It was all too much, too fast.
Charlotte swallowed her last bite of crust and reached for another slice, her desire to experience food bigger than her actual hunger. “So,” she began, “you gonna tell me why you stole an m-siphon, or…”
Dom shifted in his seat. The chair squealed under his bulk as he leaned backward, his gaze locked on her. She watched, fascinated, as his antlers cast moving shadows on the plain wall behind him.
Actual moving shadows. They rippled in unnatural ways, as if Dom’s presence brought every dark corner and shadow to life. Maybe it did. Charlotte knew next to nothing about demons, after all. They didn’t like cities, and she spent all her life in some of the most populated places in the EVP. She knew weres and shifters and the occasional vampire or two, sure, but demons were about as rare as nymphs or selkies.
Only, demons have a bit of a reputation, don’t they?
Not that she put any stock in that sort of thing. The fey had a reputation, too. They were known for being swindlers, as free with their bodies as they were with their deceptions. People looked at the fey and saw people to party with, but to watch carefully. They saw good craftspeople and designers, but also marked them as generally untrustworthy and undateable.
If anyone had a healthy disdain for caustic superstition and rumor, it was Charlotte, who wore the twin, suffocating mantles of both fey and Changeling.
“My grandmother is the Matriarch of my clan.” Dom’s voice was a gravelly thing — all pleasant roughness and hard edges that made all the soft things in her sit up and take notice. “She’s also a prophetess. She told me where I needed to be, but not why.” He shook his head. “I had no idea that woman was selling m-siphons until I walked in. Guess I should have suspected something, being in the New Zone, but…” He shrugged.
Charlotte took a slow, greasy bite and swallowed before replying, “And you knew I was your mate then?”
“No. I knew it when I opened the terrarium.” He tilted his head toward the dirty floor. The glass was gone, because he “would not have her cutting her defenseless feet” on his watch, but there was nothing they could do about the soil smeared into the scratchy fibers of the carpet without a vacuum or a Met to cast a simple cleaning spell. Neither had the right technical chops for that sort of spellwork, so the dirt remained.
“What does that mean for you, exactly?” Charlotte pressed the lid of the pizza box down a little, making it easier to see the hulking demon who seemed to swallow up half the motel room. “Like, I get what it means, but all I want right now is to go home and see my parents. What do you want out of this?”
Dom uncrossed his arms to press his palms against his thighs. Little spots of black blood stood out starkly against the fabric of his plain white shirt. In a no-nonsense voice, he answered, “I want you.”
Charlotte let out a gusty sigh and wiggled her half-eaten slice at him. “Yeah, see, that’s not an answer. I know you want me. That’s what mates do. What I want to know is what your plan is. You gonna date me? You gonna throw me in the back of your truck and lock me away in some basement until I agree to hold your hand? I don’t know how any of this works for demons. Give me something to go on here.”
Truthfully, she wasn’t even really sure what fey did when they found their mates, only that they didn’t have a preference for monogamy and tended to go through several in a lifetime. Charlotte only ever received a cursory education about her fey-specific anatomy and bodily changes, but she’d tuned most of that out in middle school out of pure adolescent stubbornness and no shortage of spite. The wing thing, though, she remembered.
She watched, unsurprised, as Dom’s expression darkened with indignation. “I told you I am going to help you see your parents. I’m also going to make sure you’re safe. I am not going to lock you up, for Blight’s sake. What exactly do you think mates do?”
Charlotte swallowed her last bite before she took a swig of cheap, artificial-tasting lemonade. Tough talker, invoking Blight’s name like that. Even she felt a little hesitance saying it aloud, and she wasn’t much for religion even in the worst of times. “I was raised by arrants, remember?” She untucked one of her legs to shake her bare foot at him. “No humans do this weird shadow thing! And fey don’t, either. I have no idea what any of this entails!”
Not to say she hated the little anklet of pure, condensed shadow now that she’d calmed down some, but Charlotte knew for certain that she’d never heard of any race doing something like what demons apparently did when they found their matches. She knew orcs had some weird hormonal shit that involved nests and gifts and things. Shifters courted ruthlessly until their mates agreed to a union. Dragons chose. Elves… well, no one really knew what elves did, but Charlotte had interacted with enough in their capital city to suspect it was something intense.
Fey, though.
Fey didn’t keep lifelong partners. They found a person they liked. They sang their mating song. They enticed with their glow. Instinct drove them to a frenzy that sparked hot and burned fast. Charlotte wasn’t sure what part of that was nature and what was nurture, but she wasn’t particularly interested in an endless string of quick relationships. She’d always wanted someone to call her own, to be her home, to accept the weirdness of her dual natures.
Maybe that was why her wings and her glow had never reacted in the fey way to a potential partner. Maybe, deep down, she did want a mate. A permanent one.
Too bad Dom had terrible timing. Before her captivity, she might have thrown herself at him. After? Charlotte wasn’t about to do anything hasty.
Dom stood up slowly from his chair. He walked with huge, deliberate strides to cross the distance between them. Looming over the foot of the bed, he asked, “And what do the fey do when they find their mates, hm?”
Oh, he’s awfully pretty.
Charlotte craned her neck to stare up at him, her heart thumping out a staccato beat in her chest. Her wings — usually neatly folded, useless things — buzzed against her shoulder blades with the mating song. Cheeks darkening with a blush, she answered, “We have our own weird shit.”
“Like what?”
She pushed the cooling pizza box off her lap. Why was it hard to look him in the eye all of a sudden? “Why should I tell you if you won’t explain to me exactly what the weird shadow thing is for?”
Dom pressed a knee into the mattress and leaned forward, edging into Charlotte’s space. The mattress dipped under his much greater weight. “It’s how demons identify who belongs to what clan.” His voice dropped an octave. It blended with the cadence of her humming wings, creating a smooth, sensual song. “Every shadow has its own unique… fingerprint, you could say. That fingerprint belongs to the individual demon, but a part of it belongs to a clan, too.”
He leaned closer. One hand, huge and deeply tanned, reached out to trace the shape of the shadow banded around her ankle. The tips of his fingers skimmed it, sending a tingle of magic over her skin and up her spine. A lick of pure heat skated across every nerve.
Oh, she thought, shocked by the intensity of such a simple touch.
“This,” he continued, gaze lowered to where his shadow curled around her delicate bone, “marks you as being part of my clan. As being mine.” He swallowed hard. In her periphery, shadows pressed closer, creeping slowly across the floors to brush the cheap bedskirt. “My shadows belong to me and move at my command, but they also have a mind of their own. They recognized you as my mate, that you were in distress, and acted accordingly. Now I’ll always know where you are, if you need me, because you will always carry a piece of me with you.”