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ASH

“Lucifer has left the Realm of the Damned.”

Dante stood in grim silence before eventually saying, “And you know this how?”

Ash turned to face the sea. They were on Dante’s balcony, off the back of his house built on top of the cliff north of the city. His whole property was protected by a powerful illusion, rendering the building and anyone in it invisible, allowing Ash and Dante to have their demon forms displayed freely.

“I know the same way I’ve always been able to sense these things. My connection to the Realm of the Damned and the magic trapping us there changed when we escaped but didn’t break entirely. No demons have left the Realm since we did. Until now.”

Dante gripped the railing, his soot-colored wings flexing and sparkling with a hint of silver. “But how do you know it was Lucifer and not someone else? Every demon wants to escape. That’s why Lucifer had to imprison us there in the first place.”

“Only he and the three of us have a connection to the magic sealing off the Realm of the Damned. You know that. Our escape didn’t break the seal. Everyone is still imprisoned there, leaving only Lucifer able to follow us, using the same method we did to escape.”

Dante tucked his wings against his back as the wind picked up. “Yes, I know. But why follow now? It’s been over two hundred years since we broke free.”

“I don’t know.” Ash dropped his head between his shoulders, arms outstretched as he braced himself on the rail.

Ash, Dante, and Onyx had been imprisoned in the Realm of the Damned for centuries, along with every other demon who’d fallen from the Eternal Realm. It wasn’t the Eternals who’d trapped them, but Lucifer. Lucifer, who had once been their friend—their brother—until somewhere along the way, he’d turned Ash, Dante, and Onyx into his dogs, forced to do his bidding and subjected to his control.

Lucifer had stolen some of Ash’s, Dante’s, and Onyx’s magic to create the seal that trapped all demons in the Realm of the Damned. When they’d finally escaped, Ash had predicted Lucifer wouldn’t follow them to the Human Realm, not wanting the rest of the Realm to know his loyal dogs had abandoned him. And it seemed he’d been right.

Until now.

“Something must have changed,” Ash said, lifting his head. “Who knows what’s going on in the Realm now. Lucifer couldn’t have hidden our absence forever.”

“He can’t drag us back.” Dante’s eyes flashed with black fire. “There are three of us and one of him. He only got one over on us before because we trusted him. That mistake won’t be made twice.”

“True, but we have to be careful. You shouldn’t still be here, Dante. You need to live somewhere less conspicuous.” Ash leveled a stern look at his old friend.

Dante scoffed. “I’m not hiding. Shearwater Landing is mine. The birds will warn me if Lucifer is coming. ”

“You’re placing a lot of trust in your shearwaters.” Ash tried not to let anger get the better of him, but Dante and his connection to the shearwaters was too much of a giveaway that there was magic in the city. Magic too great to belong to any witch or vampire.

Lucifer would know a demon was here. It was foolish.

“Yes, well, not all of us want to live alone in the woods, Ash.”

Ash grunted. There was no need to defend his lifestyle. It suited him. End of story.

“I know this is the city,” Dante said in a softer tone. “I’m not leaving until I find him.”

Ash’s anger fled and his heart ached. Dante had never given up hope. It broke Ash. He’d given up a millennia and a half ago. How did Dante do it?

The wind off the ocean caressed Ash’s face and he closed his eyes, trying to hold the memories back. The past felt less distant than it had in a long time. This never happened at his hunting lodge.

In what was arguably ancient history, he, Dante, Onyx, and Lucifer had been beings of the Eternal Realm. They and others of their kind were known as Eternals, the guardians of magic and human souls in the afterlife. There was no Realm of the Damned back then, just the Human Realm and the one of magic.

Life had been good but not perfect. The Eternal Realm was ruled by a council, who had absolute power over the guardianship of the two realms and the balance between them. Part of guarding that balance was granting Eternals their mates.

Each Eternal had a fated mate, but only the council could bring mates together and gift pairs the right to produce offspring.

Being immortal, the Eternals in charge rarely changed. Some Eternals requested their mates only to be denied by the council and told to come back in the distant future.

