Chapter 2. Blaise
Our flat was too quiet.
Ambrose had never been a chatty kind of demon, but tonight the silence had a bite to it. It felt like an unspoken goodbye.
It wasn’t unusual for this time of year. In the lead-up to Samhain, there was always a stillness between us—both of us keenly aware that this could be the last night of the life we’d built together over the past nine years, before one or both of us were summoned by our fated mates.
It was unusual for our kind to spend any real time outside the Shadow Realm unless it was to feed. Most sex demons lived there almost exclusively, tucked away in small clan pockets, surfacing briefly into the mortal world only when hunger demanded it.
The Realm itself was (unsurprisingly) dark and dreary. A place of shadows and half-lived lives, where demons passed the time conjuring small comforts and, for our clan, waiting for Samhain to roll around again.
But it had never felt like home to me.
The first time I was allowed to explore the mortal realm, I’d been overwhelmed by it—the color, the noise, the wonderful disorder of it all.
I’d known almost immediately that once I came of age, I wouldn’t go back to the dark.
I wanted to live among mortals and earth-bound supernaturals.
I wanted to build something real instead of conjuring shadows just to wait in them.
And I hadn’t expected Ambrose to want to join me.
But, Gods, was I glad he did.
It had started out simple. That first year, we spent our days exploring together, picking up shifts as supernatural bouncers for extra cash, and feeding together.
As a pair, Ambrose and I were chalk and cheese.
Calm and chaos. But, somehow, it worked.
And it was a very effective way of attracting the more adventurous mortals back to ours to feed from, always as a package deal. One night only. No strings attached.
It hadn’t been easy. As sex demons, we’d learned early on that if we wanted any chance of staying sane while spending so much time together, we had to dampen our abilities, to lock away our instincts to read emotions and feed from desire, outside of feeding.
Which, as it turned out, had dire consequences.
My hand lifted to my neck automatically, fingers brushing the thick, ridged scar left behind from the night that changed everything between us. Ambrose, though his back was to me, seemed to shudder, as if he could sense exactly where my thoughts had gone.
I wondered if he’d broken the pact we made almost a decade ago. If he’d undampened his senses around me.
Hades knew I was tempted to do the same just to see where his head was at.
But it was probably better that I didn’t know.
Things had been awkward and strained since the attack, and with another Samhain looming, it wasn’t worth risking what little we still had by tearing it apart completely.
My gaze drifted back to Ambrose. He stood tall and solid at the window, broad shoulders backlit by the amber glow of the streetlamps outside. His skin looked almost velvet-soft where the light touched it, his thick locs pulled into a bun just below the crown of his head.
I let out an awkward cough, but Ambrose didn’t stir.
Blowing out a breath, I grasped for something to say. “So... another Samhain. You ready to head back to the Shadow Realm?”
“Yep,” he replied, his gaze never leaving the window.
“You’re certainly dressed for it,” I said, gesturing to his all-black ensemble.
Ambrose’s head tilted, his onyx irises finally meeting mine. And suddenly, I felt incredibly ridiculous standing in our living room in a Hawaiian shirt and a neon-green novelty T-shirt that read Hotter Than My Sunscreen Can Handle.
Six months ago, he would’ve smirked, maybe chuckled, and definitely would have thrown back a dry remark.
Instead, his gaze slid back to the window. He let out a slow breath and said, “Tonight could be the night you meet your fated mate. You might want to dress more appropriately.”
“Yeah. Of course,” I said, my gaze dropping to my sneakers as I wondered if I prayed hard enough, would the ground open up and swallow me whole.
For a moment, every part of me begged to challenge him—to ask that we either go back to the way things were or move forward into something new. Anything other than this.
Instead, I turned on my heel and headed for my room. I yanked the stupid shirt and T-shirt off in a single motion, balled them in my fist, and tossed them onto the growing pile of discarded clothes in the corner.
Then I slumped onto the bed, dragging my hands through my hair.
Just get through tonight, Blaise. Figure it out tomorrow.
I’d been telling myself that for six months now. Deal with it later. It was the only way I’d managed to get through each day since that night.
Guilt roiled in my stomach, reminding me that whatever had changed between us was my fault and that I deserved to feel this way. The nine years before that night—the happiest years of my life—now felt like they belonged to someone else.
