Chapter 36
Micah
Knowing Aamon was back in Washington had me on edge.
Mason had fucked up all those years ago, screwing things up for Aamon, killing almost all the demons in his circle at once—and being a dick about it.
He seemed to take pleasure in acting like the nightmare he’d been born as, especially when he had a specific person to torment.
But he hadn’t counted on Aamon holding such a grudge against him for it—because Mason didn’t think anything through, ever—and he also hadn’t considered exactly how Aamon’s revenge would be carried out.
Mason was almost entirely invincible against anything other than his own nature, so Aamon never set his sights on killing him.
He’d set his sights on killing me.
Somehow, he’d deduced that I was the most important thing in Mason’s life, and then I became the target of his revenge-fueled wrath.
Aamon couldn’t make his own ichor, but he could inject it into himself without it degrading into necrichor, making him significantly stronger than any typical demon I’d had to deal with in the past. So I’d relied on Mason for protection, just as he relied on me to stop his fractures.
Eventually Aamon got bored or discouraged, and he left Washington. Neither of us knew where he’d gone, and neither of us cared. It was a huge relief to have that weight off our shoulders.
But Aamon was back now.
And, knowing him, he would still be at least partially focused on killing me.
Which was the reason for Mason being at my house right now, standing in my living room and perusing all my personal belongings, inspecting them like foreign specimens. To him, they were. He didn’t know this version of me.
Approaching the fireplace, his eyes latched onto the the photo frames there.
He picked up a photo of me in my doctoral regalia then turned it face-down, slamming the glass into the corner of the mantle so the picture frame shattered.
I just watched him, holding entirely still.
Not getting the reaction he wanted out of me, he began perusing the bookshelf again.
His fingers wrapped around a glass plaque—a teaching award I’d won.
“Mason,” I warned.
He looked at me.
“Don’t—”
He flung it hard on the ground, the glass shattering into dozens of tiny pieces, making me flinch. The picture frame was replaceable; the award was not. Mason didn’t discriminate. Anger heated in my blood, but I was determined not to let my expression slip.
“Are you done?” I asked flatly. “Are you just going to go around breaking everything in my house? You think that’ll make me give a fuck about you again?”
“No. I don’t think that. I just like breaking your things.”
In his eyes, I could see the look that I liked least when we were together.
Nothingness. He didn’t give a single fuck about what he was doing, and he genuinely didn’t care how any of it would affect me.
When he got like this, he was unreachable.
He’d learned how to do it so he could lie to me.
If he was able to make himself completely unaffected by the lie he was telling, he could hide it from me.
I focused all my energy on reaching into his mind, even knowing I wouldn’t be able to affect him how I wanted to now. It was like an impenetrable wall, his emotions completely intangible, almost nonexistent. There wasn’t even anger. Just…nothing. Nothing to grab onto.
His eyes snapped to mine.
“Get the fuck out of my head.”
I pressed my lips together.
“You know you can’t control me like this.”
Right. But when I do this…
His eyes went wide and blank, rage instantly flooding into his mind as I took his sight.
I’d never done this to him outside of sex, because it felt like a gross overuse of power, an abuse of my abilities.
Sigeian ability was in the absence of things.
The ability to take someone’s senses, to steal their emotions, manipulate and hold them in my fist, to make tangible things into invisible ghosts.
They weren’t able to be counterbalanced.
If I had someone, I had them. Because of that, I often refrained from ever using my aspect on Mason when I was angry with him.
But that was back when I cared about him.
Dark desire clawed at me, gnawed on me, begging me to take everything and make him entirely lost. His sight, his hearing, his ability to feel, to speak.
I could take all of it from him right now.
Most Sigeians could only take one or two things, but I’d been lucky enough to be born with the ability to take all six.
All five senses, and the voice.
But I refrained, knowing I wouldn’t be able to hold all of it very long—not against a Thrausian—and then it would become near impossible to control his mind afterward, which was what I most wanted to do.
I let his sight seep back into him.
He was furious now, and I could sense those tendrils wrapping around his thoughts, replacing the nothingness with a fiery blaze, giving me something to pull on.
Without moving a muscle, I unraveled one thread of his rage, testing more limits.
Three more erupted in its place, Mason’s expression twisting into something murderous.
He stalked across the room towards me, not slowing as he shoved me backwards, my spine slamming into the wall. I didn’t fight him. The angrier he got, the easier it would be for me to manipulate him, the more ground I could cover in his mind.
The deeper and stronger an emotion, the deeper I could reach.
And if he started to fracture, I could hold him in the palm of my hand, both of knowing I had the power to push him into oblivion right there.
It was so fucking tempting. I’d never let myself even think about doing anything like this to him before.
But now the idea was a living thing in my skull, the possibility of controlling him like that taunting me viciously.
His forearm slammed into my throat and I tipped my head back, skull pressed to the plaster.
“I should’ve let him kill you,” Mason growled. “I should’ve let him hunt you down, torture you, suffocate you.”
“Why didn’t you, then?” I pushed, pressing against his hold, feeling his unyielding strength. He wasn’t holding back either. “Huh? You just can’t help yourself. Heaven didn’t want you, and neither do I, and you hate it. You need to feel needed or else—what, you’ll kill yourself?”
