Page 24 of Tattooed Cowboy
I startle,listening, frozen. I don’t know how long I’ve slept before the hum changes—no longer a song but a warning.
At first, it’s faint, tucked into the wind beyond the cave. Then, it sharpens, gaining teeth, rising through the stone like a bullet through bone.
I feel it before I hear it. A pressure. A presence.
Maveryk freezes. “That’s not the mountain,” he says quietly. “That’s them.”
The air in the cavern changes. The horses snort, muscles shuddering, hooves scraping against stone. My bracelet flares bright, a pulse of light that races up my arm. I grab it instinctively, skin sizzling, the air filling with the scent of burnt copper.
“Maveryk!”
He’s already moving, snatching up the illuminated dampener, thumb flying across its cracked surface. “They locked onto our signal … somehow,” he mutters. “It’s feeding them our position.”
“Then turn it off!”
“I can’t,” he growls, frustration bleeding into panic. “It’s syncing to your bracelet. The materials are resonating—feeding each other.”
The hum deepens. Static crawls through the air. Far above, through the split in the ceiling, I glimpse faint shapes in the clouds—three points of white light moving with impossible precision.
My breath catches. “They found us.”
“Not yet,” he says, but his voice betrays him. “The ore’s buying us time, but I don’t know for how long.”
The bracelet pulses again.
Once.
Twice.
Then steady, matching my heartbeat.
I can feel it pulling. Reaching for the dampener, answering its call. A tether made of sound.
“They’re talking to each other,” I whisper. “Like they know they belong.”
Maveryk meets my gaze. “Then one of them has to die.”
He steps closer, holding out his burned hand. “Give it to me.”
“No.” The word escapes before I think. The bond hums between us, amplifying my fear. “If you destroy it, you’ll destroy yourself.”
His expression softens, but his eyes stay fixed on mine. “Better me than you. You’re not meant to bear that kind of frequency.”
“I already am.” My voice shakes, but it’s true. I can feel it singing in my blood, ancient and familiar. The Songline families, the healers who hid his kind—it’s their echo, and it’s mine, too. “We can stop it together.”
He hesitates. “Melody?—”
“Trust me.”
The hum climbs higher, a shimmering chord, like the voices of the ancients rising through stone, my ancestors drawing close across the generations. The light above flares white. The Sentinels descend.
I grab the dampener with both hands, ignoring the burn that tears through my palms. Maveryk covers my hands with his own, his voice a low growl of pain and awe.
The two devices—mine and his—flare in unison, throwing wild light across the cavern.
I don’t think. I justfeel. The bond threads through every nerve, his strength running into mine, my pulse answering his. We hold the devices together, their hums merging into a single, blinding frequency.
The cave screams.
