Page 224 of Hunters and Prey

He’d honed in on the most private, intimate parts of Black’s light, studying him there as though he could see every detail, clear as day.

It felt like a stranger had just put their hand on his cock.

“Sorry,” the other male said again. He held up a hand in a peace gesture, his voice gruff. “I didn’t know you were so sensitive down there.”

Black let out a disbelieving sound, not quite a laugh.

The male continued to hold up his hand.

“Relax,” he said. “It was a mistake. I apologized. I didn’t mean any harm. It’s not usual to find a brother or sister who’s remotely conscious down there. Especially not one as young as you. I didn’t expect you to feel anything at all when I did that.”

Black’s heart still beat too hard in his chest.

“Yeah, well I did feel it,” Black growled. “So keep your fucking light to yourself… brother.”

The older male made a polite gesture, but Black didn’t get the feeling his new “friend” was exactly shaking in his boots.

He made the gesture more to be, well… polite.

Black was staring at the other male’s face again, though.

As he did, that whisper of familiarity hit him again.

This time, though, he felt clearer.

Well, he felt more awake, anyway.

He felt awake enough to remember why the male’s face looked so goddamned familiar.

He’d seen it painted on a cave wall, underneath Ship Rock in New Mexico. He’d seen that likeness, or one pretty damned close to it, depicted in painstaking detail on the rock, down to the colorless eyes. This version––the real-life, living version––might look more mundane on the outside, but the resemblance was uncanny.

Moreover, Black had realized something else.

This fucker looked like him––Black himself.

“You’re him,” he said.

The words came out angry.

They sounded more like an accusation than a revelation.

The male’s clear eyes flickered, turning predatory for the first time.

In the same whisper of seconds, his posture stiffened, his broad shoulders shifting perceptibly, pulling him into more of a fighting stance.

The shift was subtle, so small physically, Black probably wouldn’t have seen it at all, if it hadn’t been accompanied by a dramatic shift in the other male seer’s light. Structures lit up above his head, weird geometries, multicolored, iridescent, infused with layers upon layers of highly-charged frequencies of light.

Black had never seen anything like it in his goddamned life.

He watched those structures rotate, the near-physicality of them, the quasi-mathematical certainty of them.

He stared up, watching them move and change as they charged up with light. As he looked, he could feel the other seer notice him looking. He seemed about as thrilled to have Black looking at him there as Black had been to have the other seer looking at his lower column of structures and light.

Black felt the other’s more militant posture fade in about proportional measure to the return and intensification of the male’s irritation.

“Who the fuck are you?” the male growled. “Are you going to tell me? Or am I going to have to shoot you and drag you down to the elders myself?”

Black barely heard him, though.

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