Page 10 of Demon's Mate
“Something must have changed,” Ash said, lifting his head. “Who knows what’s going on in the Realm now. Lucifer couldn’t have hidden our absence forever.”
“He can’t drag us back.” Dante’s eyes flashed with black fire. “There are three of us and one of him. He only got one over on us before because we trusted him. That mistake won’t be made twice.”
“True, but we have to be careful. You shouldn’t still be here, Dante. You need to live somewhere less conspicuous.” Ash leveled a stern look at his old friend.
Dante scoffed. “I’m not hiding. Shearwater Landing is mine. The birds will warn me if Lucifer is coming.”
“You’re placing a lot of trust in your shearwaters.” Ash tried not to let anger get the better of him, but Dante and his connection to the shearwaters was too much of a giveaway that there was magic in the city. Magic too great to belong to any witch or vampire.
Lucifer would know a demon was here. It was foolish.
“Yes, well, not all of us want to live alone in the woods, Ash.”
Ash grunted. There was no need to defend his lifestyle. It suited him. End of story.
“Iknowthis is the city,” Dante said in a softer tone. “I’m not leaving until I find him.”
Ash’s anger fled and his heart ached. Dante had never given up hope. It broke Ash. He’d given up a millennia and a half ago. How did Dante do it?
The wind off the ocean caressed Ash’s face and he closed his eyes, trying to hold the memories back. The past felt less distant than it had in a long time. This never happened at his hunting lodge.
In what was arguably ancient history, he, Dante, Onyx, and Lucifer had been beings of the Eternal Realm. They and others of their kind were known as Eternals, the guardians of magic and human souls in the afterlife. There was no Realm of the Damned back then, just the Human Realm and the one of magic.
Life had been good but not perfect. The Eternal Realm was ruled by a council, who had absolute power over the guardianship of the two realms and the balance between them. Part of guarding that balance was granting Eternals their mates.
Each Eternal had a fated mate, but only the council could bring mates together and gift pairs the right to produce offspring.
Being immortal, the Eternals in charge rarelychanged. Some Eternals requested their mates only to be denied by the council and told to come back in the distant future.
Many Eternals didn’t think the system was fair and grew tired of waiting. Lucifer had been among them. He had been denied repeatedly, as had his younger brother Onyx, Ash, and Dante. No explanation was ever given and the loneliness made time stretch agonizingly, leaving them not knowing if they’d ever be granted their other halves.
Lucifer believed the council didn’t have to grant mates and that individuals could find their fated loves themselves. Some successfully mated Eternals had sworn they’d found the fated connection without the council’s help, discovering their mates among the human souls occupying the Eternal Realm. They’d then requested approval to be mated and were granted. The council denied this, but of course, they would when it challenged their absolute power over the process.
The council didn’t control fate itself. They only had the power to see fated connections between beings. But why should anyone have to wait to be granted a mate when the connection already existed? Not all mated pairs wanted children, and offspring could be granted separately if desired, allowing the balance between Eternal and human lives to be guarded.
Ash had agreed with Lucifer, and so had many others. Some had waited thousands of years for their mates and were ready to take things into their own hands.
And it had seemed possible.
Eternals could be fated to mate between themselves or with human souls, granting those souls eternal life and a permanent place in the Eternal Realm when they mated. The process allowed the human soul to leave the cycle of reincarnation that governed human life and thus needed to be guarded. According to the council.
But this meant that if an Eternal was confident theirmate wasn’t another Eternal, they were either somewhere in the Eternal Realm as a soul or on Earth, living as a human.
Lucifer believed all their mates were out there, in one Realm or the other. The connection was already there, waiting to be recognized. Their mates could be found and the bond formed outside the council’s control. They just had to search, and if they felt no connection in the Eternal Realm, their mate must be on Earth.
Why wait for their mate to enter the afterlife and then for the council’s approval—risking their mate reincarnating and starting the cycle over—when they could travel to Earth and find their mates themselves?
The only problem was that Eternals were not permitted to enter the Human Realm. Magic and mortality were separate, offset to balance one another. If any of them fell to Earth, they would not be allowed back into the Eternal Realm. But why would they need to return? Wouldn’t it be better to live in a land where they could search for their mates, claim them, and live happily forever?
There had been no reason not to go.
Ash had secretly and naïvely believed that once they fell and found their mates, they might one day be allowed to return to the Eternal Realm. Once their quest was proven to be purely motivated by love. It was silly, but Ash had been relatively young back then.
He followed Lucifer to Earth, at his side as his right-hand man and best friend, with Onyx and Dante completing their inner circle. The four loyal friends had been committed to helping all Eternals find their mates. But when they got to the Human Realm, they couldn’t find them.
No one had expected it to be instant. They searched for generations as souls cycled in and out of the Human Realm, but hundreds of years passed, and none who had fallen were mated.No matter how they searched, they couldn’t find their fated loves.
Humans who saw them in their true forms called them demons, and the Eternal Realm made it clear they would never be welcomed back. They were stuck in the mortal world forever, and some of the Fallen began to whisper that the council had trapped their mates in the afterlife, preventing them from reincarnating, to punish the Fallen.
