Page 3 of Tell Them That I’m Coming

“Nah. He’s probably reciting poetry to Katrin about now.”

Stevie chuckles under her breath. “Poor Katrin.”

“It’s okay. He likes to put Human words into it to impress her. She has no idea what he’s saying half the time.”

“That’s Rafe for you. Just like how he completely forgot about his lessons with Loki today.”

I swivel my head, the quick motion spooking Binx. He chitters in rebuke, settling down again as I run my claws over his fluffy tail. “What do you mean?”

“I ran into Kennedy when I was passing the EL.” The Earth Library. “She heard from your mom that the two of you were visiting Brille Rouge today, but that couldn’t be right since he was supposed to meet his father this morning.”

Shit. It’s a Human curse world, one of Mom’s favorites, and pretty damn apt at the moment. “He told me he had the whole day to spend with Katrin.”

All the more reason why I ducked out and returned home earlier. I told him I’d come back for him between our midday meal and supper. With Kennedy knocked up again—another Human phrase, meaning she’s with spawn—she insists that Rafe sit down and have supper with Kennedy, Loni, and Kennedy’s ungez, Freya, every eve.

There are hours to go, but if I know Kennedy, she’s already searching for Rafe. And once she figures out that I used my shadows to bring him to his pretty demoness, she’ll be searching for me.

In my opinion, Rafe’s mother worries too much. She’s also convinced that if Rafe is missing—or distracted, or late, or simply breathing wrong—it somehow involves me.

And, for the most part, she’s right. While mages can open portals to other realms with Duke Haures’s permission, I’m the only one who can take my shadows anywhere, and no one even tries to stop me.

Another way that Alana of Sombra is different, though if I get on the wrong side of Kennedy, I might find someone who finally won’t treat me with undeserved reverence every time they see me.

And then Stevie says, “She was leaving the EL when I first saw the butterflies on the edge of the village. If I could follow them, so could she.”

I nudge Binx’s rump. “Up, Binx.”

Stevie raises her eyebrows at me. Unlike full demons, we don’t have the ridges over our brows, and the furry strips over our eyes are something we got from our human heritage. “Where are you going?”

“Wherever Rafe’s mother isn’t,” I tell her.

I like Kennedy. Honest. She’s so close to my mother, it’s like she’s my kin. They run the Earth Library together, had their first—and in Mom’s case, only—spawn at the same time, giving me my best friend, but if it comes down to snitching on Rafe to his mother or buying him a little more time to woo Katrin before I grab him by his pointed ear and drag him back to Nuit, I know who has my loyalty.

“Running away, Alana?”

“Consider it a strategic withdrawal.”

A soldier’s mate, Stevie laughs as I give her a wave, heading toward the path that leads to the lava pools, Binx at my feet. “You can’t avoid her forever, Alana.”

I can’t, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to give it a good try.

CHAPTER 2

OVERHEARD

Heading to the lava pools was smart. There’s an unspoken rule in Nuit that, whenever one of the clan is bathing in the warm springs made up of the lava beneath the ash fields, they deserve their privacy. Mainly because mated pairs enjoy the pools together, and if I know for the fact that my parents frequent the pools themselves, I try not to think about that.

At home, we have a bathtub that’s large enough to fit my father. He’s more than a head-and-a-half taller than me—not counting his horns—and nearly twice as wide which means that when I have a soak, I can stretch out. Mom? She can basically swim in there.

Being close with the village mage is a perk. Loki cast a spell to make the enchanted water as warm as the lava pools, but there’s nothing like dipping a toe into the lava itself. It speaks to the demoness in me.

And, no, I wasn’t stalling at all.

I kept waiting for Kennedy to appear at the edge of the ash field that leads to the pools. Loki’s human mother is smaller than mine, with hair that’s darker, and a bump that tells all of Nuit she is expecting again. If just to ask me if I know what’s become of her son, I wait for her to appear. She doesn’t. Whether that’s because she respects the privacy owed to a bather or because even the butterflies do, it’s just Binx and me for a while. The butterflies all dispersed once I started to remove my boots, my dress, and my undercoverings. They’ll manifest again—they always do—but for the moment, at least, there’s peace.

I don’t know why they chase me. To be honest, most of the clan has always seemed more in awe of the butterflies than me. I once asked Mom, but she didn’t know. It was actually Lilith, the clanmother and Apollyon’s bonded mate, who explained that such a shadow creature used to belong to Queen Alana, the fearsome demoness queen that my father named me after.

She perished more than two millennia ago, right before Duke Haures took the crystal crown that marks him as Sombra’s ruler. There hasn’t been a single butterfly—or faripoz, as they’re known in Sombran—in the centuries since… until one appeared after I was abducted, leading Mom and the others to find me.