With a final sigh, I pushed myself to my feet and crossed the room to the chest of drawers. A single clean T-shirt lay crudely folded in the middle drawer. As I pulled it over my head, I told myself that if I wasn’t summoned tonight, I’d do my laundry tomorrow.
Of the two of us, Ambrose had always been the neat freak. His constant nagging used to keep my messiness relatively in check. Without it, my bedroom had slipped into disorder, clothes and half-finished intentions littering every surface.
I hated the mess. And it wasn’t because I didn’t care. It was just that, no matter how much I wanted to tidy it, the energy to start never seemed to arrive.
With a final deep breath, I turned my back on the messy manifestation of my feelings and left my bedroom—potentially for the last time. When the door clicked shut behind me, I found myself lingering in the hallway.
Ambrose had left his bedroom door open.
The bed was perfectly made—hospital corners and all—the charcoal-gray coverlet pulled tight without a wrinkle in sight.
A pair of black slippers sat beside the bed, precisely where his feet would land when he woke, toes aligned with military precision.
On the dark wood dresser, a neat row of cologne bottles stood like little glass soldiers awaiting inspection, each spaced evenly apart.
Not a single speck of dust dared linger anywhere in the room.
The only sign of anything personal was the shelf of mementos.
Ambrose kept one from every job we’d ever worked together.
I knew each piece by heart: the dinted beer bottle cap from our first bouncing gig together; the torn subway ticket from our earliest days running security, before we could afford the vans and had to rely on public transport; the poker chip from a month-long job in Vegas.
I’d teased him when I first realized he’d been collecting them. Then I’d found it oddly endearing. And then every year before the summoning—except this one—we’d pull the mementos down and spend an evening reliving the last year together.
But the collecting had stopped after our last job together.
The final memento, a bloodied button from my shirt, was not with the rest.
I didn’t need to look for it. I knew exactly where it was, and why it hadn’t earned a place on the shelf.
We’d known the job had the potential to be dangerous, as all our jobs did.
But vampires, on the whole, were usually placid creatures.
And incubi tended to have a kind of kinship with them, what with both species needing to feed from others to survive.
Not that vampires needed to have sex while they fed like we did, but their bite did have an aphrodisiac venom, so it usually led to sex anyway.
That kinship was why it never crossed our minds that we’d walked straight into a cult of unhinged vampires, driven by an appetite to sample every kind of blood the world had to offer. A cult of vampires that we later learned was responsible for decades of disappearances.
And on the menu for them that night was a pair of elusive incubi they hadn’t even needed to lure. All they’d had to do was hire us.
Ambrose and I had traveled to the super-secluded, super-secret lair (which, in hindsight, probably was a red flag), expecting to just be muscle for the night for an oddly unspecific job (another red flag), only to find ourselves standing in an abandoned crypt that smelled of rot, surrounded by a load of (spoiler: biggest red flag) vampires in hooded cloaks and with hungry gleams in their eyes.
I barely had time to register the blur of movement before pain exploded through my neck. Fabric tore. Flesh followed. I didn’t even manage a whisper of my shadows before I realized what had happened.
It wasn’t until I watched the vampire staggering back, a lump of my flesh slipping from his bloodied maw and hitting the floor with a wet thunk, that I realized the motherfucker had torn a chunk from my neck.
Arterial blood spurted everywhere while my body fought to knit itself back together. The rest of the vampires scented the air, their eyes flashing and canines lengthening. But those hungry looks faded into the background, for it was only Ambrose I saw in that moment.
Usually calm to the point of unnerving, he was unrecognizable. Unfiltered rage twisted his features just before the crypt plunged into a darkness so deep even I couldn’t see through it.
Perhaps that was for the best.
What followed was carnage. Flesh tearing. Bones splintering. Screams cut brutally short.
By the time my wound closed enough to stop bleeding, the nest had been reduced to nothing more than silence and shattered bones.
When Ambrose’s shadows finally cleared, I couldn’t bring myself to look at the blood and broken bodies surrounding us. His breath came ragged, his chest heaving with fury—and my only thought was I need to get us home.
My shadows answered instinctively, curling around us as the world tilted. When they fell away again, we were standing in our living room.