Prologue. Lex
Being a witch, in theory, was great.
Being a witch who was part of the elusive Briar Coven?
Not so much.
We were a special breed of witch. Each of us was born female (except for my brother, the only warlock born to the coven in over three hundred years), and each was an almost exact replica of our female ancestors who founded the coven in the late 1600s.
Our coven wasn’t one that had a long-established history. Our female ancestors were the last living members of their covens, which the witch hunts had decimated in Europe. This ragtag group of females had all met on the ship that brought them to the New World, and they founded the Briar Coven.
For any history buffs out there, you might realize that the late 1600s, 1692 to be exact, was a very bad year for American witches. When news broke of the Salem witch trials, witches across the New World, fearing persecution once more, came up with all sorts of ingenious solutions on how to protect themselves, and my great-whatever-granny and her coven were no different. When the local mortal men expressed that they were suspicious of a bunch of single women living independently in the Massachusetts woods, the coven came up with their plan of defense.
Did they pair up with the local shifters for fluffy bodyguards like some of the other covens? No, too crude.
Maybe they cast an invisibility spell that meant no mortal could see them? Pfft , too simple.
No. What my ancestor did was to invoke the powers of Hecate herself.
The mortals were intimidated by single women? No problem! They asked the Goddess to give them husbands. And the Goddess decided that their husbands wouldn’t be just any run-of-the-mill men. Oh, no, that would be way too straightforward. Hecate decided that each witch would be paired with an incubus demon.
Incubus... as in a sex demon.
And the “fun” didn’t stop there. Each witch born into the Briar Coven since 1692 had a fated mate that was... you guessed it... a fucking sex demon.
Yup. My dad was a sex demon (which was totally gross, by the way), as was my grandfather, and my great-grandfather, and all my male ancestors right back to that fucking curse my great-whatever-grandma put on the coven.
What was worse was that I seemed to be the only witch in the coven who had an ounce of sense to see that it was a curse. No, the rest of them couldn’ t wait for Samhain to come around so they could summon their fated mate.
Being sired by an incubus also meant that we were all part succubus. As incubus demons don’t have DNA on account of being mother-fucking demons born from the shadows, the Goddess-blessed unions just produce clones of the mothers, only the “essence” of the father making the most minor changes, like different colored hair, or a different shade of eye color.
And, yeah, okay, I absolutely adored my dad and my grandfather.
But being part succubus sucked .
Since I’d hit puberty, I was horny all the time.
At twenty-seven years old, that was a lot of dick that I’d had to have in my life to try to scratch that never-ending itch. And it had recently got me into a lot of trouble. Which was why I was now on a sex ban.
It’d been twenty-nine days, thirteen hours, and roughly fifteen minutes since I’d entered the self-imposed ban on sexual encounters with other people because the last time I had taken a stranger to my bed had been the worst decision of my life, and I was still living with the consequences of it.
Usually, I was very careful about who I took to my bed. The small part of succubus in my blood was irresistible to men. An accidental touch meant I could easily end up with a stalker and, consequently, a restraining order. Usually, I would drive to a faraway corner of the city and bed someone who had no reason to cross my path in the future.
Which was what I’d done almost a month ago.
I had driven two hours to a little town on the outskirts of Sacramento, booked myself a sleazy motel, slipped into a revealing dress, and gone to the closest dive bar.
Before I’d even taken a sip of my vodka cranberry, a sculpted, kinda-hot-if-you-were-into-stock-photos man had slid into the chair beside me.
I had barely caught his name—Chad—before I was guiding him out of the bar to my motel.
I had him screaming my name within minutes.
Too bad that the next day when I’d started my new job, my boss happened to be the aforementioned Chad.