He removed his arm supporting her lower back so he could gingerly use a claw to move some of her hair covering her face. He was waiting for something, anything, a sign that said she would be okay. However, it felt hollowing to crouch here holding his lifeless female.

The moment he moved her hair, the skin on her cheek flaked like a piece of ash that was breaking apart. He darted his hand away, but another appeared above her brow, then the side of her jaw.

An acute whine shuddered his lungs when Reia began to disintegrate. Like ash, she was breaking apart, pieces of her skin curling before falling from her.

Faster and faster she broke apart before the comfortable weight of her became significantly lighter. She caved in around his arms, giving him nothing to hold.

He dug through the ash while fretting, claws cutting at stone, as the little grey flecks grew smaller as if she was turning to dust.

His orbs felt weighty as coldness trickled over his skull, but he didn’t stop digging even when there was nothing left.

“Reia? Reia!”

Where is she? Where did she go?

“That was strange,” Jabez chuckled. “But it looks as if she is gone, Mavka. No little human for you.”

He started to clap, applauding the show Orpheus was giving him as Orpheus panicked, darting his head around to look for her. She can’t be gone. She can’t be dead.

She gave him her soul. She is meant to eternally be with me, safe. That was what the Witch Owl told him. She said

that if he wanted to be content with a human, they would need to give him their soul and he would take it to keep, to protect, to hold for them.

She didn’t tell him to eat it, only that he would know what to do with it when he saw it. Orpheus had felt an uncontrollable desire to eat it, consume it, have it within him.

Reia’s soul was his to keep.

The sweet cloaking aroma was finally gone, but he didn’t feel an urge of hunger at Katerina’s body and the smell of blood that was coming off her. There was lots of it, enough to put any Mavka into a frenzy, but all he felt, all he thought about, was finding Reia.

But she disappeared. Vanished in front of him. Did she go somewhere?

Did the Demon King have her?

Orpheus growled as he lifted his gaze to him. He was a threat. He had harmed Reia, and the idea that he might actually be harbouring her somewhere filled him with rage.

He was filled with powerful magic, maybe he had stolen her once more by tricking him into thinking she’d crumbled apart.

Lunging, he ran through the bubble shield and dived for Jabez. His eyes widened and Orpheus managed to slice his claws across his face before he disappeared when he tried to grab him.

By the time he was materialising, Orpheus was already moving. His desperation, his determination, made him quicker. The adrenaline felt like acid moving through his veins, pumping his muscles with cold burning.

“Give her to me!”

Jabez hissed at him when Orpheus tackled him while snapping his jaws to chomp into his head. The Demon King had to dodge his head to the left and then right, so he wasn’t bitten before fading.

“I don’t have her, Mavka.”

Orpheus wasn’t listening.

For centuries, this creature had been teasing and tormenting him, using any means to make Orpheus suffer.

To fight him, to try to destroy his home when the charms had broken, to steal Katerina and then many of his offerings.

Orpheus had known he’d kill them before he could make it to the castle, and the only reason he’d hoped he hadn’t done the same to Reia was because he’d left behind the amulet this time.

Orpheus was like a rabid, crazed, animal as he sprinted across the throne room with such speed it had Jabez on the back foot. He was growing angrier, Orpheus’ constant attacking – and injuring him – irritating him.

He teleported behind Orpheus to grab his horns so he could hold onto him, and he quickly spun his head around on his neck to face him over his back. Orpheus snapped his jaws around Jabez’s hand before it could reach him, gnawing through the muscles, tendons, and then the bones of his forearm.

Jabez yelled, yanking back to sever his own arm while Orpheus’ body was slowly turning around so he could claw at him.

He teleported next to his throne to escape.

“This is no longer entertaining,” Jabez bit while holding the stump of his arm, placing his palm against it to stem the bleeding. “Leave, Mavka. I don’t have your human.”

Orpheus shook his head, hearing a singular bell jingle, as he snarled and crawled closer.

“You stole her from me.”

His female, his human, his little doe that didn’t deserve to die the way she did.

He shouldn’t have had to witness her weakening heartbeat, her lungs wheezing on breaths. To feel her body growing cold with lifelessness. He knew he’d never get the memory of it out of his mind.

Within seconds, Jabez was on his back, slow from blood loss and pain. Orpheus tore into his chest before he managed to get his bare feet between them.

“Get the fuck out of my castle!” Jabez roared as he booted Orpheus off him.

Orpheus flew across the room, and through a small portal.

Landing against dirt that puffed into the air at the disturbance of his body, he rolled over it into thick grass.

The sun was fading, the Veil’s forest making it seem like night was settling in long before it was supposed to.

Swiftly turning to the portal so he could face Jabez once more, it was gone, and he drifted his gaze around to find himself in front of their home.

A curt whine ached his chest. Reia?

He walked towards the house on all fours, shoving himself through the doorway that was too narrow for his body in his monstrous form.

The air felt cold, the house empty without the candles lit yet. He pushed the living room chairs out of the way, trying to see if she was curled up in hers even though he could plainly see she wasn’t.

He walked into the kitchen, sniffing the ground, before knocking over the chair she usually sat on at the dining table to check under it, but she wasn’t there either.

Stepping down the hallway, the scents in the air told him they were old, that she wasn’t here, but he couldn’t stop himself from looking, from checking, thinking perhaps his nose was misleading him.

He opened her bedroom door and found the sheets empty.

He lifted the bed to check under it. The side table fell onto its side when he turned in the room so he could leave it.