Many Eternals didn’t think the system was fair and grew tired of waiting. Lucifer had been among them. He had been denied repeatedly, as had his younger brother Onyx, Ash, and Dante. No explanation was ever given and the loneliness made time stretch agonizingly, leaving them not knowing if they’d ever be granted their other halves.

Lucifer believed the council didn’t have to grant mates and that individuals could find their fated loves themselves. Some successfully mated Eternals had sworn they’d found the fated connection without the council’s help, discovering their mates among the human souls occupying the Eternal Realm. They’d then requested approval to be mated and were granted. The council denied this, but of course, they would when it challenged their absolute power over the process.

The council didn’t control fate itself. They only had the power to see fated connections between beings. But why should anyone have to wait to be granted a mate when the connection already existed? Not all mated pairs wanted children, and offspring could be granted separately if desired, allowing the balance between Eternal and human lives to be guarded.

Ash had agreed with Lucifer, and so had many others. Some had waited thousands of years for their mates and were ready to take things into their own hands.

And it had seemed possible.

Eternals could be fated to mate between themselves or with human souls, granting those souls eternal life and a permanent place in the Eternal Realm when they mated. The process allowed the human soul to leave the cycle of reincarnation that governed human life and thus needed to be guarded. According to the council.

But this meant that if an Eternal was confident their mate wasn’t another Eternal, they were either somewhere in the Eternal Realm as a soul or on Earth, living as a human.

Lucifer believed all their mates were out there, in one Realm or the other. The connection was already there, waiting to be recognized. Their mates could be found and the bond formed outside the council’s control. They just had to search, and if they felt no connection in the Eternal Realm, their mate must be on Earth.

Why wait for their mate to enter the afterlife and then for the council’s approval—risking their mate reincarnating and starting the cycle over—when they could travel to Earth and find their mates themselves?

The only problem was that Eternals were not permitted to enter the Human Realm. Magic and mortality were separate, offset to balance one another. If any of them fell to Earth, they would not be allowed back into the Eternal Realm. But why would they need to return? Wouldn’t it be better to live in a land where they could search for their mates, claim them, and live happily forever?

There had been no reason not to go.

Ash had secretly and na?vely believed that once they fell and found their mates, they might one day be allowed to return to the Eternal Realm. Once their quest was proven to be purely motivated by love. It was silly, but Ash had been relatively young back then.

He followed Lucifer to Earth, at his side as his right-hand man and best friend, with Onyx and Dante completing their inner circle. The four loyal friends had been committed to helping all Eternals find their mates. But when they got to the Human Realm, they couldn’t find them.

No one had expected it to be instant. They searched for generations as souls cycled in and out of the Human Realm, but hundreds of years passed, and none who had fallen were mated. No matter how they searched, they couldn’t find their fated loves.

Humans who saw them in their true forms called them demons, and the Eternal Realm made it clear they would never be welcomed back. They were stuck in the mortal world forever, and some of the Fallen began to whisper that the council had trapped their mates in the afterlife, preventing them from reincarnating, to punish the Fallen.

They would never find fated love. Lucifer had led them to eternal loneliness.

Their plan had been flawed. In hindsight, the council retaliating and keeping their mates captive was an obvious move, even if it challenged the council’s claim that everything they did was meant to look after the balance between realms and preserve the natural cycle of life. The Fallen would never find their mates, and they would never return home.

Ash gave up. What was the point of hope? He resolved to stick with his chosen brothers and make the most of their grim situation. But Dante and Lucifer kept searching, faith unwavering, dragging Ash and Onyx around the globe. That had been bad enough, but then things got so much worse.

Ash sighed.

Even now, Dante hadn’t given up. He was convinced he’d find his mate in Shearwater Landing, of all damn places. Ash wanted to shake sense into him. They were never going to find their mates. They didn’t exist in the Human Realm and never would. And if by some miracle they did, after everything, Ash and the rest of them wouldn’t deserve them anyway.

