The Forlorn by Calle J. Brookes Page B

Kind.”
    “Wow. We had a neighbor in Center Thrun City that absolutely hates demons, and someone said he was once a fighter of them. How did we end up here , anyway?”
    She didn’t miss the surprised look on his face. She refused to let that surprise make her feel any more awkward than she already did.
    He laced his fingers through hers. Mara tried to ignore how it made her feel. She wasn’t a simpering idiot, melting every time a hot guy looked at her nicely. She wasn’t like that. But with this guy that was half how she felt.
    She’d just have to learn how to deal with that. “Tell me why we’re in the demon world to begin with.”
    “Over a year or so ago our goddess was freed from her prison. She and the god of the Lupoiux had been fighting for thousands of years. Then they became rajnis and the future of each world shifted. There are eighteen worlds that we know of, and this is one of the outer ones. Gaia—the one we came from—is a few layers of the onion below this one. One reason why this one can be a bit cold at times. The farther from the center, the colder. After the goddess found her mate some other things happened in other worlds. Things that were destined, of course. The Four Fates or the Four Destinies control such.”
    “What are the Four Fates? Don’t forget, I’m starting completely from scratch here.” They sat on a padded bench, near a huge stained glass window. There was glass here, then, after all. Why hadn’t that extended throughout the city? “I don’t know any of the legends of your people.”
    “ Our people.”
    “I guess. Go on. Tell me about the Four Fates. Are they anything like the three in human mythology?”
    “Possibly. The humans came after our Kind. They could have perverted one of our myths. That’s certainly likely.”
    “So there are three in human legend. Clotho, the spinner, Lachesis who determines what kind of life a human will have, and Atropos, who decides when it ends.”
    “Similar, I think, to some of our legend. There are four, and they are Laquazzeana. That’s a name we’ve given to beings who for whatever reason have ascended to a place of spirituality greater than the goddesses and gods of any world. These Four Fates are said to be some of the oldest and most powerful of beings. And some say the maddest. Why else would they put into place some of the destinies they have? No one knows their names, but the myth says that one controls births, one beliefs such as religion, another controls careers or ambitions, and one controls family ties.”
    “No death?”
    “No. Death is still a vast unknown for our Kind. No one, not even the goddess, knows what or who controls it.”
    “Scary, if you think about it. Someone else out there with the power over anyone’s death.” She’d always thought her body with wither and die when she was close to her eighties or nineties. The way all humans did. Or die some other way. That she would most likely live for a very, very long time frightened almost as much as the idea of dying did.
    “Yes, it is.”
    “I think we’re digressing. How did the Dardaptoan people end up here in the demon world?”
    “Some of the Dardaptoan lines have great foresight. It was mostly on their orders. They said Dardanos, the main city in Colorado, was under great threat. And then the attack came, with fire, and the goddess decreed that all should relocate to the demon world. Kindara, a friend of the goddess, had bonded with the High King, and he offered our peoples sanctuary. The Lupoiux have mostly relocated to a world known as Levia.”
    “Why the threats? And why were they so strong that we couldn’t stay in the real world?” She knew of Dardanos. One of her close friends had relocated there over a year ago. But… “Was everyone in Dardanos Dardaptoan?”
    “I don’t know. It was a city my brother was associated with. I have spent the last two hundred years in Australia.”
    “So how did you know to relocate? How to get