A Demons Mate (Black Butler)

Chapter 48

Serena was confused as she walked through the snow-covered gardens of the Phantomhive manor house. When she looked down, she found the pretty green silk dress that she had loved in the past covering her body. Everything was exactly as she remembered when she had left this place months ago. Actually, decades ago. She looked over to where the hedge maze should be, but there was nothing there right now. It could never have grown with Finny around. Something moved out of the corner of her eye and she turned to see the gate to the corner garden sitting open.

Snow crunched under her slippered feet as she walked and she realized that the walkway hadn't been swept. It was the first sign that something wasn't right. She was hot as well, not something that would have happened during an English winter.

A familiar black-clad form appeared around the gate of the corner garden and Serena took off with a smile. She swung into the garden and stopped dead. A large, iron fence ran down the center of the space, the same height as the walls around them, and her demon was on the other side of it.

Serena ran forward and her fingers curled around the cold iron as she smiled at Sebastian.

"Good evening, my mate."

"Sebastian." She smiled as he reached through the bars and touched her cheek. "What's going on?"

"I thought that we should talk."

The redhead flinched a little and looked down. "About the show?"

"Among other things."

"Is that why there's a fence?" Her fingers rubbed the rough iron of the fence while she waited.

Sebastian touched the iron between them and Serena noticed that his hands were bare for her to see black nails that faintly resembled claws. "I've been waiting over a hundred years for you. Do you think that I would really put a fence between us now?"

"But, I didn't..." Serena stopped and looked at the design worked into the iron. She'd seen it before. The roses worked into the iron were just like the one she had seen at her grandmother's old Victorian home. It had surrounded the garden and she had been fascinated by it as a child. It was one of the first things that she'd drawn. She had done several sketches of the one section that held the gate until she had been able to get it perfect. That fence had been her first art class. "I don't understand."

"You're afraid of me."

Her head snapped up. "No, I'm not."

The demon raised an eyebrow and she looked at the iron rose she was touching. It was quiet and she realized he was waiting for her to speak.

"It's not you. I'm afraid of what's going to happen. Of what's going to change."

"To have something, you must first let something else go."

"But, we could stay here. There's the house and...we could just stay there."

Sebastian shook his head. "You would still age even after our bond is completed if you remain in the human world. Trouble will still find you, you would still die eventually. Demons keep their mates in their homes because of the last war with the reapers but, even before that, mates were only brought back for brief amounts of time." He took a deep breath. "I could leave."

"What?"

"I could just leave and you could go back to the life you wanted." He waited for his words to sink in. "For our mating to work, you have to accept me, Serena. If you cannot, then I will leave. That is what the reapers were talking about. There have been mates that have chosen not to accept their demons and have gone back to their human lives."