The thing about people was that they were, in a word, stupid. Silly, foolish creatures, all rattled by emotions and feelings and thinking and overthinking.
They tried too much or too hard. They made complete messes of things that ought to be quite simple.
It was just in their nature, though, just as it was in the nature of dæmons to be far more simple than their human counterparts.
Dìonadair knew that for a fact when they met Jennifer Lewis and Viseryion.
She sat in her usual place beside Nick's feet, leaning against his calf, weary with the tribulations of the night – raptors in a shopping centre, honestly – when the doors opened and Jenny Lewis strode into their life with her dæmon padding along silently at her heels. The resemblance between her and Claudia Brown was uncanny, but this woman did not have Claudia Brown's mourning dove dæmon with his low, warbling voice.
Jenny Lewis's dæmon was a leopard. A clouded leopard, to be exact, the smallest of the big cats and only somewhat larger than Dìonadair herself. The last of the sabretooths, clouded leopards were sometimes called, as their eyeteeth were the longest of any extant feline species.
As Nick prattled on about Claudia Brown, no doubt putting Jenny Lewis off something fierce, Dìonadair and the leopard dæmon touched noses in tentative greeting. "My name is Dìonadair," she murmured.
"Viseryion," he replied.
She liked the smell of his fur.
Viseryion didn't get the chance to see Dìonadair up close for some time, as Jenny was being her usual, stupid, stubborn self and avoiding Nick Cutter like the devil. She refused to listen to him, and he soon grew tired of trying to convince her.
But that was one of the advantages of working in a highly-classified project. You could only avoid someone for so long.
So as Nick Cutter and Jenny Lewis sat in stolid silence at a meeting, forced to listen to Lester's preaching (call a spade a spade), beneath the table, Dìonadair butted her head against Viseryion's in greeting, rubbing her flank along his.
He lay on the floor, and she lay across from him, their noses nearly touching. "He is being stubborn," she said softly.
"As is she."
"Why do you smell of another?"
"Because she is engaged."
"And you are not?"
"I wish I was not." He huffed out a small breath, ears lying back against his skull.
The Highland lynx stretched forward to lick his muzzle.
Viseryion liked the roughness of her tongue.
It took them months, hell, over a year, to finally, finally figure it out.
The ARC was burning, Helen was off her bloody rocker, her and that demonic little monkey dæmon of hers, and Nick Cutter wanted to back inside.
As they turned away, Jenny Lewis reached out to catch him by the arm, and Dìonadair risked pulling on their link to spring back to Viseryion's side.
The first kiss was fire and ice, flint and steel throwing off sparks that erupted in fireworks behind closed lids and resonated in all the quivering particles of Dust.
Jenny Lewis stood in Nick Cutter's arms, having to lean against him to keep from falling over, still tasting him on her lips. At their feet, Dìonadair and Viseryion were purring in unison, weaving between their humans' ankles, rubbing their flanks together.
It was Nick Cutter who said it, the perpetually thick finally being the first to understand. "Soulmates."
Soulmates.
People didn't always get along, foolish creatures of flesh and blood and feeling.
But their dæmons did. The other half of themselves, the half with all the common sense, recognised each other for who and what they were.
It just took some time for the human half to catch up with the programme.
"Foolish humans," Viseryion and Dìonadair murmured together, lying curled against each other on the foot of the bed that belonged to Nick and Jenny Cutter.