Page 3 of Taken By the Twins

Billie and Sierra are human, not demon. Their essence belongs to their mates. Since they are not of Sombra, our ability to share the twin bond with them won’t work, so we had no choice but to involve the artist.

Luckily, he was more than willing to help us while the healer tended to his mate.

Damien senses the whisper of our mate’s essence more easily than I do. The logical twin, I need tosee. Much more in tune with his demonic nature, hefeels—and however he does it, it works. Using the four colors ofgizwe gathered for Malphas—red, green, white, and black—he draws on the parchment until a stunning rendering of a red-haired female with red lips, green eyes, and colorless white skin is pouting back at us.

“There,” Malphas murmurs, setting down the chalk. “This is the female that the doppelseers have put in my head.”

“Red,” whispers Damien, his white eye glowing much brighter than usual.

“Fucking hell,” explodes the female with the braid. Dagon’s mate, Sierra. “That’sTandy.”

Tandy.

“Tan-dee.” I taste the name between my fangs as I murmur it softly. I like it. “You know this female?”

“Know her?” She waves her wee hands at herself, then Glaine’s female, Billie, she of the big gold hair, a similar color to Malpahs’s craftsman-colored eyes. “We used to be in a band with her!”

Glaine’s female leans around Malphas’s shadows. “Holy crap. That’s the spitting image of her.”

I frown. “The drawing is of a smiling female. She is not expectorating.”

They share a look that makes it clear that there was some sort of miscommunication between their Sombran and my native grasp of my tongue.

Dagon’s mate shakes her head. “I don’t know about all that, but that drawing… it’s Tandy. I’d recognize her anywhere.”

“She is your friend?” I ask.

“Yeah… I wouldn’t saythat.”

Damien’s white eye is still glowing brightly. Before the other males in the room can notice, I feed a little of my essence down our shared bond to bring Damien back around while closing it off from Malphas.

Damien’s purple eye flashes, and my twin snarls around his fangs as his innate magic overwhelms him once my essence settles in his veins. “A creature with no legs, who crawls on its belly in the dirt, and takes that which doesn’t belong… that is who you think she is.”

Dagon’s mate wrinkles her strangely smooth brow. Without the ridges I expect from a fellow demon or demoness, it’s unprotected and more colorless than a Sombran’s solid shape or shadows. “What was that?”

It wasn’t a prophecy. Courtesy of the doppelseers’ twin bond, if Damien was using our innate gift to take his visions of the future and share them in the only way my twin can, I’d be aware of it even if I didn’t understand what he sees. But while my main power is seeing things before they happen and putting them plainly if I can, Damien can simply understand things about those he reads.

And what he read from Dagon’s mate is enough to have his white eye flaring again.

“A ‘snake’, Sierra,” offers Glaine’s mate. “He’s telling you that he’s picking up on you calling Tandy a ‘snake’ in your head.”

Snake. I do not know this word. It must be a human translation, but based on what Damien said to her, I imagine one of the groundcrawlingjamdacreatures that slither on their bellies as they nip at a demon’s heels while he’s in his solid form. Solid black except for the glowing white eyes that all shadow creatures have, thejamdais a nuisance.

And this human says the same of my female?

“Are you an empath?” I ask her. “Can you read others?”

“Who, me? Nah.” Glaine’s mate shakes her head, all that human hair bouncing wildly as she does. “I’m just an old pro at reading my way around a contract. It took me a while to figure it out, but Damien’s riddles are like the Sombra demon version of legalese. A lot of words to say a little, and once I figured that out, deciphering what he says sometimes became a lot easier.”

Glaine beams. “That’s my Billie. Such a clever mate.”

She is. At least, for a human, she is, but I already knew that. At Duke Haures’s request, when Billie and Glaine were travelingon the edge of the shadows, working their way toward Nuit, we kept an eye on their journey.

And then I saw red, and Damien sensed that the sixth mortal to bond with one of our kind would lead us to the seventh, and we moved our home out of the shadows before inviting the human and her guard to stay with us so that we could get a better read on her essence.

She is clever… and for the first time in centuries, I feel hope.

Hope that the time to take our mate is here at last.

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