AITA?

CASSIE ALEXANDER

Caskara Press

Copyright © 2021 by Cassie Alexander. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, email cassandraassistant@gmail.com.

www.cassiealexander.com

Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

This book is dedicated to a few fun people and groups:

To Gemma: I think I promised you this ten books ago.

To Kelsey, thank you for the amazing idea and for listening along the way.

Last, but not least, to the #MCBC discord, the #monster*******’s channel in particular, who have single-handedly made me like reading again, no small feat in these dark times.

And many thanks to M Evan MacGriogair for their thoughtful copyedit!

Contents

Becky’s Post

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Logan’s Post

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Quenalith’s Post

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Epilogue

Afterword

Blood of the Pack: Dark Ink Tattoo Book One teaser!

Also by Cassie Alexander

Becky’s Post

Dear Schmedit:

This past weekend my fiancé (24 M) and I (23 F) were at a party at a friend’s and I’ll admit we both got pretty wasted.

Apparently sometime that night he asked me if it was okay to summon a demon for a threesome before our wedding, and according to him, I told him, “Yes.”

I don’t actually remember this happening so clearly? But his friends must have heard me—because a week later, they’d all pitched in to have a Delectably Demonic ™ summoning kit delivered to our house for him.

I want to put my foot down, but that would make him sad. I think he was really looking forward to it after I told him it’d be okay—and his friends really did spend a lot of money on this thing. It’s top of the line, and they can’t return it. You know how demons are.

So I kind of feel like a jerk. I mean, I did say yes, and I don’t want to let him down.

If I tell him no . . .

AITA?

Chapter 1

“Logan, does it have to sit on our coffee table?”

The Delectably Demonic summoning kit looked like a cross between one of those canisters they had for larger fireworks around the fourth of July and a ridiculously large caliber rifle bullet. The top unscrewed and everything you needed to perform a “quality” summoning was inside: the salt, the spells, and the measuring tape, so you could create the lines you needed quite precisely.

Cheaper summoning kits—where you knew you were only going to summon up a succubus for long enough to get a handy, according to the “research porn” I’d looked at—were made of cardboard, and had little succubi holding pitchforks printed along the sides winking saucily with their hips cocked out.

This one was comparatively tasteful. It was made of burnished, forest-green-colored metal, and if you didn’t know better, you could pretend it was a work of art, which was something I would know—I worked at an art gallery.

I counted out ten heartbeats, waiting for him to respond. It was a habit I’d recently picked up to try to calm my nerves now that I wasn’t drinking, to try to get me more conscious of my own presence in my body. “I mean really, Logan,” I went on, and he looked up at me from in our kitchen, where he’d been portioning out tomorrow morning’s coffee into the machine.

“What?” he asked, like he hadn’t heard me.

“Does it have to sit here?” I repeated.

He pretended to consider things. “Oh, you’d rather me put it on the bookcase? Or maybe the mantel, beneath the TV?”

“You know what I mean,” I told him.

“I do. But I also know what you said. Y-E-S,” he spelled out, before giving me a grin.

I sighed. “This is bullshit and you know it.”

He laughed, finishing setting the coffeemaker’s dials. “I’m not a jerk, Becky. I’m never going to make you do anything you don’t want to. I just think our relationship’s strong enough to handle this is all. Don’t you?”

I looked between the summoning kit and him. We were getting married in two weeks—I’d better be sure of him. “Y-E-S,” I spelled back. “But right now? When I’m hip-deep in wedding planning?”

“That’s why my mom got you a wedding planner,” he said, ever so reasonably.

“Uh, no, your mom got herself a wedding planner,” I muttered. It’d been pretty clear that marrying into the Graff family, my opinions on my actual wedding were extraneous. I just hadn’t cared, because, well, his mom cared so much, and my parents weren’t alive anymore, anyhow.

“Well, if it’s a timing thing, then all the more reason we should do it sooner than later. Then, poof, it’s gone, out of the way—and off the table.” He put his hands on the back of one of our dining room chairs and lounged over it sexily.

Logan Graff was, for all intents and purposes, a hunk. From his chiseled face with his inquisitive eyes, his leanly muscled arms and washboard abs—I knew when I first spotted him on the campus quad that he would be a catch—then he’d walked over, and somehow, I had caught him.

And now his great-grandmother’s diamond ring was on my finger, there was a demon summoning kit in my living room, and it felt a little bit like all the walls were closing in.

“I just . . .” I began, my voice drifting, entirely unsure how to explain how I felt to him. I loved him. I loved our life. I loved our apartment. I loved our dog—okay, we didn’t actually have a dog yet, but we had the kind of lives where we could have a dog, and it felt like that should count for something.

We were perfect on paper. Logan was the tab A to my slot B, and I knew, quite viscerally, that I didn’t want to be alone in the world: after my parents died, shit had sucked.

He was good to me, and I liked that.

It would be so stupid of me to walk away—especially when I didn’t have anything else to walk toward.

“Tonight’s clearly not the night,” he said, cutting me off with his usual congeniality, and then he raked his eyes over me with a look. “Bedtime?” he suggested with intent.

“Y-E-S,” I spelled in relief.

Anything to get away from that thing—and to pretend that everything was good.

Thirty minutes later, our teeth were brushed, and Logan was over me and pounding between my legs. We’d skipped most of the foreplay—I just wanted to get to this part, because it was usually my favorite. Staring up at him, feeling him in me, knowing that for this little piece of time the two of us were one.

“Becky.” He grunted my name, making a tense face. I knew he wanted to come—and that I was nowhere near an orgasm’s vicinity.

“It’s okay, baby,” I told him, running a hand up behind his neck. “Go, go, go,” I told him, and so he did, taking me at my word, finishing himself off inside of me with a few short thrusts and groans.

He collapsed over me, covering me, pressing all the air out of me like he was holding me still, and I just wanted him to keep me there. I nuzzled my face into his neck and wrapped my arms around him.

“You want me to get your toy?” he asked, lifting his head up.

“No, I’m good,” I said, stroking a lock of dark hair out of his eyes. “There’s just so much going on, and I’ve been so much in my head lately—and only your mom would schedule a new artist reception and our wedding in the same month.”

He snorted and leaned forward, slipping out of me as he kissed my forehead. “She’s like that. You’ll get used to her,” he said, before rolling to one side to hold me close. I snuggled up against him and let things feel safe and good and right. “It’s not about the kit is it?” he asked, disrupting my happy bubble.

I blinked. “No. Of course not.” Was it though? I mean, knowing it was in our apartment certainly wasn’t helping.

And . . . had he been plunging into me just now, pretending I was some succubus?

“Good,” he said, stroking his thumb up and down my arm. “Because I’ll go throw it away right now, if you want, Becs.”

I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. I wanted to tell him yes, please, because as long as that stupid demon summoning kit was in our life . . . it was like putting a child in a room with a chocolate bar.

Something was bound to happen.

You couldn’t even blame the kid!

But at the same time, throwing the chocolate bar away just because the kid couldn’t be trusted with it seemed like a waste of perfectly good candy.

I’d bounced around between relatives growing up, and so I’d lived in tons of different places. My poverty-enforced midwestern roots said we shouldn’t waste money, even other people’s, and the vestiges of a brief southern upbringing felt that reselling it would be rude.

“But everyone knows that demons don’t count, Becs,” he went on, placing a run of soft kisses against my hairline.

Was that true?

There was really only one way to find out.

“I guess,” I agreed with him, not really knowing what else to do.

“Really?” he asked me quickly.

I took a shuddering inhale and then exhaled with a nod. “Yeah.”

If I made him happy enough, surely I’d be happy too.

That was how relationships worked.

Right?

“Tomorrow?” he pressed.

“Yeah,” I said, bravely trying to convince myself. And he was right about that earlier, at least—once it was over with, it’d be one less thing on my plate.

He squeezed me tight. “Becky, you are the best girlfriend ever,” he said.

“Fiancée,” I corrected him, and he laughed before swatting my ass.

“Go take a shower if you’re going to, I’ve gotta be up in six.”

I did as I was told, and he was asleep before I came back.

Chapter 2

The next morning, I was getting my weekly hit of both my best friends and coffee before my shift at the gallery.

Kelsey’s skin was so pale you’d have thought she vacationed exclusively in caves, and her red-blonde hair was up in a stylish, no-nonsense business swoop. She was in training to be a stockbroker, and she was busy taking stock of me.

Gemma was shorter, tan, and curvy. She was an upscale hippie, with flowy clothes, big necklaces, and she was giving me an excited grin. She was an editor at one of the magazines downtown, and I had no doubt this portion of my life-story was going to show up in a “How Far Would You Go For Your Partner?” quiz, if not an entire meaty—yet hopefully anonymous—article later.

The entire walk from the subway in, I’d told myself I wouldn’t tell them, and then the second we’d gotten our little table, I’d just blurted it on out. “We’re doing it tonight.”

Gemma blinked, but Kelsey’s eyes widened in understanding first. “D-Day?” she asked with concern.

D-Day was what we’d been calling it—Demon Day—while also assuming it’d never happen. Because up until last night, I’d been sane.

Gemma rocked back like she’d been punched. “Really?”

“Yes,” I answered, hissing the S. “I think.”

“Becky, run,” Kelsey said, definitively.

“No!” Gemma protested, pretending to kick Kelsey under the table, then looking back my direction. “I think you’re going to have a great time! And it’d be good for you to loosen up a little.”

“If she wants to loosen up, she can get a massage,” Kelsey said, giving Gemma a prude stare. “This is like a whole different level. And I mean, really, Becs,” she said, leaning in to whisper. “How would Logan feel watching a demon bone you?”

“That was like the first fight about it we had,” I said, rocking back with a sigh. “He said I wouldn’t have the guts.” I stared into my coffee, which I’d doctored up with precisely four Splenda and two splashes of almond milk, like always. “That wasn’t entirely fair—what he said was that I’m not a risk taker.” I looked over at the two of them for confirmation of this dreadful fact.

“You’re not,” Gemma said gently.

“But then there’s risks, and then there’s risks,” Kelsey said with careful emphasis. “I mean, who knows what infernal creature you’re going to pull up?”

“No, no, no,” Gemma refuted her. “I looked it up. The Delectable line is practically foolproof and a guaranteed good time.”

“Which is why you’ve used it before?” Kelsey asked her with an eyeroll.

Gemma snorted. “Hell no. If I had an extra twenty-five grand, I’d use it on student loans or blow it on Balenciaga. But it’s not my fault if all of Logan’s best friends are well-off horndogs and frat bros.”

“Don’t remind me,” I said, putting my fingertips to my temple to rub. All of Logan’s guy friends had declared the Thursday before our Saturday wedding to be some sort of national bacchanal—they were all flying out to Vegas for a massive bender.

“I’m sorry, it’s true.” Gemma scrunched her face up cutely. “If any of them were remotely awesome, they’d be interested in me.”

I huffed a little in disbelief. One of the things I loved about Gemma was her endless fountain of self-esteem. If only Kelsey and I could bottle it and sell it, we’d be jillionaires.

But she was right, too.

It was a combination of irreconcilable factors between what she wasn’t—willowy, blonde, or quiet—and that none of them could ever, ever, remotely deserve her.

“They all grew up together. It’s a weird rich people thing,” I said. “Which is largely why I drink too much at their stupid parties. I get nervous they won’t like me and then I want to disappear.”

Gemma reached out and patted my hand. Saying yes to a demonic threesome had been a call to action—I’d finally realized that maybe I had a problem and was going dry until my wedding. It was far harder than I thought it’d be—somehow without me realizing it, alcohol had woven its way through the fabric of my life. It was so much easier to be the person everyone else wanted me to be when I had a drink in my hand, you know?

“But about tonight,” Gemma said, reining our conversation back in. “I think it’s a good idea. And?” she said, and paused dramatically. “I’ve heard succubi are super proficient with their tongues.” She put two fingers up to her mouth and wiggled them, either to indicate a bifurcated tongue, or to imply eating out, I wasn’t sure. I gave her a slightly horrified look as she laughed. “I’m just saying there’s no reason you can’t have fun, too, Becs. The demon’s gonna be there for the both of you, if you summon her together.”

Kelsey shook her head. “No way. If you really do go through with this . . . I wouldn’t even consider touching her.”

I blinked. I didn’t think I had the guts to touch her, but now I wanted to know: “Why?”

“Because you know whatever you do, he’s going to tell all his friends,” she patiently explained.

Gemma blew air through pursed lips. “So what? There’ll be some dumbass high-five bro shit for Logan, but fuck them. Becs will just own it!”

“Because that’s how it works so often in real life,” Kelsey told her with a heavy sigh, before refocusing on me. “Look, Becky, if you want to goof around, far be it from me to dissuade you—you already know my thoughts on your getting married.”

“Before or after you were implied I was a child bride?” I asked. I loved Kelsey, but there was a reason Gemma was my maid of honor.

“Neither of you value me for my cuddly exterior.” She rocked a finger back and forth between the two of us. “I’m just saying that Logan’s guys are the kind of guys who talk, and they’re also the kind of guys who don’t let things go. Ever. I should know—I work with a lot of them, and I will be damned before I spread my legs for anyone in my building.”

“Which is also why you will be single forever,” Gemma told her. “There’s no-risks, and then there’s never-take-a-chance-so-why-bother-living.”

Kelsey gave us both an imperious look over the edge of her coffee. “My life’s not so bad. I’m single and rich and can buy a lot of battery-operated machinery.”

Gemma groaned and I snickered, standing up. I couldn’t be late for work. Pissing off Bastiana Graff was dangerous, she might make me pretend to help her pick out a new florist again. “Love you both. I’ve gotta go.”

“No matter what happens, Becs, group-text,” Gemma demanded, tapping a finger on the table. “Full disclosure.”

“I don’t know about that—but I swear I’ll at least let you two know that I’m alive,” I said, grinning at them both and crossing my heart quickly.

“And I hear they like it when you sit on their face,” she stage-whispered quickly.

“Gemma!” Kelsey sputtered.

I laughed and headed for the door.

I beat Bastiana in, which was rare and amazing, because sometimes I got the impression that she lived at the gallery. I turned on the lights, organized the counter, went through the mail, setting aside anything explicitly addressed for her, and then I . . . waited.

Mrs. Graff—yes, Logan’s mother, and yes, working for your future-mother-in-law was probably a bad idea—was a well-bred, immaculately dressed woman in her sixties, who treated running her gallery like it was a blood-sport. She was well known for three things: accurately picking up-and-coming artists, being the vivacious life of any party as long as she was throwing it, and pouring through her staff.

A year in, and I was probably her most senior employee, and that was only because she couldn’t fire me, really.

I could see her thinking about it though, sometimes.

And while she was happy to have me help with the physical parts of running a gallery—standing prettily behind the desk, rearranging paintings and lights to her specifications prior to an exhibition, carrying around crates of champagne and making emergency runs for ice during receptions—she had yet to trust me with any of the intellectual stuff I wanted to participate in behind the scenes.

I didn’t know how she chose the artists she showed, what kind of insurance she used for our vastly expensive paintings, what her bookkeeping looked like—and I got the feeling she’d cut off my fingers before showing me her reception party invitation master-list.

But the converse problem of her not being able to fire me was that I also felt like I couldn’t “fire” myself from her—at least not two weeks before my wedding.

After I finished my rounds, I went and stood in front of a wide space on our largest wall. Bastiana had recently sold a massive eight-by-eight-foot piece. We’d shipped it out yesterday, and it hadn’t been replaced yet. The spot where it’d been though was artfully bounded by the other paintings on either side, representational affairs of absurd landscapes—Bastiana’s new favorite, Excetera, was a girl a little older than myself who was the second coming of Hieronymus Bosch.

I found the fresh blankness in between the two much busier pieces more meaningful though, metaphorically. It let your eyes rest a little. Gave the paintings on either side of it more punch.

And in and of itself . . . the empty nothingness spoke to me, bracketed on all sides like it was by ornate frames.

Plain white.

No color.

Well, technically, all the colors rolled into one, but same difference, because if you couldn’t tell them apart, then what good were they?

You could say that the emptiness was the color of hope, or possibility, or maybe of fresh snow.

But my imagination wanted to turn it into a blank page, waiting to be written in.

With what though? And by whom?

And . . . once it was full, who was going to be the one to turn it?

I was busy staring off into space when the front door opened behind me. I pulled my eyes away from the wall, looked left, and saw a demon.

He was impeccably dressed and devilishly handsome. His suit was precisely tailored, the color of his tie matched the blue of his eyes, and his close-cropped dark hair had a hint of gray at the temples. The only thing that gave him away from Bastiana’s other upscale human clients was the slight mint-green tint of his skin.

I stood up straighter, instantly. He was an upper echelon being, nothing like the sex-driven succubus Logan’s kit would summon, but I still felt guilty.

I shouldn’t have, though. Demons had no compunction or shame, and none of my after-work activities would have bothered him. The demons had made themselves known a few decades ago because apparently they liked to gamble, buy expensive things, and eat sushi. There’d been a few rough years of what was, in hindsight, stupid fighting that we had to learn about in history class, but things were calm now. The demons had swept in, made some rather large contributions towards world peace and ocean management, and now only a few human weirdos still thought their “eternal souls” were on the line.

“Is Bastiana here?” the demon asked with an erudite accent as he joined my side, a polite distance away.

“Not yet. But I’m sure she’ll be in shortly.” I gave him a warm, customer-service smile—and realized this was my chance. “Is there something I can help you with? Were you looking for anything in particular today?”

He appeared to consider this. “Tell me about these,” he said, gesturing towards Excetera’s paintings.

I moved to stand in front of one. I hadn’t met the artist yet, although I’d read everything she’d written about her work, in case Bastiana ever let me step up.

“Well,” I said, “I think you’d recognize the topics easily—I mean, these paintings are quite literally derived from Bosch’s famous depictions of Hell. But now that we all know that Hell doesn’t exist as he conceived of it, I find these even more poignant and frightening than the paintings they’re based on.”

He made a thoughtful sound. “And why is that?”

I squinted at the paintings, although I already had them practically memorized. The little figures on them were busy terrorizing each other in all sorts of frightening and industrious ways, holding chainsaws and rifles and cellphones.

“Because all the figures on them are human,” I said, then looked back at him. “There’s no scapegoat for humanity anymore now, is there, right?” I bit my lips to consider things a moment. “I like them because even though they’re not something you might want to display and look at everyday—although from a craftsmanship point-of-view, they’re gorgeously done—when you do look at them, they invite you to realize we’re each responsible for our collective condition—everyone’s rise, or, as is it depicted quite elaborately in these paintings, our total demise, depending.”

He considered this, opened his mouth, and then the door behind me opened again.

“Craylock!” Bastiana called from behind me, weaving in with a coffee and a smile just for him. “Oh, I hope you haven’t been waiting long—and that the help hasn’t been chewing your ear off.”

She flashed me a look—Graff wasn’t my last name yet, and even when it was, I was going to have to earn it.

“No, she’s been quite lovely,” the demon, Craylock, said, giving me a warm smile.

And I, in my infinite-glamorous-upscale-I-belong-here wisdom, tucked one foot behind the other, and flicked my hand out, miming a tiny curtsy.

Bastiana’s look was withering, even as the demon chuckled.

“Yes, well, come along, darling, I’ve got more for you to see,” Bastiana said, taking his arm to pull him down the hall.

Craylock left half an hour later, and on his way out paused to give me a tiny bow with a friendly smile while I flushed bright red. I waited for Bastiana to come out and ream me, but she stayed busy in her office all day, probably finalizing everything for the reception tomorrow night. I filtered a few of her clients back her way, but mostly dealt with lookie-loos: art-curious college students or tourists who wanted air conditioning.

And when she did come out, before the end of my shift, she was waving her phone. “Logan says I need to send you home early. He’s got something planned?” Her expression was questioning, and I tried not to wilt with embarrassment.

“I think he just wants a quiet night in,” I said and swallowed. “Everything’s been so busy lately, you know? Tomorrow night’s the opening here, next weekend’s my bachelorette, and the weekend after that is the big day.”

“Ah,” she said. “And have you written the thank-you notes for your bridal shower?”

“Got them in the mail yesterday,” I told her.

She’d thrown me a stuffy, posh bridal shower for our wedding last weekend, as an excuse to have a party with all of her friends. They’d gotten us all kinds of nice things that I didn’t really see the point in, like luxe ceramic elephants and place settings with far too many forks. Writing the notes had taken hours, and I’d tried to use my best handwriting.

“Well. We may make a Graff out of you yet.” She jerked her chin behind me. “See to the front desk, then—and lock the door on your way out.”

I thought hard about what Kelsey had said while being standing-room-only crowded on the subway on all sides. The guy next to me had an elbow in my ribcage, and there was a four-year-old standing on my shoe.

Yes, of course Logan’s friends would ask him how the summoning went; they’d spent five-figures on the thing. But I could always swear Logan to never tell them, and I believe if I did, he wouldn’t.

Although, honestly, everyone knew Logan and I were each other’s firsts. Me, because I was a late-bloomer in all sorts of categories, and him, probably because his mother had a secret basement where she murdered then hid the bodies of any interested parties.

The train hit a stop, and everyone in it all rocked back and forth as one, and absolutely no one got off and no one else could get on. I was inhaling in some lady’s hair now—I had no choice—luckily she used a nice shampoo.

Being virgins was sweet and special and all, but everyone in our social circle knowing that was probably just as awkward as them knowing that we’d boinked a demon chick here in t-minus an hour.

And it even wasn’t like I swung that way besides—or I guess I didn’t know, having never had the chance. But if we were going to break up over summoning some succubus, how good was our relationship, really?

Maybe it was good to put it to the test.

A little.

One more stop where no one moved, and I realized Excetera could paint this in her next series: the hell of being on the train when you weren’t driving it, and you weren’t in control of how many people were aboard.

Maybe tonight was the night I’d find out that Logan was still bone-crushingly in love with me.

Or, I would discover that I still was with him, instead of the way I felt now, loving, but also a little trapped, like our relationship was fly paper.

The train stopped at my stop, I filtered off with everyone else, and it felt like I could finally breathe.

Chapter 3

“Well, well, well, Queen-Quenny, you’re almost free.”

Jorlahut stood in front of me, the department manager of the floor for Magical Transactional Economies and warden of the Demonic Prison. He was an upper echelon demon like myself, but tonight he was leaning into his role as jailer at the periphery of his warehouse here, having exchanged our kind’s usually posh suits for a more severe military-type uniform. He had pants that tucked in to shiny, knee-high boots, with a sharp-tipped, well-spelled stun gun shoved into one, and a tablet in his hand.

Behind him, he had crews of demons working the rest of the vast complex. Men and women behind desks were answering phones in the foreground, typing up numbers and creating profit reports, while beyond them, succubi and incubi spells were zipping up to who-knew-where and then coming back, carrying magical energy to be harvested and then needing cleaning and repairs.

“Jor,” I acknowledged him. “I believe my time is up.”

I stood and came to lean against the bars of my spacious cage. He made sure to stand further than an arm’s length away, even as he was grinning and shaking his head.

“I just can’t believe your debt’s about to be paid, Quenalith—and that this whole time you never tried to kill anyone else, other than my jailers.”

I snorted. “We both know if I’d actually been trying to kill them, I would have succeeded. And what’s a little light strangulation between friends?”

One of his eyebrows rose. “Well, they should’ve known better than to stick their hands in there with you, certainly. I just don’t know what I’m going to do for training or morale once you’re gone. These other kinds just don’t keep my people on their toes,” he said, jerking his head toward the warehouse floor back behind him.

“They’re not exactly conversationalists, either.”

Seventy percent of the succubi and incubi we sent up to Earth to answer summons were basically high-quality, spelled sex dolls. They flashed up, said agreeable things, let whoever summoned them pose them in ridiculous positions until they came, and then zipped back down with a magical charge of sex energy for us to use for our spells here or to sell in other dimensions. Humans even paid us for the pleasure, so we got them coming—so to speak—and going.

Twenty-nine percent of the remaining thirty were demons who did it for the kink of it, who wanted to have some no-strings dalliances with humans, or who enjoyed being “forced” to have or give a good time. Some of them even chose to earn commissions, and you could only pull them up with the more expensive kits.

And then the last one percent of summoned demons were like me.

Demons who had done crimes.

Murder, in my case.

With good reason, but murder nonetheless.

Because of that, I’d been sentenced to five long years of summoning duty as penance, and tonight was my last night. I squinted at the long and distant rows of eternally perky and beautiful succubi and incubi ahead of me, and then I looked to Jorlahut. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance you could just credit me with time served?”

“Not on a Friday,” he said, with a head shake. “The moon’s going to rise any minute now across the Eastern Seaboard.” I muttered imprecations in languages that didn’t exist yet as he laughed. “Oh come on, Quenalith. Just one more time at bat to freedom. Then it’ll be like none of this ever happened.”

“Except for in my soul,” I muttered—and then he and I looked at each other and cackled.

“Yeah, babe, except we both know you don’t have one.” The screen on his tablet lit up. He glanced at it and reached for the lever beside my cage, hovering his hand over it as he gave me one last look. “Just suck a dick and get shit over with, okay?”

I rolled my eyes. I had yet in my life to “suck a dick” and I was not going to start tonight. Like many sex industries, demon summoning was woefully unregulated, but because of that, I’d gotten away with bullying most of my “clients” into letting me go. Some few of them had liked that, and I assume the rest had been too scared in the moment to complain. For some reason, I had that effect on people.

“And don’t murder me in my sleep later, please,” Jorlahut continued.

“What, and risk getting another prison sentence? No, thank you,” I told him, while bracing myself to be exposed to the horniest of humanity, yet again. “Send me up.”

* * *

As I took the elevator up to our floor, and then walked down the long hallway to our apartment, I expected to be filled with dread—the kind of anxiety that I used to use vodka tonics to calm down—then was surprised to find that I wasn’t.

Maybe I’d been so nervous for so long about so much else, I’d been worn down. Between keeping Logan’s mom happy at my job and with her wedding plans, supporting him while he got a promotion at the bank, and pretending I fit in with his friends—fine. If sleeping with some random demoness was the only thing between me and sitting on the couch eating a pint of ice cream and watching Netflix in pajamas—my newest hobbies, now that I was no longer drinking—I could check that box.

I imagined myself like some intrepid arctic explorer, bravely putting my pajamas on in our bedroom, crawling over her in the living room on the way to the fridge, and then crawling over her again on my way back to the couch.

Whatever it took to get to relax.

Or maybe I would eat ice cream while Logan fucked her, and I could sit in my pajamas and just offer pro-tips from across the room, holding up numbers like at the Olympics when the ice skaters were finished in the olden days, as long as the two of them didn’t block the TV.

Logan heard my key in the lock and swung the door open, beaming down, wearing just a robe. “Hey,” he said, gladly taking my jacket, as I leaned against the wall and reached down to pry off my strappy shoes.

Halfway done, I glanced for our coffee table. The vaguely phallic-looking summoning kit was no longer there, and the coffee table itself had been pressed across the room, along with all the rest of our furniture, leaving a big space right in the center of our hickory wood floors—which now had a massive arcane symbol painted on them, and then circled, in salt.

