Hell was doing fine without me. Our war had been stale, political, and operated in the shadows long enough to go on whether or not I wasted my time in Hell. But my human? How fine would she be without a protector?
I had no strategy, save for the process of elimination, but no message from my legions, no infuriated tirades from my sister, no concerned interceptions by deities as I trespassed on their lands, deterred my pursuit.
How had the mortal world changed so much in such a short time?
I began to seriously reconsider my stance on involving the legion under my command. There was no helpless feeling like watching the mortal hours become days become years knowing that she could be anywhere—that anything could have happened to her.
Had she changed her mind once she crossed over, and gone to her people’s afterlife?
Had a new, earthly mother died in childbirth, starting the nine-month-search over again, and again, and again?
I didn’t know if she was happy, if she was suffering, if she needed me. No, I didn’t like the idea of other immortal beings around her. Yes, the thought of word spreading as to my affinity for my human made me hostile. But if humanity continued expanding at this rate, how was I supposed to shuffle mankind through a sieve until I found my one, precious gem?
I was determined to find her, and find her, I did.
In the twenty-ninth mortal year of my hunt, my search came to an end just before giving up on yet another continent and crossing the mountains into kingdoms and peoples I had yet to discover.
The sharp smell of the air above the clouds. The pearly glow that emanated from below the skin. The essence of the one I loved.
It was worthy of a parade, of a feast, of a mandatory holiday to which each of Hell’s citizens should dance in the streets if only to share in my joy.
I hadn’t taken a breath in decades, and there, in a seaside town in chilly Britannia, my lungs filled for the first time since Yuka’s passing.
But there she was, just outside of Durrington, the farm of the deer people, sloping on the edge of a riverbank.
Breathe. It was that voice within myself that I hadn’t heard in a long, long time.
She’s here. She’s alive. You’re together.
I can’t be held accountable for how long I stared in slack-jawed awe.
You found her, you found her, you found her.
It was superficial to be sure, but the moment I moved past her soul, I realized that for the first time, her hair was not black. Her features had changed over names and ethnicities and centuries, of course, but until now I hadn’t fully embraced how everything could change. I’d had no cause to come this far north, and from pale-haired reindeer herders in the north, to the rich umber of the southern deserts, to the glossy chestnut of the mountains, I wasn’t prepared for how many different kinds of humans there were.
I’d never seen shades of red in human hair.
It was as if a few precious drops of blood had been squeezed into a water basin, then dribbled atop her head. The pinpricksthat remained colored her chill-pinked skin. Quite like the deer for which her people were named, she had the dotting of a fawn sprinkled over her nose, her cheeks, her forehead. She looked nothing like Shala or Eleni or Yuka, but she looked everything like Love.
Her pearly aura might as well have been a halo. It stole the breath from my lungs, filling them with the crisp cloud and sky quality that I hadn’t tasted in nearly thirty years. I was so excited to find her, to see her, that I hadn’t done a moment of research on her, her people, her village, her culture, her beliefs.
Unlike Yuka, Eleni, or Shala cycles before her, she was in no danger from which she needed saving.
I was the danger.
I burst from the veil with the sort of uncouth elation that, understandably, nearly gave my human a heart attack. I knew my mistake the moment I’d made it. She was my human to me, after all, but to her, I was a stranger.
I stepped backward into the veil the instant her scream tore from her throat.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I could have ripped out my own hair.
Of course, she didn’t know me. Of course, I was not only a stranger, but an apparition where a moment prior only freshwater and grass and solitude had been. She would have screamed even if it had been a bucket of puppies and gold coins that appeared unannounced to ambush her.
It was a fool’s mistake.
I was humiliated by my blunder and unbelievably irritated with myself.
