20. Déjà vu
CHAPTER 20
DéJà VU
BILLIE
I didn’t need Kennedy to bat her lashes and ask her mage mate to whip up a travel spell to take me to Glaine. I’m sure she would have if I’d given her the chance to, and I would’ve appreciated the help, but I’m Billie Bickles. I get shit done, and as I’ve learned over the last month, I don’t need to have my phone to do it.
After I get Sierra’s promise that she’ll stick around until after I’ve gone after Glaine and, in a complete reversal of how we met—dragged his big butt back where he belongs, I go into problem-solver mode.
I trust my best friend. I’ll miss not spending every day with her, but if Glaine is one hundred percent sure that he has to stay in Sombra, I can, too. For now, at least. I’ve only seen part of the palace and one village up close. Without the weight of begging trapped here on my shoulders, I’d love to explore it some more—with my mate.
Because he’s mine. I think part of me has always known that he was, from the moment he stepped out of the shadows and my first instinct wasn’t to scream. I just hated the idea of fate taking the choice out of my hands. Being his fated mate, getting trapped with him in his demon world… I wanted to choose .
I could go back to New York. One day, I will. The upside of bonding with a demon is an immortal partner. With forever stretched ahead of us, there’s not the same urgency to go home. With Sierra’s confession that she’s happy with her own demon mate, that she plans on retiring from show biz as soon as she fulfills her obligations, and the relief I felt as hearing that, while I fought to get back to New York to shield her from Trevor’s obsession, she handled that without me… I can stay. There’s nothing pulling me right back, and with Sierra having her own demon mate and a pathway back to Sombra, she can visit me as often as she wants.
She can bring Three, too, since our pampered kitty seems to lord over Sombra in the bubble backpack.
Who knows? I can have her adopt a cat for me and Glaine—maybe call it Four—or I can take a page out of Kennedy’s book and tame one of the ungez like her pet, Freya.
There’s so much I can do, and it starts with finding Glaine and letting him know that I’m ready to accept him as my mate. I’m sure, in his cocky way, he’ll gloat that he was always right… but if that’s the case, why did he so easily return to the palace without me when the demon duke summoned him?
I’m not sure, but I remember what he told Apollyon when we first came to stay at Nuit.
Where I go, she goes .
Same, demon. Same.
Right. Problem-solver mode. Glaine took a portal back to Mavro with a different purple-eyed demon. I grab Sierra, knowing how eager Kennedy will be to finally meet her idol, and basically throw my best friend at my new one. With both women distracted, and Dagon tending to Three in his carrier, I march over to Loki and jab my pointer finger in his chest.
“I have Glaine’s essence. If you open a portal with your magic, can you bring me to him?”
Loki looks down his nose at my finger embedding in the first inch of his shadowy covering. He growls softly.
I don’t give a shit. I dig my nail deeper, not bothering to hide my impatience. “Kennedy is spending time with another human mate. Trust me. She won’t even know you’ve left if you hop to it, pal. Okay? Open the portal, drop me off, and if I have to walk back to Nuit with Glaine, just let Sierra know to expect me in a couple of days.”
“Glaine is in Mavro?—”
Duh. “I know that. I don’t care. He needs to be here.”
With me .
Loki’s cheeks hollow as he stays silent for a moment. I know his story. Kennedy told me all about how he went demonic after a spell gone wrong, all because he was desperate to find his mate. He knows what it’s like to be separated.
He also knows that, if a demon goes too far from his mate, he’ll burn.
That happened to Loki. When Kennedy needed some space from him before they were bonded—but after their essence exchange—she tried to walk away, and he went up in smoke. That’s how she discovered that the ‘shadow’ in shadow demon has two meanings: they can turn to shadow, and when they’re trying to bond their mate to them, they are a shadow.
Is Glaine burning up now? When Kennedy would sit with me and Freya in her house while Glaine was helping Apollyon out as Nuit’s security, she told me everything I could expect of being a mate. With a tablet from the village healer, he could extend the tether between us from ten feet to closer to a hundred-and-fifty… but Mavro is way farther than that.
Unless he’s in chains again, dampening his demon aura, he might be, and that’s all the more reason why I have to go to him.
Loki nods. “I will lead you through the portal. After that?—”
“You can go. I’ll be fine.”
