Page 5 of Taken by the Twins (Sombra Demons #7)

CHAPTER 5

HOPE

LUCIAN

I n Sombra, if you are born with the tell-tale purple eyes, you know that you are fated to be a mage. It is the mark of magic, telling our fellow demons that we have mystical powers that extend far past what they can do with their shadows.

I had them. Damien didn’t.

But I corrected that. Even as a newborn spawn, I saw that our twin bond was something to treasure. I love my brother. As a mature male, I’d do the same thing I did when I was young: sending half of my essence down our bond so that he would be a demon instead of demonic. That meant he had half of my powers as well, including sight and the ability to conjure.

Of course, with each of us having only half of our essence, our abilities manifested in different ways. It’s most obvious in how we serve as seers. I actually have the sight while Damien? He reads others in a way I’ve always been in awe of.

The same is true of our mage talent. Like with my visions, I can see what I want and make it reality. Damien’s powers rely on items reacting to his emotions. Like how, when he can’t contain his frustration at our long wait, he would roar and the villages surrounding our home would tremble. Or how the loneliness he attempts to hide—not from me, though, because I feel it, too—would summon the essence-less creatures that lurk in the depths of the shadows.

As though they feel kinship with my twin, they follow him wherever he goes.

But we are the doppelseers. Though we’re such different visionaries, together, we became the most well-respected and revered seers in Sombran history. The same is true of our magic. Combined, we can accomplish anything.

Take our home. We built it ourselves, with magic and with our claws. But when the creatures would come and sit outside the back of it, stirring around the edge of Sombra’s shadows, wordlessly inviting Damien to join them… we enchanted it. Now it moves wherever we wish, protected from all those we’d rather hide from.

Over time, we’ve journeyed far and wide over Sombra, visiting villages and larger demon cities, speaking our visions and earning a reputation that endures to this age.

Inside the cabin, we are its masters. With a wave of my hand, and with Damien’s will, we can add rooms, add floors, summon steaming water from the ashfields for our baths, even create furniture. Food is easy enough. So long as we’re near a village full of demons, we can conjure it from one of the local hunters, bakers, and growers who perform miracles of their own, creating fruits and grains out of the ash, little rain, and a few seeds.

They’re more than happy to share with the doppelseers. Especially when we give our prophecies and visions away in exchange for their hospitality, we’ve existed this way for nearly three millennia.

It’s been a single moon that we’ve had our mate with us, and already I feel as if we’ve always basked in her beauty.

Tandy is glorious . I finally understand why the color red has haunted my twin and I all these years. As a Sombra, my skin is red. I’ve never seen another creature with hair the same color—until Tandy. It frames her oddly pale face and her strangely dim eyes, but I know those are human features. Like her rounded ears and flat, ridge-free brow. We had seen and met other humans before, so we were prepared for the differences in our mate.

Prepared for them, and immediately aroused by them.

The moment she called Damien and I into her quarters, using the matefinder spell to open a portal and bringer us to her, my cock immediately knew that she was ours. It twitched and hardened beneath my shadow coverings; knowing that humans are more… delicate in these matters, we’d agreed to conceal any sign of how badly we ached to claim her before she understood that the gods had given her to my brother and I.

She does now.

Damien refused to tell her. Hurt by the way she initially rejected him after he approached her first, my twin has decided to let me take the lead on handling our female until she recognizes that she is ours.

She must.

Tandy let us take her hands after we told her in Sombra that she was our one true mate. She has to know. Even before we’d finished materializing in the human world, she was already giving us the mate’s promise. She didn’t guard her essence as we held onto her during the quick trip back to Sombra, allowing it to fill both Damien and I.

Now it is ours.

And so is this stunning little mortal.

I tried to explain it to her after we brought her to the quarters designed specifically for her in mind. The essence exchange gave me a little insight to Tandy—to our dear little one—and I knew in an instant that she was as lonely as Damien and I. She was in search of a male who would love her, stay true to her, and be there always.

She has found them, whether she understands it yet or not.

She will. We might not have any visions in regards to her, the gods telling us in our own way that we must find a way to convince Tandy to accept our essence and our cocks without their help, but I have faith in my brother and I.

