little. She folded her arms over the arm of the couch and stared at his amused face. For all the threat he presented, she felt at peace with him.

Her eyes went wide and her face inquisitive.

Kael had to shake his head to pass the grin from his face.

“Give it a bit of time, and I’ll tell you if anything peaks. It won’t scare me off, I promise,” Kael laughed, not at her but at the whole situation. Such small things to him meant the world to her.

She liked watching him laugh, and like all first meetings with someone new to care for her, she treasured it, holding it close until they too sent her away.

“Do you think we could find any family I have? Do you know of anyone that could help find them?” She fidgeted with a long lock of her hair nervously.

“Well, I have an idea. I see royal in you, the tail, and the times are right that I might know who your mother was and know where your grandmother is. We’ll need time on that because grandmummy dearest is not a kind soul and would be remiss to find a halfbreed grandkid. Father? Perhaps he was a halfbreed, himself. The grey your spirit spoke of could have been an Acerrai and phoenix halfbreed. Then again, I’ve never seen greys like yours.” Kael ran a thumb along his jawline.

Seneya nodded to herself, filled with both dread and hope.

He watched her curious gaze fall and soften, the strain of the day catching up to her. Finally, her eyes slowly closed, and she slept.

He tried to move her, wake her to curl up properly, but she slept too soundly.

“Don’t mind me, little starling. I’m going to push you onto your front and get a blanket on you,” Kael muttered as he adjusted her legs and worked her body onto its front. He moved her without protest, grateful she hadn’t been found by anyone else. If she had entered one of the kingdom’s care, their masters would not have been as kind to her as him.