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Which meant he was a lot less grumbly, a lot less prone to outbursts of any sort. Even rage, which usually came so naturally to us.
To that, Ace sighed.
“We’re not going to stop looking for Red, Aram,” he said. “But if you and Seven haven’t come across anything yet—“
“Maybe if the rest of you got off your asses to help, we’d have some fucking answers,” Aram growled, shooting out of his chair, and charging out into the hallway.
Our gazes slid to Seven, who shrugged.
“It’s been a long time since we did anything other than look for her. He just needs to be back here for a bit to unwind.”
No.
No, that wasn’t it.
While the others switched back to the demonslayer conversation, I slipped out into the hallway, then up the stairs where I could hear Aram slamming the door to his room.
Because I had a hunch about Aram.
A part of me wanted to be wrong.
But everything seemed to be pointing to my being right.
I tapped my knuckles into the door, but moved inside before he could answer, closing, then leaning back against it.
“What’s going on, Aram?” I asked to the man who was pacing in front of his windows.
Even from across the room, I could feel the frenetic energy bouncing off of him. Like whatever was inside of him was getting too big for his body to hold onto.
I had to admit, that sensation felt eerily fucking familiar.
“Them!” he yelled, waving outward, but clearly meaning everyone down below.
“What about them?”
“Talking about figuring out what might be brewing that has the demonslayers all fired up. Instead of figuring out if one of those bastards took Red!”
That wasn’t entirely outside the realm of possibilities.
See, there was a hierarchy to us evil creatures.
They referred to all of us as ‘demons,’ but it wasn’t as cut-and-dry as that.
See, vampires and shifters and dozens of other types of “demons” were evil and soulless, yes. And, sure, they were very difficult to kill.
But not impossible.
True high demons, though, the ones of us meant to live in hell and punish wicked humans until the end of time?
We were immortal.
Not even a demonslayer could truly kill us.
At least, that was how it had always been. Unless they had some new technology from the man in the sky.
So what the demonslayers did with one of us when they got their hands on us, was imprison us.
No one really knew what happened after that. Maybe they just kept us locked up underground in blessed cells so we could never escape. Maybe they experimented on us. Maybe they used us for fucking sparring practice. Who knew.
But Aram wasn’t being insane to wonder if a demonslayer had snatched Red.
Still, though, I didn’t think that had anything to do with it.
“Hey, Aram?” I called, waiting for him to quit pacing long enough to look at me. There was no denying the anguish in his eyes then. “Did you Claim Red?”
To that, I watched as the anger seemed to drain out of his body, replaced instead with something I knew far too well.
Absolute fucking devastation.
“Shit,” I hissed, exhaling hard.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “At least, not fully,” he added, dropping down in a chair under the windows like his legs just couldn’t hold him anymore.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
I couldn’t imagine anything other than a full Claiming, since that was what I’d personally experienced.
And it happened completely without warning.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe because we never had sex,” he suggested, resting his forearms on his legs as his body leaned forward, shrank into itself. “Or maybe because she…”
Because she was a demon too.
I hadn’t considered that before.
How would a Claiming work between two demons?
Could one Claim the other?
Or did they both have to Claim each other?
“But you feel like you’ve Claimed her?” I asked.
“There were times when…” he started, trailing off, trying to find a way to explain it. “There were times when I had no control over the Change around her,” he admitted. “And when that part of me sort of… I don’t know how to put it… reached for her?” he half said, half asked, as he looked up at me.
“Yeah,” I confirmed, nodding. “Your wings act completely on their own sometimes. And you can’t control your rage when you think something has happened to them.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, almost looking a little relieved. Like he’d been suffering in silence for too long. I understood that more than he could ever know.
“And when they aren’t around, you feel like you’re in a hole that you can’t climb out of,” I went on.
“Yeah,” he said, voice tortured.
“Sounds a lot like Claiming to me. But you don’t… sense her?” I asked.
“Sense her?”
“Yeah,” I said. “When you’re apart, you can… sense them. You can almost see through their eyes, hear through their ears. That sort of thing. And you can find them. There’s like this string that you can follow right to them.”
