Hungry Like the Wolf (Elements of Pining #3)

Chapter 1

Nadja Stonebreaker stared up from the floor at the human who was clearly incapable of summoning a sandwich, let alone a succubus.

And yet, somehow, he had.

Nadja hated the trip from Hell to Earth.

She’d only made it twice, both times wrapped in the wings of her mentor and clan leader, Halphas.

There was a sickening sort of sideways slide before the ground dropped out from underneath your feet and you went plummeting into a free fall.

Except it wasn’t a fall down as much as it was a fall around.

The air roared in your ears and you lost all sense of up and down.

Halphas had landed gracefully on his feet both times, steadying her until her equilibrium returned, but she was alone this time.

Summoned by this—she looked at the easel next to him, marked with a name on a piece of masking tape—Eugene, she’d landed in a heap of wings and limbs on the floor at his feet.

She’d been in her room at the Stonebreaker keep, pacing and trying to work up the gumption, the will, to go dream-walking and feed herself before she starved and ceased to exist.

Gods, how she hated it.

She hated slipping into some stranger’s brain and taking control of a dream so that she could siphon off the energy from their arousal to fuel her miserable existence.

She hated the phantom feel of their hands and mouths on her body.

She hated the way that, even in their dreams, she could smell their breath and feel their heat.

But she hated being touched by their actual hands and mouths more.

As a result, she fed as little as possible and only when absolutely necessary.

She’d been scanning the dream network, looking for a nice man with a submissive kink who would let her tie him up in his dream and like it.

It was better that way. She could get their hands out of the way entirely and, sometimes, not even have to fuck them if she played her cards right. Those lucky times, tease was enough.

Nadja had found one, finally, and been ready to go in when she’d felt that awful sensation of moving between planes.

She’d never been summoned before, not by a human anyway.

She wasn’t influential or notorious enough to have to worry much about that.

Some demons were summoned with such regularity that Hell had a special ops retrieval unit whose sole job was to rescue demons from the covens and sorcerers who found their sigils and summoned them to trap and use them.

Halphas was always grumbling about how hard it was now.

Once upon a time, he said, in the “good old days,” it was relatively hard to summon a demon.

After all, you had to have the demon’s sigil to summon them, and before the dawn of modern printing and mail, that was a tall order if you didn’t know exactly who to ask for one.

Now, however, you could order catalogues of sigils.

There was even an encyclopedia of sigils.

It had created a huge mess for Hell, and well-oiled, torturously precise bureaucracies like Hell did not appreciate mess.

Nadja had expected to find herself in the middle of a midnight forest circle or, at the very least, a dank basement, face-to-face with a powerful coven who had somehow found her sigil in one of those encyclopedias and summoned her to master or use her.

Instead, she’d found herself in a room that smelled like turpentine and charcoal, with hazy late afternoon light filtering through the open windows and a breeze ruffling the hair of a very small, very terrified young man.

Eugene. He stood with a paintbrush in his hand and a wet front placket to his pants, which were too short and showed his white socks beneath.

His paint-stained sweatshirt said St. Ailbe University.

The floor was hard beneath her—it had not been a smooth landing—and she fumbled as she rose to her feet. Gravity worked differently on Earth, Halphas had warned her during her first transit, and she felt as if her wings weighed three hundred pounds each as she struggled upright.

She looked around the room and saw that they were alone. She puffed out a relieved exhale. One human she could handle. A full classroom would be a much harder situation to contain.

“Why—”

“Don’t hurt me!” Eugene shrieked, holding his wooden paint palette in front of him like a shield.

She took a careful step back, her wings bumping into an easel behind her and sending it crashing to the floor. She winced.

“Why did you summon me?” she asked, making her voice as quiet as possible.

“I—I didn’t!” he said, his own voice little more than a squeak.

She pointed at the canvas on his own easel, where her sigil was clearly painted in bright red, looking very much like fresh blood.

“I’m an abstract artist,” he blurted, scrambling to hide behind his easel.

She rolled her eyes that the thought had just now occurred to him.

He was lucky he’d summoned her and not someone else.

She’d learned in school that this was the part where she was supposed to threaten Eugene into binding his soul to her.