“Huh,” I said. “I guess I’m glad you moved the rug.”

He laughed. “All this was harder than it looked.”

“Well, I hope you didn’t hurt yourself. I wouldn’t want you to throw your back out before you fucked a demon in front of me.”

His eyes widened a little at my outburst. “Long day at the gallery?”

“With your mother? Always,” I said, giving him a look, and then I batted the back of my hand against his arm. “And then you called her!”

“I am sorry about that, Becs—I knew it’d be awkward. But I didn’t realize until I opened the kit up that we had to do everything before moonrise.” He flipped his wrist to look at his Tag Heuer. “Which gives us just about fifteen minutes to finish up.”

“Us,” I repeated, reluctantly.

“Hey,” he said, boxing me in against the door behind me, so that he was the only thing I could see. “My offer from last night still stands. I could go grab the Dyson, and this shit’ll be gone.”

I groaned. There was no way to win. Either I was the girl who went through with this thing that I wasn’t entirely sure I was going to be into, but who would certainly regret it later . . . or I was the girl who “didn’t take risks” and who “didn’t believe her relationship was tight” and who “disappointed her boyfriend.”

I wished I could go back in time to that party and slap the drink out of my own hand.

“No, it’s fine, whatever,” I told him, sighing.

“Okay. In that case—repeat after me,” he said, and I blinked. Was he this raring to go? Couldn’t I change into something more comfortable? Maybe eat a quick snack? “Demons don’t count,” he said evenly, and then held up his hand for a pinkie swear. “Say it.”

Fifteen minutes.

Old Becky would’ve been thrilled by that—just enough time to pound a nervous beer.

But new Becky, whose hobbies now largely included consuming dairy products, knew that she should be responsible and get some protein in her stomach: it was time enough to eat a few string cheese.

I looped my pinkie against his. “Demons don’t count,” I repeated.

“Good,” Logan said, grinning. “Now, we have to be naked for this next part, so go take off your clothes. Just make sure not to step on the edges of the symbols.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I told him, darting through the kitchen to hit the fridge briefly first.

I returned, naked as requested. I’d brushed out my blonde hair out in the mirror, and had kind of laid it over my boobs, in an effort to not feel so totally naked, but it didn’t reach my nipples, so it wasn’t super helping. I hadn’t brushed my teeth though, or touched up my makeup, or any of the other things I might have done had this been some kind of “normal” date.

Logan was also naked, having ditched his robe over one of the chairs he’d pushed aside. He’d dimmed the lights and lit twenty assorted candles.

“I feel like this isn’t covered by our lease, Logan,” I said, looking around with concern.

“We’re not asking her to move in,” he said, grinning, thumbing through the spell brochure.

“I know, but like, if our neighbors burned our apartment down with a sex toy, I’d be pretty peeved.”

“Some of the candles are for the ceremony,” he said, putting out a hand. “And some of them are for the mood.”

I took his hand and let him pull me in with it. “We both very well know you’re not a candle man.”

“Yes—exactly,” he said, looking at me like I’d finally figured things out. “It’s all pretend, Becky. And just for one night.”

I took a deep breath, held it, and nodded, craning my neck to read this spell brochure he was holding. “So what’s next?”

Logan consulted his watch, then gestured at the ground. “We get inside this, without breaking any lines, okay?”

I let go of his hand and hopped in. “What now?” I asked, as he joined me.

“Now, we both read this part down here together—the part in bold, by my thumb—and when we’re done, we say them over and over again until something happens.” He held out the spell brochure like we were in college again and it was a textbook we were studying together in the library. “Snoshwrath, zolepanon, gibbalrear,” he started sounding out, and I went with him, until we’d read a whole page’s worth of nonsense.

By the third time we’d repeated it though, I knew moonrise had come and gone, and it didn’t feel like anything was working.

Maybe this kit was just a dud.

Or maybe his friends had just gotten it to pull his leg—only if I’d gone through all this emotional turmoil for nothing, I was punching someone.

Then I scented something new. A little bit of spice, a little bit of musk—and I was quite sure the candles had all been scentless before. But before I could ask Logan if he smelled it too, a cloud appeared in the salt at the center of the circle—like the candlelight was illuminating dust our cleaners missed—and then it got stronger and gained form until she was present.

And I don’t know what I’d been expecting—I just never could’ve imagined summoning her.

The being in front of us wasn’t just like a happy little ditzy, bouncy succubus like they showed in the commercials for the sex shops.

First off—she was definitely a woman. Yes, she had curves, and yes, they were bracketed by the finest fetish gear that I had ever seen, a series of bust- and hip-clinging straps that barely hid anything, but despite her near-nudity her entire presence screamed “self-possessed,” and she hadn’t even fully turned around yet.

But when she did my heart leapt into my throat. Her hair was so dark-green it was almost black, and a wave of it swept over her high cheekbones, old-Hollywood-glamour style. She had full forest-green lips, chocolate-brown eyes, and all of her very visible skin was a shaded spring-green. She was stunning—so put together and so pretty that I had to look away.

I’d been creeping behind Logan out of nervousness as the cloud appeared, but now I was glad of his larger bulk to hide me.

“Welcome, succubus,” Logan asked, his eyes flicking back and forth to the spell brochure’s page, still clearly following its instructions.

“My name is Quenalith the Conqueror, and I am no mere succubus,” she said, staring at him imperiously, one perfect eyebrow cocked—and then she spotted me, and lightly frowned. “And you are?” she asked.

“Logan Graff,” Logan said, giving her his full name, like we were at the DMV.

I didn’t say anything, I just swallowed.

Quenalith ignored him. “And you?” she asked me.

I liked to think that I was not modest, despite all evidence to the contrary, and that I was not a prude, same-same, but at that moment, I had never felt more naked in my life.

“Becky,” I squeaked out, my voice breaking.

“Ah,” the demon said, tilting her head slightly.

I couldn’t help but notice how elegant her neck was. Her hands, too. And I had no doubt that when she walked her hips would rock back and forth like a runway model’s.

Quenalith eyed me, like she could read my mind, and I full-body flushed, desperately hoping that that was not the case.

“Well, humans,” she said, “before you get any ideas, let me give you all my rules. First off—you touch me, you die,” she said, pointing at Logan.

I felt him tense. “W-what?” he sputtered.

“You clearly heard me,” she said, unwilling to repeat herself.

“But—I summoned you!” he protested.

“Yes, you did,” she said, walking to the edge of the nearest design element, to tap the line of salt at its edge with the pointy toe of her high-heeled boot. “And just how good a job do you think you did, if I’m the creature that you got?” She stroked her chin in mock thought. “It’s not my fault if some of the packages are defective. Feel free to scoop all this salt back up into the bag, and return it to the vendor.”

Logan was utterly confused and on the path to getting angry. “You’re—supposed to be—”

“What?” the demon asked him, then glanced at me. “Like her?” she said, waiting a beat before continuing. “Soft? Small? Pliable? Please.”

I blinked, instantly wanting to defend myself. I was none of those things!—no . . . I was all of them.

“If you want to get a boot kit out and polish my boots for me, that would be acceptable,” Quenalith went on. “Jacking off in front of me is also allowed. I may or may not, however, make comments about the quality of your anatomy.” She slowly ground the toe of a boot into the salt in front of her while speaking, and I knew it was scratching the hardwood. “Or,” she thoughtfully began, giving me a sly look before returning her attention to Logan, “you can give me your girl to pleasure.”

I gasped aloud. It felt like I had been struck by lightning.

She—wanted—me?

No.

It was impossible.

She was her and I had cheese breath.

Logan went stock still in front of me.

“So what is it, human?” she challenged him. “Do you want me to eat your girlfriend out or not?”

“I am literally standing here!” I hissed, safely behind Logan’s shoulder.

“Yes, and that’s a shame. I would much rather you over here,” she said pointing to the ground beside her feet meaningfully. “Spread-eagled.”

I audibly gulped, and Logan put a protective arm out around me.

But was it really though?

If he’d been truly protective, we wouldn’t be here.

Possessive, more like.

And at this stage in the evening, after setting up all this . . . did he have a right to be?

“Look, this is not what was on the package,” Logan said, flipping around the spell brochure and holding it up, to show her the agreeably smiling creature on the front of it.

“No,” Quenalith agreed, crossing her arms so that they framed her breasts perfectly. “I am better—in all possible regards.”

She smirked when she looked at him, but I would’ve sworn I saw her eyes soften a bit when she looked at me—and I couldn’t help but just keep gawking back. I’d . . . I’d been around beautiful women before. I thought my friends were lovely. I’d been in plenty of assorted locker rooms, and of course I watched TV . . . but I had never, ever, met or even dreamed of meeting someone like her.

Because in addition to being gorgeous, Quenalith seemed completely self-assured in a way that I had never felt.

I didn’t know if I wanted to be her, or be with her.

I just wanted some excuse to stay at her side.

She took a step forward, and now she was definitely looking at me, only me. I wasn’t making it up, and I was pinned.

But before I could manage to figure anything out though, she disappeared—and with her, the spell that she’d cast over me. I blinked, stumbling forward into Logan’s back.

“Logan . . . what just happened?” I whispered.

I felt his leg waggling beside me and looked down—he’d broken the summoning circle with his foot. He’d sent her home without even asking me.

He looked down with a frown. “Let’s just never talk about this again, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, slowly nodding.

Chapter 4

“Boy, are you the love ’em and leave ’em type, Quen,” Jorlahut said, as I reappeared back on the warehouse floor—this time outside my cage.

I looked around. The last thing I’d remembered was stalking toward that pretty, little, innocent human girl, who had been making me feel things I thought long lost . . .

“What happened?” I demanded of him.

“Uh, I assume you scared some poor sap into coming and now you’ve finished paying your debt to demonkind,” he said. “Congratulations!”

No. This was not where I wanted to be. I looked up. I could travel back myself, of course, but . . . they’d sent me home.

He’d sent me home.

Not her, I was sure.

Not that she might not have, given the chance . . . but she hadn’t gotten the gumption to, yet.

Becky had been beautiful. Her face was soft, her features gentle. Blue eyes over high cheeks that I’d seen flush, and with full wide lips that I wanted to make smile. Her hair was a soft golden yellow with hidden streaks of darker brown, pooling on her shoulders, and somehow, even though she was afraid, she’d worn her nudity like innocence.

Like a proverbial Eve, in the garden, walking up to a particular tree . . .

I put a hand to my chest, full to the brim of unfamiliar thoughts.

“Congratulations, right?” Jorlahut said again, and I noticed he now had his stun gun out in a casual kind of way.

“Yes,” I said, regathering myself. “Right.”

He gestured at me with his tablet. “Did you want to change before rejoining the ranks of the free?”

I looked down at myself, in all my faintly ridiculous clothing and my shoulder-length hair—whatever “Logan” had imagined me in, when he’d summoned me. I doubted any of this gear had come from Becky’s mind.

Or . . . had it? I quirked a smile at the thought.

“Quen?” Jorlahut pressed.

“I need you to do me a favor, Jor,” I said, waving a hand over myself and putting myself in more business-demon-appropriate clothing, and my hair into its usual angular bob. “I need the location of that last summoning.”

He snorted. “Absolutely-the-fuck-not, Quen. I thought you didn’t want to be imprisoned again?”

“What? No,” I said and shook my head.

“Murdering humans equals imprisonment.” He tapped the rod of his stun gun against his forearm, like a cranky schoolteacher. “Something you should know.”

“No—I’d never hurt her.” And I knew as I said it that I meant it. “I . . . liked her,” I confessed.

I’d more than liked her.

I’d felt her pull.

One of Jorlahut’s eyebrows attempted to crawl beneath his hat, then he gave a belabored sigh. “Of course you did, Quen. Every once in a while I see a tied-up human, and I, too, feel urges—all that ye olden days sacrifice shit, even symbolically—but we don’t do that anymore. Demons are on the up-and-up now.” He dared to take a step forward. “Think of the sushi.”

I put my hands to my head. “I’m not going to jeopardize our access to the oceans, Jor.” I turned my mind inward to memorize everything about the moment I’d just had on Earth before it faded. Had any of that been real? Had I actually felt what I’d felt? My heart was telling me yes-yes-yes. “But it wasn’t that. I liked her eyes.”

And the way she looked at me, like I was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.

Becky didn’t remind me of Sheloi—but she reminded me of what I felt like when Sheloi was with me.

Oh, Sheloi, forgive me.

“Her . . . eyes?” Jorlahut questioned in open disbelief.

“Shut up, or I will shut you up,” I growled at him. “And give me that location.”

* * *

The rest of the night was awkward, and it did involve the Dyson—we only had one of the smaller models, so it took me three canister’s worth of dumping to pick up all the salt.

But it was good to stay busy and hide behind the machine’s low thrum.

That way we didn’t have to talk about what had happened.

I knew we’d promised that we wouldn’t, but that was obviously a lie.

At least . . . to me it was?

Because I wanted to talk to someone about it—in fact, the longer I didn’t, the more it felt like the need to was compressing like a spring inside my soul.

If I didn’t let off the pressure, at least a little, it was going to come bursting out of me.

“Logan,” I said, after I’d set the vacuum back in its charger.

“Big day tomorrow, huh? Reception at the gallery and everything?” he asked. Sometime while I’d been vacuuming he’d gone and put on boxer briefs and a T-shirt, whereas I was wearing his robe. After the initial awkwardness when she’d left—Quenalith, I reminded myself, so I wouldn’t forget it—I’d just picked it up and started cleaning.

“Yeah, it is, but—” I started, then he went to grab the rug.

“Then why don’t you just go to bed—I’ll move all the furniture back.”

I stood there for a moment, suffused with the need to say something but then realized I had no idea what that something actually was. I sighed and walked back to the bedroom, where I crawled into bed, cheese-breath and all, and picked up my phone from where I’d left it on the charger.

I’m alive, I texted the girls.

And?????? Gemma instantly texted back.

And Kelsey chimed in with a What she said.

I didn’t answer them though, I just put my phone back down.

The next day, Bastiana needed me in early—I was helping to direct a fleet of workmen rearranging Excetera’s exhibition to her exacting specifications. We’d hung up a few of the larger pieces as they’d come in ahead of time, because we’d had no other place to safely store them, but now the entire Graff Gallery was practically a Garden of Earthly Delights: all the walls, one painting innovatively placed on the ceiling, and several freestanding sculptures set on color-coordinated pedestals.

“And how was your evening?” Bastiana asked when she got in later, with a coffee in hand.

“Lovely, Mrs. Graff,” I lied. I knew she didn’t like that Logan and I were living together—I’d heard her say as much to a friend once at a party.

I wasn’t really sure in her version of the metaphor which one of us was the “cow” giving away the milk for free or what precisely that “milk” was, if you tried to go literal, seeing as Logan had been all too ready to give some of his away last night.

She gave a look around, sniffed at the general chaos, and then reminded me, “Doors open at seven.”

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Graff. Everything will be all put together by then.”

It was . . . but it was touch and go.

Because one of the sculptures was shaped rather like an octopus, and one of its arms wasn’t on the manifest and so it didn’t get off-loaded, and it went on a joyride to the other side of town.

And then the workers plugged in too many power tools at once and blew a fuse, taking out half the lighting, one of the tiny tables we used for hors d'oeuvres was missing a screw, which made it wobbly, and the caterers called to say that they were very, very sorry, but there was no salmon available within a hundred-mile radius because of some demon girl’s version of a sweet sixteen.

This, I had to let Bastiana know about. I knocked on the door to her office, and heard a muffled “Come in.”

She was growling on the phone two minutes later. “That’s impossible.” She’d skipped yelling at me and segued directly into yelling at them—there wasn’t time for yelling detours. “Do you know who is coming to this event tonight? I don’t care if you have to airlift it in. Get some,” she said, waving me out before hanging up the phone.

I gladly made my exit, and when the caterers showed up an hour later, sans salmon, I worked with them to fluff out the food they did have so that none of the tables looked empty.

“We’re trying, okay?” their lead told me. She was wearing a neat, black serving uniform, her hair was in a severe ponytail, and she seemed distressed.

I had a feeling Bastiana had called her back more than once.

“I know,” I said, taking pity on her—she looked how I often felt. “Things will be okay, I’m sure,” I told her, even though it was a lie.

Then Bastiana came out as Excetera came in.

I’d only seen pictures of the girl wonder before. She was shorter than I was, thin, with brightly dyed red hair in a perfectly shaggy punk style, like when you’re trying not to look like you’ve tried too hard, but you have. She moved through the gallery like a shark, inspecting all her pieces and their display, but as she came to the catering tables, Bastiana moved to cut her off.

“Where is the seafood?” Excetera asked, knowing just who it was for.

“It’s coming, darling,” Bastiana said, before giving me a look.

Future bus, meet future daughter-in-law, if the caterers did not come through.

“Let me tell you who all is attending tonight, and who you should make a point to speak with,” she went on, propelling Excetera into her office, where I faintly suspected she had a book of rich people’s mugshots, to make targeting clients easier.

The doors opened at seven, as planned, and I’d had enough time to dart into our bathroom, change clothes, and give myself a fast updo.

I shouldn’t have rushed though, because almost everyone was fashionably late, which was good—the caterer was willing to swear in blood that we’d have salmon crudités by eight-thirty.

Bastiana’s patrons began to trail through, human and demonic alike. Most of the demons wore their usual suits, while some of the humans dressed hyper-casually, as if to say that they didn’t need the external trappings of success, as long as everyone knew that their artfully torn shirts cost a few thousand dollars, and they could afford to put any one of the paintings on sale tonight on a sleek, black credit card.

I greeted people as they came in, recognizing many of them, although I could tell from the looks on their faces that they most certainly did not recognize me—I’d learned long ago that I filled in some sort of pleasantly-blonde slot in people’s minds when they met me, which made me somewhat forgettable. I was pretty, but I wasn’t stunning, or even all that interesting, unless I’d had a drink or three.

And tonight I wished, heartily and heavily, that I could drink—reception nights with Bastiana were far more tolerable if I double-fisted champagne flutes—but I really needed to stay strong. To prove to myself that I could do it, if nothing else.

Then the charming demon from yesterday appeared, and gave me a smile.

“Mr. Craylock?” I guessed, not knowing if it was his first or last name.

“Charles, for close friends,” he corrected me. “And I have to say . . . I gave your talk yesterday some thought. I was just going to come tonight because Bastiana’s been strongarming me for weeks, and I like free salmon,” he said, and I winced internally, “but since there’s not any, I might as well buy something.” His grin got a little wider. “Do you work on commission?”

“Theoretically,” I answered slowly, while nodding.

“Good. Because I think I’d be greatly amused to have one of these pieces featuring human follies in one of my vacation homes.”

“Wow,” I whispered, then more strongly, “Yes. Amazing, of course! Which one?”

He took a step toward one of the larger pieces on a side wall, but I felt a breeze against the back of my neck, from the door opening behind me. At this point in time in the evening, there was only one thing it could be—the caterers finally pulling through.

I wasn’t sure what I was most scared of in that moment—Bastiana catching me talking in depth to a patron without her supervision, or her anger at me for letting some poor caterer accidentally drop fourteen trays of salmon-themed appetizers on the floor.

“Mr. Craylock—I mean Charles—I’m so sorry,” I begged off. “I think our salmon just got here—but I’ll be right back.”

“Oh, no, say no more, go,” he said, batting me away with a hand. “Go.”

I turned—without a curtsy this time, go me!—and walked to the front of the room where the tables were set up. There was a new person there with short hair that I hadn’t seen before, but they were dressed in all black like the rest of the crew.

“Oh, thank God you’re here,” I said, walking up to them, and then they turned.

“Really?” they—she—asked archly.

It was her.

Quenalith.

I took a step back and swallowed. She didn’t have Hollywood hair anymore tonight; it was in an asymmetrical bob that lifted in the back, where if I’d slowed my roll a little, I would’ve seen the green-tint to the skin beneath her undercut.

And I also should’ve realized that her suit fit her far better than any of the caterers’ did. It was as if it were sewn onto her form, following her from her bust to her waist and then over her hips again with impossible precision.

“I’m sorry,” I sputtered, wanting to apologize for literally everything. Last night, just now, and the way I was devouring her with my eyes. “I . . . thought,” I managed to get out.

An imperceptible smile lifted the corners of her lips—at least I hoped it did, that it wasn’t just my imagination putting it there. She tilted her head. “You . . . thought? Please, continue.”

I inhaled, to say something stupid no doubt, but then a caterer tapped my arm. “The salmon’s here! Help us unload?”

“Yes,” I said, wheeling to help them immediately, and get me out of the danger zone of her presence.

I helped the caterers unload and move food around—we were instantly the focal point of all demonic attention in the room, after bringing the trays in—and while I went through the motions of being helpful, my mind whirled.

Somehow the demon Logan and I had summoned was one of the demonic elite.

And now she was here.

Why—why—why? And, more importantly: did she mean any of the things she’d said?

When the last tray was settled, and the crowd had dispersed, demonic patrons going back to look at art with mountains of crudités in their green-tinted hands, I settled back against the reception desk with a sigh.

Moments later, she was leaning beside me.

Her attention was on the art in front of us, and the people milling around, but I knew she knew I was there.

“Why are you here?” I whispered. It was the only thing I could ask—and what I desperately needed to know.

She spoke without turning her head, but I could hear the amusement in her rich voice. “I have an interest in art. And, possibly, art dealers.”

I was glad all the lighting in the room was focused on individual paintings and sculptures, so that none of it shone on me—I was sure I was turning a flagrant shade of pink.

And then Bastiana gave me a glare from across the gallery floor.

“Well, we have a lot of art here then,” I said, stating the obvious quickly. “And—a lot of art dealers, too. My boss—”

Quenalith swiveled her head to look at me and one of her perfect eyebrows cocked up. “Would you prefer that I find another dealer?”

The question hung in the air between us, just like Excetera’s paintings on the walls.

Now that she was closer, I knew it was her scent I’d smelled the night before. It’d had nothing to do with the candles.

Quiet, dark and licorice-like, like absinthe.

A drink that, even when drinking, I’d never been brave enough to try.

And behind Quenalith I could see Bastiana breaking from the pack, still unwilling to trust me in the slightest. I knew if I backed away from Quenalith now, that would be the same as letting Bastiana win, again, like she always did.

I was going to show her.

I straightened my shoulders and gave Quenalith my most professional smile, no matter that around this time last night she’d been looking at me naked.

“Not at all,” I said. “This way.”

Chapter 5

After I’d bullied Jorlahut into giving me the information regarding my last summoning, I’d gone to my home on my plane.

Not a flying plane, but my plane of existence, at the edge of Temple City, one of the many dimensional locations that were favorable to my kind.

I had a gracious home at the city’s edge, right where things were about to turn bucolic, looking out at fields full of eight-legged jelothi running across waving sea-blue grass, underneath an orange-tinted sky, and in my absence it seemed like nothing had changed.

I unlocked my door with magic and let myself inside. My home was still exactly how I’d left it, pre-imprisonment—full of memories of Sheloi and I.

Art commemorating battles we won, jewels that we had stolen, weapons we’d pulled off of enemies for trophies—everything she and I had spent so long acquiring, carefully arranged and put on display.

And now everything was covered with dust here, except for me.

I was the only thing still moving.

The only one of us still alive.

There had been so many moments trapped inside my summoning cage when I had regretted that fact—and if I could’ve gone back to give my life for hers, I would have, in a heartbeat.

I walked over to a glass case full of weapons, opened it, and reached in to trace a thoughtful finger down the back of my favorite sword. The last time I’d used it had been on the gellezboth, and they had not gone down easily, with their hungry teeth and their tentacled arms. We’d lost a thousand demons fighting them, but at the end we’d pushed them back, between our valor, our blood, and our spells, once again saving humanity—and I had had so many moments inside my cage since to wonder: why?

A few decades ago, we’d finally revealed ourselves, proving to humans that it was the horrors of the other planes that they should fear, not us. We were actually on their side, something their leaders now realized at long last, at least the ones who we trusted enough to show the truth to.

And in return for our continued services, both now and in the future, they allowed us to vacation and retire among their kind if we desired.

Up until five years ago, and my subsequent imprisonment, it had seemed like an even trade. I thought Earth a gentle place full gentle people without magic, who needed saving because they were frankly not capable of saving themselves.

And all we had to do to get along there was follow three small rules:

Don’t use magic in public.

Don’t engage in any non-consensual acts.

Don’t kill anyone.

It was this last rule that I’d violated, right after Sheloi had been taken from me.

I had known humans were fragile, and I had willfully broken one.

And then for five years I had paced inside my cage, dreaming only of more violence. I’d longed to race up to Earth and demand bloody satisfaction out of every single summoning human who had ever tried to bend me.

But . . . now?

In the end?

When I was finally free?

I looked around the quiet museum of my home, a testament to my past and all my shattered futures.

Did I belong here, too?

Or did I still have life in me?

And if I did—how would I choose to spend it?

* * *

I took Quenalith on a stately tour through each of Excetera’s pieces, using what I’d gleaned from the catalogs, the internet, and a little bit of my own feelings about each of them. Bastiana had stalked us for a bit but then veered off—she had her own business to attend to—and I didn’t think Quenalith was on her radar yet.

And maybe she shouldn’t have been on mine.

There was a chance that all of this was an elaborate ruse, some way for her to shame me for my part in what’d gone down last night—maybe she was just biding her time, waiting to publicly pants me, even though I had a skirt on.

Because beyond that . . . I didn’t know.

And I thought I shouldn’t trust her.

I didn’t know her, really.

But she listened patiently while I told her the story behind each painting, as Excetera herself worked most of the crowd on the gallery’s far side. She asked intelligent questions at the right times, and more than once pressed me to elaborate on something, acting interested in what I had to say.

When I finished, she gave me a considering look. “You seem to have given all of this a lot of thought.”

“I like thinking,” I said and shrugged lightly, trying not to bask at her attention, then I blinked back to reality. “And honestly, I’ve been told I think too much.”

She blew air through pursed lips. “No such thing,” she said, blowing the very idea off. “And in any case, I’ll take them all.”

My jaw dropped. I stared at her, probably just like gasping salmon did at fishermen. “Excuse me?”

“All of them.” She gave me an amused smirk. “You’ve convinced me.”

“But”—I didn’t know how to not be rude about it, but if she’d never been here before, and never met Bastiana—“you don’t know how much they’re worth.”

She snorted and rolled her eyes. “If Craylock can afford them, then I know I can.” She looked over my shoulders, put her fingers to her mouth and blew a whistle so loud it made my ears ring. “Craylock!” she shouted, as I looked back, and the demon turned.

“Quen?” he asked, in amazement, then with emphasis. “Quen! When did you—” he started, coming over, then snapped his mouth shut at seeing me. “The Conqueror, moving amongst us mere mortals once again!”

He put his arm out for hers and she took it. They grasped forearms rather than hands, then fell into conversation in a language I didn’t know. He grinned and she laughed. It was clear they knew each other from way back, and she relaxed, taking off her coat, revealing she was wearing suspenders underneath. She didn’t need them; her pants were tailored expertly, but the way they hung on her curves and then took an elastic dive off each breast . . .

