7
Soleil
My mind won’t stop racing.
All the way down the corridor leading away from Seren and Callum and… Finn, I can’t hold on to a single thought.
They all run through me like water, slipping through my fingers before I have even a second to hold and examine them.
The demon.
His hopeful and then crestfallen face.
Me, running out of there like an idiot.
The thread of magick in my chest that’s still pulling tight.
Pulling me back to him.
I keep going.
Slowing from a jog into a brisk walk, I’m so distracted I nearly run into another demon at the end of one of the long, winding hallways. He’s tall, like all demon men seem to be, and wearing the same armor the guards at the court gates were.
“Sorry,” I mutter, reeling back.
The guard steadies me with a hand on my shoulder. “Are you alright?”
“Yes, I’m—could you take me to Vayla’s workshop?”
“The healer?”
I nod enthusiastically, which probably doesn’t make me look anything but deranged.
The guard’s brow creases. “Are you hurt?”
“No, I—”
“Sick?” He looks me up and down, like I’d have visible boils or something.
How fragile do they think humans are? Do humans get sick a lot in this realm?
I make myself breathe and try for at least a measure of composure. “Not sick. Not hurt. I’m here from the human realm to help Vayla with some of her work.”
Again, he looks me up and down, still not entirely convinced, but he nods.
“Give me your hand; I will portal us down there.”
I hesitate.
I’m really, really not looking forward to another portal.
It’s a damn good thing I’ve barely eaten today, and knowing how far it will probably be to walk, I suck it up and hold out my hand.
In the blink of an eye, we’re in an entirely different corridor.
Dropping the guard’s hand, I stagger forward. With one hand pressed to my mouth and the other braced on the stone wall, I breathe through my nose and do my very best not to throw up.
“Shit,” the guard mutters. “You’re sure you’re not ill?”
Silently, I shake my head. I take a few more deep breaths before I’m able to speak.
“Nope. Just, uh, not really used to the portals.”
“Soleil?” Vayla appears in the doorway we portalled to, sizing up me and the guard. “You alright?”
“Fine!” I say, sounding anything but.
“Alright.” She jerks her head toward the inside of the workshop. “Come on in, then.”
Grateful for the escape, I mumble my thanks to the guard for his help and follow Vayla inside.
Immediately, some of my frazzled nerves soothe.
Vayla’s suite of rooms is incredible.
On the other side of the door, the space opens up into a huge, gorgeous library filled with tomes in a dozen different languages from a dozen different realms. The next room holds maps and orreries—intricately crafted mechanical models of the stars and planets—and beyond that is a greenhouse and workshop filled with plants and herbs and more dried potion ingredients than I have names for.
The greenhouse is where we wind up, sitting across from each other on opposite sides of a long wooden worktable.
It’s the first moment I’ve been able to catch a breath since I came face to face with my demon…
Goddess, I can barely make myself think the word.
Mate.
My demon mate.
A shudder rolls down my spine.
No one said it explicitly, but I know enough to know that’s what just happened.
A demon just recognized me as his mate.
The thought feels strangely disconnected from the rest of my brain. Floating through my gray matter like it belongs to someone else, I watch idly as it passes, then make myself stop thinking about it completely.
I absolutely do not have the capacity to think about it.
Not with everything else that happened today.
I have no idea if Seren believed the story I told her when I arrived at her rooms about being here to help Vayla, but worrying about that seems a bit beside the point.
The demon’s face flashes into my mind.
Handsome, in a blond, surfer-boy kind of way.
Do demons surf?
Probably also beside the point.
But he was… hopeful. So damn hopeful. Looking at me like I was some kind of miracle.
It makes my gut twist.
Damn it, I’m not supposed to be thinking about this.
“So, are you going to tell me what really happened?”
Snapping out of those thoughts, I meet Vayla’s eye. “What do you mean?”
She just stares at me, unimpressed.
“There was… an incident. In Seren’s rooms.”
“An incident?”
“Nothing bad,” I say quickly. “I mean… not very bad… I just… there was this demon, and we… he saw me, and I think he realized I’m his…”
I swallow hard, unable to continue.
Vayla’s mouth drops open in surprise. “No way.”
“Yes way, apparently,” I mutter.
“A demon recognized you as his—”
“Don’t say it—”
“—mate?”
I give her a quick, curt nod.
“Who is it?”
Another flash of memory.
Blond hair, crimson eyes, dimples.
A frisson of magick, warm and inviting.
