Chapter 2 #2
She plants both hands on my chest and pushes hard, doing more to catapult herself away than to move me. She’s fierce, but I’ve got over a foot and easily a hundred pounds on her, so I stand down, taking a step back with my hands raised, showing her I mean no harm.
How could I ever mean her any harm?
As the instinct to chase fades, a new one unfurls to take it’s place.
It’s an instinct I’ve never felt before, but immediately recognize for what it is.
Deep within the inner workings of my soul, gravity shifts. All thirteen realms rearrange themselves, and in the span of a heartbeat, the life I thought I knew has been upended.
This human is my mate.
A joyous thing for most demons, to find the one soul in all the realms who matches yours completely. The one meant to stand beside you for eternity.
But my mate? This distrustful human standing before me?
She looks as if she’d rather carve my heart from my chest than lay her head there and let me hold her.
“Listen, buddy,” she says, taking another step, oblivious to the hands of fate wrapping around both our throats. “Back off, and no one here gets hurt.”
She tucks a hand into her pocket as she speaks, no doubt reaching for some sort of weapon. One dripping with magick, if her scent is any indication.
The woman before me is unmistakably a witch.
Her entire being radiates a magick unlike anything I’ve ever felt. Bright and assertive, with the distinctly metallic edge all human magick has. Her scent is like lightning striking stone, a deluge, a tempest.
I raise my hands in front of me to show her I’m unarmed. To calm her, hopefully, though her mouth only twists into an even more distrusting frown.
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
She laughs. “Yeah, sure. You’re just going to chase me down in the woods and what? Give me a friendly handshake?”
“I wanted to talk to you. Stop you before you go back to the human realm.”
Her brows knit together. “You know I’m a human?”
“I’ve seen humans before.”
The new queen of the demon realm is a human, a witch, and per the magick of the new bargain struck between our realms, more of her kind have been coming through the Veil to live amongst demonkind.
These witches have helped renew the balance of magick between realms, stabilizing our two worlds, and rumor has it some of them have found their own demon mates.
And now it would seem this human and I have met the same fate.
Not that she looks to feel much joy over that fact.
She still looks like she wants to bolt. She glances over her shoulder to where the faint light of the Veil breaks through the forest, then back to me.
“My name is Callum.” Hands still raised in what I hope is a placating gesture, I keep my voice low and even, doing my best not to startle her.
“Why did you follow me?”
“Why were you eavesdropping on my conversation with Pytri?”
Shit. Wrong question.
Mate or not, apparently my tendency to be a suspicious arsehole hasn’t entirely disappeared.
Her eyes narrow. “You were having a conversation in the middle of a crowded tavern. If it was private, you should have gone somewhere else.”
The witch takes another handful of steps back.
“How much did you hear?”
“Who says I heard anything?”
I snort, and she scowls. “If you had leaned yourself any further back on that bench, you’d have landed your arse on the floor.”
She steps, I step, a slow dance toward the Veil.
I could reach her in half a heartbeat.
I wouldn’t even need a portal to do it. Just one quick lunge, a hard beat of my wings, and she’d be in my arms.
The idea is so appealing that for a few long, aching moments, I’m not certain I won’t give in to it. Surely this woman, this witch, my mate, can’t hate me so much without even knowing me. We’ve made a bad beginning, but what’s such a thing between mates?
Only… her wariness and suspicion do not fade.
She takes a few more steps, quickening her pace until we enter a wide clearing around the stone arch that holds the Veil. The portal between realms, the domain of the Goddess herself, pulsing with opalescent white light in the darkness.
The witch inches toward the light, eyes darting back and forth between me and the Veil with silent calculation.
She’s going to run.
I feel it as surely as I feel the burgeoning bond springing to life in my chest, and every one of my hunter’s instincts focuses squarely on her.
Goddess, I hope she doesn’t run.
I hope she does run.
The thought of her running, of me chasing, of hunting her down in these woods, following her scent, listening to the frantic beat of her heart, fingers closing around warm skin and…
Fuck.
I’m not going to chase her.
As long as she doesn’t run.
I can’t think. Can’t get a handle on the racing of my blood in my veins and all the terrible, wonderful, unfamiliar instincts coursing through me.
“Witch,” I grate out, “whatever it is you think you’re—”
“It’s none of your business,” she shoots back.
“It is.” I want to stifle the growl in my chest, I really do, but as she takes a few more quick steps toward the shimmering of the Veil, my muscles bunch and ache with instinctive, unstoppable need.
“Oh yeah? Why?”
“You know why.”
Can she not feel it, this wild magick between us? Does she not know what it means?
The thought breaks over me like a bucket of cold water.
The king has a human mate, doesn’t he? And other demons, too, have found their fated ones in these strange, hornless, wingless creatures. So the witch standing before me should certainly be able to…
No.
She doesn’t.
If she did, she wouldn’t be looking at me like I’m about to harm her.
If she did, she would wait for a moment and listen.
“I sure the fuck do not,” she snaps.
“Don’t you?” I murmur. “So then it’s only me who feels it?”
“Feel what?”
I don’t answer, and her eyes dart back to the Veil, wider now. Her hands shake. Only a slight tremor, but I already feel so attuned to her I’m certain I’d be able to see it from a hundred paces away.
“Feel what?” she asks again, and the tremor is in her voice, too.
Hope sparks in my chest.
“What do you know of demonkind? What do you know of the witch who’s married our king?”
I see the moment the truth of it lands in her mind.
Her unnervingly green eyes go even wider. Her mouth falls open on a gasp. The tremor in her hands and in her voice reaches the hollow of her throat—a fast, staccato beat hammering against her pale skin.
I want to press my lips there. Soothe that racing heart. Draw her beneath the protective cover of my wings and keep her there until all that fright eases away.
Until she feels what I feel.
Goddess above, I need her to feel what I feel.
“Reach for it,” I urge softly. “You’ve got a tempest of magick inside you, witch, and I’d wager it’s strong enough to tell you that you’ve met your m—”
“Don’t say it,” she whispers, horror laced through each word.