I swallowed, looked away, then walked off. She didn’t need me, she already had connections—

“Human,” she called after me, before I got too far away. By then there was already another demon pleased to see her at her side. “What was your name again? Remind me?” she asked, her eyes alight with mischief or outright torture, I didn’t know.

“Becky,” I told her, much clearer than I had the prior evening.

“Ah,” she grunted, and then snapped her fingers for me, like I was some kind of dog. “Do me a favor, will you? Tally everything up, so I can warn my bankers.”

I inhaled quietly, and then nodded.

This was my actual job.

Not whatever I had been briefly dreaming.

I went to the other side of the gallery, made eye contact with Bastiana, then pressed my way through Excetera’s adoring throng.

“What are you doing?” Bastiana hissed, as I came up to whisper.

“The demoness on the far side wants them all.”

I wasn’t as quiet as I should’ve been—Excetera heard me, stopped, and looked over, first at me, and then at Quenalith.

“You all will have to pardon me,” she told the group gathered around her. “I think I see an old friend.”

She made a beeline for Quenalith as Bastiana glared—but by then Quenalith was talking to enough other demons comfortably that my future mother-in-law could guesstimate her bank account.

“All, all?” she asked me, not bothering to hide her note of surprise.

“She wants everything,” I said, nodding.

“Well, then, I’m sorry darlings—but I think I see an old friend too,” she said with a winning smile, following Excetera.

I hid behind the front desk while the party took on a different tone—many of the demons present apparently either knew Quenalith personally, or knew of her—and seeing as art purchasing had been swept off the table, all there was for it now was to polish off the salmon.

I had the price sheet and tallied it quickly—although I wouldn’t have put it past Bastiana to dive into her office on a “bathroom trip” and type up a new one with all prices doubled.

But even without subterfuge, the current math was boggling. Excetera’s full collection was several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of art. I swallowed, calculated tax—and then calculated my theoretical commission.

Holy shit.

I looked up, and saw where Excetera had ingratiated herself against Quenalith’s side. Quenalith had a casual arm around the much-smaller human, and Excetera’s red hair stood out against Quenalith’s all black outfit like a heart aflame.

Then, somehow both much too slowly and much too fast, the evening was through. Bastiana’s patrons—the demonic half of them stuffed silly with salmon—saw themselves out one by one, and Bastiana had taken my receipt away from me to finalize it up with Quenalith, while Excetera hovered like a ruby hummingbird, trying to drain the last excitement from the night.

“I would love to do more work for you,” I heard her telling Quenalith as I came near, and I heard the purring sound Quenalith made in response.

It did bad things to me, even as it slammed doors.

I had a future here.

With Bastiana—who couldn’t live forever.

With Logan—who I was very-mostly-sure I loved.

And Quenalith was interested in some other girl entirely.

“I’ll consider it,” Quenalith told her, and then put her number in her phone.

“Please, do. And call, anytime,” Excetera told her, her voice rich with meaning.

Quenalith gave her an indulgent smile, then surveyed the rest of us quickly. “I’ll have my movers get in touch.”

Bastiana waved her hand. “I’ve set up dimensional transportation before.”

“So full service,” Quenalith said with amusement, then smiled and headed out the door without even looking back.

Excetera waited until the door was closed before exclaiming, “Oh my God!” at the top of her lungs.

Bastiana laughed at her enthusiasm. “This is only the first stage. Second stage is we get her on a museum board and have them exhibit your pieces. Get a wider audience, gain in reputation—”

“And in price,” Excetera said, eyes beaming.

“Of course!” Bastiana agreed with a wicked grin. “Back to my office for a final celebratory round of champagne?”

“I’d love to,” Excetera told her.

Bastiana’s eyes flicked over to me. “Lower the gates and lock the door, Becky, I’ve got someone’s future to plan,” she said, while gesturing for Excetera to follow her.

I lowered the gates in front of the windows first, but I didn’t finish closing up.

I took one more round of all the paintings and sculptures instead, walking the same path I had earlier with the demon at my side, like one of those monks in a meditative labyrinth. I recalled everything I’d said, and every inflection I’d used saying it, thinking about them like they were under a microscope.

Was there some point in time where I had screwed things up?

But screwed things up how?

What had I been looking to get out of our encounter anyways?

I’d sold her the whole damn gallery—that was what I’d wanted . . . right?

I reached the end of the paintings and turned back, finally going for the front door, locking it firmly behind me.

It was dark out, and I needed to hurry to catch the next train, I’d spent too long moping inside. My purse was slung under my coat, all the better to keep it safe from prospective muggers, but at seeing a match light in front of me in the darkness I paused.

The match illuminated hands I wanted to be familiar with, as they brought its flame to a cigarette dangling from the mouth of a woman I knew.

Quenalith.

She lit the end of her cigarette and took a long drag, before exhaling a plume of clove-scented smoke as she flicked the match out with her wrist and dropped it.

My eyes adjusted more to the darkness outside, between her cigarette’s flame, the nearby neon, and the distant moon. I could see her like a shadow, leaning against a cement wall, apparently waiting for me.

I didn’t know whether to be thrilled or horrified.

“How’s it feel to be bought and sold?” she asked me, shaking her hand to knock away a measure of ash.

Horrified.

Definitely horrified.

I hugged myself in the near-dark and shook my head. “I never would’ve gone through with it if I’d thought we were going to get you.”

“No?” she asked, pursing her lips, somehow making them even more perfect. “Just someone like me?”

I swallowed, remembering everything Logan had said. “Demons don’t count,” I whispered. “That’s what”—Oh fuck, I might as well claim him, I was wearing his goddamned ring and she wasn’t blind—“my fiancé told me.”

“Ahh,” she said, taking another thoughtful drag on her clove cigarette, then gave a spicy and intoxicating exhale in my direction. “And do you think that’s true?”

For some reason, it felt like she was really asking. I searched her eyes to make sure she wasn’t making fun of me like I feared, and then found her considering me far too seriously for the question to be pretend.

I found it unnerving—because—because—when was the last time anyone had honestly asked me how I thought or felt?

And then cared about the answer?

I knew what I should say—and then I knew what I wanted to say, and God help me, I went with it.

“I kind of hope so,” I answered truthfully, and then lunged in and up to kiss her.

My lips met hers, and they were so soft, I knew instantly that I was kissing another girl even if it was just for the briefest of moments before I rocked back.

Her eyes inspected me quickly, then she tossed her cigarette and caught my face between her hands in one smooth motion, pulling me up lightly as she held me still, and then she was on me.

Her lips on mine, opening, her tongue pressing in.

I tilted my head lightly and went with it, allowing her access, tasting her smoke. I was close enough to touch her, but I couldn’t—that would’ve somehow made the moment too real—and it felt like I was risking everything as it was.

Her tongue searched my mouth and stole my breath away. Just as I was on the cusp of kissing her back, she pulled up, leaving me gasping and wanting more.

“How about now?” she asked, her voice as dark as the sky above.

“I—” I started, but then there was the sound of laughter, as both Bastiana and Excetera came out of the gallery, heading our direction.

Quenalith pulled me into her arms and made a gesture behind me. “It’s a spell of hiding. Don’t move,” she whispered.

I had no choice but to take her at her word as the other women passed. She had one arm wrapped around my waist, pulling my hips to hers, which brought my chest against her chest, where my breasts could feel the slight give of the space beneath her suspenders. I wanted to duck and hide my face against her neck, but I knew I shouldn’t.

My future mother-in-law got closer. I could hear her talking to Excetera about all the other woman’s plans, while they waited for their cars. How couldn’t Bastiana hear my heart beat? It was thundering in my throat!

But then their rides picked them up, one by one, and Quenalith not only let me go but pushed me back.

“Good night, human,” she said, moving to stub her cigarette out with certainty, then turning on her heel.

I was left behind, slightly stunned, having definitely missed my train, longing for her smoke and licorice scent.

Chapter 6

I stumbled home far later than normal and found Logan casually sitting on the couch, eating ice cream and watching TV just like I’d wanted to last night.

Would he know what I’d done?

Would he be able to smell the lies on me?

And then I spotted another Delectably Demonic ™ kit sitting in front of him, on our coffee table, only this time the canister was a metallic gray-blue.

“What is that?” I said, pointing at it like it was a surprising spider.

“Huh?” he asked, before dragging his eyes off the TV to see me. “Oh, yeah, so—I called the helpline at the back of the brochure today and asked to talk to the manager often enough that they express shipped me a new one.”

“Why?” I asked. I was still in our entryway, I hadn’t even kicked my shoes off.

“Because last night so didn’t count, Becs,” he groaned. “That thing . . . was an abomination.”

“No,” I said.

“No?” he repeated.

“Yeah—just no.”

He groaned again. “Really? It took me like three hours of haggling on the phone to get this one—”

“What if you get another real demon again, Logan? And not just some bouncy bubble doll?”

“So? As long as next time they actually want to be here, we’re golden.”

I started taking off my shoes savagely, resisting the urge to throw them across the room at him. “No. I’m not doing that again.”

“Becky,” he said, voice low, standing up to walk over, his entire bearing trying to prove that he was the “reasonable one,” with his hands wide and his shoulders set.

Witness poor Logan Graff, having to deal with his guilty fiancée’s increasing hysteria.

“Remember we pinkie-swore?” he said, swinging his arm up to show me his. “Demons don’t count.”

I stood in front of him, now three inches shorter without my heels, staring up. “How sure of that are you?” I asked, trying not to let my face crumple in some combination of shame and sin.

“One billion percent absolutely.” He grabbed my shoulders, straightening me.

“You work at a bank. You should know there’s no thing as a billion percent.”

“Demons. Don’t. Count. Becs,” he patiently explained then grabbed my head much the same as Quenalith had not all that long ago, and tried to tug the edges of my frown up into a smile with his thumbs.

I wanted to tell him everything, but I knew if I did, I’d be throwing my entire life into a blender. No, my punishment would have to be quietly living with myself, knowing what I’d done—or giving him the opportunity to get “even.”

“If demons truly don’t count, Logan,” I said, twisting my head out of his hands, to look at the kit on our table. “Then you can do that without me.”

“Becs,” he said, and there was a pause of ten heartbeats. I counted. “Really?”

I let go a held breath, feeling slightly absolved. “Yeah. Just don’t tell me about it, okay?” I pulled away from him, tossing my coat over one of our chairs. “There’s too much going on before the wedding for me to deal with this.”

“Done. I’ll disappear it tonight. You won’t ever hear about it again.”

“I’d better not,” I said, pulling a comb out of my hair and letting it fall. “And make sure you clean everything up?”

“Certainly, Mrs. Graff,” he said, with a British accent, and tugging an imaginary hat like he was a Victorian orphan.

It made me laugh in spite of myself—which was why he did it—and in two weeks, it was going to be true. I was taking his last name.

I’d had to think over everything fast on the train home. I wasn’t about to shit over everything he and I had—and everything that I’d become—because of some furtive crush on a supernatural being. This was just like the time in high school when I’d daydreamed about sequentially making out with all the members of my favorite K-pop band.

Quenalith was equally unobtainable, and my heart knew that, even if the rest of me wished that it wasn’t true.

I’d changed into my pajamas and was brushing my teeth in the bathroom when Logan shouted for me next. “Yo, Becs—my mom called.”

I turned the water off quickly, staring at my panic-stricken reflection. Had Quenalith’s spell been fast enough, tight enough, dark enough? Had the keen older woman scented the cigarette the demoness hadn’t put out—or could she just smell the guilt on my soul?

“Yeah?” I called back unsteadily.

“Yeah—she said to tell you she’s putting the commission you made tonight towards the wedding.”

My hand tightened around the toothbrush like it was a club. That was thousands of dollars . . . that Bastiana was stealing from me.

Then again, I had been kissing someone-not-her-son just fifty feet away from the gallery.

“And she also said thanks,” he added.

I blinked at myself in the mirror. “Really?” I asked him.

“Yep,” he said and laughed. “I was surprised too.”

* * *

I tried to tell myself that the reason I couldn’t sleep was that I’d gotten used to sleeping in public, caged as I was on the factory floor.

There were always sounds there. Phones ringing, forklifts moving cargo, succubi and incubi giggling at being power washed upon their return. There wasn’t a single night there when I didn’t wish for silence, and yet now that I had it . . .

I didn’t want to be alone with all my thoughts.

I couldn’t help myself—I’d had to seek her out, to see her.

I’d told myself I was going to Earth to show her who I truly was—the kind of being that no one else could ever hope to claim. I wanted to reveal myself to her as a creature of power, to prove to her that my time crudely trapped in her and her man’s living room was a fluke, not the sum total of my being.

But when I’d caught her off guard I’d utterly forgotten my purpose, as I watched the panic fluttering in her eyes. She’d reminded me of a kyrochi from the Plane of Pearl—oyster-like, iridescent creatures that danced in the air like butterflies. They were inherently nervous; I’d seen whole shoals of them take off before at the slightest sound, casting rainbows in the sky off their wings for miles. If you managed to catch one and held it carefully enough though, eventually it would still in your hands and purr.

Some demons still smashed them—every few thousand, you might find a gem inside—but I’d known once I’d seen her violence wasn’t an option for me. And considering how flustered she was, I hadn’t felt like there was much for me to prove anymore.

So I had listened to her stories about the art we passed. She’d flashed more of herself to me doing that than she’d known. It was easy enough to follow her eyes and discover the figures she was drawn to, but I could also hear the extra stories she didn’t want to tell me hidden in her voice. It was obvious that the repetitive painful images didn’t repel her, but not because she greedily wanted to make a sale.

No . . . I thought it was because she also held a quiet pain inside herself.

And what was more, I got the impression that she felt at home in the chaotic images. She maybe even found a kind of freedom in their wild energy, because her real life was restraining.

She had a job, working for that frankly awful woman—and of course I’d noticed how her last name and the man’s from the prior night were the same.

I knew from having been in her living room that she had all the trappings of an upper-class Earthly life.

I knew from the diamond on her finger that she was wholly spoken for.

But when she looked at me, her blue eyes said Save me.

And when she’d pressed her lips to mine . . . I’d wanted to.

I finally fell asleep near morning, dreaming of flocks of kyrochi, spiraling overhead, just out of reach.

* * *

Three days passed, in which we boxed up everything and shipped it to wherever it was that Quenalith existed—Another plane of existence? Siberia? Antarctica? They were all equally so distant from me as to be imaginary—and our next full exhibition wouldn’t be ready until after my wedding.

I remember working with Bastiana to time the date—she’d wanted to make sure that our actual wedding was planned in what should’ve been a lull at the gallery, and I hadn’t minded, seeing as she was making the majority of our plans.

I looked at the calendar the desk hid, with the word Wedding! written in blue and circled on it, and the sea of red Xs before it where I’d marked out the rest of the days. The Wedding! kept coming inexorably closer, like a horror movie monster, lurching forward each evening at midnight.

Whereas behind me . . . every quiet day away from Quenalith made all the activities of that one night seemed more like a dream.

I couldn’t imagine myself ignoring Bastiana’s unspoken rules.

I couldn’t imagine myself selling out the entire gallery.

And I couldn’t imagine myself kissing another girl, much less a demon, on the street, outside of here.

It wasn’t that she was a woman—although that was definitely part of it—it was just that I’d spent my whole life thinking of myself in a certain way: school, check; boy, check; job, check; wedding, check; kids, future check.

I’d spent twenty-three years carving a very precise riverbank inside myself for my soul to flow through.

I wasn’t prepared to have any piece of me splash out unexpectedly to make its own way.

The door opened, and suddenly Gemma was there, holding out her phone in an accusatory fashion. I hadn’t said anything to the girls since I’d texted them the other night, because I’d been a scared asshole, and here she was now, with every right to complain.

“Becky, why did I have to read an article on my own website that the gallery sold out?” Gemma loved gossip—it was one of the many reasons she was good at her job. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What?” I blinked, realizing she was flashing me a photo of a smiling Bastiana on her screen.

“Everything? Sold out?” she prompted, then looked around at the empty walls.

“Oh—yeah.” Of course Bastiana had tipped off the press to brag, on both herself and Excetera’s behalf. How often did a total gallery sellout ever happen? “It was a wild night.”

“It must have been. Or your boss somehow spiked the salmon.”

I let myself grin at her—I didn’t think I’d smiled in three days.

“Hey,” she said, lowering her voice. “Are you okay? Kelsey and I have been worried about you.”

“I’m fine,” I said, my voice pitching a little higher than normal, which she keyed into. She gave me a look, and then we both heard the door to Bastiana’s office swing open.

“Becky!” Bastiana announced, at seeing me, sounding pleased, and then her eyes narrowed on Gemma. “And Gemma,” she added, with much less enthusiasm.

Their paths had overlapped at several assorted wedding functions, and I knew Bastiana would’ve preferred me to have a less mouthy maid of honor.

“Hey, Mrs. Graff,” Gemma said as Bastiana reached our side.

“I’m going to head out now—and I need to see you tonight,” Bastiana told me.

“Why?” Was I in trouble? I still didn’t put telepathy past the woman.

“I’m having a small gathering of select patrons for a cocktail party at my place tonight.” She took a moment to survey me. “And I think you should come. Logan too, of course.”

This was hugely out of character for her. “Are you sure?” I found myself asking, before I could bite my tongue.

“Of course I am!” she said, sounding irritated that I would question her. “You helped—” she began, and then realized Gemma was present. “You were there the night the gallery sold out. It’s . . . time.”

The way she said time, I knew what she meant.

Time for her to finally let me be on the inside. To meet the right people, and possibly have her trust my taste.

Thank you, Quenalith.

“Seven for sure,” I told her. “Is there anything I can bring?”

Bastiana gave me a withering look that said she had caterers, and left the gallery without answering.

Gemma and I both waited till she walked away from the glass windows out front. “Have I mentioned before how much she scares me?” she said.

“Oh, I know,” I said, sagging against the desk. There was no one else here, and now that everything was wrapped for shipping, there was no real reason for anyone to come in. I kicked off my shoes behind the counter, relaxing.

Gemma turned back toward me. “Okay, Becky, so, what the fuck?” She spoke at a normal volume, and her words reverberated in the empty space.

I owed her answers—and what was more, I needed to talk.

“Hang on one sec, okay?” I pulled out my phone and texted Logan quickly. Your mom wants us at her house for a cocktail party tonight. Seven.

That done, I looked at Gemma, ready to spill—then I ran for the front door, pulled down the metal gates, tossed up our “closed” sign, and dragged her into the back alcove, where we hid the most expensive pieces usually.

“I’m getting a real, ‘hiding in the bathroom to smoke pot’ vibe here, Becky.”

“No pot, but yes, green.” I leaned against one of the empty walls and let myself slide down it. She followed me instantly, moving to sit cross-legged on the ground. “You remember D-day?” I asked, and she nodded strongly. “Well . . . the woman we summoned that night wasn’t like a normal demon. She wasn’t bouncy or laughing, like the ones you see on the pornos. She was . . . angry. And? Indescribably hot.”

Gemma was giving me a face like a confused puppy. “I can’t tell if that’s a good or bad thing.”

“Well, it was a no-thing at first. We didn’t do anything that night with her, but she did say she wanted to do things. To me. And then Logan sent her home, and I thought that was the end of it—until she showed up here at Excetera’s opening.” I took a big gulp of air. “And bought everything . . . because of me, I think.”

At least that’s what I wanted to believe.

Gemma’s lips pursed as she tried to figure out where the actual problem was.

“And then I kissed her,” I said aloud, feeling like the ground might open and swallow me whole—just like had been depicted on several of Excetera’s pieces.

“Whoa!” Gemma exclaimed.

“I know!” I said, wincing. “It’s not like me, Gemma. Not at all—you know that. I don’t know what I was doing—or thinking.” Only that I’d wanted it, at the time. I was shaking a little now, like finally getting to confess was releasing pressure off my soul.

Gemma’s hands reached to take mine in hers, steadying me. “Becs, are you okay?”

“I don’t know,” I told her, my voice unsteady.

She used my hand to reel me in, and hug me. “Do you want someone just to listen, or do you want a plan?”

“I super don’t know,” I repeated, from the safety of her neck, hidden by her hair. “No, just listening is fine. Everything’s moot, right? There’s no reason for me to ever see her again, and if I do, I’ll just keep my hands—and my lips—to myself.”

“Is that what you want?” she gently pried.

I shrugged inside the safety of her arms. “It’s what’s gonna happen. So it’s what I should prepare myself for.” I pulled my head back a little and caught her giving me a small frown. “Are you disappointed in me?”

“No, no, no,” she said quickly. “I’m just sad to see you like this, Becky. I don’t like it when you hurt.”

“Me either,” I said, thumping my head back against her chest.

“Have you told Logan?”

“No. I could never. He’s the one that banished her. And it doesn’t matter . . . because it’s not going to happen again.”

It couldn’t. I wouldn’t let it.

Because ever since my parents had died, I’d been obsessed with figuring out the perfect path to my future. I knew what I needed to do to survive, how I needed to be, and who I needed to get along with to make it happen.

I had plans for myself, with a capital P. Kissing Quenalith hadn’t changed a thing.

“Then your secret is safe with me,” Gemma said, giving me a squeeze. “What was it like?” she asked.

I groaned against her chest. “Kind-of-sort-of cheating on my fiancé or kissing a girl?”

“The latter. I mean, did you at least like it?”

I put my fingers to my mouth, where I could pretend to still feel Quenalith’s lips on mine if I concentrated hard enough.

“Yeah,” I whispered.

Too much.

Chapter 7

After I saw Gemma off, I checked my phone and found a text from Logan. Sorry, babe, I just got saddled with a late meeting. Try to have fun?

I groaned, but used that as an excuse to just go home early, and when I got into our apartment, I walked strongly past the kitchen, do not pass go, do not anxiously drink something just because it was there and it would calm my nerves.

I wanted to make a good impression tonight. Bastiana was trusting me for once, and I didn’t want to blow it. After all, she could get hit by a meteor tomorrow, and then the gallery would be mine, right? So I needed to start really meeting people and shaking hands, to get the feel of the background flow.

My actual end goal, and what I would do later, if the Graff name and Graff bank accounts allowed me, was feature underrepresented local artists who had unique points of view. There were tons of painters, photographers, and people who worked in other media, who all had a unique way of filtering their experiences of life and living in our city.

My current favorite was Kial, an artist who took things they found and mosaiced them over their already transgressive paintings—like creating a 3D white rose heart of precisely clipped milk gallon petals coming out of the heart of a portrait of a local drag king friend of theirs who was offering an audience member a benediction, titled Saint Who Gives A Fuck.

Each of their pieces had a story—hell, they even had pieces of the actual city built in. Each one expressed how it felt to live here, how it felt to be discarded, and the hope that sometimes, if you were lucky enough, you might be incorporated into some piece of art and live forever.

I’d first seen one of their pieces at the coffee shop the girls and I met at, and then had immediately tracked them down.

Bastiana was only interested in people whose works were likely to sell on a national stage—or would in a round or two, if their owners put them up for auction later at Sotheby’s.

But I wanted to uplift people who were less likely to have their voices heard. The people for who making art was a struggle—the people who might not be able afford to paint another painting, if their current pieces didn’t sell.

And making a good appearance at Bastiana’s cocktail party tonight could be the first part of that for me. If I could get her to trust my eye and gain access to her wealthy clientele, then I could start putting pieces in front of them from the artists that I liked. Like Kial. And I didn’t have any shame—I could totally manage to figure out a way to couch it so that the rich people felt like they were “discovering” them instead of me.

So at six fifty-five I was on Bastiana’s doorstep, and a caterer let me in.

I’d been to her house enough to know my way around—I went for the formal living room first, which was where everything had been set up, and then I heard familiar voices from the room beyond.

Bastiana’s . . . and Quenalith.

My heart sank inside me like a lead balloon, only to rebound off my vagina, which’d begun having very un-fiancée-like thoughts.

“Becky? Is that you?” I heard Bastiana ask. She’d glimpsed me through the door, and I was trapped.

“Yes, hi,” I said, slowly walking forward into the dining room, which was also for some reason set up. Oh God, this was also a dinner party. Time to seriously step up. Quenalith had the jacket of her suit slung across a chair back and was standing casually, with her hands in her pockets, giving me a stony look.

“Where’s Logan?” Bastiana asked.

“Work kept him late, sorry. He sends his apologies.”

“I bet he does.” She sniffed. “Still though. We don’t need him tonight. You remember our mysterious benefactor, Quenalith?” she said, pretending to introduce me.

“I do,” I said, giving the demoness a nod. I couldn’t tell if she was pleased or not to see me—nor was I entirely sure how I felt about seeing her.

Except for my vagina.

My vagina was very, very sure.

Very . . . clenchy.

“Well, we were just discussing the role of museums and art education in the community. And I know that’s a thing you like,” Bastiana said, like the thought was a bit beneath her.

“It is, if you’re interested,” I said, and Quenalith gave me a slight nod. I inhaled deeply to steady myself. “It’s not that the gallery doesn’t do amazing work, because it does,” I said, giving Bastiana a tight smile. “I wish there were more mainstream places for local art to get seen. Museum showings increase a piece’s prestige, and the prestige of the artist who made it—so I just wish that local talent had more of a chance at being exhibited, instead of wealthy donors always showing off their own pieces so they increase in value.”

Bastiana had begun giving me a very wide-eyed, “Not in front of the company!” look, while Quenalith seemed charmed.

“I’d love to hear more about how culture works on your plane. Perhaps after I smoke?” she said, picking up her suit jacket. “How can I get outside?”

Bastiana frowned, then her eyes lit up, looking behind me for the doorway. “Ralph!” she called excitedly, then looked to me. “Becky, can you show her the rose garden out back?”

“Sure,” I said, nodding, before leading the way.

Quenalith followed me silently through the Graff home’s stately halls, until I let us back out to the palisade behind the house, where a fleet of gardeners kept Bastiana’s roses tamed. We triggered one of the backyard lights, which she then walked to the perimeter of, as though she found the darkness more comfortable.

I stood six feet away from her in well-lit silence, watching her light up. “That’s a bad habit,” I said.

“One of many, I confess,” she told me, taking a drag on a clove.

“Like slumming it with summoning kits?” I asked, sharper than I meant to. I’d done a little research into transactional demonic economies in the past few days, trying to figure out reasons to dislike her.

Her eyes found mine, and the way the light reflected in them made them light up like a cat’s. “I was imprisoned, if you must know.”

I gasped and stepped back. “What for?”

“Other bad things,” she said, and gave me a glittering smile.

Oh God. “That night was a mistake,” I told her, hugging myself quickly. “I never should have—”

“Are you happy here?” she asked me, cutting me off. I blinked at her, as she scanned down the building behind me, like she could see through its walls and windows, before refocusing her attention on me. “It’s a yes or no question,” she went on, when I didn’t answer fast enough.

“Th—that you don’t get to ask,” I told her, stammering.

She shrugged one shoulder. “Fair.”

The look she gave me said otherwise. She took another long drag on her cigarette, before gracefully bending down to streak it out on the patio and pocketing the butt—not that Bastiana would notice or care—she had gardeners for that.

