wobbled, thin and unreliable beneath his slight frame, and he balanced himself only when he threw out his arms. His father’s pallet was set directly afore the heavy skin flap that covered the doorway to the outside, and given that Syn was a pretrans, he could not close his eyes and carry himself off upon the air. He must needed to ambulate about in a corporeal fashion.
Placing his palms upon his stomach, he pressed in whilst he held his breath. On the balls of his feet, he chose his path with care, disturbing naught, and he orientated his safety upon the bladder of mead and the fingertips resting upon it. His sire suffered from an unrelenting unsteadiness of extremity. If he were to awaken, his fingers would tell the tale through movement—
As Syn focused on the back of that hand, he saw something odd in the blood-caked flesh. There was a flash of brilliant white, and he thought that perhaps the strikes of the night—or the day, he knew not which—had been so hard, his sire had broken through the flesh of his knuckles, down to the bone.
But no.
That was not what it was.
Touching the heartbeat behind his upper lip, something stirred deep within Syn’s breast. He had no name upon which he could label the emotion, and there was, like so much in his life, nothing he could do to control the feeling.
It was, however, strong enough, insistent enough, that he committed the unthinkable. He approached the beast. Crouched down beside the pallet. Reached out with a hand no steadier than his sire’s.
Whereupon he removed a tiny fragment from the flesh of his father.
A tooth.
His own tooth.
As he held the piece of bone with care, as if he were cradling his broken body, he looked over to the remains of his mahmen. He missed her, but he was grateful she suffered no further. Indeed, her remains had not been kept within this horrid hut as a remembrance of love. They were a warning of what came when one did not obey.
Syn put his tooth into the pocket of his ribboned pants, and he glanced around at the floor. He should like to retrieve the other three. Perhaps he would—
“Where’d you think you go the now, young.”
Syn jumped back and began trembling. Ducking, he put his arms up and around his face. The response was ingrained. Trained. Second nature.
“I must needs go to get victuals,” he whispered. “I go to get food.”
There was a grunt from the pallet and his sire lifted his head. His beard was long and gnarled, a rope of coarse dark hair that was indistinguishable from the tangle that grew out from all sides of his skull. Glittering black eyes beneath fleshy brows glared.
“You get them and come back, young. Waste not time. I am hungry.”
“Yes, sire.”
His father looked down at the hand that was over the mead. A rivulet of blood, fresh and red, had welled and descended unto his forefinger, released by the tooth’s removal.
“I shall go the now,” Syn rushed in. “I shall beg fervently. I shall—”
Those eyes came back and narrowed. Hatred, like a swill upon the surface of a pond, came to the fore.
“I go now,” Syn said.
With a quick shuffle, he skirted around the pallet, but he had to slow at the heavy tarping. As a pretrans, he could survive the sunlight. His sire could not. The hut was backed in against the wall of a cave, its entry point well protected from direct light. But if he did not follow the way things were properly done upon departure, he would be put in the cage and submerged in the river’s current.
He would rather be beaten.
“You come back, young.” His father’s gravel voice was like the curse of the Omega, sly and invasive, with the promise of suffering. “Or I shall become bored and be forced to find something to do. If I haven’t already.”
Syn nodded and fell free of the hut, his stumble running him into the cave’s outcropping of damp stone.
If he hadn’t already? Syn thought. What had the male done?
Bolting out of the cave, in spite of the soreness in his legs and his torso, he threw himself into the night with all the alacrity he could summon. The moon overhead was low to the horizon and its position terrified him. How long had he been without consciousness? How long had his father been free to roam about the village and environs?
Fates, what had he done?
Fear parched