by Cate Corvin
If I failed to convince them now, I could always turn them against each other with their own desires to give myself time to escape. Send Knightley after Aislin Liddell, whom he craved with a bone-deep longing he refused to acknowledge, turn Ermengol and her long-time lover Mater Bellum on each other, send Tori and Will back into each other’s arms, no matter how much guilt I’d feel over that one.
Headmaster Burns would be the problem. He felt no sexual desire at all, nothing for me to twist against him.
I shrugged casually, like it’d just been another day for me. “I’ve seen demons summoned before, sir. I’ve had experience back home with how they get in your head. Some of them a lot worse than Prince Sitri.”
There was no “back home” outside of Sitri’s court. There’d once been a small clan of Envers, but they were long dead, and I’d erased most of their tracks before arriving on Libra’s doorstep with a forged letter of matriculation and the sum required for four years of attendance.
They could investigate my falsified past, but all they’d find was evidence of a slayer family that had died under mysterious and brutal circumstances, which would lend credence to my story.
Ermengol let out a breath. “Prince Sitri was never known for enslaving humans, sir.”
I resisted the urge to let out a sigh of my own. She believed me.
And no, Sitri didn’t need to enslave humans. Not when they so readily threw themselves into our arms of their own free will. The conjurer at the bottom of the Sugarworks had ended up in Sitri’s court, the faintest traces of his lust still perfuming the air, but he’d vanished before he could complete the circle and banish the Prince.
“No.” Headmaster Burns eyed the three of us, his lined face grim. “The Berith imp was likely an opportunist who found an open summoning circle and made use of it. Miss Feldt’s death was an unfortunate byproduct of human fallibility.”
Human fallibility, human selfishness, same thing.
“Prefect Godalming. You struck the killing blow on the Berith imp, you’ve earned the slayer-mark. Mater Bellum will escort you to her chamber.”
With that, we were dismissed. Will and Tori’s relief flowed through me like a stream, almost overshadowing my own relief at maintaining my cover.
They’d admitted to being forced into a compromising position by Prince Sitri, but neither had wanted to go into the exact details of what that had been.
Tori didn’t wait, striding down the hall without looking back. I fought the urge to follow her. She’d only snap at me, and I’d lose any headway I’d gained with her.
Mater Bellum beckoned silently to Will. He paused and glanced at me. I felt his unasked question in my mind, the Cords of Fate pulling us together again, and fell in at his side.
As an incubus, a demon of lust, the Cords should’ve been bonds of romance or lust. Instead, they were bonds of deep friendship, so deep that it was almost impossible to walk away from him sometimes, and I wondered where I ended and he began. Somewhere out there, the three fates, the Moirai, were laughing at their little joke.
A demon becoming a slayer’s best friend. An incubus, no less, bound by friendship instead of sex.
Mater Bellum’s chambers weren’t far. The inner sanctum was dark and dimly lit, with a low couch that she gestured for Will to sit on.
I stood in front of him as the Dread Mother prepared her ink and needle, wiping the skin at the apex of his spine clean. Will’s green eyes flashed in the dim light, but his lips were set, his jaw clenched.
His lust still hammered in my veins, mixed with rage at himself. When the needle pierced him, a tiny patch of skin at the back of my neck flared with sympathetic pain.
Moments later, the first tiny dot was done, the ink marking where he’d killed one of my kind. I wondered if my subterfuge were ever discovered, if he’d someday bear a tiny, inconsequential dot marking my death on his skin.
Mater Bellum wiped away a drop of blood, smeared ointment over the raw flesh, and silently shooed us out.
Will stretched his shoulders, shaking some of the tension out of his limbs. He didn’t speak until we’d returned to his room.
As the prefect, he had the best accommodations in Tenebris Hall, the king-sized bed, the overly-large shower, the weapons racks. Will collapsed on his bed, cradling his head in his hands with a sigh.