“Shall we go back?” Quenalith asked me.

I nodded quickly and reached for the door.

By the time we returned, most of the other guests had arrived, and Bastiana began introducing me around as her soon-to-be daughter-in-law.

I suspected most of them knew—several of the people and demons here tonight were close enough to be invited to the wedding, and I’d gotten the chance to recently write some of them handwritten thank-you notes.

But they were also talking art . . . I had finally breached the inner sanctum.

Thanks to Quenalith.

Once we were back inside, she and I were business as usual, where I didn’t know her, and she didn’t know me . . . except that I thought I could feel her watching me at odd times. I would finish a conversation with a mocktail in hand, and by the time I looked back to see if it was real . . . she’d looked away again.

Or, more likely, she’d never been looking at all.

A theory confirmed by the fact that, as we all went into the dining room for dinner service, she made sure to leave the only empty seat at the table between us, choosing instead to sit by Bastiana.

Then we all heard a distant door slam, and a flustered Excetera walked in.

“And the woman of the hour!” Bastiana beamed at seeing her.

“I’m so sorry I’m late! I feel awful—but I was at the canvas, and I completely lost track of time. I was just in a trance,” she explained, handing her coat to one of the servers to deal with.

“Come sit here and tell me all about it?” Quenalith stood, quickly offering her seat to Excetera, so that the artist could sit between her and Bastiana, as Quenalith moved to sit by me.

Excetera sat down and started chirping about her newest vision, and the caterers began their service. Conversations struck up all around the table, some of which I could even keep up with. I was proud of myself for not having dived into a vodka cranberry the second the party started, and I was fairly sure I knew how to use all the available forks.

Things were going well, we were nearing the end of dinner service, and then—Quenalith’s wool slacked knee nudged mine beneath the table.

I scooted my knee over, slightly peeved—the demoness was leaning over, hanging on Excetera’s every word, she probably had no idea how much space she was taking up.

And then her knee followed mine.

I pressed back, claiming my space—and she didn’t relent.

I reached beneath the table and jabbed her in the thigh with a finger, and found she was nothing but muscle beneath her suit; I almost broke a nail. She did laugh though . . . at something Excetera said.

She was doing it on purpose—and what was more, there was nothing I could do about it.

The servers took our plates away and brought out variations of dessert. I found her intrusion on my personal space flustering. It made it hard to concentrate on anything else, and it also made me wish I had a drink in hand. I bit my tongue on purpose to chase that thought away, then picked up a forkful of a strawberry trifle, with whipped cream piled high, and just as I was distracted by trying to take a tasteful mouthful without ruining my lipstick, I felt her fingertips on my knee.

All five of them, in a point, that she then blossomed out, slowly.

Somehow I swallowed before coughing, and luckily, the cake was moist, otherwise I would’ve spattered Mr. Craylock, sitting across from me—and who I now knew was next in line to be on the board of our city’s “MoMu,” the Modern Museum—with cake bits.

Quenalith laughed again, not seeming to notice, except now she was dragging two careful fingertips on my skin.

Moving upward.

I felt myself flush red, and I was sure everyone else at the table had to know, but a quick scan said they didn’t—that this subtle torture was for me alone.

I wanted her to stop, because it was wrong-wrong-wrong.

But I also, desperately—desperately—wanted her to keep going.

Her fingertips found the edge of my dress and crooked beneath it, stroking along its inner edge, from the outside of my thigh inward, following its tight-tucked line. When she reached where my legs were pressed together I gasped, then tried to cover it with another cough, before her fingers retreated to keep slowly caressing, comparatively chastely, over the satin of my skirt.

I took a large swig of water, chasing inhaled pieces of cake down, and I noticed Mr. Craylock’s concern. “Are you all right, dear?”

“Yes—just—wrong pipe,” I said, laughing it off.

Quenalith’s hand didn’t stop. Soon it was going to be where my thigh met my hip and then what?

I reached beneath the table to strongly pinch the back of her hand, and she withdrew, pulling her hand away, continuing the same conversation that she’d never stopped.

Whereas I was left reeling. My heartbeat had become a full-body thing; I could feel it in my face, my throat, my stomach, my toes—and no place thudded more heavily than the spot where her hand had just been . . . except for the spot between my legs a few inches over, where her hand could have easily reached.

Servers came by, taking plates away, and the party was beginning to break up. Quenalith stood not long after. “Care to direct me again?” she asked, paying me public attention for the first time that night.

I looked up at her preternaturally calm face. Everything about her was expressionless, except for her eyes that somehow called to me. And knowing it was the world’s worst idea, I still said, “Sure,” and stood.

Chapter 8

I led Quenalith through Bastiana’s house quickly, until we were safely alone in the backyard, where I joined her on the periphery of the porch light.

“You can’t go touching people without permission!” I hissed.

She chuckled wickedly. “But kissing them on open streets is okay? You’ll have to tell me more about how this plane works.”

I crossed my arms and hugged myself. “Excetera thinks you’re into her.”

I’d been forced to watch as much, and listen. The red-headed artist had done everything but crawl into Quenalith’s lap between the soup and the main course.

“I believe you’ve read that situation incorrectly. I am not ‘into her,’” she said, mocking my tone, “and for her part, she’s only into my money.”

I swallowed loudly in the silence that followed—four heartbeat’s worth. “Then—I don’t understand you. What game are you playing here?”

“None,” she said, surveying me coolly. “I am Quenalith the Conqueror, and I get what I want.”

I ducked back, out of the circle of light entirely, finding my back against the door. “And what is that?” I breathed, scared of knowing the answer and afraid of how bereft I’d feel if it turned out that I didn’t.

“You,” she said, stepping up. The same hand that’d been riding up my thigh found the bottom of my chin, and every thought I’d had about being strong and staying out of trouble evaporated like dew at dawn. “May I?” she asked, tilting my face up.

If there actually was a hell, after all of this, I was buying an express ticket.

“Yes,” I whispered, and she leaned in.

Her tongue pressing into my mouth exploded what little remained of my self-control. I wound my arms up around her neck, feeling the halo of shorter fuzz at the back of her head, at the same time as her body ground against mine. She’d slid the hand beneath my chin to my throat to hold my mouth in place for hers, while the other roamed me wildly, sliding over my dress’s slippery satin, caressing my waist and hips, breasts and ass. Her head bent in, and she worked her lips against mine, her tongue taking my mouth in hot thrusts and swipes and I . . .

I melted.

I knew it was wrong, even as it was happening.

I was wearing Logan’s ring.

I was at his mother’s house.

And Quenalith was the kind of demon who counted.

But that didn’t stop me from grinding against her, nor permitting her thigh entrance when she nudged it between my legs, making my skirt ride up. I moaned softly as she made contact with me, and her leg was every bit as toned as I’d thought when I’d jabbed her beneath the table earlier.

Her hands found my waist and ass and pulled, rubbing me on her, wanting this for me, and I bit back a high whine.

“So pure,” she whispered roughly in my ear. “So innocent.”

I shook my head to deny it and to force back what I was feeling as I shamelessly rocked against her. I wasn’t innocent anymore—and I’d never be again, after this.

“So scared,” she said, kissing a spot beneath my jaw, her breath hot against my skin. “So mine,” she said in a growling tone that made me shiver.

I was close so fast—I threw my arms around her neck, needing just to hang on.

“Oh, yes, human. Give me your sweetness,” she purred, helping me to go faster with her hands, and raising her thigh up even higher. “Give me all your caramel.”

I pressed my mouth to where her collarbone met her neck and moaned, as the first ripple of my orgasm thundered through me. I thrashed against her, silently ridden by the next two waves—three—four!—rocking and panting and holding my breath. Her hand wound in my hair and held me to her as she made soft but deep noises of satisfaction, until the last of my shudders were through, and then she quietly released me.

She was breathing every bit as hard as I was—but she didn’t have a single hair out of place, and her eyes had a tenderness in them that I prayed was for me alone. “Go clean yourself up. I’ll hold back the hounds.”

I dove into the nearest of the Graff household’s seven bathrooms, sat down on the closed toilet, and decided that I would never come out again.

They could just brick and mortar up the wall, like that one Edgar Allen Poe story. Then I could die of shame—sexy, sexy shame—in here, just like I deserved.

What had I done?

Who had I just become?

And what the fuck was I going to do about it now?

As much as I wanted to hide, I knew I couldn’t—and if I hid for too long, that’d definitely raise questions, or I’d be abandoned alone with Bastiana at the end of the night, which would be its own separate kind of horror.

I stood up quickly and reassembled myself, scooting my dress back down fully and ironing the wrinkles with my hands. Then I whipped my hair up into a fast bun and finished wiping my lipstick off, like it’d just come off during dinner and not on Quenalith’s lips and neck.

I straightened my shoulders, inhaled deeply, and stepped out into reality.

I would answer questions and solve my problems later—right now I had a gauntlet to run.

When I returned to the party, I found Quenalith and Bastiana congeniality chatting with the few remaining guests. Excetera was mooning at Quenalith, but Quenalith had her hands clasped behind her back, holding herself with a military-like precision.

Bastiana saw me first. “Becky? Are you okay? You look a little flushed.”

I looked behind myself, as if for an offending rug. “I tripped!” I said, forcing a laugh.

Her eyes narrowed. “This is why I tried to get you dancing lessons before the wedding. You were never in Cotillion.” She sighed, and then gave me a tight smile. “Anyhow, I was just inviting Quenalith to your party thing this upcoming weekend.”

I triple blinked. “My . . . bachelorette?”

Bastiana’s smile got even more strained. “Yes. That one.” Her eyebrows were telegraphing: This is happening. Don’t blow it.

“But—” I sputtered. I didn’t even know what Gemma, Kelsey, and I were going to do—if anything. I’d demanded it be lowkey, because everything else, was, well, like this.

“Don’t worry, dear,” Mr. Craylock said with a warm smile. “There’s nothing you can get up to that a demon won’t have seen.”

“Quite,” Quenalith agreed, smiling, but then brushed me off to continue her former conversation.

It was like nothing between us had ever happened—and no way I could prove it had, either, other than a hint of drying wetness on her thigh.

A servant held my coat out for me, and I took it, going outside to wait for my car, feeling dizzy.

I slouched in the backseat, happy to be unseen, quietly collecting my thoughts.

I should’ve told Bastiana the wedding was off, right then and there. But I hadn’t, because I should probably tell Logan first.

But that was definitely what I had to do.

It was the right thing to do, and I was still a Good Person—at least I liked to think I was.

I just couldn’t believe myself on several levels: first, that that had happened, that I’d just gone and dropped all sense of propriety and self-control; and secondly, that it had been all me.

It wasn’t part of the Plan, and I’d been completely sober when it’d happened.

I didn’t have an excuse, and I wasn’t just a passenger—I’d fucking buckled myself into the driver’s seat—and then driven myself straight into a wall.

I pulled out my phone. My fingers ached to tell Gemma and Kels, but—no—Logan need to be my priority.

The driver let me out, I tipped him, and then I felt my panic rise as the elevator to our floor did.

What kind of idiot was I to not text Gemma?

It wasn’t like he was going to let me crash on the couch after I broke up with him.

I should’ve spent the whole ride here making plans.

When I let myself into our apartment, it was dark, and I could hear the low rumble of his snoring from the bedroom. I checked the time on the microwave—it was past midnight!

Was I enough of an asshole to wake him up and do it now?

Would the doorman at Gemma’s building let me in, if her phone was off and I couldn’t get ahold of her?

I hovered in the kitchen, wracked with guilt and doubt in turns, and then I heard the siren song of the vodka I’d hidden from myself inside our pantry, singing Drink me! Drink me! Calm down! Forget!

I put my hands to my head, turned my back on it—barely—then caught a look at our trash can, where the lid hadn’t swung back right. I hit the lever with my foot, thinking I’d just be tucking a take-out container back in, but found the blue-metal container of Logan’s replacement summoning kit instead.

I picked it up without thinking. Maybe it’d been another dud? Or maybe he’d decided he couldn’t go through with it, and then I would somehow feel even worse, a thing I didn’t honestly think was possible.

Then I unscrewed the top, and found three spent condoms inside.

“Oh,” I said aloud, looking at everything in our living room which’d been very carefully returned to its original state.

Either his work meeting hadn’t gone very late . . . or Logan had lied and intentionally abandoned me at his mother’s so he could bang one demon three times.

Or three demons once each.

I knew I wasn’t entirely off the hook . . . but I also didn’t feel bad enough to get kicked out onto the streets tonight.

I shoved the summoning kit into the trash, then released the foot lever, sending the lid clanging against the kit’s pointed top.

“Becs?” he called, from the depths of the bedroom.

“Yeah, Logan,” I said. “Just me.”

“Come to bed,” he said.

“I will—just let me shower.”

I showered and brushed my teeth, getting rid of any evidence of wrongdoing and clove smoke, then I crawled into bed.

Logan shouldered himself up behind me. “Hope tonight wasn’t too dreadful,” he said in my ear, as he lassoed an arm around my waist.

“Nice to know you feel a little bit of guilt, too,” I whispered, but he was already asleep.

And just as I was about to fall asleep, I realized Quenalith hadn’t even brought her coat outside the second time.

She’d never intended to smoke—she’d just wanted an excuse to be with me.

Logan’s Post

Dear Schmedit:

Okay, so, my girlfriend (23 F) told me (24 M) I could use a demon summoning kit without her, as long as we never talked about it . . .

Well, I took her at her word, and did, and now she wants permission to use one solo too—only that was never part of the original equation.

If I’d ever thought she’d get the gumption up to use a summoning kit without me, I would’ve absolutely said no and never used mine in the first place.

She feels like I’m being unfair, but I feel like she’s trying to change the rules after the fact.

AITA?

Chapter 9

I portaled home in secrecy an hour after Becky left, after making sure that Excetera wasn’t clinging to me like a barnacle—I didn’t want to arrive at the entrance to my house holding a disembodied hand.

But I had been sure not to touch her, nor let her touch me, after Becky voiced her concern and even after Becky had gone. While casual contact with other beings did not matter so much to me, if it bothered Becky, I would stop.

Because contact with Becky was all I needed . . .

I stood there for a moment on my porch, remembering how readily she’d softened beneath my lips, throwing herself into my arms for me to take, without an ounce of hesitation.

I had been right.

We were meant to be.

Becky was my new zenuth—and it felt possible that Sheloi had somehow sent her to me from beyond. I closed my eyes, standing there, feeling wracked by waves of grief and pleasure. If I believed in a meddlesome afterlife, well, it wouldn’t have been the first time Sheloi had known exactly what I needed. And I knew, too, Sheloi would have never wanted me to cut myself off from joy.

I rested my hand on the door, remembering the way Becky’s kiss and hands had pulled me in, the soft, small sounds she’d made as she gave herself over, and the way she had trembled for me at the end. . . . I breathed the memory of Becky coming against me in, fit to make me come myself. All I wanted to do right now was make my way to my bedroom and touch my own skin, pretending that my fingertips were hers.

I burst into my home, thinking I’d do just that—only to find Jorlahut, casually sitting on my couch, clearly waiting. I came up short in front of him.

“Having fun?” he asked me, looking me up and down.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded.

“I’m here because you’re apparently spending time on the human plane.” One of his shiny boots was crossed over a knee, while the supporting leg’s boot still had the stun gun tucked inside it.

“So what if I am? I’m free now, aren’t I?” I passed by him and went into my kitchen to get a glass of water for myself.

He inhaled and exhaled exhaustedly. “Quenalith, we both know that’s not a good idea for you.”

“Says who?”

“Says me,” he said as I returned. “As your former jailer, my superiors think it’s my job to keep an eye on you. I don’t want to see you come back.”

I leaned against one of my home’s many display cases, setting my glass carefully down on its top. “There’s no chance of that happening.”

“Is that so? You mean you haven’t already used a spell in public?”

Just the once, outside the gallery . . . “You were watching me?”

“Someone has to, Quen. If you don’t behave, it makes me look bad.”

I rolled my eyes. “It was a mere spell of hiding. To protect a girl’s honor.”

“Nothing mere about it—and it was a violation of all of our treaties.” He stood and took his stun gun in hand.

“Jorlahut!” I snapped. But before I could explain how foolish he was being, he threw his hands up in the air, pacing in a stomping circle before stopping to yell at me.

“No! It’s a violation of the code! There is no reason for it—and no other explanation!”

“You’re being overdramatic, Jor—”

“Am I?” he said, whirling, pointing the stunning device in my direction. “Don’t make me do things to you I don’t want to, Quen,” he begged, twisting his head. “You and I may have been glorious in battle together once upon a time, but now you are a civilian—and I have a job to do.” He stared me down, huffed, and shoved the stun gun back into his boot. “Don’t do this to me, Quenalith. To either of us.”

“Jorlahut—” I tried again—I needed to make him understand what had happened. And how helpless I now was. “She is my zenuth.”

It was one of the many words the humans had stolen from us without knowing—back when all we could do was whisper into the ears of learned men to influence their realm, because our actual arrival would’ve driven them insane.

They had changed the word to be zenith in time, but the underlying meaning was the same.

She was the best of all things, to me.

Any world, any plane I was on—she was above me, in the stars.

He frowned deeply. “She’s a human, Quen. She can’t truly be your anything.”

I shook my head. “No. I feel it,” I told him, willing him to feel my passion too.

“Gah! You spent too long in that cage is all.” He started talking to the ground, unwilling to see the intensity in my eyes. “Going up every night. Simmering in their predilections.” He suddenly looked up at me. “And don’t think I don’t know what you did, Quen—scaring your clients into submission, or only getting off the girls, making the guys jack off alone.” He thumped his forefinger into his chest. “I covered for you. Every time. For five years. Think on that. I even went as far as giving that last night of yours an express replacement kit . . .”

I stood straighter instantly. “Did they use it?”

“Pfft—not that long ago,” he said, shaking his head again.

I did the math between when I had let Becky out of my sight and now. “Was there a girl there?” I asked him.

“Why would it matter?”

“Was. There. A. Girl. There,” I asked him, far more ominously.

“How should I know?” he complained.

“Because if there was, and another demon touched her, I will kill them—who did you send?”

His lips thinned into a straight line. “Remella,” he said—because he knew I’d find out somehow even if he didn’t. “And if you kill her—it’s back in the cage for you, only this time, they’ll throw away the key.”

“Then I hope for both our sakes I will not have to,” I said, opening up a portal behind me. “Do not be here when I return,” I told him, and stepped through.

* * *

I sat across from Logan the next morning at our kitchen’s small bar, holding the mug of coffee that he’d made me.

“So how was your meeting?” I asked him casually. I felt as fragile as a house of cards—even a mild breeze could’ve blown me down.

“Just the usual. Stupid Johnson speaking up, getting us all stuck late again—that man can’t resist the sound of his own voice,” he said, giving me a grin. There was a proverbial pep in his step today—so how come I felt like I’d stepped in gum?

“Logan . . . I saw the kit in the trash,” I said, starting slow. Everyone makes mistakes, right? So maybe that was what had happened with me . . .

“Oh?” he asked, then didn’t even bother playing innocent. “Sorry about that. I was trying to keep everything clean.”

“Well, thanks for wrapping up, I guess. Did you have fun?” And was your fun even remotely comparable to me dry-humping Quenalith in your mother’s rose garden?

A moment of confusion clouded his expression. “You sure you want to know?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, Becs, I mean, I’m a red-blooded male, and demons don’t count, like we promised, so . . . yeah. It was a good time.”

I nodded heavily. “So . . . what would you say if I got one?”

He leaned forward and squinted, as though he had not heard me. “What?”

“I mean . . . if I got a kit and summoned one, what would you say?”

He belly-laughed. “I thought you didn’t want to go down that path again? I mean—sure—I’d love to do that kind of thing with you.”

“No—I mean alone,” I corrected him.

“We both know you wouldn’t,” he shook his head.

“But what if I did?”

He looked at me like I was being absurd. “Why are we discussing the impossible?”

“Because there’s one in my purse right now,” I lied. I set my coffee down and put my chin on my hands. “I won it last night—your mom had a raffle.”

“My mother would never host anything as déclassé as a raffle.”

“Answer the question, Logan,” I said, jerking my head back to where my purse hung, near the front door. “If I had one, could I use it alone? Just like you did?”

“Okay, fine, no, but not because of principles—but because you don’t have one. Becky, I love you, but you don’t have twenty-five thousand dollars to your name.”

“I have credit cards,” I muttered. “And—that’s kind of a double-standard, don’t you think?”

“For me or for you? Because when you said I could have a solo night, you never mentioned that you might want one. I might’ve made different choices if I’d ever thought you would be serious.”

I made a face at him, then steeled myself, ready to come clean. “Logan, it’s just that—”

“You’re thinking too hard. Again.” He leaned across the counter and kissed my forehead. “Okay, I’ve gotta get to work—see you tonight, like always?” he asked, giving me his trademark killer grin.

I sank back, having lost all of my truthful momentum from my sails. “Yeah.”

Thirty minutes later, I was in confessional at the coffee shop, with Kelsey and Gemma.

Conveniently for me, Gemma had already told Kelsey everything about Quenalith’s and my kiss, and I spilled the beans about everything else, as quickly as I could.

“Becky, that’s like bad of you, but also fucking hot,” Gemma said.

“Thank you, I think?” I was sitting there with my head in my hands, and I heard Kelsey blow air through pursed lips.

“No—I mean, yeah, it’s hot, but in all other respects, no.”

I turned toward her. “I thought you would be all for this? I thought I was a child bride!”

“No,” Kelsey corrected me. “I’m on the side of rationality. And there’s nothing rational going on here,” she said circling my head in the air with one finger. “Maybe down there,” she said, gesturing to my hips beneath the table we were sitting at. “But you can’t go blowing up your life for a maybe, Becky.”

“As much as I hate to say it, Becs, Kels is right,” Gemma chimed in. “Do you even really know this demon?”

“Only that she just got out of prison,” I said, having forgotten to pass that information along in the first run through.

Gemma settled back in her chair. “Well, fuck. This easily tops anything we could’ve made happen for your bachelorette, so I’m all about your Hallmark-channel-and-ice-cream plans now.”

I sat there, staring morosely into my coffee. Kelsey was right, of course. If Bastiana turned against me . . . I would literally never work in the art scene in this town again—or in any other. I’d be lucky if kindergarteners let me watch them fingerpaint.

And . . . I didn’t really know anything about Quenalith . . . other than the way she made me feel.

Kelsey brought her hands together like a pastor at a pulpit, summoning people to prayer. “Look, maybe this is a good thing—in that you’ve had a chance to sew a few, very few, wild oats here, before settling down for the rest of your life, with the man and the job that make sense.”

Gemma nodded, agreeing. “Just use this to appreciate what you have more. Everybody needs fond memories.”

“Or vast regrets?” I asked her.

Kelsey put her hand on top of mine. “Honestly, Becky, what’ll you regret more? Seeing where this leads—or being forced to sleep on one of our couches for eternity?”

“I don’t know, mine’s a fold out,” Gemma said, giving me a grin.

I snorted softly. “I just wish I had more time. And that everything wasn’t so locked down yet.”

Kelsey made a cough that sounded suspiciously like child bride, and I pretend kicked her under the table.

“And,” I said, picking up steam, “I wish that I’d left more time for experimentation, and that I hadn’t been afraid of things when I’d had the chance. I just thought that I knew what I wanted, you know?”

I mean, I hadn’t started dating Logan or working for his mom under false pretenses.

I just thought I had everything figured out already.

“We’ve got you no matter what you do,” Gemma told me, standing up and blowing me an air kiss.

“And if you decide you have to blow your life apart,” Kelsey said, “I’ll send my cleaners over to collect the pieces and we’ll reassemble you.”

Chapter 10

I managed to make it to Earth’s midday before going to its plane again. Remella told me she’d only partnered with a man, and I believed her—Becky’s “fiancé” needing to prove himself by mounting another demon made sense to me, even as I found the idea pathetic.

But I had a feeling I knew where Becky would be. I wanted the chance to see her and hopefully pull her away to speak to her alone.

I left my hair in its dramatically severe style and put on a gray suit this time, with a white button-down shirt underneath and a slightly darker gray tie, portaled into a nearby alley, unseen, and made my way over to Bastiana’s.

The place was still empty—they hadn’t refilled it yet. And little did Excetera know that all of her hard work was currently sitting under tarps in magical storage, which was where it could stay for all I cared.

Becky was still behind the gallery’s counter, looking at something on her phone. She glanced up as I walked in and her eyes widened in surprise.

“Looking for more art?” she asked as I approached, her voice going high.

I lounged over the edge of the desk. “You are art to me, so yes.”

I watched her chest heave, then she leaned forward to whisper. “You can’t say things like that.”

A golden lock of her hair fell forward, and I wanted to push it back for her. “Why not?”

“This for one,” she said, holding up her hand and pointing at her ostentatious ring. “And, secondly—I don’t even know you. Not really.”

“Something easily fixed,” I told her, then strode to the back of the gallery. Bastiana was inside her office, talking on the phone, with a pencil in her hand. “I’m making your secretary show me where to get coffee—we’ll be back.”

The older woman looked up, recognized me, and then waved.

When I came back, Becky was still behind the desk, looking slightly perturbed.

“Coffee?” I asked her.

She sighed, but picked up her bag. “I’m not a secretary,” she said, as she led me out the door.

The area of the city that Bastiana’s gallery was in was very upscale and catered to demonic clientele readily. All of the buildings were different variations of gray, stone, or shiny.

“I’m sorry,” I told her, following along on her right. “I know you are an art dealer.”

“Well . . . I’m not that all the way yet, either. But I want to be,” she said.

“Why?” I asked, with genuine curiosity.

She paused, and I paused beside her, watching her take my question seriously. Her gaze went distant, but her face stayed animated in thought, her brow rising and falling as her lips pursed—watching her was charming.

“Well . . . there’s the feeling of history, when you deal with older works. Some of them just have a presence to them. Either they’re snapshots of a time that no one’s alive to remember anymore—or they have a feeling about them, like they’ve lived through the years since they were created, and I like appreciating that.” She thought some more, and then nodded. “With new, more modern pieces—I just get excited that there’s something original in the world. If it bends my mind in a strange way and makes me think differently, all the better. And, sometimes, art is like a doorway . . .” she began, then glanced up at me and went quiet again. “Sorry, I’m rambling.”

“Not in the least,” I told her.

She shook her head and started walking again. “No—I need to stop telling you things—I don’t know anything about you.”

I followed her quickly and started talking. “My name is Quenalith, as I’ve told you. My appellation, however . . .” I frowned a little, not sure how flexible Becky’s mind would be. “There are other worlds than the one you know, on many different planes. Not all of them are good places. Some are quite violent and would overrun yours, given the opportunity. In the past, the demons—as you call us—have protected you, and I was one of those protectors.”

Her pace slowed as I spoke, and I was sure to match it. “When you were . . . conquering things?”

I nodded. “Yes. I was quite highly ranked before my discharge.”

She paused in front of some café, her blue eyes wide. “Before you went to prison?”

