He was very important to this realm.
Other souls joined us in the room. Two others. Owu’s mother and the yellow were back, and… everyone was screaming.
I floated to wakefulness and opened my eyes.Oh.
We had company.
The tiny room was packed with demon ghosts. They shimmered in the room with their pearly, translucent presence. And all of them were young—young teens at the oldest. Most were hunched and misshapen, their jaws disjointed as though they’d died screaming or warped with pain.
“What is she doing?” The mother clutched at her son, who was the only other calm demon in the bedroom.
He whispered, “Mama, don’t worry. They’re like me.”
His shaking mother and father stared at the child ghosts. The yellow had jammed himself into the far corner.
One of the eldest teens drifted to me. “Nwiu rolod.”
Two colors. My voice was soft and not entirely my own. “You all had scales of two colors?”
The children nodded in unison.
“If you would tell me the cause, then I would hear it,” I said, bowing my head.
The same demon replied, “Our destiny was greater than the power of our mother and father.”
A hunched girl rasped, “Their matings were incomplete.”
All eyes focused on Owu’s parents.
“Your mating is incomplete,” I asked them in a voice of ice. “And you didn’t think that was important?”
Owu’s mother shook her head. “Our mating is complete. We moved through all seven rituals.”
The red stared at his son, a telling blush showing between the red scales bordering his face.
“Your son’s life depends on your honesty,” I boomed in a voice of hundreds.
He shouted in fear, and blurted, “I thought we were mated!”
Mated enough, the red’s tone implied.
“But,” he said, “during our smoke ritual… she passed out from the pain of my smoke. My power was so much greater. I couldn’t hurt her any longer. I gained the markings from the ritual after, but…” The demon gestured to a marking on his side. His markings were yellow, in the color of his mate, and hard to see against his skin.
I peered at the space next to his finger. A scar interrupted the two ends of the marking from joining. “The ritual was incomplete.”
Owu shifted his gaze to mine. “That’s why I’m yellow and red?”
His mother covered her face and sobbed but did not shove her mate’s arm away when he wrapped it around her.
“Yes, Owu,” I said gravely. “And your destiny is very great too. From a complete mating, you might have been born strong enough to meet it on your own. But now I am here to help you.”
His mother clutched my arm. “You can heal him?”
“Yes, but you won’t like the cost.”
Her face turned stony. “You will feast on his pain.”
That’s what demon healers tended to do.
