Page 76 of Demon's Bride

“If you’d just—”

“No,” he says again. “Anything else, Allie.”

“Eren…”

He crushes me closer. “Do you mean to leave me?”

Oh, Goddess.

“No!” I say hurriedly. “It’s just… I need help. I don’t have any idea what we’re up against here, but maybe if I speak to my mother, they’ll have learned something since Emilia came back, something that could help us.”

Eren doesn’t answer right away. He doesn’targueright away either, so I suppose that’s its own kind of win.

It’s not like I don’t understand the source of his fear. He believes I’m his mate, he’s watched his realm slowly deteriorate over the last year, he can feel the same instability in the magick that I can, and he just wants to protect me from it. Annoyed as I am at how overbearing he’s being right now, I can at least accept the reasons behind it.

He’s also been alone, in all the ways that matter, for a very long time.

More than anything else, I can understand what that’s like. I can understand the need to keep something precious close, to fear losing it, to want to cling to it with everything you have. Still, it doesn’t give him a pass for keeping me sidelined and preventing me from doing everything I can to solve all of this with him.

A study in contrasts, my demon. Such a force in so many ways. So confident when he needs to be, so dominant and assured.

But also an anxious puddle of mush when faced with the thought of something happening to me. It would almost be endearing if it wasn’t so damned frustrating.

Taking a deep breath, I dial back my irritation for the sake of getting somewhere with him.

“If I went back through the Veil,” I ask, choosing my words carefully, “do you think it would break the bargain?”

He slowly shakes his head.

“Do you think I’d be stuck back in the human realm?”

“No.” He sounds very certain of that.

“What makes you think—”

“Other Tithe brides have gone back. Always briefly, but they’ve gone back.”

“They have?” I’m floored. Just one more thing I didn’t know, one more way I was so completely unprepared to come here. Needing a little space to gather my thoughts, I shift away from him and sit at the edge of the bed.

“Yes,” he answers, sounding acutely miserable about that fact.

My mind’s going about a hundred miles an hour, sifting through the new possibilities. I close my eyes for a moment, trying to figure out just which thoughts I need to pay attention to.

“How long do they stay?”

“A few hours, a day at most. There are written records of it. No one has ever been certain how a Tithe bride leaving the demon realm would affect the magick, so none ever stayed long enough to risk it.”

My mind is still tumbling over itself with possibilities, inwardly cursing the fact that I’m so damn far behind with knowing about any of this. Just another reason I need to go back through the Veil and speak with my mother.

“Why wouldn’t you want me to go? If it’s just for a few hours, what’s the harm?”

Eren doesn’t answer right away. When I meet his eyes again, his face is still contorted in worry and he glances away like he doesn’t want me to read whatever it is he’s thinking in his expression.

“Eren. Talk to me.”

I don’t know how to reassure him, what else I can say.

“If you go to the human realm, what’s stopping you from just staying there?”