I clenched my jaw. “That is something I would rather not talk about.” And I never should’ve mentioned it the prior night. “Though I will honestly answer anything else.”

She swallowed thoughtfully, as I reached past her, to hold the door behind her open and let her go inside.

The barista had already known Becky’s order, and I ordered a ridiculously frothy caramel drink. I paid for us both, and after I picked up our drinks, I joined Becky at a table, sitting politely across from her, keeping my hands to myself.

“Come here often?” I teased her, handing her drink over.

“You could say I have a drinking problem,” she said, then appeared to panic. “A coffee drinking problem.”

I swirled my drink’s straw, lightly stirring it. “I don’t blame you. This beverage is one of the many delightful things found only on your plane.”

She looked at my drink, where the sugary brown substance was drizzled on top the whipped cream. “Do you actually like the taste?” she asked.

I tilted my head subtly. Was my Becky innocently asking, or was she attempting to flirt with me?

I swiped a finger through the whipped cream. “Yes,” I answered her, before licking the cream and caramel off it. “But more than that, I like the sticky.”

I watched her slowly turn red, and knew that even if I hadn’t caught her flirting, that she could read my tone.

It made me wonder what colors I could make other parts of her turn, given time and inclination.

“Ask me more questions,” I told her.

Anything to make her more comfortable with me.

So she asked me about where I grew up, what kind of schooling demons had, which plane was the prettiest, and what it was like to be in battle. I answered everything as truthfully as I could, but the last one threw me.

“Hm,” I said, buying myself time to think by finishing my drink off. “Well, while there’s a certain inevitability to it, I guess, because battles never just happen, it’s also not worth preparing too much for, because as you fight, the field can change. If you go into battle with too many preconceived notions—or you’re too sure of the outcome—you’ll lack the flexibility to take advantage of opportunities as they arise.” I sucked my straw clean, and then licked the last of the caramel off of my lips. “Sometimes all you can do is just smoke and let go.”

“Smoke? Like . . . humans smoke?” she asked.

“Yes. It doesn’t hurt our lungs. We’re not built like you.”

“It’s still a gross habit.” She wrinkled her nose.

“Fine,” I protested lightly. “I only smoke when I’m nervous, anyhow.”

She made an adorably confused face. “But why would you ever be nervous?”

I stared her down. “You tell me.”

I watched her pulse pound at her throat as she took a gulping inhale and swallowed it. “Quenalith—” she began.

“Quen,” I gently corrected her.

“Quen . . . I’m not going to sit here and lie and say I don’t like you, because I do. But whatever it is I think you’re looking for . . . I don’t think I can be that.” She rocked her lips between her teeth then slowly let them roll back out. “I have a fiancé, a job, an apartment, and a wedding. You seem amazing, you really do, but I’m not prepared to walk away from my whole life.”

And I, who had been on all the known different planes, and fought thousands of creatures in hundreds of battles, had never been wounded quite like this before.

“I see,” I said in a measured tone.

“Maybe . . . if we’d met a long time ago,” she went on, twisting the knife she’d slid into me. “Or, who knows, some far time in the future—but as for right now, all we can be is friends.”

I nodded slowly. “I hear you,” I said, but on the inside I seethed. How dare the universe present my zenuth to me and then take her away before I had a chance to make her mine.

It felt like some cruel new form of punishment, even worse than being caged in the summoning blocks.

She pulled her lower lip out a little and worried it between her fingers. “If that’s the case, Quen . . . I understand if you don’t really want to come to my bachelorette.”

“Are you saying you don’t want me to come?” I asked, bracing myself, and desperately wishing for a cigarette.

“No—we can be friends,” she said quickly. “If you want to be, that is.”

I was feared on many planes, and I was the last thing untold monsters had seen before they died, and yet here I was, lapping for any attention I could get.

Yes, I could’ve killed her fiancé, and his mother, or otherwise navigated their social ruin to free her, but I could tell my zenuth was like a budding flower.

If I plucked her too roughly she would bruise—and if I plucked her too quickly she wouldn’t bloom at all.

So if a friend was what she needed, then a friend was what I would give her.

Even as perhaps it killed me.

“I would like that,” I said, pulling out my phone. “Care to give me your number?”

She took it from me. Our fingers brushed, and I concentrated on the thrill of that small contact as I saw her type her number in then call herself so she had mine. “It’s sometime on Saturday,” she said, looking a little sheepish as she put me into her phone. “We’re still not super sure what the plan is, and it could be really boring, considering everything that seems to be your normal life, but I’ll make sure Gemma keeps you in the loop—if you get a text from a strange number talking about a party, that’s her. She’s my best friend.”

“Good,” I said, glad to be included, and glad that she had more friends. The more people that watered her with love the better.

And speaking of love . . . did she know what her fiancé had done with Remella?

If she didn’t, I had no business telling her—I didn’t want to hurt her.

But it stung that she was pulling back from me because of him, when he was clearly so unworthy.

She stood up and grabbed her purse. “I’d probably better get back before Bastiana wonders where I’ve gone.”

I stayed seated, rather than follow her like the slavering beast I was. “Thank you for showing me this place,” I told her.

She gave me a smile so bright it hurt me.

“Thanks for the coffee,” she said and left.

Chapter 11

Two days later, I was getting into the tiny car that Gemma had rented for the occasion, to haul Kelsey and I and three people’s worth of camping supplies out of the city and into the woods, all horribly wholesome-like.

“Whose good-bad idea was this?” I asked, laughing as I got into the passenger seat.

“Mine!” Kelsey said from the backseat, where she was lounging against a stack of rolled sleeping bags.

“Really?” I asked, twisting back. Kelsey seemed like the least outdoorsy person ever. Her manicures were always perfect, and she never had a single hair out of place.

“I didn’t do ten years of Girl Scouts for nothing,” she said, and grinned.

“And besides, we both thought you could do with some fresh air,” Gemma said, beaming.

It wasn’t lost on me that we were spending the night away. And while I was pretty sure both of my friends were still on the side of weddings and normalcy, I also wouldn’t put a thoughtful shenanigan past them.

I mean, once you started sewing wild oats, what was the difference between one . . . or twenty?

“Did you get in touch with her?” I asked Gemma, knowing she’d instantly know who I meant.

“I did. And I told her not to bring anything,” Gemma said, in a leading fashion. “Except for camping shit, that is.”

“Good. Thanks.” I relaxed back into my seat a little. Most people would assume a camping trip meant booze—but my friends had my back.

Two hours later we’d parked and followed a dusty trail in a quarter mile to a fairly desolate campsite, in a clearing between tall green trees with a firepit already full of wood in the center. There were bench-like logs around it to sit on, and plenty of flat paces to put up tents.

“Oh, thank God,” Kelsey said, spotting the pre-cut wood inside the pit. “I’d paid extra for them to bring it up here, but if they’d forgotten, I wouldn’t know how to complain. I lost cell service an hour back.”

Her saying that made me check my phone—and mine was gone, too. “I guess Logan’s on his own tonight.”

“I’m sure he’ll be just fine,” Gemma said, unshouldering her bags.

And thinking back to the last night I’d left him alone . . . “Yeah, me too.”

We each started to put up our own tents, but it was harder than the packaging made them look—so then we concentrated on doing one tent each, as a team, which made getting the ends of the sticks into the sewn creases easier but still seemed to take forever.

We were all having a good time though—Gemma was telling us all the local gossip her magazine couldn’t put on their website for fear of getting sued, and Kelsey kept interrupting with stories about this guy she kept running into.

“I thought you said guys at your work were off limits?” I teasingly complained as we got the final tent up.

“That was until I saw him in bike shorts,” Kelsey said with a leer, and Gemma and I both laughed.

We finished tamping the tent stakes in, and it was time to start a fire—the sun was about to fall down behind the tree line. I stretched my back, while Kelsey started doing what I assumed were required pre-fire things in the pit, while Gemma lined up an assembly line for making s’mores.

The moon had already risen tonight. It was high and clear in the sky, and it made me think of other moonrises not that long ago.

But Quenalith wasn’t here now, was she?

And in hindsight, it’d been naïve of me to think she’d want to come to my bachelorette—much less a version of it way the hell out here.

She’d ditched me, or she was lost—either way I had to make the best of it, which shouldn’t be too hard. I was with my friends, after all. And I didn’t even know what a stupid and unfair part of me was hoping for, when I gave Gemma her number to set things up.

I’d sat down beside Gemma to swipe a marshmallow, content to drown my sorrows in sugar and friendship, when I heard someone walking up the trail. I looked over—and there she was.

“I am sorry I am late,” Quen said, addressing our small group. “I had some matters to attend to.”

And she looked like she’d just come from another meeting, dressed in one of her omnipresent suits—only this time with a backpack on.

She swung it to the ground and took our group in. “I’m Quenalith,” she said, introducing herself to the others with a hand out. Kelsey and Gemma both shook hers in turn, and then she looked to me.

“I know who you are,” I said, and she grinned.

“I tried to read up on camping customs,” she said, taking off her suit jacket, and folding it over one of the carved log benches. “I have prepared a list of ten frightening stories to share,” she told us.

I giggled and Gemma laughed. “S’mores first,” Gemma said.

“Fire first,” Kelsey corrected her with a groan, which attracted Quen’s attention.

“Do you need help with that?” Quen asked, moving to kneel at her side.

Kelsey made a grumpy face and then sighed. “Yeah, I guess—if you want to give it a little whoosh-bang or something.”

“Whoosh . . . bang?” Quenalith asked her.

“You know,” Kelsey said, waving her hands in front of the pile of kindling.

“Ahhh . . . magic. No—I think your problem is more prosaic. It’s too windy,” she said—and then she batted out a wing.

A wing.

She had wings.

My heart stopped.

If I’d thought she was beautiful before—somehow the addition of one bat-like wing extended made her more so. It was slightly longer than her arms could’ve stretched, and you know how sometimes you see a form and you just know it’s balanced? Like da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, only in person, where the perfection of it just stuns you all at once?

Seeing her wing was like that.

I wanted to touch it. I wanted to run my fingers against its leather, I wanted to stroke the place where it sank into her skin, and more than anything else, I wanted to know how that would make her feel.

I heard Kelsey try her luck again with the lighter, and now that Quenalith’s wing was out and wind-blocking, the kindling must’ve taken because I heard her clap appreciatively.

“We’re in business, ladies!” Kelsey said, as Quenalith folded her wing back in, and it disappeared, taking all of its possibility with it.

“All right, Quenalith!” Gemma said excitedly beside me. “Please tell me this’ll be the first time you’ll have ever had a s’more!”

Quenalith looked over her shoulder to give Gemma a warm look. “Even if it’s not, I’ll lie.”

After that we just talked. Silly stories, things about our recent lives, that one weird guy on the subway, who somehow seemed to be on the subway, every day, every train, and hopes and plans and dreams.

Quenalith stayed quiet for most of this and while I felt a little bad, I didn’t blame her; me and the other girls were tight. I knew her stories from the coffee shop the other day were next-level. Not that my friends wouldn’t enjoy hearing them, but they wouldn’t really fit in to our normal lives.

Just like Quen couldn’t.

Not all the way.

For her part though, she seemed to be enjoying herself and was polishing off a fleet of s’mores.

“Yet another delicious Earth custom,” she said, working another marshmallow to a crisp at the end of a metal spear. “I like that you can catch them on fire before you eat them,” she said, and I couldn’t help but smile as she turned her attention toward me. “What other Earth customs are there that we can do?”

“Definitely not spin the bottle or truth or dare,” Gemma whispered. Kelsey snickered, as Quenalith gave me a confused look.

I mouthed the words “don’t ask” to her, then said, “You were right about the scary stories earlier—and I’m pretty sure you know the scariest ones. Want to share?”

“No, no, no!” Gemma cut in, her eyes lighting up. “Me first!”

Quen gestured to her and let her have the floor.

It took me a few minutes to realize that Gemma was basically telling Quenalith the plot of the Halloween movie franchise, with some extra urban legends thrown in. It took Kelsey slightly longer, but I could see by her face when she figured it out, and then both of us were biting back grins as Quen paid rapt attention.

“But if there was someone in her back seat with a knife—why didn’t she just jump out of the moving car?” Quen asked in all seriousness. “Or is the man in the truck going to hit her?” she asked, seeming inordinately concerned.

Gemma was beaming ear to ear. “Those are great questions, Quenalith, that I absolutely will get to—”

“She’s making it up, Quen,” I told her, unable to hold myself back anymore.

Quenalith blinked, and then rocked back. “Ahh—ohh.” She nodded, understanding. “Stories, not histories.”

She was still smiling though, and seemed to be chuckling a little to herself.

“Tell us one of yours?” I prompted.

She considered this, then shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. All of my monster stories are real. I get the mood of this now. I don’t think they’d be appropriate,” she said, then looked back to Gemma. “But in your story . . . does the girl get safely home?”

“When I’m telling it—always,” Gemma said, and finished her story, for Quen.

After that, not even the sugar high could keep us up. Kelsey yawned, and Gemma was wiping her face with the back of a hand.

I looked around and realized we were a tent short for our company. “Wait—Quen—what about your tent? Don’t we need to put it up?”

Quen looked at me strangely. “Why would I need a tent? I checked the weather—it’s perfectly fine. And I have camped in far worse places than this.”

I inhaled and bit my tongue before I could offer anything foolish, like her sleeping beside me. “Oh—okay—”

She was rustling in the bag she’d brought, and unfolded something to sleep on, on the ground.

Because she was totally fine out here. Alone.

Without me.

“This has been super fun,” Gemma said, giving us a wave before crawling into her tent. “And you’re a good sport, Quenalith.”

“I try,” Quenalith graciously agreed.

“G’night all!” Kelsey called, and then it was just the two of us and the dying embers of the fire.

Even if Gemma and Kelsey hadn’t coordinated leaving Quen and I alone together—I knew they’d done it on accidentally-on-purpose, via the powers of long-term-friend telepathy.

I crawled into my tent too, but left the flap open so that I could see out, and Quen could see in. “So . . . can you like, fly?”

The end of the fire cast her profile in shadows as she turned to look at me. “On certain planes.”

“Are humans ever allowed to visit?”

“Rarely. But sometimes we make dispensations for them. World leaders, academic faculty, and what not.”

“Oh. But never anyone . . . prosaic,” I asked, using her word from earlier back at her.

“Not really, no,” she said. “But your plane—your Earth—has much to offer.”

“Compared to all those other planes? No way.” I looked past her at the stars. “It’s strange to think there are so many other worlds out there though.”

Her gaze followed mine, rocking on her back to look up. “There’s not so many.”

“Easy for you to think. You’ve already seen them all,” I said lightly. It was true. She was a million-billion times more worldly—Earth and others—than I was.

She tilted her head back toward me, and I could tell she was watching me out of the corner of her eye. “And yet I had never had a s’more until tonight.”

I gave a light laugh. “Earth doesn’t count, Quen.”

“Why not?”

“It just doesn’t,” I said, shaking my head. “But—tell me what you see, when you look up at the stars.”

She licked her lips in thought. “Might I tell you a different story, instead?” she asked.

“Sure.” I scooted my sleeping bag up to the tent’s edge and played a hand through the grass just outside its door.

“All right,” she said, and started in with her melodious voice. “Once upon a time—because I hear that is how your kind starts stories—there was a woman who loved another woman with her entire heart and mind.” I stilled my hand, tensing. If either Gemma or Kelsey were still up, this was going to make for a very awkward drive home tomorrow. “They fought together across the planes,” she went on. “Back to back. Arms almost linked sometimes. They trusted one another, utterly.”

And that was when I realized I needed to get my head out of my ass, because not everything was about me.

She told me about three battles in particular, where the women had fought against dire, dire odds, and the entire time my heart was clenched.

I kept waiting for the inevitable part where one of them made a misstep, and one of the women died. Or got trapped in a “chasm of eternity” by one of the cave-troll things it sounded like they were fighting.

Because the longer the story went on, the more certain I felt that it couldn’t have a happy ending.

“Then they were both released from their commissions, and they chose to live in peace.” She slowed in her telling, and I could feel that this story was costing her. “Here. On Earth. To eat salmon and explore its gentle beauty for the rest of their long lives.” She paused.

“And then what?” I whispered.

She didn’t answer me for ten heartbeats.

Twenty.

Fifty.

“And then that didn’t happen,” she said, so softly I could only barely hear.

I reached my hand out toward her without thinking—she was in pain, I knew it, and the thought of her hurting was unbearable.

Without looking over, she placed her hand on top of mine, pressing it gently into the ground. I flipped my hand over instantly, so that our fingers could twine, and I could be there for her. She took it for the kindness that it was, holding my hand back and stroking her thumb softly against my wrist and palm.

I didn’t know how long we stayed like that—only that I didn’t want to be the one to pull away first.

“Go to sleep, human,” she whispered, as she let go of my hand. “I will make sure the flames quench.”

And I didn’t know what to say then, either—I just retreated into my tent, to do as I’d been told.

Chapter 12

Quenalith was gone in the morning when we woke up, backpack and all.

“Wow,” Gemma said, after she’d finished brushing her teeth with water from a water-bottle. “Now I can see why, well, you know.”

She waggled her eyebrows at me.

I ran my fingers through my hair and blew out air. “Yeah.”

But if anything . . . her coming here last night had only helped to convince me to stay strong. Quen was so different in so many ways: her life, her stories, her wings.

And . . . there was a good chance she was just looking for a rebound.

Was I tempted?

Fuck yes.

But I knew it was only because it the kind of idea that was so bad it seemed good. Like releasing a tiger into a room just to get a chance to pet it. Sure, it’d feel nice for a time, but someone was going to wind up getting mauled.

Kelsey emerged from her tent, her hair somehow perfect.

“How do you do that?” Gemma asked her, and I laughed.

“I’ll never tell,” Kelsey said and grinned. “C’mon ladies, let’s pack up.”

They dropped me off at my place with my bag, and I took the elevator up. It was Sunday afternoon . . . just a mere six days until my wedding.

But even though my reflection in the elevator looked a little haggard—everything was going well.

I had made a decision.

I just needed to stick to it.

And—I’d managed to get through the prior night without doing anything dumb. Something that even Gemma and Kelsey could attest to.

Double and—I hadn’t even wanted to drink once last night!

I was living life on the straight and narrow now.

I was so good!

I unlocked our apartment door and called out to let Logan know I was home. He didn’t answer—I assumed he was gone. I hitched my bag up, aiming for the laundry room, and a shower wouldn’t hurt to get the ground-sleeping kinks out of my neck . . . but I slipped on something on my way there.

I caught myself, then looked down, slowly kneeling to inspect what had almost tripped me.

Salt.

I drummed my fingers once, twice, on the ground beside it, thinking.

Old salt?

Or new salt?

Because while I only had access to credit cards, Logan actually had his dearly departed daddy’s bank account, and could order up a case of summoning kits directly.

Then I heard a key in the lock behind me, and quickly stood. Logan was there, wearing gym clothes and was slightly sweaty. “Hey, baby!” he said at seeing me. “How was your trip?”

“It was good,” I said, because it had been, until just thirty seconds ago. “I was on my way to take a shower—”

“Want some company?” he asked, with the kind of slight leer that used to turn me on, the kind of look that said he knew things that I didn’t.

Maybe that was still true now.

But maybe I didn’t want to know them anymore.

“Nah—I’m too exhausted, really. There were so many crickets out there—they kept me up all night.”

He laughed. “City girl.”

“You know it,” I said, leaning up to peck his cheek, even as salt ground beneath my shoe.

* * *

I managed to stay away from Becky for fifty-six hours.

The first day was easy—I felt embarrassed. I wasn’t sure why I’d felt compelled to tell her any part of Sheloi’s and my story.

Would she think it an act of desperation?

A maudlin plea for a pity fuck?

All I knew is that it had been a very, very long time since I had taken that much armor off, metaphorically, and afterwards I felt exposed and raw—I had come back welcoming the solitude of my home, and all the pieces of actual armor on display around me.

The second day, I began to pace.

The tactician in me couldn’t just let things go—sure I’d sworn to be friends with her. It wheedled. But-but-but, it began, trying to crawl out of its cage.

I just kept using bigger locks, telling myself all of my relationships ended in despair, that it wasn’t right of me to destroy her life, and the most honest one of all—that if I came on too strongly, I’d frighten her.

But . . . Saturday was coming.

And when it got here, it’d be too late.

The problem was that I didn’t know what to do. I’d never been confronted by any difficulty I couldn’t shoot, stab, or slice through.

I always got what I wanted—with the exception of Sheloi’s life, and in that case, I had gotten rich revenge.

But other than the awful moment when I had lost Sheloi . . . I had never felt so helpless in my life.

Like someone was stepping on my back and ripping out my wings, just when I had been so close to flying again.

I broke down and texted Becky on Wednesday, after I’d made some other calls.

* * *

When I’d gotten in on Monday, Bastiana had pulled me aside, and the unthinkable had happened.

She had asked for my opinion on something!

She didn’t know any artists who would go through all the hassle of displaying their work at the gallery when they wouldn’t get a proper show, and it would only be one and a half weeks—but she thought I might know some artists who would jump at the chance—and she was right. I did.

I called Kial instantly, and they brought their portfolio over immediately. Bastiana had surveyed it, sniffed, and shrugged, but that was enough—I had a crack team of other artists assembled Tuesday morning, helping us get all of Kial’s art on the walls as quickly as possible to maximize their exposure. Bastiana stayed inside her office, and the gallery was essentially mine.

For the first time . . . I was in charge. And I was the one who got to stalk around, thinking.

I knew Bastiana wouldn’t let me throw a proper party, or give me a budget for salmon—these pieces were priced a lot lower than our usual stuff—but maybe there was some way I could do a little something.

Maybe on Thursday night when Logan went to Vegas.

Bastiana always left at six on the dot. Maybe I could throw an underground art reception, and what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

I was madly coordinating this via text on Wednesday when I got a message in from Quenalith. Want to give me a tour of the MoMu today?

I stared at it and sighed. On literally any other day, yes—but Bastiana’s letting me show a local artist through the end of next week. This gallery’s my baby right now.

Got it, Quenalith had texted back.

Which was why I was surprised to see her and Gemma both walk through the door, ninety minutes later.

“Quen? Gemma?”

“Is the wicked witch dead?” Gemma quietly asked.

I blinked as Quenalith laughed.

“Why didn’t you tell me you’d gotten to pick the next artist to show!” Gemma hissed in glee.

“Because I’ve been so busy trying to make it happen!”

“Yes, well,” Quen said, coming up behind Gemma. “Gemma’s agreed to watch the floor here for the next hour so you can take me on a tour.”

“What?” I said in disbelief. “No.”

Gemma clucked her tongue and held her hands up like she was holding a phone. “Promising new gallery scion chooses her first artist for Bastiana’s,” she said. She mimed scrolling through an article as I gawked.

“I just figured if she was here,” Quenalith said, nodding at Gemma, “then she’d be able to get all the information she needed for her next article is all.”

I felt myself flushing at the thought, then remembered Quen had an ulterior motive.

“While I take you on a museum tour?” I asked, snorting a little.

“Couldn’t hurt,” she said, giving me a grin. “Craylock got me an invite to talk to the board this afternoon. I’m thinking of donating money toward a new wing, but I honestly would like to know what I was getting into—and I could bring you with me.”

I swallowed. That . . . actually was a large opportunity. I looked to Gemma. “You swear not to screw anything up, and to lie profusely if Bastiana comes out?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” she said, then started wandering taking photos of the work.

“And?” I called after her. She looked back at me. “Don’t post your article until Thursday. After five. I might have an interesting addendum.”

“You got it,” she said, giving me finger guns and then shooing me off.

“I can’t believe you,” I told Quen the second we were outside.

“Well, if you didn’t want me to contact your friends, you shouldn’t have given me their phone numbers,” she said, chuckling. She swooped her hair out of her face with one hand, looking over, and the afternoon sunlight caught the green of her skin just right—it made her look luminescent, and it took my breath away.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said, shaking my head quickly, coming back to Earth. “A whole new wing? How much does deviltry pay?”

She laughed and gave me an open smile. “You’d be surprised.”

By the time we got to the MoMu I was nervous about leaving Bastiana’s, and doubly so about meeting the board, so I dragged us down one more block to the city’s more general art museum, the Keene, an older museum for representational art.

“Can we start here?” I asked her.

“Of course,” she said. “I’d go on any tour with you.”

I waved to the women behind the counter, who all knew I had a season pass plus one, and took Quenalith to my favorite floor, the one with the room full of English romantic paintings: beautiful pastures with satyrs chasing nymphs, gorgeous, stately funeral processions of horses and armored men, women eating ripe fruit and giving one another quiet smiles.

Quen walked toward the piece displayed in the center of the room immediately. It was Waterhouse’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci, on loan from a museum in Germany—it told the story of a knight being led astray by a woman who was pulling him down, both with a scarf around his neck, and the power of her eyes.

Quenalith looked back at me. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for such a literal soul.”

“Surprise!” I told her with light sarcasm. “No, you’re right. Most times I do like the ferocity of more modern pieces, like what I’ve got at Bastiana’s right now. But these ones are all so perfect and dreamlike, they make me feel . . .” I let my voice drift, not capable of defining it really. Everything inside these frames was beautiful, warm, and safe.

Seeing them always felt like coming home.

And they were why I’d first been drawn to viewing art, before quickly discovering that while I thought I had taste, I did not actually possess a single artistic bone in my body and couldn’t draw if my life depended on it.

I inhaled deeply, trying to decide if I should come clean with Quen or not—then remembered this past weekend, when her thumb had stroked my wrist. She’d shared something deep with me . . . maybe I should share something of my own in return. “I ran away the day I found out my parents died.”

Quenalith had wandered on to look at the next painting, but suddenly I had her full attention. She returned instantly, standing in front of me, all of her muscles tensed on my behalf, like if there was something she could kill for me she would, while her liquid brown eyes were full of soft concern.

“I was ten. Fourth grade. The only way I could get around was the bus. So while my grandma was crying, I climbed out a window and caught one, and after about twenty stops I got out here.” I didn’t know what to do with her emotion on top of mine—looking away was safest. “There was a nice lady at the front desk who asked me my name and let me through—but told me I couldn’t leave without checking in with her. And then I came here, and I walked from painting to painting, staring at the perfect places held inside them, wishing so desperately I could just pull myself through. To go to a soft and perfect world, another place, where things were better.”

“Becky,” Quenalith said my name quietly and reached out a hand, but I didn’t take it, I was afraid if I did I wouldn’t finish talking.

“Then a few hours later my grandmother caught up with me—the lady had called the police, who’d called her—and I got the spanking of a lifetime.” I sniffed, running the back of one hand beneath my nose. “But I still believe that good art can be a doorway to another, better place, if you can let it. That it can heal you. And that’s why I like my job, Quen. It’s important to help as many people create doors as they can—because you never know when someone else might need them.”

She reached for my chin, pulled up my face, and I watched her open her mouth. I expected to hear another “I’m sorry” like all the other useless “I’m sorrys” I’d already heard a lifetime of before, but what she said was, “Come here,” before offering the safety of her arms.

