Affinity

Chapter 12 - Nathan

Nathan stumbled back and looked up to the sky as if trying to find the source of all the offending noise. Layers of dark clouds were covering the night sky, and the air had the thick humidity that came with springtime storms. He closed his eyes and felt the cool rain falling on his heated face. Yes, that was right. There was a storm. The sound still echoing in his ears was thunder.

His mind was sluggish and his body humming. There had been so much blood. It was tingling on his tongue, and he licked his dry lips. He felt such immense strength and power that he felt as though his body could hardly contain it. Every cell was on fire. He was so high. He was soaring.

He tore his gaze from the sky and looked around himself in awe. What had he been doing that he hadn't noticed the forest? It was so glorious! The colors and textures were overwhelming, even for a vampire accustomed to preternatural vision. The trees had such vividly green new leaves, and the new buds on the flowering bushes were so bright. The earth was a rich brown with specks of an even richer black. It all seemed an external parallel to the overwhelming power he felt within him.

The sensations of the rain falling heavily on his hypersensitive skin and the agitated wind whipping at him were raw and stimulating. But they were not enough to distract him from the nagging feeling that there was something he was missing, that he had been in the middle of something he should return his attention to. He turned as if to seek out whatever he felt the urge to find, but his movements were so quick that he turned a full circle before he was able to stop himself, and he stumbled.

He frowned and held his reeling head. He needed to concentrate. He opened his eyes wide with his efforts to clear and sharpen his vision. He let go of his head and looked down at his palms, trying in vain to bring them into sober focus. At a blindingly bright flash of lightning, his head snapped back up. He peered back up at the angry sky through the treetops and the falling rain. Thunder cracked, and he winced and covered his ears.

He had to rein himself in and gain some control. There was something important he had to see to. As he was slowly forcing himself back to reason, he had an increasingly strong feeling that it was something he had made a mess of and now had to fix. But what had it been?

There came another loud rumble of thunder, and he frowned again. Had he missed the lightning? Surely lightning had preceded the thunder. Then he felt a heavy blast of heat. That couldn't be right. Something was definitely wrong.

Before he was able to look around to figure out where the heat was coming from or what the matter he had to attend to was, a force hit him from the side, and he went rolling across the soggy ground. He landed hard in the grass, and he had to force himself not to get distracted again by the grass that tickled his face when he moved. He felt the unmistakable sensation of a particularly powerful magic stinging his skin, and he concentrated hard on that feeling instead. Something was coming back to him.

He remembered witches and a bloody battle. There had been a trap set and an ambush carried out. Images flashed through his mind of an unaware, hapless victim wandering past below him and then the taste of delicious, intoxicating magical blood and the inevitable rush as he had drained the witch dry. Then there had been another to the same result, and then— And then what?

He couldn't think. Heat was washing over him in waves and he finally pushed himself up onto his hands and knees and looked over to see that the lower branches of a tree to the side of him had caught on fire. He sat up and watched the flames with interest. It was odd to see the destructive glory of a fire in the midst of such a storm, and he lost himself in the dancing flames. As he watched, entranced by the movement and color and light, the fire seemed to slow down so he could make out each individual flame as it leapt, stretched, merged, separated, and consumed.