by Brianna Jean
I had no reason to open it. The neighbors kept their fucking trash cans on the edge of the property line between our houses, which sat merely inches from said window.
Something shifted to my left.
I froze and closed my eyes, letting my other senses feel the weight of the invasion. Someone was standing next to me; I felt the warmth radiating from his body even though I was positive that I hadn’t seen anything.
“In my fucking room?” I laughed. “This will be good.”
I kept my eyes closed, pushing out my senses to see if whoever was in my room was planning on moving around—they could want to steal something.
When you close your eyes, you take away one of your five senses, so your other four kick into high gear. The remaining senses worked together to make up for the loss of one. I counted on that theory to work as I forced myself to relax, to quiet the adrenaline pumping in my veins.
“That’s a cute trick, Pup, but it won’t work against me,” I heard a deep male voice say from the same spot beside me. I didn’t move. Neither did he. “What would you do if I were a murderer?”
I scoffed, oddly not afraid. I had a feeling he wouldn’t hurt me. His energy felt more curious than anything. “Are you telling me you’re not a murderer?”
“Answer the question, Pup,” he requested in a quiet rasp.
I didn’t answer right away, calculating my options. Opening my eyes, I looked around my dark room. My twinkling lights had been turned off by the timer I set, but the moonlight cast a calming blue hue around the space.
This wasn’t normal, of course. I was dealing with something that I had no hope of understanding, not without getting someone to tell me the fucking truth.
All I knew for sure was that someone was in my room.
I could feel him. There was a shift in the air whenever he took a breath, another energy source in the room, a suffocating tidal wave of emotions, but the room surrounding us was empty.
His voice was very much real, very much here, but there was nobody.
No person. No Human…
Deciding to take the risk and trust my gut, I moved to sit on my bed before lying back against the pillows that I had haphazardly thrown around. “I don’t think I will.”
I closed my eyes again, listening to the darkness around me.
The silence was loud.
“You want to die.” His voice cut through the quiet.
It wasn’t a question.
“I want to die,” I repeated his statement, my voice hushed. I really only had one option since clearly, I was either fucking crazy or my visitor was one of the guys from the alley tonight. I was betting on both. “I’m not sure if that statement is entirely true, but I know it isn’t entirely false. What do you do when the world hardens you? When looking in the mirror becomes too painful and using your fists to let the anger breathe isn’t enough anymore? You either drown and die in your own bullshit or you fight to survive. I’m not sure which one I’m doing.”
He was quiet for a moment, seemingly shocked by my answer. I was too. I never considered my life to be so black and white, but it was. I was merely surviving because I hadn’t decided if I wanted to drown yet.
“You’re only talking to me because you can’t see me.” He stated another assumption, his voice leaning toward playful, like we had started a game of sorts. Like I had written him off as safe.
Which I had.
If he was in my room, somehow invisible, and talking to me…he wasn’t here to kill me.
I’m not sure how I knew that, but I wanted to trust my instincts. I was talking to him because the energy felt familiar, like a warm blanket from Hell.
Dangerous. Addicting. Lethal.
“That’s one point for you, Casper,” I tried, seeing if he’d sense my fib.
The voice chuckled. “Liar. You feel me, yeah?”
I sighed because this was fucking weird. Because it made no fucking sense. Because I didn’t want it to end. “Yeah, Casper, I feel you.”
The bed dipped next to me. I held my breath but didn’t move, wanting to see what he’d do next. If he’d show himself to me.
Silence stretched between us for what felt like hours. At some point, I turned on my side and closed my eyes. Bestia was there to greet me, her nose right up against mine. She huffed, sending hot air into my face, before nudging me with her snout and curling back up in her cage. I hated that I had to mentally put her in one at all, but as I got older, she got stronger. I was afraid that one day, she’d “get out” when in reality, I had just hit my breaking point and gone crazy.
She watched the empty space next to me, her head on her paws, with raw hunger in her eyes. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I opened my eyes just in case. Not knowing who it was made me feel weird but not enough to kick him out. I had a feeling it was Quint, based on his wild energy, oozing sex and confidence, mixed and layered with bitter resentment and hatred.
I didn’t need to see into his soul to know that demons tortured him like they tortured me.
The space next to me was empty, but the warmth was still there.
I waited.
Eventually his thick voice sliced through the air. “You’re fucked in the head, yeah?”
He sounded hopeful, like he might have finally found someone who understood.
I paused before answering, “Yeah.”
A heavy breath. “Do you ever get sick of the dark?”
I shivered, not from fear but from the question. It was a good one. One I’d asked myself on many occasions.
“No,” I replied honestly.
I waited for his response, but nothing happened for a few more heavy moments. His presence was like a cloak around my body. I felt him everywhere and nowhere at all.
I felt a little high, a little crazy, a little reckless.
I wondered if he was going to respond, but after a handful of minutes passed, I figured he wouldn’t. I closed my eyes, and not long after that, I felt sleep start to take me but not before I heard his whispered rasp, “Me neither.”