“His name is Finn.”
“Finn?” Her eyes go as wide as I’ve ever seen them. “Your mate is Finn? Nighfall?”
“Apparently.” I press my fingertips to my temples, trying to massage away the budding ache there.
A burst of laughter slips out of her, but she immediately stifles it with a hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry. It’s not funny. It’s just… Finn? Really? I never would have thought…” She pauses for a moment, considering. “You know what? No. I can see it. The two of you are—”
“Not a thing,” I cut in. “The two of us are not a thing.”
“Alright. Whatever you say.” She stands from her seat and walks over to a bookstand at the side of the room, where the familiar, heavy-bound tome of Ariana’s grimoire sits.
“Finn Nighfall,” she says under her breath with a small, amused snort as she cracks the book open.
“What?” I can’t help but ask. “Is there something wrong with him?”
“No. He’s just… well, Finn is a bit of a… character, I think you’d say. He’s very well-known at court.”
I want to ask her exactly what well-known means, what character means.
But pressing her would mean I… care.
It would mean I’m invested even a little in this whole mate thing, that I see any kind of future where Finn and I are… anything.
And that’s not the case. Absolutely not.
“Let’s just get to work,” I grumble, standing from my seat to join her at the grimoire.
On the bookstand, there’s another sheaf of papers next to Ariana’s book. It contains painstakingly written translations to match the pages, with notes about where the text needs more research.
“Allie’s work?” I ask.
Vayla nods. “Yes, the queen has been working on it as she has time.”
The queen. Allison Hawthorn—Ashblood—is a queen here. I should probably remember that.
She points to a place in the translation. “This is where I’m stuck. There are ingredients listed here that don’t have a modern translation. Queen Allison and I were trying to determine what Ariana was referencing.”
“I might be able to figure it out in context,” I say, scanning the rest of the page, the other ingredients, Ariana’s narrative about what she was trying to accomplish with this particular brew. “May I?”
“Please do.” Vayla gestures to the page and steps back. “Pull up a chair and get comfortable if you want to. I’ll be harvesting some fern hearts if you need anything.”
She gets to work on her harvesting, I get to work on deciphering text, and for the next hour it’s easy enough to pretend.
Pretend I really did come here to earnestly collaborate with the demon court’s healer.
Pretend I’m not currently a fugitive from the coven.
Pretend nothing at all happened when I went to Seren’s room this morning.
The work is hard, exactly the kind of tedious and annoying I thrive on.
Everything Ariana wrote is centuries out of date.
Between the way language naturally evolves over time and the fact that most of what she was working with in her potion brewing comes from the demon realm, it’s hard to make any kind of sense of it.
But magickal principles apply across realms. Once I know the ailments she was trying to treat with these potions—fevers, aches, rashes, other various maladies—and can get a foothold with a few familiar lines of ingredients, I can start filling the rest in for myself.
It will take more than translation. After we’ve got the pages, the next step is to brew some samples and see if they do what we think they’ll do. But if we can accomplish that, we might find something of actual worth in the pages of this ancient grimoire.
We might find something that can actually help people.
That, more than anything, makes it easy to sink into the work.
I’m not back in my workshop making my thousandth anti-wrinkle serum for a priestess who can’t accept crow’s feet just come with the territory of getting older. I’m not spending all day on a vitality elixir that will be sold off to fund some other priestess’s twelfth office renovation.
It’s nice to feel like I’m doing something that matters, for a change.
But reality—like it always does—comes crashing back in way too soon.
Hunched over the grimoire, glasses on and eyes squinted as I try to make out a particularly tough passage, I nearly jump out of my seat at the sound of a door opening.
Seren and Allie stand in the workshop’s doorway.
“You called the queen on me?” I ask my sister with a glare, then flush red when I realize how rude that was.
Goddess, what’s the protocol for addressing royalty?
I probably should know that since we’re in her court.
Even though we’re around the same age and even though she’s the High Priestess’s daughter, I barely know Allie.
She didn’t make the cut for coven training, which was a pretty big fucking deal around the coven hall when it happened, and meant she went to regular school instead of magickal training with the rest of us.
Now—almost two decades later, after she married the king of the demon realm during the last Tithe, and after she helped me escape the coven hall and come here—I’m keenly aware I have no idea how I should be speaking to her.
“Sorry, uh, your Majesty.” I wince at how awkwardly in comes out. “I didn’t mean to involve you when I’m sure you’ve got much more important matters to—”