DOFAB#3

Chapter Nineteen

* The seatbelt sign has been turned on. I repeat. The seatbelt sign has been turned on.*

~ TRISTAN ~

Lud-dub, lud-dub, lud-dub.

The silence in me is no more. Each beat screams, thundering through my veins, filling the quiet with everything her, everything from a world that no longer exists...

Trisy, I caught one. Did you see it? I sneaked up on it. Look, it's so—ek! A Kinaley covered in mud and pond water from head-to-toe screams as the frog she managed to catch jumps from her hands onto her soiled dress. She runs straight to the annoyed beast she met in a field of flowers, tears brimming as the whole hoard of frogs she's spent the last two hours trying to catch decided they've had enough of this little creature for the day.

The terrified little huntress-in-the-making sits on my shoulders, clinging to me as if the army of frogs may catch up to us and exact their toad revenge. The price of slaughtering angels without orders, babysitting the forty-pound massarra-to-be who weighed less than my sword. A being I was ready to rip into before her unexpected poisoning changed the course of our lives.

Curled tresses made golden by the sun are no longer bouncing beside my shoulder from the head of a five-year-old Kinley. They're spinning, a wild mane of spun honey fanning around her as she twirls in the wheat fields, soaking in the warmth as her caretaker sits by mending the dress she tore when her horse lessons ended with her getting thrown off.

Gone was the human...the eevie that went up in a blaze. In her place, a new her stood, unaware of how close she came to death at the hands of the vampire she professed to love. Still, her cheeks tinted pink as she held my gaze. Her caretaker, Marianna, looks up from her needlework to see a stopped-spinning Kinaley curtseying to the vampire decked out in armor covered in blood atop the hill.

I thought if I stayed busy, I'd forget the being who gladly gave me a place to sink my fangs. She was a stupid, naïve, little creature who couldn't see all I wanted from her was what ran through her veins.

An air of mischief gleamed in Kinaley as she unwound the shawl the wind helped be her dance partner.

"Kinaley, don't you do it," Marianna warns, entangled in threads and needles.

Kinaley smiles, letting the ribbon of fabric go as she takes off, dress hiked as she runs off. Her laughter comes to an abrupt end as she smacks into the vampire on the hill. I'm now in front of her, her shawl wrapped around my blood-drenched hand.

"You dropped this." My throat burned in her presence, my loins twisting in enlightenment that another unifying way existed between a bleeder and a vampire. After the way it ended the first time around, I told myself I wouldn't allow myself to want something that doesn't belong to me. That this bright, vibrant, full-of-life being got it wrong last time. She shouldn't have offered me her heart because all I'd do is rip it from her.

"Keep it." Kinaley circles around me. "A gift for the beast who was kind enough to return it." She places a kiss on the shawl dangling from my white-knuckled grip. "Until we meet again, Tristan Darkos."

That's all it took to open the door. I was consumed by her words, by her touch, by the desire to have her profess to love me again.

Tri-Tristan. Kinaley's breath puffs out. Her hands tangled in my hair as I sink to the cobblestone below the archway in the east courtyard, bunching her long skirt so that I may drink from her thigh. Kiss me, her spoken words from another time tunnel through me, turning over into this new life cycle.