I stepped inside them without thinking. I felt them close around me, then I was trembling against her once again. She held me tight with one arm, while soothing the other up and down my back.

“It’s okay,” she whispered into my hair, and something about the tone of her voice and the way she held me made me think it really might be.

Tears rushed my eyes faster than I could blink them back. It’d been so long since I’d told anyone that story, and so long since I’d cried hard, but for some strange reason I felt safe around her. I cried in her arms without fear, and without shame. I didn’t even worry about other museum patrons seeing me—if art couldn’t make you cry sometimes, what good was it?

“It’s okay,” she whispered, running the line of her jaw over the top of my head. “I’ve got you.”

I took a great shuddering inhale and collected myself, pulling back, my eyes puffy and my nose wet.

“Oh my gosh, Quen,” I said, batting at her neck ineffectually. “I’ve gotten make-up and snot all over your nice suit.”

She caught my hand in hers and stopped me. “It’s art. I’ll frame it,” she said, her lips quirking up into a sorrowful tease. “Are you better?” she asked, running a hand against my cheek and up into my hair, rubbing the path my tears had taken away with her thumb.

“No,” I told her, shaking my head, pulling myself together. “But I will be.”

“Come to my meeting with me,” she said, tracing her hand down my arm to reach for my hand.

My eyes widened and I stepped away. “No—we didn’t even get to look at their exhibits, and I’m a mess.”

“I don’t care,” she said, closing the distance between us.

I put a curled-up fist to my chest. “But I do, Quen—I have a reputation to uphold. I do want to meet them . . . but I want them to take me seriously. I don’t want to be looking like this, hanging weakly on some donor’s arm.”

Quenalith’s eyebrows rose as she appraised me. “Fair,” she intoned.

“Thank you.” I wiped beneath my eyes with both hands. “You should go make your meeting on time,” I said, and she nodded as I stepped even further away. “But keep your dance card empty tomorrow night.”

Her head tilted, letting her hair hang freely. “Why?”

I tried my best to give her a mysterious smile. “If I pull things off, I’ll let you know.”

Chapter 13

Logan kissed me before I even got up the next morning—he was taking a red-eye to Vegas, checking in early to a room he’d already booked, then taking a half-day nap so that he could get up refreshed for his bachelor party on local time.

I woke up enough to hug him, even though I could tell he was antsy to leave. “Don’t do anything too crazy—promise?”

He laughed. “Don’t worry, I won’t do anything you wouldn’t, Becs.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” I said, knowing all the things I’d gotten up to recently.

“That’s right—because I’m out there to have fun,” he teased, oblivious, then leaned forward to kiss me once again. “I’ll be back Friday night, and then the next morning—”

“Yeah,” I breathed quietly. “The big day at the big church.”

“You and me,” he promised, as it felt like my throat was squeezing shut. “For the rest of our lives.”

I squeaked out, “Exactly,” and then he was gone.

I should’ve slept in for another few hours, but the second I was awake, all my plans started rattling around in my head, and it was easier to concentrate on them then to think about Saturday.

Could I really pull everything tonight off by my lonesome—and under Bastiana’s nose?

There was only one way to find out—and I was pretty sure she wouldn’t fire me two days before my wedding.

Mostly.

The day at the gallery passed in a combination guilt and excitement.

Everything was as ready as I could make it—all I had to do was send out texts at six ten.

Then Bastiana drifted by my desk at five-fifty-five. “Have you heard from Logan?” she asked, shaking her phone like he lived inside it.

“Yeah. He texted me when his plane touched down.”

“Oh good,” she said, making a face. “Lord only knows what he’s getting up to this evening,” she told me, then sighed heavily, reaching over to put an awkwardly maternal hand on my forearm. “You’ll have to learn to be tolerant of Graff men’s foibles, marrying into our line.”

I gave her a tight smile. “I think I can manage.”

“Ha,” she said quickly. “That’s what I thought too. His father didn’t settle down until I’d given him Logan. Seemed to wake him right up—that’s what I recommend. And it’s better to have them young—easier to regain your figure.”

I blinked at her and swallowed. This might have been the most sequential sentences Bastiana had ever said to me, all at one time.

“I know you’re alone this evening, dear,” she went on. “Would you like to come over to my place, for a night cap? And then I could give you more life advice?”

I bit my lips. Bastiana didn’t know I’d had a drinking problem—she’d always been too self-absorbed to notice, and I’d been excellent at faking sobriety. “No—thank you. I’ve already planned a quiet night in. My girlfriends are coming over, we were going to order Italian.”

“Carbs? Two nights before your wedding? I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” She sniffed, then sighed. “In any case, lock up, and take tomorrow off.”

I blinked at her. “Really?”

“Well, the gallery is going to be closed this weekend, after all. And, nothing personal, but I doubt much of this will sell,” she said, giving the room a look around. “Some of it is pretty on the walls, yes, but it doesn’t have the presence of my typical selections. You’ll get there,” she said—perhaps the kindest thing she’d ever said to me—then gave my arm another pat, and with that, at six oh-two, Bastiana Graff was out the door.

I counted out sixty heartbeats and then started hitting up assorted group texts on my phone.

Almost immediately, three things happened: Gemma posted a “late-night update!” to her magazine’s website in their local interest area, saying that Bastiana’s gallery was featuring a brand-new, up-and-coming artist for one week only and celebrating with an underground party—all of my friends and local contacts knew they needed to come and help me, immediately—and I ordered ten pepperonis, ten veggie pizzas, and three of each with gluten-free crusts for delivery.

Because I hadn’t been entirely lying to Bastiana after all—my girlfriends were coming over, and we were eating pizza.

I had most of the folded tables out of storage by the time the first people from the local scene hit the door, and at the thought of having a party here under Bastiana’s nose, well—word got out. People were happy to pitch in and set the tables out for future pizza, a friend of a friend brought massive speakers to play their playlist, and still others brought in coolers full of ice.

And all of Kial’s friends had pitched in to bring them a case of champagne.

“Thank you so much for taking a chance on me,” they said. “I can’t believe it.”

“If I’ve sold out the gallery once, I can do it again,” I told them and laughed. The more people who arrived and were having fun, walking around and talking about their art, the lighter my heart felt. I took Kial’s shoulders in my hands.

“This is your night. Own it,” I said, and air-kissed near their cheek.

I went back to my old haunt behind the desk out of familiarity. One of my favorite things to do ever was to watch other people enjoy things—which was another of the joys of introducing people to new art.

Standing outside the circles of everyone gathered though . . . I wondered if I was using the desk as a shield.

Now that I wasn’t drinking . . . all there was was the real me. And while I’d been “good” for a while now about just hanging out with my best friends and avoiding extra stress—the addition of Quenalith to my life aside—trying to be less anxious and more present and less worried about everyone else’s feelings . . . well, that shit was hard.

For some reason, it was far easier to make sure everyone else was having a good time than it was to try to have one myself.

Maybe even to admit that I deserved to have a good time.

Especially without drinking.

Because I kind of liked the girl that I was when I was drunk—she was brave enough to think a demonic threesome was a good idea, she was fun, and she fit in with Logan. It was terribly hard to imagine that people wanted to stick around for this version of me, who felt a million times less exciting and who possibly possessed the nervous system of a chihuahua.

But . . . people were here, weren’t they?

And maybe I should join them.

As if to confirm this decision, I heard a familiar voice booming from the front door. “Make way!”

I looked over and Quen was there, with some sort of Styrofoam container in her hands, fog drifting from its sides. People fell back at the command of her voice, and the party parted, allowing her and ten demons, some of whom I recognized, to come in. She went straight for the catering tables, and I met her there, watching her shove pizzas over to set what she’d brought down.

“Sometimes, we can even bring our own salmon,” she said, taking the lid off and revealing meaty slabs of pink meat in a rose formation over dry ice.

I laughed and grinned. “Did you also happen to bring any forks?” I asked, because I didn’t have them—I was lucky we had napkins.

“We’re demons, dear,” Craylock said, coming up, to reach into the container with his hands, tearing off a strip of salmon to slurp up. “We only pretend to be civilized.”

The addition of demons—and the possibility all of their money—increased the stakes for Kial. I made sure to go grab them and introduce him to Craylock, who then took Kial under his wing, metaphorically.

“I like this,” Quenalith said, when I finished a round of hosting and felt like I could pause nearby. The music was cranked, some people were having heavy conversations in corners, while others were dancing in the more open areas—it was perfect. “It feels like the celebrations we would have after battles,” she went on.

“I like it too,” I confessed. I knew I might not always be able to get away with something so rowdy—and I knew half the crowd was here just for the satisfaction of snubbing Bastiana—but it still felt good. “How did your meeting with the board go?”

“Spectacularly,” Craylock answered on her behalf, as he came up. “Who knew how interested in art our girl was.”

Quenalith lightly scoffed. “I have money, they like money—it wasn’t all that hard.”

“Yes, but you managed to be charming, a skill I know is difficult for you,” he teased her. She eyed him wildly, and I snickered. “See?” Craylock said, gesturing at me. “She also has your number.”

“I’m sorry, Quen,” I said, agreeing with him, while wincing on her behalf. “You’re just generally better at looming, I think, is all.”

“Comes with the conquering,” Craylock said.

“Shush, old man, or I will leave with all your salmon,” she complained.

He guffawed. “Like there’s any salmon left!”

I put a hand to my mouth and giggled helplessly. Quen was right. This felt good. Then I realized it was eleven, which meant that it was 8 p.m. in Vegas, and that this party was too good—Bastiana was bound to find out about it, first thing tomorrow. I should check in with Logan—if his mom was going to yell at him while he was undoubtedly hung over, he deserved a warning.

“I’ll be right back, okay?” I told the demons, while taking my phone and ducking into Bastiana’s office.

Logan’s phone rang and rang, and it was fine by me if I went to voicemail; I was sure he was someplace just as busy as here and twice as loud.

But then he picked up, sounding sloppy. “Oh my God, Becs!” he shouted into the phone as I pulled it away from my ear. “I’m having such a good time! Babe, I love you so much!”

I grinned at Bastiana’s wall. “I love you too!” I shouted back at him—probably the first time I’d told him that in days.

But I was filled with love right now for everyone, riding the high of pulling my reception off.

“Babe—babe—I gotta go, okay? I’ll call you back tonight though.”

“Don’t, I’ll be asleep, silly. Just—if your mom calls you tomorrow, tell her everything’s fine.”

There was some commotion in the distance behind him. “What? Yeah—sure!” he agreed. “Bye!” he yelled.

“Bye,” I said more quietly, holding the phone and grinning.

“No, that was just Becky,” he explained to his friends, before I could hang up. Things were quieter now—perhaps they were in a car? I inhaled to shout at him that his phone was still on, and I could hear him, when I hear one of his friends ask him a muffled question. “Oh, no, man, you should’ve seen her,” he exclaimed, and I paused, frozen. “She was so hot.”

My thumb stopped pre-swipe.

Who was?

The demoness he’d slept with twice now, maybe?

“Yeah, no, she was so into it, she was all over the other girl,” he said and chuckled roughly. “There’s nothing like watching your fiancée eat another girl out. Even if that girl is green.”

I counted out five heartbeats as I heard his friends cheer, and then I came to my senses and hung up the line.

It didn’t matter how good or bad I’d been all along.

Because Logan was in Vegas making up lies about me regardless.

“Becs?” There was a knocking at the door. I turned and I saw Gemma. “You coming back to the party?”

I latched onto her, knowing just what I was going to do next. “You know how I’d trust you with my life, Gemma?” I asked her.

She made a smug face. “Obviously.”

“Well, now I’m trusting you with these,” I said, dangling out the keys to the gallery. “Something’s come up, I’ve gotta go.”

My best friend read me like a book. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, it’s fine, I just need to put out some fires at home is all. But please—let everyone stay here as long as they want. If you can’t figure out how to use the iPad with the credit card swipe, and people are serious, get their info, and I’ll call them back tomorrow. Tell Kial I love them, and everyone else thank you.”

“Becky,” Gemma said, her voice low. “For reals?”

“Yeah,” I said, giving her a brave smile. “Totally. I’ll just sneak out the back.”

And once she was gone, I did just that, grabbing one of Kial’s chilling celebratory bottles of champagne on my way out the door.

Chapter 14

The bottle of champagne sat beside me like an extra passenger on the subway, and it was so late at night there wasn’t anyone to mind.

“You gonna have fun with that?” a homeless person asked, and for a slim second I contemplated giving it to him, before deciding not to.

“I sure hope so,” I told him, before moving it into my lap.

Our doorman gave me a thumbs up coming in, and by the time the elevator had hit my floor, I had the wire cage off the end of the bottle, the cork out, and was glugging.

Fuck not drinking.

Fuck Logan.

Fuck my life.

And most importantly—fuck being good.

I wiped a smear of bubbles away from my chin and let myself into my apartment. I burped, kicked off my shoes, untucked my shirt, and ran my fingers roughly through my hair.

This was me.

This would always be me.

It didn’t matter how hard I tried or how good I pretended to be or whatever the fuck plans I made to escape myself—I would always be the same me underneath.

The girl I was now, who was anxious and scared and who used alcohol like putty to fill in all her cracks.

I stumbled to our couch, turned on the TV, put on whatever was first on Netflix, and took long determined drinks straight from the bottle, letting the alcohol and my rising stomach acid burn the back of my nose.

The sooner I wasn’t thinking—or feeling—the better.

How the fuck had I ever managed weeks of sobriety?

And why had I bothered?

It hadn’t gained me a goddamned thing.

When I hit the end of the bottle, I pulled out my secret stash of vodka, and after that I had no idea what time it was anymore, or how long the show had been playing. I was stretched out on the couch like someone had dropped me there. The room was spinning, and I was close to blacking out.

Then my doorbell rang.

What few braincells I still had present flickered back to life. Had Bastiana found out? Had the gallery burned down? I was sure as shit it wasn’t Logan.

The person at the door hammered against it. “Becky, are you in there?”

Quenalith. Fuck.

“Don’t make me use magic, Becky—open up.”

“I can’t,” I slurred from the couch.

“Can’t, or won’t? One I’ll respect, the other—oh, fuck this,” I heard her mutter, right before the door opened. She was still in the suit she’d been in at the party, and here I was, the literal definition of a drunken mess. I grabbed the nearest bottle and clutched it to my chest to shield me.

She stepped in and closed the door behind herself, crossing the room quickly, looking at me with increasing concern. “What happened to you?”

“Nothing,” I said, curling up into a ball to hide from her. “This is me!”

“Becky.” The disappointment in her tone was obvious.

“Yep!” I went on, gleefully torching everything I could. “This,” I said, gesturing at myself, “is the girl you are into. This is who I fucking am. So congrats, really, on getting out.”

The look on her face softened as she came near, pushing away the coffee table to kneel down at my side.

“This is not you, Becky,” she told me softly. “It may be a part of you, yes, but it doesn’t have to define you.”

I closed my eyes, shook my head, and then instantly regretted the motion. “Quen—you don’t even know me,” I told her, opening my eyes back up. Everything behind her spun, but her face was oddly clear.

“I know enough,” she said, picking me up—and a moment later I was gone.

* * *

I couldn’t use magic in public on Earth, but on my plane there were no treaties. I portaled the both of us back home.

Becky was practically boneless in my arms. I had to carefully navigate her through doorways, until I reached my bedroom and could lay her out upon my sheets. She sprawled in passed-out disarray with the scent of alcohol heavy on her breath, a bottle clutched to her chest.

I sat beside her, my heart sinking as I stared down.

Despite all the pieces of armor and weaponry on my walls, demons were not invincible creatures.

We did die, and we could be killed.

Which was something I knew, of course, coming from a century’s worth of battles . . . and from the night I’d lost Sheloi.

We’d been up in the woods outside this city, not far from where Becky’s group had camped, looking at a home on Earth where we could rest together. Enjoy each other’s company. Eat sushi every Sunday, for all the remaining weeks of our lives.

But on our way back from that, our car had been hit by a massive personal vehicle, the kind men seemed fond of there. There’d been no way for me to avoid the impact; the truck didn’t even try to stop. It shoved us off the road so hard it rolled up the side of our car, sending spinning wheels through her window, crushing her door and side of the car in. Sheloi shrieked, my vision was obscured by smoke from burning rubber, and underneath that bitterness I could scent her blood.

I used every spell I could. But I wasn’t fast enough or strong enough, or the initial damage had just been too much—Sheloi died in my arms that night and a part of me, I thought, died with her.

A part I believed I would never get back.

And so, after I lay her down and placed a kiss upon her brow, I crawled out of the wreckage of our car and climbed up his to find him bleeding too, draped across his steering wheel, his foot still on the gas, and the floor of his ridiculous vehicle rattling with empties.

Was he hurt?

Yes.

Might he have survived?

No one would ever know—because I disemboweled him.

I wanted him to scream like my Sheloi.

I wanted to see him lose just as much blood.

And by the time more of my kind arrived, portaling in in the darkness to stop me, it was too late for him. He was a shredded mess, his own guts quivering atop the aluminum cans and glass bottles strewn inside his car.

The demons who’d found me convened a quick court. I’d obviously broken the treaty, but there were extenuating circumstances, and the human himself had been drunk. So in their infinite wisdom my people decided to hide my crime for me and throw me in the summoning cages, to be at humanity’s beck and call, expressly forbidden to harm any that I served.

They thought that that would be punishment enough, but they were wrong, because I felt far more punished here, now, knowing that my zenuth had so easily turned to drinking when all she had had to do was call me.

I pried the bottle away from her—why was she holding onto it, and not my hand?—and hurled it across the room, listening to it shatter.

How could I not have known this about her?

I scanned through my memories, looking for signs that I’d missed, and found none.

Which was, possibly, a sign in and of itself.

I’d watched her drinking at Bastiana’s dinner party—and yet when I’d kissed her in the garden, I hadn’t tasted any on her lips.

Her own friend Gemma had sent me a text telling me that her bachelorette party was not one of “those” kinds of parties, and when I’d inquired what she meant she’d told me explicitly to not bring booze.

I pushed a lock of Becky’s hair away from her face. For all that she’d fallen tonight . . . I didn’t think she wanted to be like this.

She had been trying.

Something had done this to her.

And if someone had hurt her—oh, how I would hurt them back.

* * *

When I woke up, I felt sick, and the room was still spinning—so much so that it didn’t even look like my room anymore, because I knew Logan and I didn’t have any swords in cases on our walls.

Then I blinked, coming to my senses.

Swords. On the walls.

I wasn’t in my apartment.

I lifted my head up too quickly, making it ache—and saw a green arm around my waist.

I wasn’t even on my plane.

Quenalith stirred beside me, waking up as I did. She was wearing a flowy white top with long sleeves and not much else. “You rise,” she said softly, smiling.

I put my hands to my head. “Oh my God. What happened?”

Was there a reason I was here? Had I slept with her? If I had, and I couldn’t remember it, I would figure out a fucking way to go back in time or die trying.

“You tell me,” she said, sitting up much more quickly than I could have. She rocked off her bed and I watched her walk away. Somehow she seemed even more naked now than she had the night of the summoning, with her lithe green legs leading up to the curve of her ass, which was cupped by different fabric and only barely hidden by the shirt she wore. It was because she was casual, I think—her guard was down.

I’d never seen her like this before.

She exited the room, and I heard her doing something, then she returned with what looked like a mug of tea. “This doesn’t taste good, but it should fix your head. Sip it slowly.”

I took it from her. It smelled awful—I’d never manage more than one sip—so I just took a glug—and I could feel the substance hit my stomach and fight with the remains of all the alcohol.

“Oh my God,” I exclaimed again, before slapping a hand across my mouth to help hold back my rising bile.

“Over there,” she said quickly, pointing, and I bolted, finding myself in her incredibly tasteful bathroom—everything in it was carved from swirling crystalline formations. I collapsed over what I prayed was the toilet and puked my guts out, wrapping my arms wearily around its sides.

I did feel better when I was through—just in time to feel worse, again, about being my most authentic self here on her bathroom floor.

She sat on the edge of what I thought was a tub beside me—it looked like it was carved out of a giant amethyst gemstone—and she placed a gentle hand on my back.

“Maybe just don’t look at me,” I told her.

“Why?” she asked, sounding hurt.

“Because.” I tilted my head away from her—everything in her bathroom was clean and perfect. Just like it’d been in the other room—belongings and art, like in a tastefully displayed museum. And then there was me. “I’m disgusting.”

“No you’re not, Becky. You’re beautiful.”

I rocked my head against my arms. “Don’t say that—”

“Why?” she pressed.

I swallowed, tasting the stomach acid I’d just puked up wash back down. “Because it’s not fair to me when you say things you don’t mean.”

Five heartbeats.

Ten.

“I’ve never lied to you, Becky,” she said softly. “What happened?”

I thought back, trying to remember, then when I did I felt myself fold inward. “Can I clean myself up first?”

“Of course,” she said, rising graciously and offering me a hand. “Help yourself to anything you want. I’ll wait in the other room.”

I let her leave me behind and made my way to her sink, splashing water on my face and going through the things on her agate countertop until I found one that might have been toothpaste and put it on a finger to scrub off my tongue.

I was still wearing what I’d been in the prior night, the now-wrinkled linen shirt and pencil skirt I always wore at Bastiana’s.

Bastiana’s . . . where was my phone? Had Gemma closed everything up okay? Did Bastiana already know about everything, and was she yelling Logan’s ear off?

Had I fucked up everything?

If I had, did I care?

The thought of Logan just making up wild stories about me hit me harder than it should have. Kelsey was right. She’d always been right.

I dragged myself back out to Quenalith’s bedroom, my shoulders slumped, and found her sitting on the end of her bed. She hadn’t taken the opportunity to get dressed; instead, she had one elegant leg tucked under herself, patiently waiting.

“Becky . . . what happened?” she asked again.

I put a fist to my mouth.

“What happened was you,” I told her, barely audible around it.

Chapter 15

Quenalith’s eyes widened and I watched her hold her breath.

“Not you literally . . . but the thought of you,” I told her. “And the way Logan is, and the way he’ll always be . . .” I put my back to the one empty space on the wall behind me and sank down it to wrap my arms around my knees. “I called him last night. He was in Vegas, he left his phone on a little too long, and I heard him talking to his friends.”

Quen’s face was graced with consternation—a slight furrow between her perfect brows, and a small pout to her full lips. “If I have brought dishonor on you, I am deeply sorry.”

“No.” I sniffed. “That’s the thing, Quen. He was telling them about a night that didn’t even happen. Some story about me going down on some demon chick—like in his dreams, but not in my real life. He was straight-up lying to them.”

She began making a low growling sound, which was ominous even though she was half-dressed. “Toward what end?”

“To be popular, to sound cool—I don’t know. The thing is that I’ve been trying so hard to be everything he and his family wanted,” I said, slowing down as realizations hit, “and then in the end, it wasn’t good enough.”

I’d made all my plans and been tying myself into a pretzel . . . for what? I bit my lips and looked very intensely at where my toes wriggled into her plush carpeting, feeling adrift anew, the very thing that I’d been hustling my whole life, ever since my parents’ deaths, to avoid.

Quen got off of her bed and crawled down to put herself on my level until I had no choice but to look into her deep brown eyes.

“I want you,” she said quietly.

Ten heartbeats.

Twenty.

“Why on Earth, Quen?” I asked her quietly, because we literally weren’t on it.

“Because,” she answered simply. “I like it when you think, Becky—and I always want to know what you are thinking. You have a kind heart—I’ve seen it so often since I’ve met you. And I find you beautiful, even when you’re worried that you’re not.” She crawled a little nearer. “You don’t have to change or try to please me, Becky. I not only want you—I want you as you are.”

Tears I was ashamed of sprang to my eyes. “I’m not special, Quen.”

She tilted her head, letting her hair hang freely. “Why would you believe that, when you could believe me?”

“Because,” I repeated back to her. “Believing you is scary.”

“Then I shall believe for the both of us.”

She made it sound like it was that easy—and maybe for her it was.

Couldn’t I at least try, though?

She ran her hand into my hair and looked at me with her dark eyes. I leaned toward her, looping my arms around her neck, willing myself to believe, trying my hardest to have hope.

“May I kiss you, Becky?” she asked as her gaze searched mine.

“Yes,” I breathed. “Please.”

She made an appreciative sound as her hand in my hair cinched tight to keep me still, and then she opened my mouth with hers, pressing into mine with her tongue, giving me languorous kisses, a slow yet passionate invasion that I gladly accepted.

This is happening, a small part of me whispered. I couldn’t believe it, but that didn’t matter, because it was. Quenalith was believing for the both of us, just like she’d promised. All I had to do was give in and—and—I wanted to.

She pulled her lips up from mine, dragging my lower lip out with her teeth, making me moan at the same time my pussy clenched. Her pupils were wide, and she used her hand in my hair to turn me, making me present more of myself for her attentions, kissing the corner of my lips, across my cheekbones, and at my temple, discovering me slowly, planting her kisses across my skin like little flags of ownership, and I let her, hopelessly at her command, breathing hard, my eyes only half-open, the seam of my underwear growing wet.

She ran her nose beneath my chin and started kissing lower, making me show my neck to her, as she peeled my body off hers so that she could run a hand underneath my shirt, against my skin.

I whined, giving myself over as her hand slid up above my bra and cupped my breast.

I’d been strong for so long.

I wanted her to conquer me.

And then I blinked back into my body, fighting through a cloud of endorphins, hyper-aware of everywhere we touched, and how she was doing all the touch-ing.

For all of my plans, I’d always let someone else be in charge of things, mostly, and when I didn’t, I had alcohol for an excuse.

But I didn’t want to look back at this and feel just like Quen was doing things to me.

No—I wanted to do things to her.

Needed to, more like.

“Becky?” she asked, concern in her voice.

I shook my hair, making her let go.

“No—not like this,” I said, and she released me in an instant.

There was anguish in her eyes though at the thought of being separated—and just like when we were camping, I couldn’t let her hurt alone for long. I put a hand up to hold her face.

“It’s my turn,” I said, and meant it.

Her eyes searched mine again. “You don’t have to prove anything to me, Becky,” she said.

“No. I want to,” I promised, then made good on it.

My lips found her neck, and she rocked her head back with a breathy grunt, resting it against the bed behind her, and now instead of steering me with my hair she ran her hands up into it, encouraging me to continue, scratching her nails lightly against my scalp.

I felt her swallow beneath my lips, found the U at the base of her throat and licked it, then I pushed the edge of her collar aside, so I could run a line of kisses from her neck out to her shoulder’s point. “Zenuth,” she whispered in a sigh, some word of relaxation or pleasure in her mother tongue.

I licked a line back inside her collarbone, kissed where it met her neck, and started working my hands at the low buttons of her shirt as she moaned, until her shirt was open, revealing she had nothing on beneath it.

Her breasts were full-bellied teardrops, just heavy enough to pull down and to the side without support. Both of them were dotted with nipples as wide as the length of my thumb, the same dark green color as her lips. I lifted one up and heard her gasp, drinking the sound of it like wine, as I lowered my mouth to suck on her.

Quenalith’s eyes closed as my lips touched her, and she purred. “Oh yes, human, just like that,” she whispered, moving a little beneath me, as though my kisses were unsettling her.