I felt the faintest brush of Tori against my mind in the next room over. She was struggling, pacing, a ball of mixed emotions that flowed from one into the next without stopping: anger, sadness, guilt.
“It’s my fault Selena’s dead,” Will finally said, his voice flat.
I dropped into his desk chair and kicked out into the middle of the room. “You never liked her anyways.”
I felt his irritation before he spoke. “No, but she was still my responsibility. She’s dead because of me. Her whole life wiped out just like that. That’s not the way she should’ve gone.”
In all my two hundred years, I hadn’t really thought about life all that much until I met Will. Their souls would be recycled into the bodies of demons or angels, anyways; why worry about what happened on this single plane of existence?
But slayers were a picky lot about death and dying.
“Look, it was your first time up close with a demon.” Ha. “We always lose a few senior year, and more of us will die right after we graduate. That’s just life, Will.”
He turned his cold gaze on me. “Father will hear about this by the end of the day. That his only son got a girl killed on her first practical of the year.” His lips drew back over his teeth. “And that’ll just leave more room for Tori to snake her way into his good graces. I’m done, Sura. It’s fucking over for me.”
The Cords urged me to make this better. That was what human friends did; they listened to each other’s feelings and provided solutions.
Lucifer fuck me, but acting like one of them was hard sometimes. My solution would’ve been pretty simple: get rid of all that pesky shame and anger by fucking Tori senseless, which was what he wanted to do, then accept that life sucks, everyone dies, and move on.
But that wasn’t what he wanted to hear, which was unfortunate, because the sexual energy he and Tori gave off was enough to juice me up for days. It’d taken all my willpower to banish Sitri when my cock had been hard as iron, responding to the lust coiling between Will and his most forbidden desire, the most delicious meal I’d had in ages.
“You have an entire year to show Percival what you are.” I propped my feet on his desk and leaned back in the rolling chair. “It’s not over, Will. We’ve got months to pull ahead.”
He groaned into his palms, the sound muffled. “Yeah. But even if we win, Selena won’t be there for it, because I fucked up. I lost one of us.”
In the moment of silence between us, I felt some of Tori’s emotions brush me again. Her spiral of anger and terror had finally spun out and been taken over by the desire and guilt.
All I had to do was reach out, prod that desire a little, and she’d knock on Will’s door…
But that was ‘unethical’. The Cords made it very clear to me that this would be a violation of our friendship... and possibly of whatever else we had.
I’d forced myself to examine my own feelings, digging under the ever-present layer of lust and want to the Sura beneath, the one who’d been born when I met Will. There was more to existence than constant desires and surrender.
Realizing that I wanted her to want me for me was just as painful as the moment I’d realized how deeply I was entwined with Will. I could make her want me… but that wasn’t the same as Tori choosing me of her own free will.
For the first time in my existence, I wished I wasn’t an incubus, but a real slayer. There’d be none of this annoying guilt, the irritating desire to know if she really wanted me or if some of my natural essence had spilled out and affected her.
I reeled myself back in, shutting off the connection to Tori’s mind. If I wanted her, I had to earn it the hard way.
“Sura.” Will slumped back on his bed and stared up at the ceiling.
“Yeah?”
“How did Prince Sitri know your name?”
I felt like a bucket of cold water had been tossed over me. Even though the Prince was the one who’d planted me in Will’s path, he’d find it very funny to drive a wedge between us and see what happened. See how strong the bonds between us were now.
And I’d counted on Will being so caught up in Tori that he wouldn’t have noticed.
“Because I told him.” I let a hint of chagrin creep into my voice. “When he appeared, he asked me, and it just slipped out before I got my head on right.”
“Huh.” Will went silent for a moment. “Yeah. I was… it took me a minute to realize he was actually there.” After what felt like a full minute without breathing, I allowed myself to relax. He’d accepted the lie.