The sun peeking through my curtains woke me around noon the next day, my body sore as hell from the fight. I stretched, loving the burn of my muscles, the aches and pains that reminded me of a hard-won battle.
I turned over, remembering my visitor from the night before, and found a black and red piece of cardstock sitting on the empty pillow next to me.
I picked it up and read the neat silver cursive:
Annalise Gordon,
You and a friend are invited to a party tonight at Hellhound.
10pm.
You know where it is.
My heart sped up. Hellhound.
Not only did I know where it was, but I had just spent weeks listening to the rumors that had begun spreading about the infamous bar in Hell’s Kitchen. It was exclusive before the rumors—seeing as how it was invitation only—but apparently, people had started going missing.
Getting an invite to Hellhound was nearly impossible, but there were always the stupid fucks who just couldn’t take no for an answer and tried to trick the system, replicating the invitation online and printing it themselves.
Those are the people who never made it out.
The rumors began about a month ago, my customers at the diner bringing all the gossip as they ate pancakes and guzzled down milkshakes.
I looked down, flipping the card over to see that it was blank. Just the same color as the front, with no lettering or a logo. I fell back into my pillows and released a heavy breath, blowing my hair from my face.
What had I gotten myself into? Quint obviously left the card, and I was helpless against the urge to see what they wanted. They knew I wouldn’t be able to resist the invite.
Fucking bastards.
I’d go because I was curious but also because I knew they had answers. About me, about Bestia, and I wanted to know what they meant by the things they said the night before.
I guess I was spending the night of my twenty-first birthday
at Hellhound.
It was late afternoon as I paced in the living room of our penthouse, walking back and forth in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the New York City skyline.
“Okay, I know I agreed to this last night and everything, but I’m not so sure this is a good idea anymore,” I said to Lanier, who sat stoic in the huge white love seat, facing the window. His black hair a mess, shoulders slumped. I couldn’t see those green eyes of his, but I bet that if I could, they would show the same amount of struggle I felt.
“It’s our only choice, Q.” His voice was rough and full of torment.
“We are sending her to the fucking wolves! As soon as she walks in, the whole place will catch her scent and know what she is. Hell, our job is to protect her from a situation like this, not throw her in the pool to fucking drown.” I didn’t like the worry in my voice. I would normally welcome a situation like this.
A hot-as-fuck baby-badass in a room full of Demons? Hell yeah. Let the madness begin. But I hadn’t been able to escape her face since I first laid eyes on her last night. She was everywhere. Those bright as hell purple eyes haunted me.
She hit me right in my sore spot. The lonely one. The one I kept so well hidden not even my brothers knew it existed.
I tried to make jokes with the guys after she left, but I knew Lanier saw something was off with me. I was affected by her. I still didn’t fully understand why, but after last night in her room, I was beginning to get it.
I had felt a twisted sort of pull when I was there, and I hadn’t been able to shake it ever since. I could still smell her—cinnamon and strawberries. Spicy and bitter with a hint of sweet red sin.
It didn’t help that Lanier seemed to lose all his fucking cool when it came to her. Cabe and I took our cues from him because he rarely ever lost control. It was the one thing I always envied about him. He could turn off his mania, while I was forced to eat mine for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But when it came to her, he was unbalanced—it certainly didn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy.
And Cabe? Well, he was a whole different kind of fucked. He already knew her. Those goddamn visions he’d been having have haunted him for years.
He used to talk about the little girl with bluish black hair, and we all laughed at him, calling him a psychic pussy. But now? Now I found myself envious that he knew her first. He’d be able to gain her trust, hear her secrets. If any of us would, it would be him.
“Do we have any other choice, brother? Do you see another way to get in the same room with her before midnight?” Lanier asked with a bite of frustration.
No, of course not. But I wasn’t going to say that.
“We could just show up at her apartment or some shit. Super stalk her while she walks around the city and corner her in an alley again? That was hot as hell. Plus, I’m a genius with a rope. Tie that little bitch up and drag her fine ass back here.” I knew it wouldn’t work, but it was always fun to rile up my best friend.
As soon as I mentioned the rope and called her ass fine, he went red with rage. I could feel the chair beneath him vibrating all the way across the room where I stood.
I snickered. “I’m kidding, you pussy. She’d have our asses on the ground, and we’d be the ones tied up in less than a minute. I have no doubt about that.”
Sighing hard, he said, “We’ll just have to watch her carefully. Let her get into some trouble first. If one of the Demons tries to touch her, she will most definitely put on a show.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose, no doubt thinking about the danger we would be putting her in. It wasn’t something to take lightly. He knew I was aware of that, but I wasn’t sure what to do with my worry. It was a new feeling, an emotion that I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt before.
“She doesn’t have her wings. She isn’t fully Transitioned. We have no idea what will happen tonight, so one of us will have to be around her at all times,” I supplied, plopping myself down onto our C-shaped black leather sofa and staring up at the ceiling. I threw my hand in the air for effect. “I volunteer as tribute!”
He huffed a small laugh. “Of course you do.”
It was silent for a few minutes, both of us lost in thought.