I pulled her nipple into a peak, teased its rough nub with the tip of my tongue, and Quen gave me a moan. I found her other breast with my hand, used my thumb and forefinger to pinch and pull its nipple, and felt her writhe again.

It was nothing to kiss across her chest to taste her other breast, holding myself up in between her legs, kneeling on my knees on her soft carpet, bracing one hand beside her ass. My other hand wandered freely, stroking the curves of her lovely skin, the swoop in from her hips to her waist and then out again, to hold and rub the breast I wasn’t kissing.

I touched her leanly muscled arms, I stroked the softness of her back—wishing there were wings there—I ran my hand against plushness of her small belly, and up her muscled thighs.

And then there was only one more place left I hadn’t touched.

I rose up, my eyes asking her for permission, as I tucked my fingers inside the waistband of her underwear.

Her eyes met mine and measured me. “Do not do this if you’re only doing it to get back at him.”

“I’m not,” I swore.

Quen licked her lips, nodded, and rose up.

I pulled, she kicked, then she was free. She had a neatly trimmed arc of hair, and just beneath it I could see her dark green folds waiting.

I lowered myself until my stomach was on her carpet and I was lying in front of her. A casual observer might have thought I was going to worship her, bowing down, and they wouldn’t have been far off.

“I don’t actually know what I’m doing,” I confessed.

She gave me an absolutely wicked look that made my nipples hard and my body shudder.

“I can teach you,” she promised, her voice rough and low. “Kiss me here,” she said, reaching down to spread herself slightly open with her fingers, showing me her emerald clit.

I swallowed and leaned forward, closing my eyes and trusting in myself. My lips found the slight salt of her fingers as my tongue pressed the softer flesh nestled in between.

The second I did so, she gave a rich sigh.

That was all?

That was what I might have been afraid of, thirty minutes—or a lifetime—ago?

Kissing her someplace that I already knew on myself to feel good?

I brought my hands in to spread her thighs wider, to make more room for my face, and she chuckled at this new aggression in me as I worked my lips against her. Now that there was no doubt of my aim, she slid her fingers away, and I sucked at her clit the same as I had her nipples, slow, and then hard, then slow again, rubbing its little mound against my tongue.

“So good, zenuth, so good,” she moaned, giving another of her writhes beneath me, like I was doing something to her that she couldn’t fully contain. I licked lower on purpose, opening her folds to taste her, and she purred.

She wasn’t actually caramel—just like I knew I wasn’t either—but her taste was all her. Something I’d never had before, something I could hardly understand, and yet I knew I’d always crave.

I took my time, pressing my tongue in, lapping into her, chasing every drop, listening to the music of her pants and moans. She was louder now, her small shudders becoming more frequent, and her hands that had been stroking over my arms and down my back, were now winding in my hair.

“Zenuth, do not stop,” she warned me.

I quickly glanced up and caught her jaw dropped low, her eyes intent even as her gaze was heavy. I didn’t pull away to answer, I just moaned between her thighs and listened to her echo me. Her hands pulled my kisses higher, and I took the hint, circling her clit with my sucking lips again, as I felt her ass rise her hips up to meet me. Her body shuddered, her hips rolled, and I knew she was close, so close.

Because of me.

Yes.

This wasn’t in any of my plans, ever—how could it have been?

But now that I was here, there was no place else I’d rather be.

I wanted her sweetness, her caramel, her licorice.

I whined into her pussy, begging her to come for me.

“Zenuth,” she hissed, and then she turned my name into a gasp on an inhale. “Becky,” she said, a question almost, and then she cried out as I pushed her over the edge.

Her hands pulled my hair as she shuddered, her hips thrusting, rocking herself against my tongue, and I—

I kept sucking.

I wanted all of it.

I wanted her.

And when she finally relaxed beneath me, I rose up, moving to kneel in front of her, balancing on my hands, sitting rather like a cat. I felt some heady combination of empowered and dizzy, like I had just landed after jumping out of a plane. I’d been scared, I’d been excited, and now that I had managed it once—I wanted to do it all again.

Quenlith sighed, eyes closed, head rocked back, like she was reluctant to gather herself, but when she did, and her gaze met mine, her expression was as merciless as it was sexy.

She got to her feet more quickly than I would’ve thought her capable of, then easily swooped me up with her, turning to lightly toss me on her bed, where she immediately followed, crawling up behind me, her shirt forgotten behind her on the floor. Her dark-green hair swung forward over both her cheeks; her breasts hung freely, nipples still hard. She was already coming for me like something out of a dream—and then her wings unfurled.

“Oh my God,” I whispered, and she paused, breathing hard, trying to read me with her eyes.

“Do I scare you?” she asked, her voice rough.

“No,” I whispered, and shook my head.

“Good.” Then her hands were at the waistband of my skirt, tearing the fabric there like it was tissue paper.

Chapter 16

My hands raced for the buttons of my linen shirt, fumbling against them, trying to give her all of me, all of my skin, all of my everything. She pushed up the fabric I hadn’t managed to free myself from with one hand, pushing my bra up as well, lowering herself to kiss a breast at the same time as I felt her hand stroke up the inside of my thigh.

Her wings cast both of us in shadow as her mouth started working at me. I was already spinning as I saw her dark-green lips take my soft pink nipple in, feeling her tongue swipe against it. Her eyes flashed up, watching the effect she had on me as she pulled and sucked, all the while her hand on my thigh slowly rose higher.

I’d always known she’d wanted me, ever since that first night we’d met, so in some ways this felt inevitable, and I wanted all of it to take forever—each new caress, new kiss and new sensation—each moment to stretch out an eternity. At the same time though . . . the longer she took, the more I desperately wanted to reach between my legs, haul her hand up, and come hard, putting my pussy out of its aching misery.

She sucked on my other nipple then tugged at it with her teeth as her fingers found my folds, slid them open, and stroked their center.

She made a thoughtful sound as I gave a helpless gasp.

“So wet from pleasing me,” she said, breathing across the kiss her lips had left, and my whole body shivered. Then her fingers were there, pushing in, and I whined as my hands tightened, one on her free wrist that I had grabbed, the other winding in her sheet. “Oh, zenuth,” she whispered, kissing beneath my breast as she began to rub me deep inside.

I rocked up involuntarily with a helpless sound, watching her with cloudy eyes.

She licked across my ribcage, her dark tongue tracing a word I couldn’t read until I lay back down as her fingers found a place I’d never known before inside before.

“So much caramel,” she whispered, looking up at me, then changed the angle of her hand, to not only rub me with her fingers but also fuck me with them, pulling out to shove back in and hit that one sweet spot. I cried out in surprise and pleasure. “Yes,” she hissed. “So sticky.”

She licked a line across my stomach, and I heard the smacking wetness where we met, grunting when her hand landed again.

Some other Becky would’ve been embarrassed by that. Old Becky, the one that had spent her whole life desperate for connection, willing to bend herself into any shape—even uncomfortable ones that didn’t fit, making herself small and less sharp, or pretending to be less fragile than she was—whatever it took, as long as it meant other people would stay—she would’ve been horrified to ever sound like she wanted something this badly.

But the Becky I was now had lost her shame, as Quenalith’s hand thudded into me again.

This was me.

All me.

And if Quenalith wanted me like this . . . then I did not need another.

I moaned, rocking my head back and lifting my hips up for her, begging her to finish me.

“Fuck, Quen,” I whispered.

She purred, and I looked down, watching her swipe her dark tongue across her bright white teeth.

“I will make you make sounds no man has ever heard from you,” she promised, and I believed.

I wanted that.

From now until the end of the world.

I let go of her wrist and the sheet, and I reached for her.

Quenalith paused, then pulled her fingers out of me and fell over me in a moment. I wrapped my arms around her, finally touching her soaring wings, tracing the pads of my fingers down their struts, as she nestled her face in my neck.

“Quenalith,” I said, whispering her name into her hair.

“I am here, zenuth,” she whispered back. My fingers found the spot on her back where her skin went from smooth to rough, where her wings erupted from her, and she gave a husky sigh.

“There?” I asked her, stroking it again. I felt her nod and watched her close her eyes in bliss.

“Everything you do, zenuth,” she breathed, then looked up at me and swallowed. “How you moan, how you taste, who you are. All of you pleases me.”

I couldn’t even imagine a world—much less a plane!—where that was true, and yet I was here, wasn’t I? I gave her a shy smile, still tracing my fingers against her wings. Her eyes rolled back and she gave a low groan.

“Zenuth, do not be frightened, but not all of your kind’s pictures of us were wrong.”

I didn’t have time to wonder what she meant before I felt something I couldn’t see wrapping around my ankle and squeezing.

“Quen?” I asked, as she pulled us both over onto our sides, one of her wings disappearing, the other protectively arcing over us. Then she reached down and grabbed my top-most knee, hitching my leg over her hips and leaving me open for what I now realized very clearly was a thick dark-green tail rising up from below the tangle of our thighs.

* * *

I saw Becky’s eyes widen and I caught her chin with my hand, making her look at me.

“I would never hurt you,” I told her and I meant it. “Tell me if you’re scared.”

Her wide blue eyes blinked as her head nodded, but even then I wasn’t sure. Just because I was so eager to show her everything didn’t mean it was a good idea.

I only wanted her to know all of me.

But I could hide it.

Just like I mostly hid my wings, and like I’d learned to hide my heartache.

It would be easy.

Then, as if Becky sensed my hesitance, she reached for my hand and twisted it, popping my thumb in her mouth to suck.

Permission by proxy.

Showing me what she wanted done.

I closed my eyes, brought my forehead to hers, and trailed the blunt end of my tail up.

Sheloi and I had spent so many nights writhing, twining tails and tongues together, and for so long I had thought I’d never know that kind of pleasure again—but here I was, rubbing the end of my tail tip between sweet Becky’s folds.

My zenuth.

I opened my eyes and kissed her cheek, still rubbing her, stealing her wetness for myself, one slow tail-drag at a time. She eagerly sucked my thumb, as if to urge me on.

“Do you want to take it, my pretty little human?”

She gave me a quick nod as her pupils widened and her nostrils flared. I stirred the tip of my tail against her, giving her a wolfish grin, before using my thumb like a hook to keep her helpless, twisting her away so I could kiss beneath her jaw.

“Deep?” I wondered. “Hard?” I mused.

She made a yearning sound then, ache mixed with longing, and lightly bit my thumb.

I laughed at that. “Don’t worry, zenuth. I will have you,” I said, and started pushing myself in.

She moaned, and I moved myself down her body, licking her throat until I reached the remains of her shirt and bra as I headed lower. My zenuth had not even gotten all her clothes off, and I liked that, I liked her in wild disarray, not knowing whether she was coming or going, only sure she was getting fucked. When I reached her breasts, I pulled my thumb out of her mouth so that I could grope her with both hands, plumping one breast for sucking and then the other, listening to her whine, her crooked up leg wound about my waist.

“Quen,” she gasped, as I pushed a little bit more of my tail inside her.

“You’re so beautiful, zenuth,” I said and watched her flush like always. I nipped at the place where her ribcage met her stomach, as she took deep gasping breaths. I ducked my tongue into her navel because I could. “So smart,” I whispered as she laughed, wriggling myself down further, ducking my shoulder beneath her thigh, disappearing my wing for just long enough that I could reappear it beneath her knee to hold her leg up. I ran a trail of kisses across the slight roll of her belly, then I grabbed its flesh with hunger. “So good,” I breathed, as I squirmed lower, bringing one of my thumbs down to pull the soft skin above her clit tight, exposing her small pink pearl for the taking.

“Oh, Quen,” she said, the instant my lips found home, and I felt her shiver. One of her hands went for my hair, and the other went to balance on my wing, which I liked.

I reached my other hand between her legs. I was too low now to have leverage with my muscles, but that didn’t need to stop me—I grabbed my tail just below where it corked her tight and started using it to fuck her.

She groaned loudly, almost like she’d been punched. I flickered my tongue and sucked her as I rocked the end of my tail in and out of her pussy, her wetness overflowing, streaming down my hand and chin. She started making lost sounds, low moans of satisfaction, along with my name.

“Quen—oh—oh—Quen,” she hissed and groaned, and I answered her with my tail and tongue, wanting nothing more than to make her happy. “Oh, God, Quen,” she went on, and as her hips started grinding against my face, the muscles of her leg above me twitching like a cat about to pounce.

I pulled back, panting, every bit as turned on as she was. “Let me give you another inch, Becky,” I whispered, kissing her inner thigh with light teeth, listening to her moan. “You’re a good girl, you can take it. I know you can.”

She moaned again, and even though I wasn’t doing anything, I knew my words had struck an inner chord, so I kept going.

“Let me make you feel good, my zenuth,” I purred, before giving her clit a begging kiss. “I want to stretch you so tight before you come.”

She didn’t answer, so I rose my eyes up the arc of her body and found her jaw dropped, her eyes shining, full of disbelief and unshed tears.

I stilled everything at once. “Oh, zenuth, I would never hurt you, I swear it. Don’t be frightened.”

She took a shuddering inhale. “I’m not, Quen.”

“You promise?” I asked her. She gave me a heavy nod, and I was forced to take her at her word. “It’s okay then. I’ll just kiss you,” I said, and lowered my head to do so.

She gasped as my lips made contact with her again, and started whining at once, high pitched animal sounds, as her hand wound tightly in my hair. I made satisfied noises in response—I wanted her to know how much I loved it.

How much I loved . . . her.

The knowledge of what she was to me fell around me like a cloak. I had named her my zenuth and now she truly was.

From that first night of knowing her, all our moments until now, and everything I wanted for our future—I closed my eyes and ate Becky out like her pleasure was the only thing standing between me and death.

“Oh God, Quen,” she hissed, her hand on my wing clutching hard. “Oh, fuck, yes—you can put more inside me—oh, fuck, do it, yes—”

I rammed another inch of my tail home just in time to feel her pussy grab it, right before she started screaming.

“Oh my God—oh God—Quen!” She called my name out, and it was the world’s sweetest song.

She was writhing above me, falling utterly apart, and I lay below, greedily licking up all her pieces. I purred against her, feeling her pussy pulse around my tail, trying to shove it out and pull it in in turns, as even more wetness spilled between her thighs.

She rocked and she gasped and she shuddered, until she slowly released my hair and wing and unwrapped her thigh, gently falling back, while staring at me. I dragged my tail out of her and brought its tip to my lips, where I licked her juices off of it like an ice cream cone.

Her eyes got wide, but then she laughed. “Caramel?”

“No,” I told her. “Better.”

Chapter 17

I woke up tangled in sheets, feeling like I’d been righteously fucked, and for the first time in recent memory I literally had no idea what time it was.

Friday?

Saturday???

Had I just gone and missed my wedding, making everything moot?

It was a coward’s way out—but fuck it—if I had, I wouldn’t cry.

“Quen?” I called aloud, rocking to the edge of the bed and standing up, completely naked. We’d done so much, my God. I vaguely remembered her telling me she couldn’t give me magic clothes, that she had to go get some real ones for me, and me telling her I was going back to sleep.

Now that I was alone though, I couldn’t help but snoop. Her bedroom was arranged like a museum almost—she had all sorts of collections artfully boxed on the walls. Pieces of armor, strange and fearsome weaponry—some of the swords still looked like they had blood on them—and in between the displays were pieces of art. Battle scenes—desperate and crowded battles against horrifying creatures on technicolor planes—and portraits.

I wanted to pore over everything, but first I needed to figure out if it was day or night.

I stumbled toward a window on the far wall and peeked behind a heavy curtain, to find a sea of unfamiliar grass waving outside . . . the same color as the ocean.

And something was galloping across it in the distance . . . some kind of . . . spider-horse?

I gasped.

“Enjoying the view?” a voice I didn’t recognize asked behind me. I whirled and found some kind of military-looking demon man standing there, looking displeased, with a bundle of fabric beneath one arm.

“Who are you?” I asked, covering myself up.

“I should be asking you that, human,” he said. “Only I already know who you are. Quen’s folly.”

“She’ll be back soon,” I said, edging away from him.

“Yes,” he agreed. “Which is why we need to go. Now.” He tossed the fabric—clothing—on the bed for me. “Get dressed.”

I wanted to—I didn’t want to be naked in front of him—but it felt like a trap. “Why?”

“Because you don’t belong here.”

“But Quen—” I protested.

“Is a fool,” he growled at me. “Clothes,” he said, pointing. “Now.”

I took another step back—and onto something sharp. I yelped, kneeling down, pulling a small glass splinter from my foot.

He frowned, kneeling nearby, touching the ground before sniffing his hand, and then he harshly laughed. “Well, isn’t fate a fuck.”

“You’re scaring me,” I said, because it was true.

His eyes narrowed. “More than what you saw out there?”

I took a deep inhale, unable to deny I’d seen a spider-horse.

“You don’t belong here, human,” he told me. “No matter what Quen’s told you.”

She hadn’t told me much of anything—we’d been too busy learning one another’s bodies to make plans.

He reached past me to yank the curtain back, where I could see more spider-horses, shaggy creatures with too many legs and too many eyes, skittering in the distance. “This world is like nothing you’ve ever known, nothing you’ve ever seen. You will always be at a loss here, totally dependent on her for everything.”

I swallowed. But that wasn’t very different from my current life—and somehow I’d managed it with Logan.

And look how well that’d turned out.

“I don’t know what she’s told you,” he went on. “And I don’t know what she sees in you—and somehow—you’ve got her drinking?” he asked, taking a sniff of his hand again with a mystified face.

I hauled a shirt on quickly, and caught a glimpse of a familiar clear glass vodka bottle top sticking out from behind the foot of a display case. “She . . . doesn’t drink?” I asked him.

“Fuck no. Not after one of your kind’s drunk drivers killed her beloved zenuth.”

I blinked at hearing that name from his lips. “Zenuth?” I asked him. Was it a word, or a name?

“The woman she loved.” He jerked his chin at the wall behind me and I turned.

One of the portraits was a younger Quen. And the matching portrait beside it, of another beautiful demoness, eyes shining and bright, with a slightly dimpled chin . . . all that time, all last night—or however long it was—of course Quen had had another life before me.

She’d even told me about it when we were camping.

Another woman.

Another love.

Another life.

“Drunk people disgust her,” he went on. “Then again, if she drank enough to black out, it’d explain why you’re here. Lapse of judgement and all that.”

I pulled on the pants he’d brought me and buttoned them slowly.

“I don’t understand,” I murmured. Here I’d been thinking her home was like a museum—but looking at it now, I recognized it for what it was.

A shrine.

Dedicated to her past.

Crowded with memories with some other woman—beautiful, battle-hardened, and with a goddamned tail—to whom I could never compare, no matter what she whispered to me.

And that scared me more than any spider-horse ever could.

“Join the club—but I’m taking you back to Earth now. And if you’re smart, the next time you see Quenalith, you’ll run.”

I didn’t know what day it was.

I didn’t know what I was going back to.

The only thing I was sure of was that being scared of my own future wasn’t an excuse to hide here, trapped in someone else’s history.

Quenalith’s Post

Dear Schmedit,

I am told humans turn to you in time of need.

I (100+ demoness) was recently invited to share time with a human couple (24 M, 23 F, respectively.)

I only feel attraction for the girl, but my inclusion in their relationship seems to be tearing them apart.

I desperately want her to be mine. She is my zenuth—the one I see when I look up at the stars.

But if I claim her so, I would be taking her away from the only man she’s ever loved, the only life she’s ever known, and all the opportunities she’s worked so hard to get.

I feel like we were meant to be—even as I know me acting on that will destroy her life.

AITA?

Chapter 18

I had the scary demon dude take me to Gemma’s and we skipped the doorman—he deposited me directly in her apartment’s hall, then disappeared.

There were still no windows, I was inside the building, so I knocked quietly.

“Gemma?” I asked, hoping that it wasn’t 5 a.m.

The door burst open shortly after, revealing Gemma and Kelsey standing inside. “Becky!” Gemma shouted, before dragging me in.

Her apartment did have windows—it was night, after all.

“Oh my God! You’re all right!” she said, wrapping herself around my neck, while Kelsey frowned disapprovingly from a few steps away.

“We thought you were dead!” Kelsey complained, and then lunged in to hug me too.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, and meant it, awkwardly hugging them back before asking, “What day is it?”

I needed to know.

Gemma pulled her head back. “After midnight on Friday! Or early Saturday morning, if you’re technical. What the hell happened? Where the hell have you been?”

I blinked, not sure where to begin, and then saw the look on Kelsey’s face. She clearly knew. I didn’t have her amazing powers of hair-styling—my bedhead said I’d been fucked six ways to Sunday.

“I was right,” Kelsey told Gemma, grabbing my wrist to drag me over to the couch. She sat me down seriously. “You have to tell us what happened, Becs. You have no idea how hard we’ve been covering for you.”

Gemma nodded, agreeing strongly. “Hang on just one second. I’ll make some tea.”

And that was how I found out that after I’d left, the party went on perfectly, and almost all of Kial’s pieces had sold. At the end of it, Gemma told a worried Quen that I’d gone home, which was where Quen had found me. Gemma and Kelsey had closed everything up, and in doing so had found my phone in Bastiana’s office, where I’d apparently dropped it.

“I was worried you were kidnapped!” Gemma said, lightly punching me.

“I told you I was going home,” I complained.

“And I was this close to calling the police after Logan called today!” she said, pinching her fingers up between us. “The only reason I didn’t was because I figured Quenalith was on it.”

“That’s one way to put things . . .” I went to run my fingers through my hair, where they promptly got stuck in tangles. “What’d he say?”

Kelsey took over talking. “When he got home and you weren’t there, he texted me, and I told him everything.”

I gasped, assuming the worst and feeling like she’d hit me. But if Kelsey had ratted me out—hadn’t I deserved it? And didn’t Logan deserve to know the truth, even if he was an asshole? Fuck.

“That you’d thrown an amazing party at Bastiana’s gallery,” she went on, “and that you knew she’d find out, so you were hiding from her, and you wanted to do that whole, ‘don’t see your man before the wedding’ thing like some people do.”

“And he believed that?” I asked her, my voice rising.

“Uh, frankly I think he was relieved. He was also very, very hung over.”

Gemma snorted. “And he knows what it’s like to have to dodge his mom.”

I huffed a sigh. “Yeah.” I remembered the night he’d spent alone, with himself and some demoness, “hiding” from her . . . while I hung out with Quen in his mother’s garden.

“So what really happened, Becky?” Gemma asked, putting her hand on my arm.

I took a deep sip of tea, frowned, and started. “First . . . I called Logan.”

I told them all about listening to his half of his conversation, and how I’d gotten wasted right after I’d gotten home. Gemma scooted closer on the couch to wrap an arm around me, while Kelsey gave the whole situation a weary headshake, muttering, “That asshole,” repeatedly.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “But he was drunk, and drunk people make bad decisions, right?” Just like when I’d drunkenly agreed to a threesome and blown up my life on accident. “Then Quen came to check up on me and . . .” I paused.

Here I’d gone to school to be able to talk about art at the drop of a hat and explain how complicated techniques could evoke palpable emotions—but I didn’t have any words for being with her. I was still sore-in-a-good-way, and the memories were too fresh—both of me being with her, and me leaving her behind.

I closed my eyes. Quenalith was literally a being from another world. I knew, because I’d seen it. And fuck, she’d fucked me with her tail!

I took a deep breath and swallowed.

“It was good,” I admitted softly. Not because I wanted to confess, or even felt guilty at this point, but because I just needed other people to know. Because everything was going to hurt here coming up and I didn’t want to hurt alone. “It was like really, really, really good.”

I opened my eyes again, looking at Gemma and Kelsey, willing them to believe me.

But just because Quen and I were good together didn’t mean that it was right.

I felt like I was holding a grenade. And I wouldn’t have a drink to blame what I did next on.

I was the one who was going to pull the pin. And I was going to throw myself on it.

And I had no idea what would be left of me afterward.

“Becs?” Gemma asked quietly, when I’d been silent too long. “I hate to ask, but is tomorrow still happening?”

Her voice went high up at the end with her question.

Kelsey leaned forward and set a hand on my knee. “More importantly—are you okay?”

I stared into my mug, wishing it was full of something a lot stronger than tea. All I could do was answer honestly. “I don’t know.”

* * *

I may have gone a little crazy buying Becky things. I’d had to go across her world to find a place where it was daytime and stores were open. And when I got there, I realized didn’t actually know her size. I explained her proportions to a helpful salesperson—and then I wasn’t sure what she liked so it seemed safer to buy her one of everything, jeans, skirts, shirts, dresses, in the first store.

And the second, and the third.

I created a small portal in the bottom of my shopping bag that led directly to my closet, gleefully funneling things through, imagining the look of surprise on her face when I’d get to show her everything later—and then when I returned to do just that, she was gone.

“Becky?” I went through all the rooms of my house, calling her name with increasing panic. “Becky?”

At the end, I raced outside. It was dangerous out here for her, surely she’d known that—the non-Earthly colors should’ve given it away—but why hadn’t I warned her?

“Becky!” I shouted, as loud as I could.

Jorlahut portaled in. “Looking for someone?” he asked, crossing his arms while giving me a smug expression. “I took care of your problem for you.”

My wings unfurled without thinking, and I portaled a hole so my arm could grab my favorite sword, drawing its scabbard through to my side. “What did you do,” I growled as I unsheathed it. If he’d hurt my zenuth, he would wish that he were trapped in a chasm of eternity by the time that I was through with him.

“Quen!” he said sharply, waving his hands. “I only took her home.”

I was still breathing hard. “Why?”

“Why? To her home where she belongs on Earth?” he said, enunciating things over-clearly. “Because she’s a fucking human, Quen.”

I made an unholy sound and advanced on him anyhow, sword held high. This would be the last time Jorlahut meddled in my life.

“What you should be asking is why she let me!” he shouted, taking a step back as I held my swing. “I didn’t kidnap her, Quen—she wanted to go back!”

“Why?” I demanded in a snarl.

“All she had to do was take a look around!” He stood up straighter, finding some courage at last. “This place scared her—and maybe you did, too!”

I stood in front of him, feeling appalled. I wanted to call him a liar, but I wasn’t sure I had a right to—and I was certainly acting frightening now.

“She is . . . whole?” I asked him, embarrassed by how weak I sounded when I said it.

“Of course, Quenalith,” Jorlahut snapped, his shoulders sagging now that I was no longer on the attack. “You’re the only one that murders humans here.”

I rocked back, resheathing my sword. “Jor—your business with me is through. I don’t care how many superiors told you to watch over me—if I see you again, nothing will stop me from killing you. I will take you to a plane known only to me, and you will disappear. Do you understand?”

I watched his throat bob as he swallowed. “Yes.”

“Then get out of my sight.”

I went into my house to get my phone.

* * *

After I finished my tea, Kelsey left, and I curled up on Gemma’s fold out for the night to try to get some sleep, because I still had a big day! tomorrow.

Which explained why there was a knot in my throat and why I wanted to puke so badly.

