AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Hang on.
Loki is gripping the stem between his claws, eyeing it closely with an expression that makes him appear as relieved as I was.
“Sammael said you were a resourceful human,” marvels Loki, twirling the stem between his claws. Watching closely, my heartbeat slowing again, I notice that his claws actually pierce the wisps of the stem that are more shadows than ash.
Huh. I guess it’s a Sombra thing. The demons can use their claws to hold the ashbalm flower while my human fingers are just too clumsy and make it fall apart almost instantly.
Swallowing my nerves, I cover up my earlier worry with a strained chuckle. “You know, you should do me a favor and carry that.”
He immediately offers it back to me. “I cannot,” he says regretfully. “You must bring it to Duke Haures yourself.”
Why am I not surprised? Bending my elbow, I jerk my chin at the crook. “Fine. But lay it there, please.”
He does, and once he has, he asks, “Are you ready to return to Mavro?”
More than ready. “Yes.”
His purple eyes lighten, closer to a soft lavender shade, as he moves his hand in front of him in a circular gesture. When he’s done, a black oval hovers over the ground. He flexes his fingers, showing off his claws, then flings out his hand.
The oval moves with the gesture, growing, growing, growing until he’s made another portal.
Loki goes first. Cradling the delicate ashbalm flower in my arms so that it doesn’t crumble any further, I stumble into the portal, following after him.
Seconds later, the portal spits us out in the same blue-tinted room with the partially open roof I was in earlier.
Duke Haures is still lounging in his throne, looking ahead as though he’d spent the last half-hour or so waiting for our return. And maybe he did, maybe he had more faith in myself than me since he has a very familiar purple-eyed monster standing just in front of the dais that holds the duke’s massive crystalline chair.
Sammael.
He’s wearing the same golden chains I watched Loki conjure and clasp on my mate’s thick wrists. His hands are folded at his waist, black shadows woven over his bottom half while the rest of him is the same solid, dark red shade he is when he’s his solid demon form. The chains pool on the chilled floor, even cooler through the soles of my shoes after my trek through the ash fields, then the shadows.
“Hope.” He breathes out my name. “You really are here in Sombra.”
Did he doubt I would chase after him? Or did he think that, when the duke or one of his soldiers mentioned to him that I came all this way to claim him as mine, even going so far as to brave the shadows for that stupid flower, it couldn’t be true?
That they were fucking with him?
It’s strange, just how easy I can read his face. No… he didn’t doubt me. But if he knows all about what kind of person Hope McReary is—from watching over me, plus the way he got a peek into my soul even before I agreed to bond myself to him—then he probably never expected I’d push past my anxieties and my fears to do everything I’ve done since he left me.
To be honest, if you’d asked me last week, I wouldn’t have thought myself capable of it, either.
I guess I surprised the shit out of both of us.
I give him a crooked grin, drinking him in. When he willingly walked through that fiery portal, I never thought I’d see him again, but he’s here and he…
He…
Okay. He looksdifferent.
It takes me a second to pinpoint what it is. Maybe I got used to the marks on Loki’s chest, and on Malphas’s, too, but even though I only spent a few nights with Sammael, I remember his beautifully sculpted chest intimately. His nipples were pretty and brown, standing out against his dark red skin, and there wasn’t a bit of hair on him anywhere except for his head so it was smooth and hard anddelicious.
It still is, only now? Sammael has four letters seemingly tattooed on his chest. They’re silver and they shimmer, kind of like a mirror, and from this distance, I make out four letters:S-P-E-S.
For a heartbeat, I have no idea what that means, and my initial instinct is to think the worst. Both Loki and Malphas wear their human mate’s names on their chests so of course I can’t help but think that Sammael picked another girl after he came back to Sombra.
But then, as though it popped into my brain on its own—and, granted, it probablydid—I suddenly understand that the word ‘spes’ is the concept of ‘hope’ in Sombran. It refers to the emotion of wanting something, needing something, expecting something to happen… and when he thinks of that, he thinks of me.
He left me behind to save me. He didn’t erase my memories like he did to Johanna, and even though he probably figured that we would never see each other again, he left me with a part of him—and then tattooed a memento of me on his chest.
