Storm and Fury (The Harbinger 1)

“What do you mean?”

“I have what’s called retinitis pigmentosa, and no, don’t ask me to spell that. I’m probably not even pronouncing it correctly. It’s a...degenerative eye disease that usually ends in partial or total blindness,” I explained rather factually. “It’s usually hereditary but sometimes people can just develop it. A great-grandmother of mine had it and it skipped a couple of generations, and I ended up the lucky winner of crappy eyesight. I have little side vision. Like if I look forward, I can’t even see you. You’re nothing but a blob of shadows. It’s like having horse blinders on,” I said, lifting my hands to the sides of my head. “And my depth perception is pretty terrible.”

“Wait. Is that why I’ve seen you flinch if something gets close to your face?”

I nodded. “Yeah, if something comes at me from the side, I often can’t see it until it’s, like, right there, in my center vision. My eyes don’t adapt well from light to dark, and extremely bright light is just as bad as extremely dark areas. There are...tiny black spots in my vision, kind of like floaters, and they’re easy to ignore at this point, but I have cataracts already. It’s a side effect of these steroid eyedrops I had to take when I was younger.” I shrugged and started walking along the edge again. “Which is why the moon actually looks like two moons on top of one another until I close my right eye.”

Stopping, I placed my hands on my hips and looked down at the park against the street. The trees were just shapes of thicker darkness against lighter shadows even though the park was lit.

Zayne touched my arm, and when I looked at him, I saw that he’d shifted into his human form. “What does this mean exactly? Are you going blind?”

I lifted a shoulder again. “I don’t know. Probably? The fact that I’m not completely human throws a wrench in the whole thing, and the disease requires a level of genetic mapping to see what the prognosis could be—I assume you know why that can never happen. But the disease isn’t predictable even in humans. Some by my age are completely blind. Others don’t develop symptoms until they’re in their thirties. Maybe my vision loss will slow down because of the angelic blood in me, or it may stop entirely, but it has been getting worse, so I don’t think my angelic side is doing that much good. I just don’t know. No one can answer that. No one can even answer that for a lot of humans with the disease.”

Zayne was quiet as he listened, so I continued. “When my mom noticed I started walking into things more often and having trouble navigating when it was really bright outside, she and Thierry took me to an eye doctor, and the man took one look at my eyes and referred me to a specialist. A lot of really annoying tests later, the disease was confirmed. It was a shock to say the least.” I laughed. “I mean, come on. I’m a Trueborn. Fighting while having these huge gaps in my vision isn’t exactly easy. So, how did this happen? But it is...what it is.”

“I noticed some things, like the flinching and your steps seeming unsure at night, but I never would’ve guessed it,” he said. “Never.”

“Yeah, I don’t think most people do. You know? Most people only think of the blind and the seeing, and they have no understanding or concept of everything in between. I don’t hide that I have this disease.” I looked over at him. “I’ve just learned to compensate for it, so much so that sometimes even I forget...but then I walk into a door or a wall, and then I’m quickly reminded.”

“And the stars?”

A faint smile tugged at my lips as I recalled what the eye specialist in Morgantown had once asked me. “At my last appointment, about a year ago, my eye doctor asked if I could still see the stars at night. It was weird when he asked, because I had to think about it and I realized I couldn’t answer the question,” I admitted. “I hadn’t looked up at the stars in, like, forever, and it sort of hit me, you know? That one day I would look up and I wouldn’t see a star, and that would be it. I’d never be able to see something so...beautiful and simple again. Up until that moment, I’d taken that for granted. So, every night, I look up to see if I can see the stars.”

Zayne didn’t respond, but I felt his intense gaze on me. I started twisting my hair as I lifted a shoulder, unsure of what else to say. “So, yeah...”

A moment passed. “Can you see the stars now?”

I tipped my head back and lifted my gaze. It was a cloudless night and the sky was like a deep oil slick broken up by tiny dots. “I can see them. They’re faint.” Raising my hand, I pointed to two stars, one on top of the other. “Right there. Two of them.” I closed my right eye and the two tiny blurs of white became one blur of white. “Oh, wait.” I laughed. “There’s only one star there.”