She was supposed to smoke and menace and extort him, to tell him that she would make him suffer an eternity of agonies if he didn’t sign his soul over to her.

But she wasn’t a bargainer or a reaper. She was a succubus, and not a very good one at that. And while she was starving, she doubted that she would be able to extract even a thimble full of desire from this terrified young man, even if she’d wanted to. Which she didn’t.

Besides, soul harvesting had been the sole occupation of so many of her colleagues for millennia that now there was a population crisis in Hell, which had led to a housing crisis and an energy crisis. Hell, it had caused what the morning news was calling a climate crisis as well.

Eugene cowered behind his easel, whispering what were no doubt prayers with his eyes squeezed tightly shut.

She felt bad for scaring him, not that she’d meant to, but she imagined him slapping paint randomly on his canvas, probably thinking to himself that it was his best work yet, and then suddenly there was a bottle-green, winged, fanged creature at his feet.

That he hadn’t had a heart attack was, frankly, a miracle.

“I’ll make you a deal,” she said. “If you never breathe a word of this to anyone—and I mean anyone—I’ll leave, and we’ll both pretend this never happened.”

Eugene nodded his head so vigorously that it was a wonder his neck hadn’t popped.

“Good,” she said. “And, uh, cover that up. Right now.”

He raced around the easel and started painting over her sigil with rushed strokes. When the whole canvas was that lurid, blood red, he turned to face her, his eyes wide with the question.

“Perfect,” she said. “Thank you.”

“No sweat,” he said, which was ironic as he was sweating profusely.

There. That had been easy enough. No harm, no foul. Except that now she had to figure out how to get home. She’d never travelled across the planes alone and had no idea where to even begin.

She turned, knocking over another easel with her wings, and winced. She carefully turned back to him.

“How do I get out of here?”

Eugene’s eye went comically wide. “Like that?” He gestured at her, head to toe.

“Shit,” she said under her breath.

“There’s a janitor’s closet in the corner. They don’t clean on the weekend so nobody will go in there the rest of the day. You could hide in there until tonight and then… sneak out?”

“You won’t try to lock me in?”

“I won’t. Cross my heart,” Eugene said, drawing a cross over his sternum.

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

He swallowed and stood up taller. “How do I know you are?”

She canted her head from side to side. “Fair point. Okay. Well—” She looked and saw the door in the corner. “Good luck, Eugene. See you around.”

“No offense,” he said shakily, “but I hope I never see you again.”

She smiled, in spite of herself and the situation. “Same.”

Nadja closed the closet door behind her, sitting carefully on an old stool in the corner.

The room smelled awful, but it was dark and quiet and would give her space to think.

She thought about Eugene’s innocent doodling of her own sigil and got an idea.

She knew what Halphas’s sigil looked like.

She could draw it on something in here and summon him. Then he could bring her home.

The wall beside her was laddered with floor-to-ceiling shelves containing everything from cleaning supplies to paint.

She didn’t want to paint his sigil, though.

It felt too permanent, which was dangerous for him.

She rummaged through boxes hissing when something sharp poked her.

She pulled the box farther off the shelf and saw, in the midst of a box of assorted nuts and bolts, a shiny brass tack.

Nadja took the tack and went to the darkest corner of the closet, beside the mop buckets.

Next to the baseboard, as small as she could possibly make it, she carved his sigil into the flaking paint.

It wouldn’t be noticeable but it would do the trick.

She nicked her finger with the tack and pressed it to the sigil, just to make it work faster.

Her ears popped as the pressure in the closet changed and Halphas appeared before her, eight feet tall and deep red, like the underside of a ripe plum.

His shoulders were so thick that he nearly spanned the width of the small closet.

His tall horns spirals over his head; horns that he used for more than decoration, the tips kept dangerously sharp.

He thundered. “Who dares to summon the Earl of—Nadja?” His voice was instantly quieter, normal. “Nadja, what the hell are you doing here? And why did you—?”

She threw herself against him. Halphas wrapped his arms and wings around her, and she pressed her face against his chest. The weight of all of the things that could have happened to her was so very frightening all of a sudden and she felt hot tears gathering in her eyes.