Katrina got up and went after him, sliding her arms around his lean waist. Kyle stiffened, but her embrace only tightened in spite of her fear. She leaned her head against his back and spoke, gentle but firm.
“Kyle, tell me. What did she do?”
“Release me and I will answer you,” Kyle replied. It took more control than he wanted to admit not to shove her away. She was only trying to comfort him. But she was not his.
Though his tone was even, Katrina heard the dire warning in it and slowly let her arms drop from around his waist. She took a step back, horrified at her audacity but unwilling to draw attention to her mistake by apologizing for it. She was in a different world now, a dangerous world; she had to remember that.
Instead she offered him a nod, as he so often offered to her, and he continued.
“She confessed herself, to him and all present, unashamedly,” Kyle said quietly. “And dared my father to fault her for it, for ‘love is never wrong’, she told him.”
“She’s right,” Katrina said as she returned to her seat. “It isn’t. It’s the one thing that keeps me sane when Nikolai talks about things that just make my mind boggle. I don’t suppose your father took too kindly to that.”
The understatement made Kyle burst out in laughter.
“No,” he admitted with a shake of his head though he kept his eyes on the dark of the garden. “No, he didn’t. He killed her. Or rather, he had Kihirin do it. Right in front of me. I was held in my mortal form, trapped by a power greater than my own. It took the entire power of seven of them, plus what my father could spare, to restrain me and keep me in form. I couldn’t even go to her as Kihirin drained her life. He was in mortal form and used a scythe to slit her throat. She kept her eyes on me as he prepared to do it, telling me the whole time that she loved me and it was worth it. When she was all but gone, they released me. I went immediately to her.”
Kyle’s voice had again lost some of its might, and Katrina wanted to embrace him again, but she didn’t dare. Kyle wasn’t like Nikolai at all, and neither could nor would be soothed by a hug and a kiss.
“She knew, though, didn’t she? That you were with her?” Katrina asked in a whisper, knowing Kyle’s keen ears would hear her.
“Yes,” Kyle replied softly, “she knew. They never had any intention of letting us alone - letting us be with one another. They’d always planned to stop us in whatever way they could, and I was a fool to think I was indispensable. At that moment, I didn’t care about any consequence that would come of the proclamation my father wanted me to make. I professed for her, and told her what I should have told her the moment I knew it. ‘I love you,’ I said. She smiled and made me promise to remember the day we had together, the holy day, and I promised her I would never forget. Then she died in my arms, and I could do nothing but watch.
“And as her soul left her body, I tried to stop it, even though my power had already been stripped. I was as powerless as a mortal, and I couldn’t do anything to stop her death.”
Katrina tried not to let her tears fall, but she couldn’t help it.
Kyle turned around to regard her, and she hastily wiped her eyes. He crossed the veranda to the table she was again seated at, took a handkerchief from his breast pocket and offered it to her.
“Shh,” he said as she accepted it hesitantly.
A fleeting thought of warning crossed her mind about accepting something offered by a demon, but it wasn’t enough to dissuade her. Besides, he’d helped her and Nik before. But why? Demons never did anything selfless, did they?
She was so caught up in her own thoughts that she almost didn’t
hear what he was saying.
“If Nikolai returns to see you’ve wept, he’ll never again allow me in your house, and you made such a fuss to have me here.”
Katrina laughed as she dried her eyes and blew her nose. “So she died.”
“Yes,” Kyle said softly. “She died for love of me. Because she loved me. That is why, my lady Katrina, I choose to be ‘alone’, as you say.”
“But you professed for her like they wanted,” Katrina said to him with anguished eyes. She sniffed once more and dabbed at her nose with the handkerchief. “And . . . and . . . if you’d done that to begin with, she wouldn’t have been killed!”
Kyle simply looked at her and Katrina cringed at the stupidity of what she’d just said. Now that was “movie stuff. It was Lucifer, after all, and he wasn’t exactly an honest guy.
“What happened then?” she asked, mostly to cover up her silly accusation.
“I had become human,” Kyle said with a shrug. “Though this was yet unknown to me and to the others who stood by. A demon cannot love, ever. If a demon finds his heart and professes love, he will become mortal. Human. Demons cannot love, therefore they become something else. When I professed for Catrine, I became human. The mortal I’d been in possession of, his soul and mine fused. Two souls cannot share one body without fusing. As the mortal’s soul was already damned by his own hand, and mine was given to me by my father, Lucifer thought it his property and took it for his own, leaving me—”
“A body without a soul,” Katrina said with him.
“Yes,” Kyle affirmed. “In his words, ‘forced to live off the blood of those I betrayed him for’. Worse, I betrayed him for love of a mortal — something he cannot abide. He took back what he’d given me, though he had no right to it. Looking back, I should have entrusted it to my Catrine. I should have given her my soul as well as my heart.”
Kyle bent down to look Katrina firmly in the eye.
“Remember that, Katrina,” he said gently. “When you’re at your wits’ end with Nikolai, and the Council and the Destrati, and immortals and souls. When you grow weary of the War Between the Sides, remember that it all comes down to one thing and that is love. It was love that began it, and someday, it will be love that ends it. Remember.”