“Yeah,” he murmured, and when I glanced at him, he was staring up in the direction I’d pointed. “There’s a star there.” He looked over at me, and our gazes locked. “Do you see more?”

Feeling a little dizzy and silly, I looked away with great effort. I scanned the sky again. “I see a couple. Why? Are there a lot of stars?”

When he didn’t answer, I peeked at him, and found that once again, he was staring at me, his head cocked slightly, causing a strand of blond hair to graze his cheek.

I kept twisting my hair as nervousness grew like a nest of birds waking up and taking flight. I looked away. “I’m guessing the sky is full of stars?”

“It is, but the only ones that matter are the ones you see.”

My gaze flew to his.

He smiled at me. “You are... You are incredibly strong.”

The comment caught me off guard. “What?”

“You’re standing here talking about losing your vision like it’s nothing. Like it’s no big deal, and it’s huge. You know that.” Reaching over, he placed his hand on mine, startling me. Gently, he untangled my fingers from my hair. “But you’re dealing with that. Living with that. If that’s not the definition of strength, I don’t know what is.”

The nest of birds moved to my chest. “I don’t think it’s strength.”

He pulled my hand away from my hair. “Trin...”

Flushing at the first use of my nickname and realizing I liked it when he called me that, I turned my gaze back to the two stars that were really one. “What I mean is, I don’t think it’s being strong. I can’t change what’s going to happen. Maybe one day there’ll be a cure and it will work for me, but until then, I have to accept this and I can’t dwell on it, because it is scary—it’s scary as Hell to really think that all of this will be gone and I’ll have to learn to live differently with the expectations of who I am and what I am, but I have to deal with it. And I do so by not letting it define me or consume every waking moment of my life. That’s not strength. That doesn’t make me special.” I shrugged. “It just means I’m...doing the best I can.”

Still holding my hand, he squeezed. “Like I said, the definition of strength.”

As if I had no control, I found myself staring into his eyes again, thinking that it was going to suck one day when I couldn’t see the stars, but it was going to be a damn shame when I could no longer see those pale blue wolf eyes.

“I can’t believe you haven’t told me until now.”

“Don’t take it personally. It’s not something I talk a lot about, because I just... I don’t know. I don’t want people treating me different because of it.” I turned to him. “I don’t want you treating me different.”

“I wouldn’t.” He stepped into me, careful of the fact we were still on the ledge. “Okay. That’s not exactly true. I admire the Hell out of you, but I already admired you. So now it’s more.”

I tried to stop smiling, but I couldn’t as I looked down at where he still held my hand. With the moonlight, I could see it.

“What are you going to do if it does get worse?” he asked.

“Maybe I’ll get myself a seeing-eye gargoyle.”

Zayne chuckled. “I can be that for you.”

“Uh, yeah, I feel like you’d grow very bored of that.”

“I don’t think so.” His fingers curled around my chin, bringing my gaze back to his. Air hitched in my throat. “I don’t think...there’s ever a boring second around you.”

“You don’t?” Needing a little space after discussing something so personal, I pulled free and backed up. “Good. I bet you can’t catch me.”

Pivoting around, I took off running on the ledge. I heard him shout my name, but it was lost in the wind as I picked up speed, the wind lifting my hair from my shoulders and sending it streaming behind me. I reached the edge of the ledge at a breakneck speed and there wasn’t a moment of hesitation or fear. I jumped, surrounded by nothing but air, and in those brief seconds, right before I began to fall, I became weightless and I knew that was what flying felt like.

Hitting the ledge of the building across the alley, I tucked and rolled off the rest of the speed, popping back with a wild smile breaking out across my mouth.

Zayne landed a second behind me, fully shifted again, and his wings lifted out and spread wide. The roof was more lit here so I could see the stunned look etched into his features.

Tossing back my head, I laughed as Zayne stormed toward me, fully shifted once more. “You should see your face right now. Oh my God, you actually do look speechless.” I spun away from him. “Didn’t know that was an actual thing—”

Zayne was on me in a heartbeat.

I squeaked as he caught me, lifting me clear off my feet as he held me to his chest. He pivoted, pressing me back against the cool metal of a maintenance shed. Like the night in the subway, there was no space between us, and I don’t know exactly when I’d curled my legs around his lean waist, but I had and I liked it.