Kayleb

CHAPTER ONE-3

THE FIRST THING HE heard was the click of the front door closing. A blanket lay heavy and too hot over his chest and there was something off about the air around him. Kayleb sucked in a deep breath and realized the problem.

He was supposed to be dead.

Kayleb took another breath, keeping his eyes squeezed shut as he focused on the beat of his heart. Steady, strong, there, and it really shouldn’t have been. For a crazy moment, he thought he might be a ghost, forced to haunt this foreign planet, his brother’s shadow in death in a way he’d never endured in life. But when he cracked his eyes opened and moved his arms, he could push the blanket down. An experimental press of fingers against his cheeks showed him to be solid and warm.

Alive.

How?

Footsteps sounded down the hallway and Kayleb froze. He felt like an intruder in his own home, as illogical as that was. But he wasn’t supposed to be here anymore, he was supposed to be... done. Dead. Finished. And something almost like disappointment snapped through him. He hadn’t wanted—didn’t want—to die, but he’d met his end with honor like a proper Detyen. And now he’d woken up at home like it was just any other day.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Penny Morales, Krayter’s human denya, asked quietly. She must have slipped in the door behind him. If she’d looked over at the couch, she would have seen him move, seen the rise and fall of his chest. But he didn’t blame her for averting her gaze. This was hard enough for a Detyen, let alone someone without the denya curse living in her blood.

“What’s there to say?” The footsteps must have belonged to Krayter. His voice had taken on a cadence that Kayleb had never heard before, vulnerable and sad. Everything they’d normally keep hidden from one another. “He was...”

Kayleb sat up and cast the blanket completely off of himself before they could say anything else. He didn’t want to know what they would say when they thought he couldn’t hear. Those words weren’t for him.

Penny shrieked for a breath and Krayter cursed. Kayleb stood up, bracing himself on the back of the couch. He didn’t feel physically unsteady, but his mind was still catching up to the fact that he wasn’t dead like he was supposed to be. “Um... good morning,” he finally managed after several moments of staring blankly at his brother and Penny.

Penny’s skin drained of color and her eyes widened until they were larger than he’d ever seen before. Her mouth dropped open and she looked from him to Krayter and back again. Her mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.

Krayter stared at him, an unreadable expression in his blazing red eyes.

He felt like a fool. He couldn’t find the words to say anything that needed to be said, and his feet were rooted in place just as surely as the trees towering over Central Park.

And then Krayter let out a whoop and vaulted over the couch, wrapping his arms around Kayleb and almost tipping both of them onto the floor. “You’re not dead!” he practically yelled into Kayleb’s ear. “Why aren’t you dead?”

“I don’t know.” Kayleb pulled out of the embrace, but he didn’t step away from his brother. His heart beat too fast and he couldn’t quite get a deep breath, but it didn’t feel like he was about to drop dead at any moment.

“I think we need coffee,” Penny said before she retreated to the kitchen, leaving Krayter and Kayleb alone again.

Several minutes later, in possession of both coffee and pastries from the bakery on the corner, Kayleb, Krayter, and Penny sat at the kitchen table and stared at their food. Krayter took a nervous sip of his drink before setting his cup down and idly running his thumb over the lip of the mug. “Have you considered that you might have calculated your birthday wrong?” he asked quietly.

The same thought had occurred to Kayleb. He’d been born on Jaaxis, which was lightyears from Earth and on a completely different calendar. Though his birth had been recorded in Interstellar Common Time as well as on the Jaaxis calendar, he’d still needed to convert it from IC time to the Earth calendar. “I did the calculation three times and had it confirmed by the extraterrestrial immigration agency.” He looked up from his coffee and saw that neither Penny nor Krayter seemed willing to meet his eyes. Kayleb pulled his communicator out of his pocket and brought up his identifying data. “See for yourself if you still have doubt.”

Krayter’s arm twitched but he didn’t reach for the device. Instead, Penny grabbed it. Her eyebrows drew down in concentration, but after a moment she handed the communicator back to him with a nod. “That looks correct to me. What else could it be? Is it because you’re so far from home?”

“If distance were an issue, the destruction of Detya would have been a...” He couldn’t bring himself to call it a gift, but when Penny bit her lip, Kayleb figured that she knew what he meant. “The curse is something that lives inside of us, it can’t be outrun. The only cure is to find a denya.”

“So no one has ever tried to get around it before?” she asked. “Really?”

Krayter sucked in a breath and studied Kayleb with new eyes. After a moment, he shook his head, and Kayleb was confused anew. “What is it?”

“You don’t remember that old story?” Krayter asked with a slight frown. “About that man... I can’t remember his name. The scientist and his daughter.”

“That’s just a legend and I’m clearly not one of the soulless, if they ever existed at all.” Kayleb scowled at the thought.

“Wait, what?” Penny shook her head. “Anyone want to take pity on the human and explain?”

Krayter smiled at his denya and reached over, lacing their fingers together. “It’s an old story, ancient by the time Detya was destroyed. Like one of those grim ones that you told me.”

“The Brothers Grimm? So it’s a fairy tale?”

Kayleb didn’t know what they were talking about; fairies, whatever they were, didn’t exist on any planet he’d been on. His translator didn’t offer a better word.

But Krayter nodded. “Exactly! It is a myth. Hundreds, maybe a thousand years ago, a scientist went mad. His denya died and none of his children could find their mates. He dedicated himself to study, to find what causes us to die at the age of thirty. And he found it. He called it our soul, though I don’t think that means the same thing to humans. It is the heart of our personality, our emotions. Anyway. On the eve of his final daughter’s thirtieth birthday, he performed a procedure to remove her soul and save her life. And it worked. But the next day she awoke and killed her father, destroyed his lab, and then flung herself off a cliff because whatever he’d done to her was too horrifying to let happen to anyone else. Whispers of the soulless have been around forever. They are like...” he paused to think for a moment, “they are like your vampires. Not quite living, dangerous. But imbued with life after they should have died.”

“And they don’t exist?” Penny asked. “You’re sure?”

“If they ever did, I’m sure they didn’t survive the destruction of Detya,” Kayleb said before Krayter could talk more of the stories of their youth. They had more pressing issues than so-called fairy tales at the moment. “And I still have my soul, I promise.”

Krayter opened his mouth as if he wanted to argue and Kayleb glared at him, resting his hand lightly on the table. He didn’t let his claws out, but Krayter glanced down and snapped his mouth shut. “Fine, this didn’t happen because you had your birthday wrong, and it’s not going to be solved by the old stories. Maybe we can find other Detyens on this planet. There might be an elder who has an idea. At the very least we should call Ruwen.”

Their cousin was the first Detyen to find a human mate. Right now he and Lis were off on a journey to meet Lis’s friends back where she’d originally come from. Though both Lis and Penny had questioned Ru’s decision to leave before Kayleb’s final night, it was the way of their people to not crowd the dying but to celebrate life while it lasted.

“There’s one possibility, isn’t there?” Penny asked, as if whatever she planned to say was the most obvious solution.

Kayleb had no idea what she might say. “There is?”

“Isn’t it possible that you found your denya somewhere? That you slept with her and... I don’t know, forgot? Isn’t that the simplest solution.” She looked between the two brothers and shrugged.

“No,” said Kayleb, shaking his head and pushing back from the table. He paced the length of the small kitchen, his mind whirling. “That’s something I wouldn’t forget. I’m certain.”

Right?