Henri and Hein glanced at each other, their heads processing the same thoughts. They could sense the anger bubbling just beneath their wife’s skin as well as the immense power her father had locked up. Provoking her further—even unintentionally—would prove to be fatal to them so they both reached the same conclusion.
“Rather than explaining, let us show you, Solene,” Henri stated whilst moving closer to her.
Solene clenched her hands and stepped back, preferring no skin contact with any of them for the time being, but before she knew it, she felt someone’s arms wrapping around her.
It was the other Henri, or Hein… or damn it, just her second husband.
“Relax my wife, you’ll get your answers as soon as you close your eyes,” he whispered in her ear.
The sound of his voice had a lulling effect. It immediately made her feel drowsy. In front of her, she saw Henri’s ungloved hand stretch and when his fingers touched her forehead, she was in another plane of existence and time entirely.
“Please, please, please…” Solene heard someone say, breaking the seemingly deafening silence around her. From darkness, light burst and showed the depressing scene in full color.
On a familiar balcony, a young woman knelt and cried. Her hands were clasped tightly against the balustrade and her head was held high, looking at the sky as if begging for a miracle.
“Hear me out! Is there someone out there?!” she continued whilst bigger tears fell from her eyes. “I need your help! I can’t lose my baby! Please, stop my miscarriage!”
She was truly begging for a miracle, Solene thought, and this broke her heart.
Suddenly, Solene noticed a disturbance in space behind the woman. A small circular shadow appeared at first until it burst and revealed a black robe-clad man. He was holding the largest scythe Solene had ever seen.
In her subconscious mind, she immediately recognized him as her second husband—the dark blue-haired man, King Hein of Sattus.
“You know, looking up at that obsidian sky won’t help. The gods up there are too people-shy. You should try an alternative instead,” he stated immediately earning a gasp from the woman.
“You’re the King of Hell,” she expressed after turning to face him and wiping her tears away. She had been introduced to this entity before by her husband and didn’t hide the fact that he was royalty.
“Correction,” Hein replied curtly, “I’m the King of Sattus—the spiritual realm, or you can call it Underworld or Afterlife if you want. Hell belongs to the demon realm and they have their own set of rules and crazy there.”
The woman managed to calm her emotions and talk to him without her voice shaking.
“I thought the Underworld and Hell are the same, Your Highness.”
The latter cocked a brow, feeling slightly confused. “You are the Mistress of the Rantzen Clan. I expected you to be well-informed. Did these earthly shows led you astray?”
“I try my best to learn, Your Highness. You know very well my husband has left Earth shortly after our marriage,” she pointed out.
King Hein rerouted his glowing red eyes on the ground and muttered, “An unfortunate event, yes, and so will the unborn child you carry.”
With this, her sadness sparked anew.
“No… no!” New tears formed in her eyes.
Hein saw the potent emotion displayed in front of him and his eyes turned to slits.
“Is this what ails you, Mistress?”
“I can’t lose my child. He is what’s left of my Niklaus! He is the reason why I still carry on living!” she cried out as she covered her face and broke down on the floor.
He was unaffected by this.
“You call it a ‘he’ as if you know what its gender is.”
“I just know!” she replied with a muffled voice. “He will be the master of the Rantzen Clan. He will follow the footsteps of his father!”
“Yet you’ll be saying goodbye to him even before he is born,” as if his earlier words weren’t enough, he reminded her once again.
Talk about adding salt to injury, Solene winced.
“I can’t do that,” she looked up at him and expressed. “No, I just can’t! My misfortunes are too much. Help me stop them, Your Highness!”
She clasped her hands again and this time redirected her supplication to him.
“I would do anything just to keep my baby! Please!”
Even before appearing in front of her, this was exactly what he expected her to do and this pleased him.
“Your words are inspiring, Mistress, and I hear it. What about a deal then? Are you up for it?”
“Yes!” she accepted in the blink of an eye. “Oh god, yes! I’ll do anything!”
Grinning, Hein left his spot and neared the balustrade; the handle of the scythe scraping and making a gloomy noise against the marble floor.
This both fascinated and brought Solene chills.