We will claim her, and we will do so before the next gold moon.

Otherwise, if the prophecy we foretold to Haures all those millennia ago comes to pass first, then all of this would’ve been for naught.

Time is running out. The three of us—Damien, Haures, and I—have known for more than twenty centuries that once the human world of legend mingled with Sombra, it could lead to the end of our realm as we know it.

Damien saw the prophecy first, and he explained it as this:

The child born of two worlds,

belonging in both, belonging in none,

will bring with it rain,

and the firsts of Sombra will be forever done.

It took us decades to understand exactly what the prophecy meant, despite how seemingly straightforward it might appear. I had multiple visions myself, and they all end the same: a tiny half-mortal, half-demon who manifests rain in Sombra when it cries, manifests flooding when it’s separating from this realm, and manifests whipping storms when it is separated from its mother.

The child itself is cloaked in shadows, similar to how the visions about my own future are; most likely because the end of Sombra affects all of us. It was clear from the start, however, that it is part human, though I could never see the identity of the parents, either. To keep the prophecy from coming true too soon, Haures put into place his first law: no contact between the human realm unless a true mate summoned their demon partner to them.

It was essential. Both Haures and my brother and I knew that we were fated to mate human females eventually. Haures would be first, Damien and I last to find them, but so long as a demon male refrained from mating his female during the gold moon, we could keep the prophecy held at bay.

And then the demon artist Malphas found his mate in a human female called Shannon, and once she was expecting his spawn, time started counting down.

We are in a race against it. Haures has his mate, but while he is a bondmaster, he is no seer. If Damien and I bond out mate to us, we will finally be whole. Our powers will increase exponentially, and we might be able to see past the prophecy in a way to prevent it.

The child will be born. There is no doubting that. Any moon now, in fact, which means that we must find a way to convince Tandy to be our mate sooner than later. Though, if I’m being truthful with myself, it is not so much the fate of Sombra that has me desperate to make her ours.

It is the bond that snapped into place when she promised herself to us and gave us the mating promise that makes me ache to hold her in my arms while taking her at the same time as Damien.

But that must wait. Human mates need to be wooed, and whenever she allows me to, I try.

Damien… well, he will. As soon as Tandy is receptive to me, she’ll be receptive to him, and he can show her that he will be a good mate to her, just like I vow that I shall.

Whatever it takes.

Tandy is maddeningly stubborn.

It has now been four moons. Four mornings. Four eves. Telling me with a defiant tilt to her head that we gave her the room so she sees no reason to leave it, she’s stayed upstairs despite my repeated offers for her to explore the rest of the cabin.

I want her to like it. It is her home now, and if there’s something about the space that she wants adjusted, she need only tell us and it is done.

She insists that she has everything she needs once I explained to her how she was to relieve herself. Our bathtub needs magic to summon fresh water from the hotspring and disappear it, but we also have a water tube that’s of a temperature acceptable enough for her to drink. After the first night when she refused, she’s eaten every meal I’ve prepared for her. I wove her three dresses out of shadows that mimicked the one she was wearing when she summoned us, plus feet coverings after she admitted that the ones she had on—with the points on the end that made our wee mate appear a bit taller—were causing her discomfort.

She is pleasant at times. Endearingly sassy at others. Her essence reveals that she is doing her best to make sense of her new reality.

I am a logical male. Damien is ruled by his emotions, but I see clearly, and I lay out the facts. In my way, I made it clear to Tandy that she is ours. She gave us the mate’s promise. We have no intention of returning her to her human realm no matter how she pleads sweetly or uses harsh human language that nearly singes my pointed ears.

She will understand. I am a logical male, and a good one, but most of all, I am a determined male.

I need Tandy. I need her affection. Her smiles. Her heart.

Her cunt.

If I do? Damien needs it double. Every day she is here, he withdraws further, though he insists that he is just biding his time until Tandy is ready to accept that we are her males.

She stays upstairs in her quarters. We’ve conjured a small room that we share so as no to intrude on her space until she welcomes us into it. Currently, Damien is sitting at the table, tapping his claw against a bottle of demon wine that was given to us as a gift from a grateful clanleader.

