Page 176 of Last Gift: Supernatural Battle

And we’d never fall for the same strategy again. Scouting for demon gates would be a regular thing for the coven and other supernaturals for the rest of time. I was certain some identifying tool or magical demon radar could be formed eventually.

Most of the discomfort in my chest dissipated. “Yes, that’s what we must do.”

“Uh…,” Andie said. “Tempest?”

I peered at her, then followed her wide-eyed stare across the meadows.

Sascha stepped forward. “It’s a child.”

With my eyes blurry from fatigue, spotting what they’d seen took me a second.

“It is a child,” Wild said low.

I saw the boy then. The demon boy. “Mother be.”

He couldn’t be more than three or four. Boy was a loose term, really. The demon boy branched the line between toddler and child if anything.

My mouth dried. The child’s mother or father could be dead here. “I don’t want him to see the bodies.” I rushed forward, the other rulers close behind me.

Most of our force was still on the knolls, and slowly their movements and soft noise quietened as they, too, spotted the demon toddler.

I stopped on the other side of the demon bodies, and Wild and the others formed a line either side of me to block what we could of the child’s view of the battleground.

The hooded child walked to us.

“He’s walking to you,” Andie said. “Do you know him?”

I shook my head. “No, I—” I mean, I was part demon. The only part demon here. That the child might be related to me made the most sense. “Maybe through my father’s side. I have no idea.”

The toddler fell over twice, and I listened to him scold himself in the demon tongue for being clumsy.

“Tempest,” Wild said in a curious tone.

I wanted to ask him what he’d figured out, but I couldn’t take my eyes from the small form as he stopped ten feet before me.

The boy lowered his hood and smiled directly at me.

I gasped as a bond within me that had only ever been thin and mostly unresponsive swelled and thickened and glowed with a surge of connection. The bond shot between me and the boy, and the love I felt for this demon toddler was undeniable and unmatched in its nature—being the bond between an adult and innocent.

I’d crossed the space between us without realizing. I dropped to one knee before the boy, searching his face in wonder. “Who are you?”

He replied in my tongue, and a small dimple appeared as he smiled again. “I’m Adeuto, Aunty Tempest.”

My eyes rounded. “What did you just call me?”

“Aunty Tempest,” the boy said in confusion. “Mother said I had to come to you now. That you’d know who I was.”

His mother fucking lied.

“I share a bond with you,” I told him, reaching to take his hand. Now that he’d removed his hood, I could see that his scales were black, but embedded deep within them was a flicker of red. And that red was one of hundreds of hues of red.

I shook my head. “Who are your parents, young one?”

I’d never expected to be disarmed by a demon child. I didn’t know what I thought they started as, but this boy was as any other boy. I could feel his sweetness and intelligence through our bond. I could feel that he didn’t mean harm. I could feel that he loved. That he loved me.

“My dad is king,” he answered. “But Mama said she’s dealing with him, so don’t worry.”

The demon king’s son was here. Fuck. I did my best to absorb that bombshell. “And who is your mother?”

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