Mason’s eyes darkened, a smirk tilting the corner of his mouth. “Yeah.” He nodded, leaning into his arm on my throat. “Yeah. Keep talking. Whatever it takes to forget that you can’t actually kill me—and that I can kill you.”
I could kill him, though. I’d just have to use his own aspect as the weapon.
“What does strength mean if you can’t control it?”
There was a flicker of pain in his expression then; it felt like victory.
“What does power mean if it tears you apart?” I added.
“It means I’m not a target,” he bit out, low and cold.
“And you are. Go ahead and take my sight if you want, take my hearing, make yourself invisible, make me invisible. Do whatever you want, and I’ll be able to hurt you through any of it.
” He jammed his elbow into my windpipe, spearing his white electricity through me, jolting my veins, setting every nerve alight.
What he was saying was true. Even using all abilities I had, he could still fracture and overcome every boundary.
“All you know how to be is manipulative.”
“Yeah? Is that what I am?” I questioned. We both knew the answer to that, though.
I grunted when Mason let more white electricity ripple through my veins. It fucking hurt.
He leaned closer, close enough that I could feel his breath on my lips.
“I don’t care if the fractures kill me,” he started, voice hoarse. “As long as they kill you too.”
Mason shoved off me, then stalked out of my house without another word. I raised a hand to my throat, pressing my palm against the hot skin, feeling the zaps of his electricity still lingering under my skin like needles.
As long as they kill you too.
I paced over to the bookcase, my heart pumping, my shoes crunching over broken glass, then grabbed the bottle of aither and poured myself a heavy glass of it, though I’d need a lot more than a blend of extracted trace elements to survive Mason.
The liquid was thin and airy in my mouth, sliding down my throat, my skin faintly glowing with the rapid increase of neon in my system.
We’d fought so many times over our many years together.
Physically tearing into each other, but neither of us using anything other than our muscular strength because, on some level, we didn’t want to actually kill each other.
I knew he could rip me to shreds with electricity; he knew I could fuck him up in other ways.
We didn’t need to prove that to each other.
It was just aggression. Just violence.
Our shared language.
But now, those instincts of restraint were slipping away.
I’d given myself another taste of intentionally provoking him so I could knot more threads of his mind around my control, and he’d shot pure electricity into my muscles.
We’d never done that before. It was unwinding something awful, deep inside of me.
Something monstrous, something I’d always kept on a tight leash until now.
I thought of my own words, my own promise to him.
Kill Aamon or I’ll push you over that edge so fucking fast you won’t be able to ever claw your way back up.
Another mouthful of aither poured down my esophagus, searing my flesh, burning in my stomach.
Until that moment, I’d never turned his own mind on him.
Not even once.
Not when I ended things with him, and not in any of the years before then.
When he needed my control to keep himself from fracturing, from falling into the darkness, I let him pull on me. I dampened his power, molded it into something he could handle, so he wouldn’t end up dead at the bottom of some ocean, chasing a high he’d been born addicted to.
But now…
The imprint of his lightning was clinging to my skin, and I wanted to be furious about it—I was furious about it—but beneath that, heat twisted low in my chest, shamefully familiar. No one else could make me feel that level of raw, visceral, wicked pain. No one else could touch me like that.
No one except him.
Blood flooded my groin and I tipped my head back, resting it on the leather backrest of the chair. I hadn’t expected that using my powers like this would feel so addictive.
There was this toxic magnetism in it, in realizing this was a line we couldn’t uncross now. The restraint had always been there between Mason and I, but now it was cracking, shattering. And there was almost relief with the destruction of our previous boundaries.
I downed the rest of the aither in my glass, my cock hardening.
When we were together in the past, it’d been a never-ending battle.
We both switched, and it wasn’t easy. It was tiring and violent and nasty and constant.
Neither one of us wanted to fully submit to the other, and that dynamic alone was a reason we never would’ve worked out, but in those tangled depths, in the midst of drowning with him…
It was everything.
I’d never wanted anything like that. Not until Dakota dug her way into my consciousness, and I found something I wanted even more.
My palm drifted down until it was pressing on my erection, my skull instantly filling with thoughts of her. I’d never felt like this before, never taken anything other than a distanced, professional interest in my students. But with Dakota…
I needed something soul-consuming from her. Something disgusting.
I wanted to fuck her until she couldn’t walk.
Tie her down and make her come until she begged me to stop.
Do more than that. Fuck her mind, too.
She wouldn’t drown with me. She would starve. Piece by piece, stripped down to what I wanted most, shaped in my hands. It was the only way I knew how to nurture.
I was torn, splintering into two burning halves. She was like Mason, self-destructive and desperate and harboring a dark kind of violence inside of her. But, in the same breath, she was everything different. I needed to hold her in my fist, mold her and shape her, take care of her in my own way.
I needed to own her in a way I never could’ve owned him.
I needed to make her see herself the way I saw her.
My fingers worked my pants open then pushed my boxers down, wrapping around my dick.
I knew exactly how this ended, and I still couldn’t stop myself from beginning it again.