Beast of the Damned #2

*Chapter Thirty-Two*

~ TRISTAN ~

Blood. It flows within us all. Thumping...rushing...waiting to be devoured. To the damned, it calls, evoking the darkness that lies beneath. It nourishes and feeds, an insatiable thirst driven beyond the marrow of bone. Woven like the veins we hunger, it defines. It controls. It stirs the soul.

Sani. It rules us all, giving life and taking it.

The choice is uninvited. Ordained by the silence or within the beating. It's nature's law. Divine will. But there comes a time when we reach a precipice. An acknowledgment that no matter what we do, we'll continually be standing at the edge, a carnage of red waters battering the cliff on which we stand. What happens when the cliff finally crumbles and submerges us in the death that lies below? We become our truest self.

Sputtering and choking, the lunar female warrior's feet dangle in the air. The cords in her neck jut out beneath my hand, straining from the breath denied to her. There is no satisfying crunch as I crush this female's windpipe, no delighted chill that marinates my spine as she drowns in her own blood. There is nothing but the ire of Kinley's absence.

"She's gone because of you."

Like the broken staff that banished the feathered-beast that came before, this silver-haired female's blood is also iridescent. It's a purple that almost matches my mother's eyes. It turns the same color all inhabitants of this living rock possess when it falls to the ground, minus demons. Demons have both feet in the Underworld, their spirit taking on flesh for short stints of time. It's why their blood stays black. Brukah's are the exception to the rule. This female in hand, with my new skin growing over the last exposed bones of my regenerated knuckles, she's proving to be an exception as well. Whatever magic lives in her is fighting back. Her spine should have long departed her chest by now and pierced her worthless heart.

Talons similar to those of my maker impeded the healing of my severed arm. This freckled-face warrior is defiant, gritting her teeth at me through the pain. Unadulterated hatred spews at me as if she and Roarra are celestial sisters from above whose singular purpose in life is to keep me from a moment of happiness. The lives I've squelched warranting perpetual punishment that eternally costs me Kinley. The Heavens, my Maker, my own flesh and blood, and now this female, they all seek to take what isn't theirs. Kinley belongs with me.

"Deveast, you're going to want to see this."

Peach tones covered in dirt and dried scarlet are discarding at my feet. There it is again—potent cinnamon with a hint ginger. The adolescent naked female shivers from the cold night. She curls into herself, tibia shattered and the tip of her toe missing.

"The bird we shot down, it transformed into this." A commander of the Ninth Sanctum informs me. "She appears to be in some kind of catatonic state."

Smoldering spices wafts into the air, pungent and overbearing. I toss the lunar female to the ground, my senses under attack as if Kinley were standing right next to me. The injured, young adolescent female's eyes move back and forth, shielded behind her eyelids as if she's in a deep state of REM sleep she cannot wake.

"This creature is one of the birds responsible for the loss of my warriors?" I crouch beside the female, a mane of golden-brown ringlets with dark lashes against peach skin. Sweeping her long tresses out of her face, it's as if I'm staring at biological relative of Kinley's aged thirteen to fifteen. The difference between them this one's narrower nose-bridge and lips are symmetrical while Kinley's mouth features a pouty bottom lip.

"Is this a creature of the Heavens?" Nakasha asks, bypassing the lunar warrior hacking up her life force in violent tantrums that will seem like offspring play when I'm through with her.