Those eyes.
Green as springtime and wide with surprise, looking into them is like falling into the ether of the Veil itself. Endless and eternal.
I tug her hood down to her shoulders and a tumble of golden hair falls free, soft curls my hands ache to sink into, grip hard, tip her head back so I can—
“What the fuck is your problem?”
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 seemthishuman 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?”
