it’s about anything but the music. I’m compelled to serve the music. Nothing more.”
She sneezed. “Need I say more?”
Lyric was caught off guard by the suggestion he was lying. He hadn’t intended to, hadn’t thought he was, but he was new to checking in with feelings. Looking over at Shivaun, he was momentarily arrested by the way her eyes sparkled at night.
“You try to make something of me that I’m not.” With a flash of insight, he thought there might be the kernel of opportunity in her starry-eyed, girlish insistence that he was the sort who was misguided by morals. “But if you think so much of me, why won’t you accept me as mate?”
“Why the hurry? If we’re goin’ to live forever, basically, we can take our time.”
“If we’re meant to be, which I believe we are, why wait?”
Shivaun’s internal lie detection sent off a warning. Not that what he’d said was an outright lie, but that something in his tone suggested a shading of the truth. There was something he was being careful to not say.
“Demon. Pull this giant automobile off the road right now and tell me what you’re hidin’.”
“I’m not…”
He’d begun to speak the protest forming in his mind, but realized it was useless to try to fool another demon with truth sensitivity. With a deep sigh he momentarily looked away from Shivaun, out the driver’s side of the car. When he turned back he pointed, directing her attention to a road sign. The headlights were bright enough to allow even humans to read ‘SCENIC LOOKOUT JUST AHEAD’.
After two minutes of uncomfortable silence, they pulled onto a small, but level graveled space with a few giant boulders around the edges. Lyric cut the engine.
Shivaun got out, shoved the heavy car door closed, and walked over to the cliff’s edge. It felt like there was nothing in the universe but the two of them, a vintage icon of America’s mid-twentieth century love affair with cars, and the crashing of waves against rocks far below. The half moon hovered above a shelf of fog that looked out of place, but illumination fought through the mist and created an otherworldly scene where filtered moonlight met ocean calm just beyond the breaks.
“What would happen to me if I fell?” she asked. “Would I just float to earth as we did after the storm?”
Lyric hadn’t been expecting the first thing out of her mouth to be about a subject unrelated to timely mating.
“You mean would you cease to exist?”
“Aye. ‘Tis what I mean.”
The fact that he didn’t answer immediately was disquieting. It could mean that he didn’t know or that he didn’t want to say or that he was trying to find a way to shave the truth.
Finally, he shook his head. “I don’t know for sure. The fact that you aren’t a natural-born demon is a wild card. I think you’d survive. But please. Let’s don’t test the theory.”
She turned to face him. “So what is it you’re hidin’? Say it plain.”
“It’s a freak of happenstance that we haven’t already encountered other male demons. Males who will know, intuitively if you will, that you’re an unmated female.” The intensity of his stare conveyed the import of what he wanted to impress on her. And she listened just as intently. “In the elemental world there’s no such thing as going steady. You’re either mated or you’re available.”
“And you think I’d be interested in just any Tom, Dick, or demon?”
“It’s not you that worries me, Shivaun.”
“Then what? Stop pussy footin’ around.”
“A female demon is the rarest thing in the universe and possibly the most powerful. There are a lot of males out there who will want you. For the wrong reasons. Gods help me if they find out you exist. They’ll stalk you, hunt you, try to capture you. Consent won’t factor in.”
He let that hang in silence between them so that she could, hopefully, process all the implications.
At length, she said, “You’re sayin’ I’d be forced to mate?” After a pause, she added, “Rape? Captivity?”
Lyric’s concerns had been laid bare and all the accompanying feelings played out on his face. She tried to recall if she’d ever seen him so expressive in the past and couldn’t find a single memory with that kind of emotional display. Except for sex.
He gave a single sharp nod.
“But givin’ you consent to be my mate would save me from that fate?” She giggled about the unintended rhyme.