Page 1 of Xantera
The Choosing is tomorrow night, and I’m more desperate than ever for them to pick me.
Not because I’d get to live the rest of my life in the Blood Moon Palace and be revered from one of those ivory-wrought balconies, a symbol of our city’s continued hope and protection of the future. Not even because I’d finally get to see what our twelve Holy Guardians look like up close—their marble skin, their crimson eyes, their pointed fangs.
No, there’s another reason I want the Guardians to choose me this time, but it’s buried so deep in my bones that I don’t allow myself to inspect it. Instead, I focus on blocking out the thing that has been tormenting me every Sunday night since the month I turned twenty-three:
The guttural sound of a man snoring.
Malcolm is my newly assigned civil partner, but neither of us have given each other more than what we’re required to in the last six months of our official union. We share the same living space, eat dinner across the table from one another, make polite conversation, and go to sleep in our separate rooms—unless it’s Sunday, that is. On Sunday, every couple in Xantera is required to “keep their spark alive.”
That’s what the Twelve Guardians call what I just pretended to moan through.
Now, I’m slowly shifting aside the rumpled sheets with Malcolm’s snores rattling in my eardrums and his cum drying on my thighs. There’s no way I’m getting a wink of sleep if I stay here, and as far as I know, there aren’t any rules saying I have to let my ears bleed after keeping our spark alive. I’m pretty sure the Twelve Guardians would want me to be bright-eyed and alert for my shift tomorrow morning.
Just as the pads of my feet touch the floor, however, the howling starts.
The noise erupts from the distance, a kind of lonely, echoing peel that scrapes through the air with jagged claws, surpassing the Wall that surrounds Xantera and settling over the city in eerie waves. It lands on my skin, painting me in goosebumps that I can never seem to shake off no matter how many times I’ve heard them throughout my life.
Round and round the Monster prowls,
Starved for meat and bone.
Beware its eyes, resist its howl,
Stay within the stone.
If it weren’t for the nightly howling, I’d almost wonder if that childhood lullaby of ours was nothing but a silly rhyme. If nothing prowled outside the Wall that our Twelve Guardians built for us five hundred years ago. We certainly can’t see over the immensity of it, and nobody has gone in or out in centuries.
Well, except for the few citizens who disobey.
But that howling—it’s enough evidence for me. It definitely isn’t human, and there’s always something hungry and yearning in it that makes me want to bolt.
Instead, I continue to my room in the slowest of tiptoes, my weight creaking against the floor until I’m safe in my own cube of a room across the kitchen. Maybe I’ll give myself the pleasure that Malcolm is never able to now that I’m alone.
But I’m not alone. The howling continues, and as I fold my arms over my breasts, I can’t help but wish, once again, that I’ll be Chosen tomorrow night when the blood moon waxes.
Because beyond that secret reason buried deep in my bones, nowhere is safer than with the Guardians who vanquished the Monster in the first place.
“Good morning,” Malcolm says just before dawn, when we slide our plates onto the kitchen table and sit down opposite each other.
“Good morning,” I echo.
Breakfast today is porridge, peaches, and milk, delivered to us via a pair of graceful hands through the metal slat in our front door. I never get to see the person who makes their rounds before sunrise, distributing even portions of food to everyone in our complex, but their hands are as familiar to me as my own.
I swallow a spoonful of porridge before dabbing at my mouth with a cloth napkin. “How did you sleep?”
“Good.” Malcolm nods, running a hand through his mousy brown hair. “You?”
“Good, thank you.”
For a few minutes, the only sounds between us are the scraping of our spoons and Malcolm’s open-mouthed chewing. I keep wondering if he’ll ask why I wasn’t in bed with him when he woke up, but he’s staring off to the side with an absentminded expression,as if the silent, blackened screen mounted between cabinets is more interesting than me.
I make another stab at conversation.
“Did you dream about anything?”
“No. I don’t usually dream.”
“Oh, okay.”
