A Demon's Horns: Vice College For Young Demons: Year One

by Marie Mistry

  After that, Arazon decided we were going to spend the day attempting to write our own poetry in the style of one of the demonic ‘masters’ of literature. By the time I walked up the stairs to my bedroom at the end of it all, I was well and truly fed up. I definitely wasn’t in the mood to see Triston leaning against my door.

  “Not in the mood,” I said honestly. “I appreciate you coming though.”

  “You used up all your power in that duel,” Triston spoke slowly. “I think you need a top up. It’ll speed your ankle’s healing.”

  I sighed, because he was technically right. Demons could heal almost anything if our bodies had enough power, even diseases. It was part of the reason why the unshown were the only demons who had to worry about dying from anything other than a mortal wound. My ankle would probably be fine in minutes if I let him give me a top up. But I really wasn’t in the mood.

  “I’ve had the worst possible day,” I told him. “You really have no idea.”

  He smiled. “I can make it better.” He crowded me against the door, pressing little suckling kisses to my neck.

  “I said no, Triston,” I told him firmly.

  I felt a flicker of sensation along my horns and looked up. Aeron was standing on the stairs above us, looking down with a question in his eyes. Triston followed my gaze and seemed to wake up.

  “Sorry,” he apologised, instantly backing off. “I shouldn’t have pushed. I don’t know why I did.” He seemed genuinely confused and a little upset to have broken one of the unspoken rules of Lust.

  “I do,” Lulu called up from her room, carelessly showing that she’d been listening the whole time. “If Lilith is low on power, the man-drawing effect of her sub-caste is amplified to try and top her up.”

  I groaned and stamped through the door into my room.

  “Great! Just bloody perfect,” I growled, as I dumped my bag, coat and gloves onto a chair. “Sorry Triston, I didn’t mean to mind-rape you,” I called back, pulling the heavy earrings out of my ears and rubbing the lobes for relief.

  He smiled a slow, easy smile. “I’d hardly say it was against my will. See you later,” he trotted up the stairs and I continued taking off my jewellery, pausing when I pulled off the ring from my horn. It was perfectly clean, despite having been tossed in the moat. I chucked it in my little box of jewellery in frustration.

  “Stupid man,” I grumbled, looking at my bed longingly. Sometimes, I just wanted to climb in and sleep through the drama. But I still had Vrosis’ lesson, and he’d notice if I wasn’t there. I sighed. Vrosis would also think my refusal to practice duelling was stupid, especially seeing as – like Nelly said – I might have painted a huge target on my back when I showed off that amount of skill in front of all those witnesses.

  I frowned, I was being petty. Leaving my room, I jogged up the two flights of stairs between my room and Triston’s. He answered on the first knock.

  “Lilith?”

  I silenced him with a kiss.

  “Good plan.” He smiled when we came up for air. “I like it, very simple.”

  I ambushed his mouth again.

  I still didn’t go to practice that night, instead I chose to sit and listen to Vrosis talk about current affairs in the demonic world with the others. When it was our usual time to leave for practice, Nelly gave me a look as if to make sure I was sure. I nodded, settling into my chair with my glass of wine, basking in the absence of the headache I now knew was a result of my body needing more power.

  “Tomorrow,” I mouthed, and it worked to pacify her.

  That was when the irritating stroking feeling on my horns returned. Despite my glances of hatred at Aeron, he didn’t stop. He carried on for the remaining hour of Vrosis’ tutorial, driving me crazy with scratching till I’m certain Lulu was beginning to think I’d gotten head lice.

  By the end of Vrosis’ two-hour tutorial I’d had enough. Once the elder was outside the building and the others had gone up to bed, I rounded on the smarmy git.

  “What are you trying to accomplish?” I demanded. “Do you want me to get you in the balls?”

  He smirked. “You wouldn’t dare. You’re too chicken to.”

  I all but growled. First the public hand job, then the letters, then the ring, the threat and then the innocence gift and the constant bloody stroking of my horns. “What is your game?” I demanded. “You are driving me crazy.”

  “Then do something about it,” he challenged.

  My eyes blazed at his arrogant smirk, and then I stiffened as he leaned over to me and ran a hand along my horn.

  I shivered. “Stop it.”

  “Oh, so they’re sensitive in that way, are they?” He grinned. “Perhaps once you’ve begged to blow me, I’ll stroke them for you. How would you like that?”

  I saw red. “Fine!” I all but yelled. “You want a duel that badly, you’ll get one!” I slapped his hand off my horns. “Aeron Saxon, I demand a duel, and when I win, you’re going to explain every little infuriating thing you’ve done to me since I arrived at Vice.”

  His eyes widened a fraction in surprise, but it was so quick I might have imagined it.

  “I accept,” he said, his silky voice making the words sound much dirtier than they should have. “And when I win, Succubus, you’re going to beg to blow me.”