I’ll be with my mate.
Up until the moment that Loki opens a portal on the other side and I get spat out from the shadows of his spell into very familiar surroundings, I think I convinced myself that Glaine took the first opportunity to be rid of me and high-tailed it back to the duke. After all, being the head guard was his identity. For centuries, that’s all he was. Behind his shields, Glaine couldn’t hide how much it hurt when Duke Haures released him from his duty. I should’ve known he’d go back if he could.
Isn’t that what I was trying to do? Instead of taking the chance to have a new life, a new future, I was desperate to return to my old one. I was the Whiskey Rose’s manager, right? I had the world at my fingertips. The power and prestige that came with the title… wasn’t that what I fought so hard to see again?
That sounds terrible. Like I don’t care about Sierra when the truth is that our lives were so intermingled, it was hard for us to just be Billie and Sierra. We were Whiskey Rose and manager. That’s it. Having some time when I could be Billie again… it was good for me. Just like how I see the light in her eyes for the first time in years now.
She’s happy with her mate. A workaholic to the bone, she won’t dip on being Whiskey Rose and disappoint her fans, but she’s looking forward to her future with Dagon.
And now that I’ve seen her and realized that I can have a life of my own, I want to share it with my own demon mate.
I only hope that I’m not too late. I wasn’t playing hard to get all along, not really, and I regret to think I was leading Glaine on by acting the part of his mate these last few weeks without actually finalizing our bond, but I’m ready to do that now. So long as he’ll still have me, I’ll make him mine.
I thought my biggest obstacle would be that Glaine finally gave up on me and rejoined the other soldiers at the barracks—and then I see the narrow cat, the bars on the cell door, and Glaine crouched in the far corner, the front pair of horns in his chained hands, and I gasp.
I was wrong. Way wrong.
The portal closes behind me, but I don’t care. If we’re right back where we started, that’s fine.
We’re together and that’s all that matters.
“Glaine?”
At the sounds of his name in my voice, his head jerks up. “Billie. No. What are you… you’re supposed to be in the human world. Not here.”
Forget where I’m supposed to be… “What are you doing here? In the dungeon. In chains ? I thought the duke dropped all the charges.” Wait. A terrible idea pops into my head. Supposed to be in the human world … “Did you think I was leaving with Sierra? I just wanted to talk to her, Glaine. That’s all. I wouldn’t leave without you.”
He blinks. “But I thought?—”
“You thought wrong. And, baby, you shouldn’t think without me there to help you out. What happened? You got the idea that I was leaving, and what? Since that breaks the first law, Duke Haures threw you back in the cell?”
“That’s not why I’m here.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Then why are you?”
“The duke’s first law is that no human should know of Sombra.”
“Unless they’re a mate.” I gesture at myself. “Mate.”
Smart demon. He doesn’t remind me that, technically, we’re not fully bonded yet so it wouldn’t count in the duke’s eyes. It should, though. We got in trouble in the first place because I pointedly refuse to accept that I was a Sombra demon’s mate.
That was last month Billie. This month Billie? I’m proud to call Glaine mine.
“There are more laws than that,” Glaine admits. “I was sent to put a clan artist in chains and take him to the dungeon once when it became clear that his human mate did not want to choose him. He kept the bond open and unfulfilled as long as Duke Haures allowed, but us demons have to accept when Fate and the gods get it wrong. Lilith denied me because she knew Apollyon was her male. And you… I’d wait forever for your acceptance, my mortal. But I won’t put you through that now that you can leave me behind.”
Is he… is he serious? The self-centered demon who stole me before he even said ‘hi’ is trying to be noble and let me go all because he got the wrong idea in his head?
“Oh, no, you don’t.”
The flash of obvious anger in my voice has Glaine’s familiar scowl returning. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me, Glaine.”
He pretends as though he didn’t. “Why did you send… Loki. It had to have been Loki. Why did you send him away? You know I don’t have the power for shadow travel. I am a… was a soldier. Not a mage. There won’t be any guards willing to leave the cell open for me now. You should’ve left while you still could.”
“And leave you in the dungeon?”
“Don’t worry about me. We’re not bonded,” he says, and it’s true. “No matter what’s passed between us… I can release you from our mate bond. You no longer have to be tied to me.”
