Page 119 of Alien God

My eyes widened. He’d never mentioned this before. That he could come back permanently. He’d hinted lately that he didn’t have to be at Heofonraed all the time like he’d previously implied. That he could come visit me here with my friends. That particular conclusion had come about without any more conversation, both of us settling on it in silence. My friends and I would eventually stay here together on Sionnach and not some other viable world. I told myself that it just made sense for us to do that, and that I also wanted to stay with Aiko and the others. I tried to convince myself that it had nothing to do with living in Wylfrael’s world, being close to him when he came back to visit.

“OK, so you’ll come back here, then?”

“I will come back here to live out the rest of your life with you.”

The biting certainty of his words shook me. The rest of my life. It was a vow. Like a marriage vow.

Trying to distract myself from how much that statement had knocked me off balance, I refocused on my original question. The one he seemed to be avoiding.

“Right, but what will you do after that?”

Lightning flashed through his eyes, a thunderous bolt of pain crashing down his features. He wrenched his gaze from my face and dragged his hand through his hair, mussing it and loosening the blue tie at the back. He looked ruffled. And, other than during particularly intense moments when we had our relations, he never looked ruffled.

He glared moodily out at the landscape. We were still trekking through the forest, the mountains on our right, snow-capped peaks piercing up into a cloudy sky.

His fingers dug deeper into my hair, catching around my throat and pulling me closer to him even as he looked away.

“I’d mourn you. For a very, very long time.”

I stared at him in profile. I hadn’t been asking about emotional things. I wanted to know the logistics of what would happen when I was gone and he was supposed to be dead. The Sionnachans knew enough about the mate bond to know he was supposed to die when I did. I’d merely wanted to know his plans.

He’d mourn me.

That was surprising enough. But even more surprising was his comment about a very, very long time. We looked at time completely differently, he and I. A lifetime for me was a mere moment for him.

A very, very long time to a stone sky god was eternity for a human.

Absurdly, tears pricked at my eyes. Not because I was thinking about my own death, but because I was thinking about Wylfrael grieving without me there to, to...

To what? Comfort him? Love him?

Before I could pursue that terrifying line of thinking, Wylfrael spoke again, granting me salvation via distraction.

“When you are gone, I will disappear. I will go into exile and hide on some forgotten world. I will have to do that eventually anyway, so I do not hurt anyone when I go mate-mad. I don’t have berserker blood like Skalla, which means in madness I likely won’t be strong enough to open any sky doors, and my star map may be gone by that time, anyway.”

“Hold on. Mate-mad? What does that mean?” He’d mentioned it when talking about his cousin. The Lord Skallagrim who’d nearly killed him. But I didn’t have an exact definition of the term and hadn’t known that he was susceptible to it, too.

Wylfrael still didn’t look at me, gazing with a dark expression at the beautiful snow and trees.

“If a stone sky god does not find his mate and claim her with his knot, he will eventually lose his mind.”

“That’s going to happen to you?”

Dread and panic combined in my stomach, a nauseating turmoil. So not only would he grieve me, he’d eventually go into exile and go insane, all alone?

Not long ago, I wouldn’t have cared. I even might have thought that Wylfrael deserved such a fate. But not now. Now...

Now, it broke my fucking heart.

“Wylf! Can you look at me, please?” My last word was a choking sob. At the change in my voice, he whipped his head towards me and caught my jaw in the cage of his fingers.

“Torrance-”

“Don’t do this!”

His eyes flared.

“Don’t do what?”

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