“You see, Mistress, a supernatural being like me has close to an eternity for a life,” he began as he watched the night sky with little to no stars. “Eventually, boredom strikes. I am well on my way there,” he admitted with a pained face. To Solene, she also saw some other emotion with it but she couldn’t pinpoint what.
“The routine tasks, the day-to-day life filled with nothing but dead souls, facing death and death and nothing but death over and over again—it’s meant to turn someone crazy, myself included. So, I’m thinking of a way—an experiment if you will—to make my life more… bearable.”
The Rantzen Mistress looked up and wiped her tears dry.
“You want to switch bodies with my son?” she said. It was an absurd idea, but one she was willing to do for the sake of her baby.
“Good idea.” He grinned and gazed at her. “Although that’s possible, no, I don’t need to switch bodies with your son. I only need him to share half of me. I want to experience being human and I want to use the Rantzen Clan to make an army of human-hybrid grim reapers—you know, to do my work for me. I got that idea from one of your Earth books. You humans certainly have a colorful imagination. Grim reapers don’t exist in the spiritual world, but I can make that happen using your clan. You have been serving me as conjurers and exorcists all your life, so why not try another venture?”
“I will accept!” the woman cried out without a second thought. “As long as my son lives on past my womb, I accept!”
King Hein grinned wider.
“Good choice, Mistress.”
His great scythe moved, its blade swinging towards her. In less than a second, it slashed a part of her dress right in the center of her one-month-old belly. A yellow-to-golden glow appeared from her slicing wound thereafter, bathing almost her abdomen, and when it disappeared, the wound was gone but it left the mark of the Rantzen clan: the theta.
“With that seal on your skin, it means our deal is official and this also means your unborn son now shares my life. He will live, Mistress. He will dodge death make no mistake in that. He will be me and I will be him. We will both share one life and one experience. We will share one body whenever needed. We will share the same knowledge, skills, and power. From now on, he will hold two titles: Master of the Rantzen Clan and the King of Sattus.”
“Can I still name him please?” the woman requested, pleading him with her eyes.
Hein just shrugged. It wouldn’t matter what name she gives him. This wouldn’t change anything anyway.
“Go ahead, it’s a privilege I will still give you.”
“I’ll name him Henri. Like his father—Niklaus Henri Rantzen.” She touched her stomach and smiled as she stared at it. New tears formed, but these were now tears of joy.
“Approved,” the king replied. He moved away from the balustrade with the intent to enter the inner room but the woman quickly cried out.
“Thank you, Your Highness!”
He slightly shifted to show his brooding profile and said, “Don’t thank me, Mistress. We both gain from this arrangement after all. Now, call the most powerful conjurer in your family. I want to start training the first batch of grim reapers and I need her to round them up.”
She stood up and nodded in haste.
“Of course, I’ll call Lady Ursula.”
Once Solene saw her ran towards the balcony door, everything turned black again. When her eyes flitted open, she found herself back in her small bedroom inside the hut, lying on the mattress with the duvet covering half of her body. This told her her trip to the past was done. She was back to reality; back to deal with her two husbands, or one, or… ah fuck. So confusing.
But at least she was wiser now. Everything made sense: his changes in mood and actions, his preferred seclusion in his chamber when they weren’t wedded yet, and his words during their first date.
‘My personality is interchangeable, Solene. I could be poetic now, but cruel the next. I could become harsh, silent, and cold. I could do gentle and I could also do romantic. I could be this now, but that the next, and I could also be both at the same time. I am a man of different flaws and strengths, Solene. A pandora box all for you to find out.’
And hell, what a mind-blowing pandora box she had opened. Two Henris. Two lovers. Double the trouble in bed.
She blushed furiously at the thought. Why did she suddenly think of that?
This didn’t mean her anger disappeared though. She still had a bone to pick with them with regard to her father’s death and she was going to clear that up now.
Fully focused on the two sitting on each side of the mattress, Solene slowly sat up and hugged her legs—a meager way to show her anger actually. In fact, she had run countless scenes on how to confront the blue-haired man: one of which was to jump on him and strangle him to death. She wanted to try that now, but since there were two of them and since she didn’t want to kill the man she loved, she instead retreated and decided on a more civil way of talking to him—them. Urgh.