“And that’ll get you out of the dungeon again? You’ll dump me to get free from the chains, that it?”
Was I wrong in believing that he honestly chose me ? Not because of Fate, but because?—
“No. Because I love you too much to keep you here when you don’t want to be kept, my Billie. I love you enough to grant you the one thing you desire above all us.” He gulps, and I know he’s remembering the prophecy from the doppelseers when he says: “Your freedom.”
I never wanted freedom, unless he’s talking about the freedom to choose. And guess what, Glaine?
“We’re not bonded,” I say, and he shudders out a breath to hear that I’ve agreed with him. I moved closer to where he’s still crouched. “At least, not yet.”
His eyes brighten. “Billie?”
“You’re not falling on your sword for me, Glaine.”
A look of confusion flashes across his face as he slowly rises. “My sword? Would you like to take it for protection in the mortal realm? Without me there to keep you safe and your mortal body so fragile… I cannot retrieve now because of the chains, but later?—”
“Don’t be an idiot. I’m not trying to stab you, I’m trying to keep you from sacrificing yourself for me.”
Glaine juts out his chin. “I’m only upholding my end of the deal I made with Duke Haures.”
What? “You made a deal with the devil? When?”
Behind me, I hear more than a few people suck in a breath, muttering under the next after they blow it back out again. Right. Probably not the best idea to refer to the ruler of his world as the devil, but come on. If Sombra is a Hell knock-off, that makes Haures the white-skinned version of Satan—especially if he sent another of his guards to take Glaine back to Mavro in chains.
My demon mate doesn’t answer me. That’s fine. I’ve gotten to know Glaine well enough to know that, while he’s proud, he’s also protective. He might have let me yank him back from the portal, but especially after the way I insulted the duke in front of the rest of the village, he’ll stay quiet if he thinks he’s doing it for me.
Luckily for me, I have his essence.
I don’t use it enough. It never sat right with me. Blame it on spending all those years in the tabloids, but even after I purposely stepped out of the limelight, it always irked me how people thought they knew me based on what they read online or printed in a magazine. People rarely got to know me , and that sore spot kept me from fully accepting the essence of who Glaine is because it seemed like… cheating, I guess.
The more time I’ve spent in Sombra, the more I’ve realized that I had let my own hang-ups twist something sacred to Glaine and his fellow demons. By giving me his essence, it was inviting me into his soul, giving me a front-row seat to everything Glaine . I’m not the one who stubbornly refused it for reasons that started to seem silly a few weeks ago.
So, though my first instinct isn’t to tap into Glaine’s essence and learn the answer for myself, there are times when I do and it’s almost a natural reaction. If it saves me from being blindsided like when I learned he thought Lilith might be his fated mate, it’s worth it.
I screw up my face. Through the whisper-thin bond that sprang up between us from the first time I accepted that he might just be my mate, Glaine sends a jolt of pure love and undeniable panic toward me. His face gives nothing away, grumpy as ever, but his emotions are as clear as the memory of Glaine agreeing to return to the dungeons in my stead if I ever chose to return to the human realm without him.
Because that’s how Haures enforces the penalties of breaking the first law. Humans aren’t allowed to know that Sombra or its inhabitants exist. The only exception, of course, is when a human female accepts that she is a Sombra demon’s one true mate. Once the pair is bonded, they’re both tasked with keeping Sombra a secret if they choose to exist together in the human world, like some of the mixed mated pairs have. But they have to be bonded—and while I haven’t spent a night out of Glaine’s bed since we left the bathtub together and tumbled into it, we’re not bonded.
Well, that’s about to change.
Even before he knew anything about me, he knew I was his mate. That’s why he stayed behind in the throne room with Duke Haures while I was brought down to the dungeon that first night. Because he bartered with the duke—and Glaine’s imprisonment is more because he thought I was leaving than because it’s taken us this long to fulfill our bond.
I get the feeling that these rules of Duke Haures’s… they’re not laws. At the very least, they’re not set in stone. As the ruler of Sombra, he can pick and choose who has to follow them, and what the outcome from not following them is.
Then again, if he’s only here because he thought I was leaving, then once I prove to him I plan on staying , there’s no reason for the duke to keep him down here.
That’s a problem.
Solution: prove with actions more than words that I mean it when I say I’m not going.
Here goes nothing.