How Not to Mesmerize Your Human Muse (Falling for Demons #6)

Prologue

Azrion

Magic was wonderful and terrible both. Azrion had seen it do amazing things in his eight short years, but that morning he had witnessed some of the worst of it.

Arder Pond was always peaceful, though, doubly so when his brother held his hand and guided him over the rocks at its bank. It was the place they always came to when home got a little too loud in spite of the many chambers they had to hide in.

Azrion’s next step wasn’t steady, and he slipped, but a flash of purple light buoyed his feet and tail as his hand was gripped tighter.

“Careful,” Valromotch warned, readjusting their baby sister in his other arm. “The blightspawn will eat you if you fall in.”

Azrion snorted. He knew there were no blightspawn in the city.

They weren’t even out in the Veilwood, confined only to the Dreadmoor and were rare at that.

Still, the thought sent a shiver through him.

“The pond’s too pretty for monsters to live in it,” he professed like he was an expert on particularly blue bodies of water.

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” Valromotch led him to their favorite spot and settled on the big, mossy rock they called theirs. “Shouldn’t chance it though.”

“You could fight it off.” Azrion grinned, picking up a stone and chucking it across the water. It skimmed over the surface with a purple glow all the way to the other end.

“You probably could too. Look how good you’re getting at that. They’re not gonna let me into the guard without promising you’ll come along.”

Azrion’s chest filled with pride, but then he turned to his brother and frowned. “Do you really have to go live in the barracks when you join?”

Valromotch shrugged. “That’s a big part of it. You have to bond with your fellow scouts and train all day and study runes to get strong.”

“Sounds awful.”

Their sister Zaiya babbled an agreement and stuck her tail in her mouth.

“It won’t be so bad. And by the time I’m gone, she’ll finally be talking, and you’ll be the big brother.”

“I wish she already knew how to talk,” Azrion lamented, suddenly so full of melancholy he didn’t know what to do with himself but collapse on the boulder beside his brother and pout.

Valromotch let him sulk because it was really the only time he got to. At home, long faces weren’t allowed, not with everything the Zizreni children were meant to be grateful for.

After the glowering wore off, he gazed out at the water again. It really was the best color, and Azrion knew them all, even the hard to pronounce ones. “Do you think they’ll ever like each other again?”

His brother sighed, not needing clarification because they’d had a version of this conversation many times. “Not without some really powerful magic.”

Azrion picked up a second stone and flipped it over in his hands. He could make it light and fast and move by his will alone. But he couldn’t make it love. No one could, he knew that, but maybe someday some demon would.

And maybe that demon would be him.