Page 5 of Demon's Bane

No, the power she exudes is something else entirely.

Beyond witch or demon magick, beyond anything I’ve ever even glimpsed.

A sliver of the Goddess’s heart, laid bare for me on this strange street in this unfamiliar realm.

The knowledge of who this witch is—ofwhatshe is—slams into me in a soul-jarring wave of crystalline certainty.

This witch is my mate.

Impossible, utterly impossible, but there she stands, looking at me with guarded skepticism etched all over her beautiful face.

For a few long moments, all I can do is stare silently at her as I settle back into some semblance of equilibrium.

The street is dim, with lanterns mounted on metal poles illuminating the scene in warm, yellow-tinted light. It casts the woman in front of me in shadows and stark highlights—the curve of a soft, pale cheek, the sweep of an upturned nose—all her delicate beauty framed by wary suspicion.

Despite that suspicion, she’s the loveliest creature I’ve ever seen.

The witch, whose name I don’t even know, has a short, slender frame and long black hair. Her full lips are stained adeep red and her eyes are lined in smoky kohl that accents their rich, fathomless brown.

Silence stretches between us, weighted with a desperate charge I’m not even sure she can feel.

I should say something. Anything.

But I’ll be damned if I know what that something is.

Because the longer I look, the harder that undeniable instinct courses through me.

It has me by the throat, a million impossible threads of fate and the hand of the Goddess herself drawing me here, right here, to her.

Hold her. Claim her. Keep her.

It’s a command coursing through my blood and bones, making my muscles ache and my body sway unconsciously toward hers.

The woman marks the movement with a widening of her eyes, a sharply inhaled breath, and the unmistakable scent of sour fear rising from her as she takes a step back.

She doesn’t feel it.

She doesn’t know who she is to me.

She’safraidof me.

“Rhett?”

Cold clarity crashes over me at the sound of a familiar voice calling out from the other side of the shop’s door, at the iron-rich magick that accompanies it and reminds me why I’m even in this realm.

To deal with the Crescent Coven—liars and thieves, the lot of them—to get to the bottom of the crimes that have been committed against my village and my people.

I’m meant to find justice, to hold those who’ve wronged my realm to account, to bring myself a bit of honor after the years I’ve spent squandering it.

I’m not meant to find my mate, and I’m certainly not meant to find her in a Crescent witch.

Even if she is a Crescent witch with eyes like freshly turned earth and a scent like springtime, a Crescent witch who feels like the other half of my soul, the one being in all the thirteen realms I was always meant to find.

“Joan,” Esme says. “Are you going to invite our guest in?”

Joan.

My mate’s name is Joan.