  I frowned as he straightened then offered me a hand to stand like a gentleman.

  “Shall we continue this outside?” He asked smoothly.

  “Fine,” I grated, following him through the back door of the Carnal Tower and into the space usually reserved for our practice sessions.

  Aeron didn’t wait for me to be ready, the moment I was standing a reasonable distance away from the tower he attacked with missiles of pyrokinesis.

  I went to deflect them, but they never reached me.

  For some reason they stopped halfway between us, falling to the ground.

  “Giving up so soon?” I asked, drawing huge boulders of earth towards me and sending them flying at him.

  They didn’t reach him. They fell midway between the two of us in a neat line. I moved closer and tried again, using larger rocks.

  “What the hell?” I asked. “Why aren’t my powers working?” I tried again with pyrokinesis.

  Another failure, what was going on?

  Aeron was staring at me in shock. “Mate,” he whispered.

  I wrinkled my eyes. “Mates don’t exist anymore, idiot.” I told him, drawing water from the lake and sending it flying at him.

  Nothing.

  Aeron began walking towards me slowly. “Lilith…” he began.

  I upped the ferocity of my attacks, abandoning any attempt at subtlety as I sent powerful missiles of PK at him. He just walked through them, and they fizzled and died as they got close to him.

  When he was a hairsbreadth away from me, I gave up.

  “What are the odds?” he asked, stroking a hand across my jaw.

  “Why is it always me?” I wondered, just before I fainted.

  Chapter 13

  When I came to, we were still outside on the ground, but Aeron had manoeuvred me so that I was lying in his lap. My eyes went first to the birch above us, its browning leaves tumbling so peacefully around the two of us despite the chaos in my mind. I studied it for a few seconds longer, before letting my eyes focus on the unreadable face in front of me.

  “You’re stubborn, you know that?” he asked, looking out at the moat.

  “Who won?” I asked.

  “We both did,” he answered. “We found out we’re mates.”

  I sighed. “They no longer exist, Aeron.”

  He looked down at me. “I want to tell you something,” he began, “about my father.”

  He wasn’t listening to me and didn't wait for my reply before he started talking again. “His name is Kellert Krossian, but you’ve already figured that out. What you don’t know is that he is an Incubus.” I frowned, but didn’t interrupt. “My father escaped the extermination of your kind. He
had just graduated at the time, and he managed to survive by seducing the woman sent to kill him. She was from Greed, and he managed to convince her that she could have him for herself. Her name was Calandra Pruitt.”

  I’m pretty sure my eyes were wide as dinner plates as I rested on his lap, listening to him.

  “My father then used his ability, not enough to kill her, just enough to age her beyond that which an ordinary demon would age to. He can give her youth back, and he promised he would once she lied and told everyone that he was not an Incubus. He made her convince everyone that he was in Promiscuity and it worked, because she was high in the ranks of the ones responsible for exterminating the rest of his kind. Then, once she had done that, he continued to dangle her youth over her. He used her to protect himself while sleeping with everything that moved so he could be strong enough to avenge his family.”

  Aeron paused. “My father knew he was in a dark place, but he believed it was up to him alone to get revenge. It drove him mad. Eventually, he raped women when they wouldn’t be seduced. There was one Greed woman in a library who would not succumb to his charms. My father had just finished abusing her when an unshown came out of nowhere and attacked him. He fought back with his power, and it refused to obey him.”

  “The Greed woman was your mother.” I understood now.

  “And the unshown was his mate, and my mother’s best friend,” Aeron finished. “She gave birth to Bane three years later.”

  “So, you’re saying Incubi and Succubae still have mates?”

  “No, my father’s theory is that since the unshown have decreased their contact with the castes, mates who were unshown were never found. For caste demons, the chances of ever meeting your mate decreased due to a lack of interaction with the unshown. And the situation worsened exponentially for them when they started killing each other in a frenzy to find a mate. There are still mates, they’re just much more likely to be unshown. Nature’s way of preventing inbreeding in the species, I guess.”

  I rubbed at my neck, my eyes searching the patch of grass in front of me rather than meet his. “So, what does that mean for us?”

  “It means you are very lucky.” He smirked. “You got me.”

  “It could be a fluke.” I pushed an escaped wisp of hair behind my ear nervously.

  “We’re just lucky we found out about it in privacy. If anyone else had seen… This has to be our secret, Lilith.” Urgency tinged his voice.

  I frowned. “Why? The caste would never tell.”

  “There’s not a single person in the castes who gives a damn about the unshown,” Aeron said, bluntly. “The moment caste demons discover that they could have a mate among the unshown, there would be demons throwing power at every unshown they came across. They are powerless. Unshown cannot defend themselves.”