That was the fun thing about the rulers of Hell. They could walk down a crowded street, and nobody would actually see them. They would, however, feel their influence. Duke Amdusias sometimes liked to pop into human concerts and whip them into a frenzy, though no one would ever know the demon had been onstage as well, and Marquis Leraje could incite a riot just by strolling through a city.
“We should probably just be glad we weren’t taken to his court,” I said, nudging the topic in a safer direction. “Live to fight another day, Will.”
“Guess I have to.” He stared at the ceiling sullenly, but I felt what was really eating at him all too clearly, the emotion thrumming through the Cords.
“Are you still planning this senseless revenge on Victoria?”
Will sat up, eyes blazing. “Senseless? She was given every chance to back down and fuck off back to nowhere. Now she’s got even more ammunition against me. I’m not stopping until she’s gone.”
My stomach churned with unfamiliar emotions. As intensely bound as I was to Will, I already felt those Cords reaching out for Tori, too.
Not to mention my own want for her. It was almost unnatural, that a demon of lust should be afflicted with uncontrollable lust himself. Will’s hatred towards her disturbed me on a deep level, but every time I tried to break away from him, the Cords pulled me back into line.
It was starting to occur to me that we were bound too closely.
“You’re still with me, aren’t you?” Will leaned forward, propping his forearms on his knees. He was streaked with dust, and still smelled like caramel and musk from Sitri’s influence.
I struggled against the Cords, but Will’s desires were too powerful, woven into my own psyche. “I’m with you.” Lucifer, I needed Victoria, a shield between myself and Will, even if it was just for a moment… even if it was giving in to my own nature and wants. “Don’t beat yourself up. We’ll figure this out.”
I was almost breathless when I left his room, torn between his rage and the building thrum of want from Tori.
As soon as I closed the door behind myself and locked it, I peeled off the stupid little slayer uniform and let it fall to the floor. I hadn’t touched the crosses or holy water, which would’ve burned like fuck and made it hard to hold this false face over my own, but being so close to the iron was uncomfortable for an extended period.
I felt every particle of air against my bare skin, every bead of sweat, and breathed a sigh of relief. How they stood to be bound up in clothes for so long was beyond me. It was like some unnatural form of low-grade torture.
Even from two rooms away, I still felt Will’s rage in my veins, but it was a little dulled by distance and Tori between us.
She was almost sick with lust, a bright spot of crimson against the dull gray background of the school. I crawled into my bed, only a foot away from hers, and fell into it, dulling even more of Will’s anger.
Except… it wasn’t anger anymore. Now that I was gone, he was free to spiral into his own darkest, most desired thoughts, remember how she felt under his lips…
If I hadn’t been bound to Will, I wouldn’t have had so much as a shred of conscience about nudging the two together. I fed on the energy of the sex he had with others, but it was like eating ashes and dust, whereas with Tori…
I’d been almost drunk on the energy they’d made. I’d almost forgotten to heighten the glamour I wore, to hide the glitter of my skin and eyes.
And they hadn’t even had sex. That was just an appetizer, a teaser of the banquet to come.
I gripped myself, already iron-hard from Tori’s relentless waves of need, and settled into the glow of lust she made.
She was thinking about Will, what it’d feel like when he slid inside her and drove home, the phantom taste of him on her lips. Every cell of my own body was suffused with her desire, my cock straining as I pictured pushing into her.
I couldn’t hold back a groan of need, my own desires long-repressed. Since taking this human face, I hadn’t fucked anyone, fearing they’d sense what I was. I was ravenous. Starving.
Tori’s emotions wavered, and suddenly her thoughts reached out to me.
Surprise almost drove the breath from my lungs. I hadn’t nudged her subconscious at all. This was all her, her own thoughts, her own free will.
She dreamed of Will, his lips on her neck… and of me, biting my lower lip and the feel of my cock against her ass.
I slowly pumped my cock, tight pressure building in my balls as Tori’s fantasies wound through my mind. She was an incubus’ dream, not holding back on a single detail of what she wanted us to do to her.