There was a time when Ash deserved love, but that was before he and all the Fallen had been damned. They truly were demons, no longer eternal guardians of magic and nature’s balance. Things had been irreversibly damaged when they’d let magic infect the Human Realm .

Ash never had children with a human, but other fallen Eternals had. Lucifer was the first to father a half-human child, even though he had convinced them all they could find their mates on Earth. He was the first to give up in an irrevocable way, lying and saying he was still searching.

That first child had damned them all. They were born the first witch, the first human to possess magic.

Magic wasn’t meant to exist outside the Eternal Realm or to taint Earth’s natural order. Mortality and magic were supposed to be separate, and when the council discovered the existence of witches—their population growing as more Eternals had children with humans, and those half-humans sired a second generation—the council damned them all.

The magic in a witch’s blood made it impossible for their souls to reincarnate after death. Magic was something only Eternals, who lived forever, were supposed to possess. The balance of magic and mortality had been broken, leaving witches no longer able to participate in the natural cycle of life, so the council banned all humans with magic from the Eternal Realm.

And so the Realm of the Damned was born, a Hell for all magical humans to spend their afterlife in, separated from their nonmagical loved ones forever.

The Realm of the Damned grew crowded with souls who couldn’t cycle back to Earth, and magic twisted in the Human Realm as witches looked for immortality and a way to escape damnation.

It was all their fault. Ash’s fault for convincing others to follow Lucifer. Lucifer’s fault for having that first child. Never finding their mates was their punishment for ruining the balance of magic in the universe.

“He isn’t here,” Ash said to Dante, trying to be kind but needing to be firm. “We can’t stay waiting around forever. Lucifer will know we’re here—I’m sure he’s heard of your birds and will know what it means—I won’t let him drag us back to Hell. If we leave now, you can return to Shearwater Landing once we’ve dealt with Luc.”

“No.” Dante’s fingers flexed on the railing. “I can feel it. We’re close. I’m not leaving until I find him.”

Ash detected a deep sorrow in Dante’s stubborn words, which was much harder to argue with. He rubbed absently at his chest, just over his heart. “Then what do we do about Lucifer? If you won’t leave, we have to do something.”

Dante turned, facing Ash and resting an elbow on the railing, a hint of surprise in his raised brows like he’d expected Ash to continue hounding him for not leaving the city. But Ash wouldn’t be the one who broke Dante, no matter how many problems his hope caused.

Dante’s gaze turned calculated. “Lucifer might be coming here to look for us, but he won’t find anything. This house is close to impenetrable, and I won’t investigate any new triggers to the magic on my old place. It will be a dead end. I only showed up to meet you because my birds told me you were in the city. If you lend a hand in bolstering the illusions and protections here, Luc won’t be able to get in on his own. He’s not stronger than the two of us combined.”

“We don’t know he’s alone,” Ash reminded Dante.

Dante’s tail flicked. “Then we better get Onyx.”

“You know where he is?” Ash suspected tracking down Lucifer’s younger brother would be much harder than finding Dante.

“Yes,” Dante grumbled, almost a growl. “He’s here in Shearwater Landing.”

“Here? Why?” Wasn’t this city too boring for Onyx?

“I have no idea. It’s not like we see much of each other.”

“Right.” Onyx had always been hard to get a handle on. “We’ll go find him and make a plan. Lucifer might not realize I sensed his entrance into the Human Realm, so hopefully, we can get ahead of him.”

Dante smiled, letting his fangs descend. His eyes blazed. “I wouldn’t mind capturing him for a change.”

They had to neutralize Lucifer somehow, and even though Eternals and demons could be destroyed, Ash didn’t think they’d kill him. “Imprisoning him would be satisfying,” he admitted.

Ash wanted to steal Lucifer’s power as Lucifer had done to him, Dante, and Onyx. He might never have a mate, but he could find satisfaction in turning the tables on his enemy.

This could be good. As long as they weren’t being foolish by staying here. Lucifer always seemed to have some trick up his sleeve.