  “What does your mum think about this? She has to know…”

  “She was the one who told him why he couldn’t attack a lowly unshown.” He shrugged. “She’d been married to an Envy official and they were trying for a baby, so she had done the required rituals to make her fertile. The Envy didn’t want a bastard son, so he left her when he found out what had happened. Somehow her friendship with Leonie was good enough that Leonie was able to convince her not to give me up to strangers. I was raised with Bane till I was ten.”

  “You don’t want a mate though. You hate me, remember? Besides, I’m not convinced it’s not a fluke.”

  Aeron rolled his eyes. “I don’t hate you. I’ve told you before; you’re just fun to tease.”

  “Playing with my horns while I’m trying to focus is not teasing,” I protested.

  “No, that was just to get your attention. I guess I felt a tiny bit left out that you chose Ryon and Triston as your lovers and not me.”

  I frowned. “What planet do you come from? You had a hand job from Lulu right in front of me – because that sets the right first impression – and then after that you ignored me for my first day in Lust. Then for a full week, you tripped me with your power at every opportunity and had staring contests with me. Then there is the horn stroking, the letter stealing – all before I ever slept with Triston or Ryon. And then telling me to beg if I ever needed to ask you for power whilst continuing to torment me! What part of that is getting my attention in the way that would mean I would want to sleep with you?” He made my head hurt.

  “Firstly, I don’t recall having any… wait… you were the girl watching us outside the tower!” He realised with a grin. “Without the horns you looked different... How can you judge me when Lulu does worse at the breakfast table to Ryon and Triston?” He had a point there, I frowned.

  “Your first day I ignored you, which is true, but it was because, as a rule, I don’t invite people prying into my parentage. Lulu only knows because I got drunk one night and told her. As for the letters, they were vile. I couldn’t believe you’d had to read such hurtful rubbish. I took them away so you wouldn’t obsess over them and come to hate the caste which you fit into so well. About telling you to beg for it… you’ll recall that the evening before you had just slept with Triston, and I was feeling a little bit jealous. What was meant as an invitation might have come out a little bit …wrong.”

  I snorted. “That is your idea of an invitation?”

  He ignored me and carried on. “Plus, you’ve made no mentions of the nice things I’ve done. I bought you an innocence gift, which I would never have done for anyone else because I don’t usually join in with innocence circles.” He named the initiation practice where I’d had my first kiss. “I lied to my mother to protect you, because if she ever got wind of Vrosis moulding a new Succubus to bring unity to Lust and threaten the current stable political climate, she would tell the elders. It would be her duty. And I protected you after your duel with your mother when she took that cheap shot at you. Not to mention fishing your ring out of the moat and cleaning it.”

  That had been him protecting me?

  “And if you really believe this is a fluke,” he continued, grabbing a small handful of tiny, dying birch leaves from the floor and starting a small aerokinetic ball of wind in one hand, visible only by the way it stirred up the leaves above his palm. “Use your power in conjunction with mine. Make the wind grow, and if nothing happens, you’ll be proved right.”

  I looked at the swirling debris, then at him. “But if you’re right, and I’m not dreaming – which is still possible – then we’d be bound together.”

  “We’d both be stronger,” he argued. “You’d have someone to feed your power. Being with you would fuel mine. We could keep each other safe.”

  “But you’d want to keep it a secret. How would we manage that?” I didn’t want to live a life with even more secrets in it. “Why don’t we take it slow? We could start by trying not to be horrible to one another.”

  His eyes darkened. “Don’t be a chicken, Lilith.”

  I frowned, crossing my arms. “You can’t dare me into a lifelong commitment… Look, I’m not saying we’d never do it. I just think we should take it slow. I can take power from you as well as the others, if that would help.”

  “You’d expect to keep sleeping with Ryon and Triston?” He raised an eyebrow. “Not happening.”

  “Why?”

  His breath lightly misted against my face as he looked down at me with those strange yellow eyes. “You’re mine. You were mine from the moment your powers fell to the ground in surrender.”

  I shivered slightly. “Then what am I going to tell them? How will I have enough power for practices?”

  “You’re going to tell them that I don’t share,” Aeron told me, his eyes blazing with more intensity than I had ever seen. “And you’re going to do it the moment you next see them.”

  His orders made my skin prickle, but he was stroking my horns absently as he spoke, and it felt oh so good.

  “I’m drawing so much power just from this,” he whispered, awed, as his fingers alternated between stroking between my horns and my hair. “
Imagine what it will be like when we’re bound. Do it Lilith.”

  “Make me believe it’s worth my while,” I challenged, looking at the air in his palm with trepidation.

  He chuckled. “So stubborn,” he repeated, with a smirk. “Very well, if you insist,”

  He shuffled me up into his arms and stood in one smooth motion, leaving the chilly night behind as he carried me easily through the doors of the Carnal Tower and up the stairs. We bypassed my room, and I wondered which one was his. I’d never been to Aeron’s room, and I was surprised to find it was at the very top of the tower. His door opened to reveal more stairs, and he carried me up them easily.