Her climax felt like a volcano inside me, shooting pure pleasure through my nerves. It took everything I had to hold back a deep groan as I released myself, my muscles jumping from the aftershock.
I felt amazing, like I could run a thousand miles without stopping, rip part a mountain with my bare hands. Even with the way these slayers fucked like bunnies, I hadn’t had a meal like this in years, pure, vicious longing coupled with an unfulfilled need.
The last thing I wanted was for Tori to be driven away. These unfamiliar emotions were alarming; the drive to please Will, to be the best friend he needed; the bitter taste of wanting something so close, but so far away, in Tori.
Every day brought me closer to having to make a choice between the two. Be what Will needed… be what Tori wanted.
But how could I be anything for either of them when I didn’t even know what I was becoming?
CHAPTER NINE
________
TORI
After Selena’s death, the horror of almost fucking Will under the influence of a greater demon, and the subsequent investigation into how our first practical went so terribly wrong, I’d almost forgotten about one of my more pressing worries.
We were a month into the first semester. Professor Knightley’s chalkboard was so covered in scribbles there was barely room to write anything else. Today when we walked in, Professor Ermengol was perched on his desk.
“Second practical starts tonight, my lovelies,” she said. “Let’s hope none of you are stupid enough to run face-first into a summoning circle this time.”
My face flushed as I took my usual seat. Sura dropped into the chair next to me. Since the incident under the Sugarworks two weeks ago, he’d pulled back on his relentless flirtation again, but sometimes I’d catch him staring at me or Will, a secret lurking behind those dark eyes.
But Prince Sitri had done something for me that I hadn’t anticipated.
He’d scared me straight.
After we’d been interrogated extensively on the circumstances of Selena’s death and the successful summoning circle under Sweet P’s Sugarworks, I’d been almost nauseous with desire and terror, the lingering after-effects of a demon Prince mixed with the fear that I was about to get booted right back out. I’d never see James’ dreams through. The walls would remain bare of the Holmwood name. I needed to be on there; if our name was inscribed on these walls, every Holmwood that came after me would have a place here if they wanted it.
Who’d have thought Sitri, the rul
er of Hell’s incubi, Inciter of Lust, would’ve convinced me to stay away from dick?
Knightley dropped a scarlet folio on his desk and flipped it open. “This assignment will be slightly different than the usual. It’s a request from King Thraustila.”
The few murmurs in the back of the classroom went silent. The King of the Clouded Court was asking us for help?
An icy fist buried itself in my guts. Càel the White Wolf was somewhere out there, with my face in his mind… and at the top of his hit-list.
“Believe it or not, we do work with vampire jurisdictions at times,” Knightley continued, acknowledging the stunned silence. “Why else do you think we’re permitted in their establishments? It’s a symbiotic relationship, rather like parasites and hosts… we gain access to their inner sanctums, and they have petty rivalries and disputes taken care of while keeping their hands clean.”
Sounded more like we were the vampires’ hired guns and lapdogs to me, but I wasn’t about to argue with Professor Knightley. The guy had clearly seen some shit.
“So… we’re like the vampires’ clean-up crew?” a girl from Lux asked. Her name came to me after a second- Lara Dumont.
“By helping Thraustila with these requests, we cement our position as trustworthy allies. He, in turn, might deign to allow certain of our kind near the vampire throne. Symbiotes, Dumont. This is Political Strategy 101.”
Lara made a face and resumed tapping her pen on the desk.
“None of you will enjoy this practical, but this is an excellent view inside how we must engage with our Shadowed World counterparts. You do not have to get cozy with the vampires.” Knightley made a face when he said ‘cozy’, like he’d never experienced the word for himself in his life. “You do not have to become their best friends, but you do have to understand reciprocity and how to turn it to your advantage.”
I waited with bated breath as he scanned the dossier Thraustila had sent him. “Lux, you’re to stake several rogue vampires. Come get the addresses and get to it.”
Aislin got out of her seat and took a slip of paper from Knightley.
