“Did you put the tracker on him?” Paxton asked.
Héctor shook his head, his wings vanishing. “It won’t work in Hell.”
“So we just let a half-demon decide our next course of action?” Paxton demanded with displeasure.
“We probably need to show some good faith on our side if we want the demon duke to help us,” Zak said, silver lightning flashing in his eyes. “He’s our lifeline to our mate for now.”
“As I said, we need to turn off our emotions and follow only logic and facts,” I said. “That way we won’t screw up again and make our mate pay the price.”
Héctor nodded. “I’ve gathered some concealed information from Pythius.”
Zak, Paxton, and I focused our attention on him and, when he hesitated, snarled for him to spit it out.
“He didn’t know everything about his prince’s plans for my lamb,” Héctor continued, “but one thing works in our favor. Loki desperately wants to keep our mate alive.”
“What’s she to him?” I pondered, trying to be analytic. “She doesn’t share his bloodline. On the contrary, she’s a threat to him. She’s a princess, the second heir to Lucifer’s crown.”
“He wants Hell all to himself, and my lamb can help him defeat his father,” Héctor said. “And he needs us, so he wants to strike a deal.”
I gave him an appreciative look. The old boy was the most lethal, scheming one. That was why his territory was the largest in the former Half-Earth.
“Lucifer and Ares came for her because she’stheLiving Flame,” Héctor added, “the ultimate weapon I’d been searching out for centuries. And she’s been right in front of me all this time. I never thought that the Living Flame could be a person. I assumed it was a magical, animated fire. I studied the prophecy again and finally pieced everything together after my lamb was taken.”
“If Rosebud were the Living Flame,” Zak said with an ounce of suspicion, “she could have vanquished Ares and Lucifer when they bound her in the Ever Realm.”
“It hasn’t activated in her,” Héctor said. “It takes time for the flame to bloom. Our mate has just come into her power. She lived as a human her entire life until Axel dragged her to the Academy and forced her to go through the Ritual of the Blood Rune.”
I glared at him, grief and guilt gnawing at me.
“The Runes broke the seal that had bound her power and rendered her a normal human,” Paxton said. He was smart enough to piece everything together, too. “We’ve all seen how fast her power developed. She wouldn’t have held Ares’s Glory if she hadn’t had the flame in her.”
“I think Loki recognized the Living Flame in her,” Héctor said, “and that we’re needed to help her activate it, or the last thing he’d do would be to seek an alliance with us.”
We swallowed, trading hopeful yet anguished looks, as we discussed our new plans.
Our mate was alive.
But she was in an even direr situation than before. We wanted to get to her this second, but we couldn’t afford to screw up the timing.
“I haven’t told you how I first met my lamb,” Héctor said, looking into the distance.
We then finally learned that the fucker had met my Cookie in a Dreaming, and the dream had been real, like an alternate dimension.
Then he dropped another bomb. “I saw our mate again in the dreamscape last week. I thought that I had her spirit in my arms.” He paused, his throat bobbing up and down. “If I’d known I had her in the flesh in that dream—” He recollected himself. “Our mate told me she was in Hell and she was cold to the bone. Our sworn enemies had cut her open—”
He was unable to utter another world. Death light shadowed his whole being.
Tears leaked from my eyes.
Paxton pounded his fists into the wall, denting the steel.
Lightning burned in Zak’s eyes.
We turned on Héctor with renewed fury that he’d kept this from us. We didn’t pound the fucker to meat pulp, but only because he offered to get us all into the dreamland to meet our beloved.