“You,”—she tossed a sharp look at Hein and gnashed her teeth—”you killed my father!”
The one addressed didn’t show any reaction except the unchanging piercing glare she had received since earlier.
“Speak now!” she ordered, her voice shaking.
From crossing his arms, Hein disentangled it and released a deep sigh. His stiff expression lightened then, showing a more vulnerable—remorseful even—King of Sattus. “Yes, I did, Solene, but only because I didn’t allow him to live again. Your father’s death was untimely being that he was killed by a half-demon. He was eligible to have a second life. I had the power to grant it but I admit… I didn’t give your father a second chance to live his life with you.”
“And I feel guilty about it,” Henri added. Solene redirected her attention to him. “Am I selfish to say that I tried my best to protect you, to take care of you, and to spoil you just so that my guilt would at least ease?”
“Yes,” Solene answered straight away, but she didn’t look at either of them this time. She instead lowered her head and allowed her tears to fall. Well, her question was answered now, but not in a way she expected it.
Technically, he didn’t kill his father. It was a half-demon as what he mentioned, but he did allow him to die anyway and leave her and her mother to grieve big time. Somehow it opened up a new sadness in her heart.
“Solene,” Hein scooted closer and attempted to touch her cheek, actually expecting her to move away but she didn’t. “I’m sorry. I truly am.”
Solene basked on the feel of his hands on her face. This was a first to be able to experience this half of him. It was new, it was unusual, but overall, it felt good. His presence felt good and this ultimately lessened her sadness.
“I don’t have the power to turn back time for you, but even if I can, I wouldn’t do it. Otherwise, we wouldn’t meet and we wouldn’t be betrothed and I’ll spend another lifetime looking for you, my other half.”
“Hein…” she breathed in his other name which caused a spasm of happiness all over him.
“You are our mate, Solene,” Henri neared her too, touching her waist and back. Then, they suddenly molded into one body and chorused, “The woman meant for me.”
Solene, seeing this, momentarily widened her eyes, but this didn’t evoke fear from her. In fact, she was captivated by this change.
His long hair prevailed but it was the color black. His facial features were the same but Solene couldn’t help but point out an excitingly dangerous quality in his expression. He wore a different outfit—the shade of black still—but he was now in an open robe and trousers, clearly showing his drool-worthy body.
“When I first saw you, I was already moved. The way you looked straight at me with fierce conviction in your eyes even when you were still young, I was intrigued,” he explained whilst running a thumb across her bottom lip.
Solene’s sadness and anger finally vanished. This was replaced with a new kind of emotion: a desire for him, for them, for… oh whatever. She was already lost. She locked gazes with him and did her own exploration of his face too.
“Honestly, I never planned to fulfill your father’s wish. I was a prick that way,” he confessed.
“Is this the reason why you never showed yourself as Henri?” Solene queried, linking everything that happened in the past.
“Yes,” he agreed with a repentant look, “but years later, when the oracle told me about my destined mate, I realized it was you. You were already a teen then, already bombarded with demon and elemental attacks, and worse, surrounded by the haze of death.”
“Huh,” Solene mock-laughed at the irony.
“Since I wasn’t ready to meet you yet, I sent Ursula to draw the tattoos on you.”
“Did you sent Grandma Riza—or Ophelia—too?” she questioned further.
“No, it was the late Mistress—my mother in a way—who did that, Solene,” he answered. “She found it her responsibility to protect you too.”
She lifted her face up and took in his wonderful masculine scent.
“Bless her soul,” she muttered.
“She’s happy with her husband in the Afterlife now so she’s blessed,” he remarked. His hands moved to her chest and pressed her down the mattress. “As for you, you’re in for a good spanking. You took too long, Solene. I almost became insane being alone and bored.”
“It’s not my fault, Henri,” she chuckled whilst touching his strikingly handsome face. “Tell that to my mother and father when they created me.”
“Hmf, then, we’ll just have to make up for lost time.” His voice turned husky and his eyes lit up with unrepressed desire. “Including the three weeks you’re gone from me.”
***
Author’s Note: Damn, Solene is so lucky. 0_o