“You spent hours with Tandy this morning,” he says softly, and while there is no jealousy in his tone—because he is never jealous of me, only of the males that flash across his consciousness now that we have Tandy’s essence—I can’t help but experience guilt regardless that I spend most of time wooing Tandy while Damien lurks in the shadows downstairs. It’s his choice, and yet… “Has anything changed, Lucian?”

I shake my head. “When I look at Tandy, I see rain.”

In a fiery world like Sombra, we have only enough rain to survive. It is essential that we do. We are made of shadows. Without light, there is no shadow. With too much rain, there is no fire. If we flood…

There is no Sombra.

Damien blows out a rush of air through his nose. He jerks his head, the light from our enchanted orb reflecting off his horn. “She does not want us.”

“She will,” I say encouragingly.

“I wish I had your faith, brother. But she prefers human males. I see them in my head. She was quite desirable in her world, and the gods know she is what we dreamed of and more. But we are so different… why would she choose us?”

That’s what Damien says. Only I know what he means: why would she choose me?

He feels so much, but it’s not always pleasant.

I crouch down next to him, laying my hand on his thigh.

“You don’t have to look at her past, Damien. We all have them, and we cannot fault Tandy for what she did before she knew she was fated to be our one true mate. We are the doppelseers. We look to the future.”

His white eye flares. Just the white one. “I am aware. I’m sorry. I… I’m trying.”

I sigh, then rise back up so that I’m standing. “I know.”

Poor Damien. My twin has never been so close to losing his constant battle with letting go of his tenuous hold of our essence, releasing it completely so he can go fully demonic. I thought having Tandy near would help him, but not while he refuses to woo her himself.

But he hungers. I know he does.

I want my mate desperately, but Damien. He needs her.

And with time slipping quickly through our claws, I suddenly understand that we will never have the chance to claim Tandy fully before the half-demon, half-human spawn is born if Damien doesn’t treat her like she is his mate.

“Go to her.”

“What?”

“You must talk to her, Damien,” I tell him firmly. “You haven’t attempted to learn our mate. Get to know our dear one.”

“I do.” Damien taps his temple with his claw. “I have her essence, Lucian. I know everything about her.” He drops hand to his heart. “I sense her every movement. Her emotions. Her thoughts. I know it all.”

“So why won’t you tend to her? She needs to know you, too, brother.”

He’s quiet for a moment before he admits, “I know how badly she wanted to leave before, and how she seems to be more comfortable with the idea of staying the more you talk to her. I won’t risk your chance of having a mate at last by frightening her again.”

My forehead furrows as I look at Damien. “You mean, our mate.”

“Of course,” Damien answers quickly. “But that doesn’t change what I mean. You’re making headway with her, Lucian. You go.”

No.

“She is not my mate,” I tell him. “She is ours.” Waving my hand, I summon a tray that comes with fresh-baked bread, cubes of cheese, and some charred ungez. “Here. Tandy has not had her evening meal. Share it with her.”

“Lucian—”

“Now.” I put as much power into that one word as I can. I’m sure my purple eyes is flaring now, but though I usually let Damien do what is best for him, in this, I must choose what that is for my twin. Though my guilt from earlier only increases so I do add a gentled, “Please.”

Again, he’s quiet for a moment as though deciding his next move. Then, with a short nod, Damien pushes up from his seat at the table.

He holds out his hand, wordlessly taking the tray. I give it to him, and after another moment’s hesitation, he snatches the bottle of demon wine from the table.

Damien adds it to the tray, then stalks out of the room without a backward look at me.

I take his seat and exhale roughly.

My twin is right. I have been making headway with Tandy. Only before I came down here, I had a vision of her clinging tightly to a demon male in his shadows, her head thrown back in ecstasy as he held her to him, mating her with wild abandon. It was so fleeting, I couldn’t tell if it was Damien or me, but the fact that I had a vision including Tandy at all gave me hope.

Hope that we can change the prophecy.

Hope that we can save Sombra.

Hope that she can save Damien.

And, most importantly, hope that—after so many centuries of plotting—we’ll have the one thing we’ve ever wanted: her .