Even if nothing physically happened tonight, all of Hellhound would know that she had yet to Transition, and her scent alone would make her a target as fresh meat. Not to mention whatever my father wanted her safe from could be in the bar tonight. We had no idea who or what was after her, we just knew that he wanted her protected.
“I can feel the gears turning in that tiny brain of yours from all the way over here, Quint.” Lanier’s voice was raw. Not something I was used to. “You’re worried about her.”
Fuck. I was. “Yes.”
Of course Lanier saw it. He never missed anything. That was one of the many reasons we became friends and then eventually claimed each other as brothers.
Sure, I was 276 years older than him, but before we met, I’d spent all those years alone. As a Warlock, we didn’t age once we hit twenty-one—just like the Nephilim but much lonelier if you never found anyone you liked enough to spend eternity with. I was different than the other Warlocks; I didn’t like what I was, and it made me an outcast. But they also didn’t carry demons around with them just because of who their father was.
I was damned from the beginning. I stood out.
I wandered around Earth, playing various games with the Humans as I fed from their negative emotions. I didn’t like that I was forced to feed off their sins, their mistakes, so I tried to befriend a few of them over the years, but I was a scary motherfucker, so it never worked.
My eyes showed a little too much of my crazy, a few too many of my demons.
I drank and messed around with other outcast Warlocks but generally spent my time wallowing alone in my boredom until fifteen years ago when my father decided that my stay Topside was permanent. It took longer than I cared to admit before I wandered into a broken-down basketball court in the darker part of New York City and found Lanier and Cabe playing a game of one on one.
They were sixteen when I saw them playing, and I looked to be in my twenties, so I couldn’t approach them without looking like a fucking pedophile. I also didn’t know how to talk, think, or act around them.
It wasn’t until I saw Cabe and Lanier interacting with each other, the friendship they had, that I wanted to figure out how to have that myself. Growing up and living in Hellfire didn’t teach me about how the Human brain worked. I had one, but I hadn’t grown up around normal children. My siblings were Demons, evil. I didn’t like being around them.
I needed to learn how to be a friend, how to make the guys like me. It sounds creepy if you think about it too hard, but at the time—I was simply trying to survive inside my own head. The two of them, the relationship they had, made me see what I was missing. So I watched… the joking and laughter. I was fascinated by the games they played.
I waited two years, until they were eighteen. When I approached, I kept the little secret to myself and pretended like I was just a neighborhood kid coming to play basketball. We clicked instantly.
I told them I was a Warlock—a Demon—and explained who my father was, confirmed that I was a helluva lot older than them but that I stopped aging when I hit twenty-one just like they would in a few short years. Sure enough, when they did hit the golden age, we celebrated together. I was there for their Transition; I was there for every occasion. It wasn’t long after their Transition that my father bought us the penthouse, they moved in with me, and then just like that, we were a family.
I never told them that I had spent time learning how Humans interacted with one another, using them as my example. I never told them how bad it was in Hellfire. I didn’t want to seem weak, or worse—creepy. No, I kept it to myself, but it didn’t matter, they were my brothers as much as I was theirs. None of us were related by blood, but we were brothers by choice.
We still didn’t know why my father was so accepting of the three
of us together, but we never questioned it. Lanier lost his father at a young age, and Cabe had no known family, so they lived in an orphanage that was run by two Nephilim. Our friendship was natural because, in a lot of ways, we were the same.
Our brotherhood was built on a foundation of resentment. We all resented who we were, what we were capable of, what life had handed us. I couldn’t explain the feeling I lived with every day, but they lived with the same one. Their pain echoed mine. Abandoned. Alone. Angry.
“Any news on the mating bonds?” I asked, breaking the silence. I moved my hands through my hair, pulling on the strands.
Lanier stood up and moved to the stark white kitchen, passing by the modern steel appliances and over to the wet bar in the corner. He poured himself a glass of something brown, sucking it back in one go.
He hung his head, the weight forcing his shoulders to drop.
He didn’t like what he was about to say.
“She’s the reason, isn’t she?” His voice was dirty with defeat. “She’s the key to the mating bonds coming back.”
He had been searching for the reason the mating bonds had stopped forming for the Nephilim as well as the Warlocks.
When the guys Transitioned, we expected mates to pop up for both of them over the course of the year. It wasn’t surprising when mine didn’t show up. Warlock mates were hard to come by—very few had them—but Lanier was ready to do the ceremony and turn the bond down to become Fallen. Three years later, we still had no answers, but Lanier did find out that it had been twenty-one years since the last mating bond was confirmed. We planned to confront my father and ask for help finding the reason for the absent bonds. Then she came into the picture and threw a five-foot-two, hundred-and-thirty-pound wrench in our plans.
She was my goddamn wet dream in the flesh. She was everything my hollow heart hoped for. Even now, as I sat on the couch, watching Lanier toss the glass into the sink in the island and bring the bottle to his lips instead, my animal was clawing at my insides, trying to get out. Aching to find her, protect her. He wanted to rip into her soul and stake his claim on her wild beast.
