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Prologue-Kian

Spring is an ugly season.

I don’t care who claimed otherwise.

Poets could wax poetic about renewal, songwriters could croon about fresh starts, and artists could paint it in shades of soft pinks and gentle greens, but facts were facts.

And fact: Barren County at the end of March was ugly as fuck.

The trees look skeletal. Their branches are gnarled and reaching out like desperate hands toward a sky that refused them.

What little life dared to sprout came in the form of spindly buds, pale and fragile, barely clinging to their limbs like nervous debutantes.

The ground is a battlefield of slush and mud, deep enough to suck the boots off an unwary traveler.

And the weather?

The weather is an absolute fucking nightmare.

One minute, the wind cuts like a knife, slashing through my jacket with an almost sentient cruelty. The next, the sun is bursting through the clouds, searing everything in sight with a humid, oppressive heat.

It’s as if Mother Nature herself can’t decide whether to freeze us or bake us alive.

Hot flashes, I think with a smirk, though I keep that observation to myself.

There are too many women on the ranch who’d take offense. Perimenopause jokes are an acquired taste, and I’ve enough trouble keeping the peace.

But it isn’t just the landscape making my skin itch. The air itself just feels wrong.

Thick.

Charged.

Like the moment before a storm breaks.

The scent of wet earth mingles with something else, something sharp and metallic that has nothing to do with the land.

I roll my shoulders, resisting the urge to turn around.

Something is coming.

It’s stalking me. And that isn’t a guess. It isn’t paranoia.

I feel it as clear as the sun shining through all the gray clouds above me.

The sensation slithers along my spine, cold and insidious, curling around the nape of my neck like unseen fingers.

My Bull snorts, stomping the ground inside that metaphysical plane where he waits.

I know they are watching. I feel the quiet, appraising scrutiny of the Crew from the barn, or out in the fields, wherever they may be, just watching to see what happens next.

They can’t know what it’s like.

What it feels like to be hunted by something you can’t control.

This presence? This force?

It’s a hunger.