I dared to turn my phone on after Gemma closed her bedroom door—I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help myself. There were twenty angry texts from Bastiana—I was impressed, I didn’t think she knew how—but by the last one it was clear she was losing steam. Logan had sent me one when he landed, and then two more after that, separated by a few hours: So hungoverrrrrrr, and, Thinking about you, baby! Can’t wait for tomorrow! which made me feel even sicker to my stomach.

And then after that one from Quen came in: I want to be where you are.

I took a shuddering inhale at reading it. I knew she meant it. And I knew I wanted her to mean it, and I really needed my stupid heart to shut up already.

I want to hold you in the night, she continued. I want to kiss you at the dawn.

Somehow the knot in my throat got even tighter.

Who the hell even was I right now?

Why did a gorgeous demoness want me?

I stared up at the ceiling of Gemma’s small apartment, knowing I was going to get very familiar with it soon, and that she was going to have to pour out all her liquor because we both knew we couldn’t trust me alone with it.

And then there was Quenalith on my phone, breaking through my walls like the Kool-Aid man and taking my fucking common sense with her.

I never want you to cry again, Becky.

But if you must, I want to be there to catch all your tears.

I gawked at the screen, and wanted to text back, liar!, because she was so close to making me cry right now.

I concentrated on everything that angry demon man had told me and the truth that I’d seen with my own eyes—it didn’t matter how right it felt. Quenalith and I were different. To an insurmountable degree.

And what was more . . . I couldn’t live my life hanging onto someone else’s coattails.

It didn’t matter whose they were.

I couldn’t be that girl anymore.

I needed to find me and figure out who the hell I was and learn how to stand on my own two feet finally.

I stared at my phone, needing either to catch my breath or drink, and for once I took the healthier option.

I saw the three dots of her typing in something else, but she paused as she must’ve seen mine.

You said you’d never hurt me, Quen, I sent her. So stop. Please, I asked her, and she did.

Chapter 19

I knew it was Saturday on the human plane, in Becky’s time zone, and I knew both when and where her wedding was.

Never having gone to a human wedding before, I wasn’t sure how to dress—I felt like my normal suit wouldn’t be enough, so I decided to put on my old military finery. A crisp navy suit with a high tight collar, and two lines of silver buttons, plus every medal I’d ever received pinned in a neat formation above my breast. Then I strapped on my show sword, long and elegant in its silver scabbard, with its round ruby pommel and its thick leather hilt, before slicking my hair back in a severe fashion and grabbing my gift, portaling up to Earth.

My portal let me out in the room that most public places had added since demons had made themselves known—a private place where humans couldn’t peek through and accidentally see disturbing things—so I emerged into a small and depressing beige chamber with a high ceiling and an opportunistic “Jesus died for your sins too!” sign painted on the wall.

I sighed. Churches.

“Quenalith?” Craylock asked aloud as his portal closed behind me. “Bastiana invited you? I assumed her guest list was set in stone months ago.” One of his eyebrows cocked. “Did someone die?” he teased.

I gave him a serious look as I unfurled my wings and reached for the door handle to emerge into the rest of the building. “Not yet.”

Outside the portal chamber and through another set of open doors, light music was playing, and everything resembled ostentatious confections. There were white flowers piled high in corners, tied to the ends of the benches, and draping down from the ceilings on white silk streamers.

Rows upon rows of humans and demons were sitting politely, whispering amongst themselves. I recognized Gemma and Kelsey standing up at the front in pale peach dresses, talking quietly to one another. Across from them there was a row of men in tuxedos with similarly peach bowties.

Logan stood at their head, looking nervous—well, he should be, to see me.

I pitched my voice to project like I might if there were a battle happening and I needed to summon soldiers to my side. “I was led to believe I could object!”

My voice cut through the music and all the crowd’s murmurs, and I instantly had everyone’s attention.

I put one hand on my sword hilt, arced my wings out behind me, and swept up the main aisle, with my gift beneath my arm.

“Where is Becky?” I called out.

A silver-haired woman up front stood and turned. Bastiana. “Quen-a-lith?” she got out, sputtering my name.

“I object. To the highest degree,” I said, turning to encompass the entire space with the force of my intention. “And I would be willing to do so with combat,” I stated, looking up and down the line of Logan’s friends, feeling confident that I could take all of them on at once. “So. Where. Is. Becky,” I demanded, as Gemma ran up, reaching for my arm.

“Quen—we don’t know where she is,” she said. I could tell by her panicked flush she was telling me the truth.

“Y . . . you?” Logan said, finally placing me. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

I dragged my eyes up him to glare with the promise of violence. “What I would’ve done that night if you had let me—stealing your woman.”

Bastiana’s head spun between us. “Quenalith, how do you know Logan?”

“Ask him,” I spat, before focusing back on Gemma. “When’s the last time you saw her?”

“An hour ago. We all got out of the limo together and then she said she needed to do something and disappeared.”

She couldn’t have gone very far, then. And I had a feeling I knew where she had run off to.

“Thank you,” I told the girl curtly, then spun on my heel, racing for the portal chamber’s door.

* * *

I was so lucky everyone at the Keene Museum knew me—had since I was a kid, really, because even though I bounced around a lot after my parents died, anytime I hung out with my grandma, which was most summers and every major holiday, I’d always made sure to drop in.

Just in case one of the paintings ever opened up and finally saved me.

So when I’d rushed in wearing a wedding dress, I swore the women behind the desk not to tell anyone—hoping that they’d do a better job of keeping their mouths shut now than they had when I was ten—no one really batted an eye as I quickly made my way up to my favorite floor.

I went from painting to painting like I was greeting old friends, trying to recapture the peace I used to find here. Perfectly painted lush gardens rolling for miles, where nymphs tempted beachcombers, and lovers got to look adoringly at one another forever, their most perfect moment frozen beautifully in time.

It didn’t help.

I stared—hard—ignoring the way other patrons were also staring at me, seeing as I was here in a strapless white dress, with my boobs smushed up, my hair braided into a crown with white flowers threaded in it. The dress was gathered right beneath my chest; after that, it flowed equally out in all directions, yards upon yards of delicately flowing fabric, front and back. It was the one thing I’d put my foot down on with Bastiana—the second I’d put this dress on, I knew I wanted it.

I think because if you squinted hard enough, if you saw at me with the soft eye of a gentle painter, I would look like I belonged here. Like one of these dancing women, like someone was playing me a lyre right before a kiss.

Like someone in a painting was going to reach out and pull me through.

But no one ever did.

Same as always, except . . . I swallowed while realization slowly sank through me.

I had managed to go through a painting on my own, hadn’t I?

With Quen.

She’d taken me to a whole other world, and it had been amazing and perfect, up until the moment when I’d realized I couldn’t stay there.

“Oh, Becky,” I heard someone gasp, and turned, to find Quenalith looking stunned in the gallery’s doorway. She strode over to where I was and stared down at me, all the pretty medals on her chest rising and falling with each of her breaths. “Let me,” she started, but I cut her off.

“No.”

She tilted her head, blinking, now stunned for a different reason, her eyes going a little wild.

“Did I frighten you?” she asked.

“No, never,” I told her, because it was true. I would never be frightened of Quen, of her brashness or her physicality—and I wasn’t even frightened of the world outside her door.

It was the world I’d created for myself here that frightened me. The one where I was so desperate to fit in that I either tied myself in knots, or greased my mind with liquor.

It was why I couldn’t choose her—I needed to choose me first.

“Quen—you’re right. I can’t be with him. But that doesn’t mean that I should be with you,” I managed to get out all in one piece. I needed her to hear me say it, without interruptions.

People who’d already been looking at me strangely, or giving me a wide “crazy-lady” berth, now turned to snoop. Quen batted out her dark-green wings, surrounding us with them, effectively shutting out the outside world. I remembered the face she’d made when I’d touched them and how it’d felt at the end when I needed to hold onto one.

“Is there more?” she asked, with a pained look.

I shook my head.

“No. I just can’t run from him straight to you.” I reached up to rake my hand through my hair nervously, realized it was in braids, and pulled out a flower to shred instead. “It wouldn’t be fair to you. Or even him, really.” I snorted softly, looking down. “And probably also not to your other zenuth’s memory.”

Her hands caught mine and stilled them. “Becky, what are you talking about?”

“Your first zenuth. The demon who brought me back told me about her. And also how she died.”

I watched Quen’s jaw clench as her eyes narrowed in pain. “Becky—”

“Quen—I drink. A lot. And I don’t want to anymore, but I can’t promise I’ll ever sort my shit out—and I don’t want you looking at me like that until I do.”

“You drink because he’s hurting you,” she growled. Her hands crushed mine as her brow furrowed.

“No—I drink because I’m hurting me,” I corrected her, pulling my hands free of hers and letting petals drop. “Just—let me take ownership for something in my life, okay? I am a liar, and I am a fuck up. And just because you don’t agree with me doesn’t mean that that’s not true.”

I watched my words land on her like physical blows, and fuck, that hurt me too, but I knew better than to reach for her. It wouldn’t be fair, to either of us, even if watching her agony felt like it was killing me.

“You have a whole life on another plane without me, Quen. I saw it. I wouldn’t want you to give that up for me.”

“What if I want to?” she said, crowding closer.

“The answer’s still no.”

Her hand grasped the hilt of her sword. “I don’t know what to do, Becky,” she said in a low tone.

“I do,” I told her. “I need you to let me go, Quen. For a bit. I don’t know for how long. I just need to live my own life and make my own mistakes and learn that I can pull myself up again.”

“But I would help you,” she whispered intensely, bowing her head to mine.

“You will, Quenalith,” I told her. “By letting me go.”

She took three settling breaths, then slowly pulled her wings back, releasing the both of us, and as she rose her head and glared at bystanders they quickly found other places to be.

“This is for you,” she said brusquely, handing a small box over.

I took it from her. “Thank you.”

Then I stepped around her, the long hem of my dress brushing through the flower I’d torn apart. I needed to give Logan his ring back, fire Bastiana, and let Gemma know how much I liked her couch.

“Becky,” Quen called after me, as I’d almost reached the door.

I stopped, but I couldn’t turn back and look at her. I didn’t have that much strength. Like Orpheus and Eurydice, who I knew were depicted somewhere on these walls, if I looked back, I was sure that I would break.

It didn’t matter; her rich voice easily carried in the gallery.

“He didn’t tell you what zenuth meant, though, did he?” she asked, and when I didn’t answer, she went on. “It is a term of affection, the highest order my kind can grant. It means that when I look at the stars, I see you in them.”

I rocked in my heels, placing one hand against the wall for balance.

“And yes, I once used that term for another, but that doesn’t cheapen it, Becky—it only proves I know the boundaries of my heart.” I heard her take a ragged inhale. “I know exactly what this feels like. I have no doubt or questions. And I do not call you my zenuth lightly—when I say it, I know full well what it means.”

Her voice echoed in the gallery, and everyone else was so quiet you could hear a pin drop.

“For as long as we both draw breath, Becky, I will see you in my stars—no matter what sky I am beneath. So call me, my zenuth, if you, too, look up and think of me.”

I bit my lips and squeezed my eyes shut, trying to trap all my tears inside them, and then I gave up, whirling—but she was already gone, portaled away, with other museum patrons staring at the place she’d just been standing.

Chapter 20

Things were hard afterwards.

Being poor sucked just as much as I’d remembered, but at least Logan had dumped all of my clothes, shoes, and purses off on Gemma’s doorstep in a dramatic gesture—little did he know I was selling them all off on Poshmark.

I was right about no one wanting to hire me, just like I’d feared. Throwing a party under Bastiana’s nose was one thing, but ditching her son at the altar was entirely another. It was like I’d poisoned every single serious patron in the city against me, so while I still had artist friends, after a while I stopped trying to get art-adjacent jobs—I became a barista at the same coffee shop where I’d first spotted Kial’s work.

Did I still want to drink?

Yes.

But I started going to meetings. And once I’d stopped pretending to be someone I wasn’t all the time, things got a little better. I no longer had to ever hang out with frat-bros or worry about what anyone thought of me, really, because no one thought about me, other than my closest friends . . . which wound up being rather freeing. It was the fear of not-mattering to everyone I met all the time that used to panic me into bad decisions, or into clinging to anyone who would pay attention to me.

I was slowly learning that it was okay to just . . . be.

Which was good, because I didn’t actually have any cogent life plans, other than Gemma’s endless patience and knowing that each month the café’s owner would let me pick what art we were going to put on the walls. Kial had put a good word in for me, and the owner could give a fuck about Bastiana, so I had a little handwritten business card out with my email on it taped to the pastry display case. Word got out that I was enthusiastic, unafraid of poking holes in walls, and helped hand sell, so every couple of days some new artist would email a portfolio over to me. I would be thrilled each time, and it got to where I would coordinate a tiny coffee-drinks-only (because we didn’t have a liquor license) reception for whoever was showing.

Weeks turned into months turned into almost a year, and while my life wasn’t ever easy, it had a sustainable rhythm to it, like a dance I knew the steps to. And while occasionally customers or coworkers would flirt with me, I would always shut them down. It wasn’t that I was saving myself for anyone—not that sleeping in Gemma’s living room left a lot of opportunities for “dating” or “mystery,” even on the nights when she went over to a guy’s place.

It was just it never felt right, because I still had dreams about Quen.

I would wake up, tangled in my sheets, having come in my sleep or hot and bothered and needing to touch myself, and I felt like Persephone—another popular character in romantic paintings. I’d gone to hell, or at least where all the demons lived, and I’d eaten forbidden fruit there, so it made a perverse sense that I should be punished for eternity.

And as for Quen . . . I googled her a few times and never pulled up anything. It seemed without me to keep her on Earth, she’d left, so I hoped she was happy, off looking at a technicolor sky somewhere without me.

I was busy wiping down one of the arms of the milk steamer on a Tuesday, when I heard someone call my name with excitement. “Becky?”

I looked over and saw a familiar green face. “Mr. Craylock?” I breathed.

He stepped up to the counter quickly. “How are you, dear? It’s been so long—and I was afraid Bastiana might have had you pieced out and shipped to different countries.”

I gave him a grin. “I’m getting by. Is she doing okay?” I said, and was surprised to find out that I meant it—I didn’t harbor Bastiana any more ill will.

“She’s burning through staff, but that’s just like old times,” he said with a smile. “And Logan’s engaged again.”

I blinked. “Well, that’s quick, but I can’t say I’m surprised. I don’t think alone is in his vocabulary.”

He gave me a strange look then. “What about yours?” he asked me.

But then the man behind him in line cleared his throat in an annoyed fashion, so I ignored his question.

“What can I get for you?” I asked instead.

He gave me his order and waited while I made it, taking an appreciative sip and giving me a courteous nod on his way out the door, then wheeled around and came back to me, cutting shamelessly through the line. “The MoMu is opening up its new wing this Friday. You should come.”

I stiffened, and some of the next drink’s hot steam hit my hand. I hissed and pulled it back. “That’s nice of you to say, Mr. Craylock, but I don’t think anyone really wants me there.”

“Nonsense,” he said, placing a solemn hand to his chest. “I’m on the board now. And I’m officially inviting you to come.”

I shook my head, and finished up the order I was working on, while he squinted at the pastry counter like he was considering a croissant. Then he stepped back and raised his coffee as if he was toasting me, and told me, “Friday!” before walking out the door.

Thirty minutes later, an invitation hit my work email.

“Are you going?” Gemma asked me after I told her that night. “Because you have to go, Becky—but if you’re going, you can’t half-ass it.”

We were looking at the page for the event together on her MacBook. It wasn’t just a reception . . . it was a gala.

I reached over and closed the lid of her laptop quickly. “Damn.”

“Yeah,” she breathed. “I love you and all, but we’re entirely different shapes,” she said, sensing my problem instantly. And the closet of full free clothes where she worked was all size zeros and twos, way smaller than me.

I didn’t own a single gala-appropriate outfit, nor would I have the funds to buy one between now and then—or even the time to try and thrift something decent.

“Unless . . .” she began, then ran into her bedroom, and I could hear her dragging things out from underneath her bed.

“Oh no, no, no,” I said, knowing what she was thinking as she emerged, holding a poofy tangle of white silk. “No, no, no,” I continued. “It’s cursed.”

“Which is why you didn’t sell it, when you’ve sold off everything else?”

“It doesn’t have tags,” I muttered.

“That doesn’t matter online, and you know it. It’s got an interesting shape, it doesn’t scream wedding—”

“Except for the white.”

“Which can be fixed,” she said, laughing. “C’mon, Becky, you haven’t even been to a museum in months. Just think of this as a free ticket in, okay? At least let me try.”

I sighed. In the choice between “fun things to torture myself with” versus paying Gemma some rent, I’d had to let all my museum passes lapse. “All right. Just promise I won’t look like a jilted bride when you’re through?”

“Done,” she said, taking the massive amount of white fabric out the door.

She didn’t say a single thing about it in the intervening days, so I was hoping she’d forgotten, until I got home after my shift on Friday to find a dress I almost didn’t recognize draped across my fold out bed.

“Wow,” I murmured, crossing the room to it to hold it up. Gemma emerged from the bathroom instantly, her hair up in rollers, clearly going out on a date.

“Kial helped! Since they’re a drag king, I felt sure they’d have access to a sewing machine, and I was right!”

Kial had taken out most of the underlayers, which skewed the dress less wedding-ballet and more evening wear, and they’d started using black spray-paint on the silk at hip height, with obvious strokes, not hiding what it was, only layering it on more heavily the further down the skirt they’d got, until the bottom third of the dress was a dark night-black, which they’d then peppered with twinkling stars.

“They’re glue-gunned though,” she said quickly, following my eyes. “Kial has mad crystal application skills, but there wasn’t enough time to sew—so don’t brush up against anything too hard.”

I grinned and laughed. “It’s amazing.”

“I know,” Gemma said smugly, and started pulling her rollers out. “I’m done in here—it’s your turn!”

In the end, I was an hour late.

I knew there was going to be some sort of red carpet bru-ha-ha that I wanted to avoid entirely, and a little bit of it was that I was scared.

I just kept telling myself that I would be fine alone. I would get to look at the art if nothing else, and if I felt tempted at all to drink to hide, I could just leave. There was no job or social status thing keeping me here; I was just an art aficionado.

I had absolutely nothing left to prove.

So I trotted quickly up the stairs to the main doors, lifting the hem of my skirt. When I’d been fitted for it, I’d had heels on, and I didn’t own any heels high enough now, so I had on a pair of my black work sneakers underneath.

I flashed the invitation on my phone to get inside, waved to one of the desk girls I recognized helping out behind the door, then followed the path to the elevator and took it up, getting off at the floor that had the new wing attached.

I could hear the party echoing from here—and that had been another good reason to be late.

It was way easier to blend in when there was already a crowd.

I took a caviar-cracker thing off of a drifting waiter’s plate, went to my right, and steeled myself to have a stress-free good time.

And how hard would it be, really, in a whole new wing, full of art I hadn’t seen?

Only, I realized, as I put the cracker to my mouth and the caviar burst across my tongue . . . I had seen this piece before, or one just like it.

It was one of Excetera’s—even if I didn’t remember its name, I absolutely knew her style.

I walked quickly to the next piece—and it was one of Kial’s. I’d never seen it before, but I recognized their work instantly. It was bold and intricate—they’d created a close-up of an empty asphalt lot, with 3D dandelions coming off of the canvas out of capped needles, threading the caps together with so much gossamer string and fishing wire so that the structure beneath the poofs was almost completely obscured.

And the next artist was Moxie Six—my first coffee shop find. She was doing a series called The Holy and the Arcane, portraits of normal people: waiting for the bus, sleeping on the ground outside of shelters they hadn’t managed to make it into, standing in line outside a check cashing shop—all fastidiously done with stained glass. Elevating every day people and their situations in a medium few would ever see outside of churches.

I took a slow scan of the room—and found I recognized every single artist in it. I had shown pieces of all of their work before at the café.

My jaw dropped, as my heart felt like it was pressing against my dress’s seams. I couldn’t believe it—and then I saw her.

Quenalith, her hair a little longer, but still in a fastidiously tailored suit, with her hands held behind her back, laughing at something someone had told her—Excetera. I recognized the artist’s still-red hair from here.

I’d checked the gala’s website at least twenty times after I’d gotten my invitation, trying to talk myself into or out of going—so I knew Quenalith wasn’t mentioned on it once.

Just some anonymous donor.

I put my hand to my mouth.

This was her wing.

Then her eyes flickered up, and she saw me.

There was no point in pretending I wasn’t staring, especially after I saw her gesture an apology to Excetera, and she started walking for me.

She pulled up short a polite distance away, and held her arms behind herself, just like she’d been doing in her prior conversation—only she was looking at me in a way that made her gaze feel like hands. “Craylock told me he’d invited you. I didn’t think you’d come.”

“Quen, what is this?” I asked her, looking wildly around.

Dark amusement quirked her lips. “I have excellent taste in women, but poor taste in art—so I decided to borrow yours.” She took a proud glance around herself. “I wanted to help make a space for local artists here, so I commissioned all of these to help.”

I bit my lips, remembering our conversation at Bastiana’s that one day. “Quen . . . this is amazing.”

“Thank you.” She bowed her head slightly at the compliment, then her eyes caught the edge of my dress. “I see you brought your stars with you.”

Before I could respond though, someone called her name. She cast a pained look behind herself, then sighed.

“Excuse me,” she said, and I watched her go, my heart in my throat.

“Oh my God, that dress looks great on you, Becky!”

I turned and found Kial there. Of course they were here; they were being shown, after all.

Which—I slowly realized—meant that I knew all the artists here, as they excitedly found me one by one, putting the pieces together between my showing them at the cafe and them getting an anonymous commission under NDA for the pieces on display tonight. I was so excited to hear what was happening in their lives artistically, and to look at all their new work, it felt like I was hanging out with family—around art no less!—and also a little bit like my slate was being wiped clean.

I did belong here. At least for one night.

And threaded through it all was Quen.

She was moving from group to group, socializing avidly, people pleased to see her join them and still smiling went she left—humans and demons alike—and I noticed there were never any introductions.

Did everyone just know who Quenalith was? That felt entirely possible to me, seeing as she was stamped on my soul . . . but what seemed more likely was that she’d made a life for herself here on Earth.

Without me.

She’d bought the MoMu a whole new wing, after all.

I was still trying to figure out how that made me feel when Excetera brushed up.

“Hey,” she said, squinting, trying to remember me. “You look so familiar.”

“Just one of those faces is all,” I told her.

“Well, nice dress, very punk-chic, I love it,” she said, holding up a flute of champagne in her left hand—where I could see Logan’s great-grandmother’s diamond on her ring finger.

“Engaged?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, her eyes flashing with some combination of lust and greed. “Bastiana Graff’s son. He’s the whole package.”

If by that you meant hot, with a deep bank account and with an artistically inclined mother . . . But I grinned. I couldn’t really be mad at her; it wasn’t my place.

“Congratulations,” I told her.

“Thank you!” she said, taking a sip of her drink before spinning off.

Then soon the night was winding down, and people started to slip away. Kial wanted to drag me to an afterparty, but I’d opened the coffee shop up at 6 a.m.—the only reason I was still standing was because I had secret sneakers on under my dress. I hugged everyone and begged off, promising that I’d see them soon, and took one long last look around for Quen.

I didn’t see her, which hurt, even as it felt right.

Chapter 21

I took the elevator down, hitched up my skirt a little, and started walking out with purpose. I’d already dialed up my ride; it was going to be here any minute—I waved to the desk girl again, then went to wait for it outside.

I walked into a cloud of clove-scented smoke. I looked over to see who it’d come from and saw Quen at the same time she saw me.

“Nervous?” I asked her, while raising my eyebrows.

She took the cigarette from her lips and striped the butt out on the brick wall behind her, before pocketing it. “Would you believe I haven’t smoked in eleven months, thirteen days, and”—she made a show of looking at her watch—“about five hours?”

“Yeah.” I laughed, and she gazed tenderly at me.

“How are you, Becky?”

I wanted to shrink beneath her attention even as I wanted to have it on me, always.

“Would you believe that I haven’t had anything to drink in nine months and four days?” And there was a green chip in my purse back home to prove it. “The first two months were kind of rocky. Whole lot of ‘woe is me’ and ‘what the fuck have I done?’ going on. But things got easier after that.”

“I’m glad,” she said. Then her perfect lips parted and inhaled like she had so much more to say.

It was too much; I had to stop her.

“I can’t believe you did this, Quen,” I said, looking safely up where the new wing was inside.

“I like Earth, Becky,” she said with patience. “I always intended to stay here. But I was worried if I told you that eleven months or so ago you wouldn’t believe me.”

I gave a slow nod of agreement. “You were right. I wouldn’t have.” I pinched my lower lip between my fingers. “I was a different person then.”

“And now?” she asked me. Her tone had as many different layers as a wedding cake.

And now . . . Quenalith had dedicated a whole wing of a museum to my vision, a monumental declaration of my zenuth-ness—but then had had the strength not to tell me, like I had asked her, because she didn’t want to hurt me more.

I wasn’t prepared to deal with the enormity of that right here in front of her.

I heard a car stop behind me and an electric window rolling down.

“Becky?” a stranger asked.

“That’s my ride,” I told Quen, sinking back and opening up the door. It took me a bit to coordinate all the fabric from my dress in with me, and I was sure crystals were popping off left and right.

Quen sank and leaned in through the car’s still-open window, her hair hanging freely down. “You never opened my wedding present, did you,” she said, but as a statement, not a question.

I shook my head. I’d come home that day and thrown it into the same box Gemma and I had hidden my dress in—it was the only wedding present that I’d gotten. Something about opening it seemed like it would break the bubble, and finish slamming the door on my past.

Not with me and Logan—with me and Quen.

“If you still have it,” she told me, “you should.”

She tapped the car’s frame and stood, taking her clove smoke and licorice with her, as the driver rolled up the window on my side.

The driver dropped me off outside Gemma’s place, and I bustled up my skirt to go upstairs.

My phone buzzed as I reached the door, and I opened it up quickly in foolish hope, my stomach doing flips.

Having fun?

Only Gemma. Yeah, you? I texted her back.

Almost done with my date!

Awesome! I texted back distractedly, while fumbling for my keys.

The second I was indoors I raced for Gemma’s bedroom, digging under her bed to find the dress box, then reached into it, pulling out the gift that Quen had given me.

I tugged on its bow, sliding it off, and pulled up the lid to reveal . . . all the contents of a summoning kit inside.

No fancy carton, or cartoon demons.

Just a candle, a large silk sachet of salt, and a handwritten note.

for my zenuth

~ Q

I stared at all the objects individually—then realized there were no instructions, either.

It didn’t matter though—I took them all into the living room and started pushing Gemma’s furniture around.

Faced with my utter lack of artistic ability, I gave up and drew a heart. It wasn’t worth pretending I was summoning her up for any other reason. I’d managed to make it on my own for almost a year, with a little bit of help from Gemma and Kelsey. Yeah, I’d lost everything, but in doing so I’d found myself.

And now I wanted to find her again.

I lit the candle, I said abracadabra forwards and backwards, and I waited, staring at the center of the heart, counting the beats of my own, longing for something to happen.

When it didn’t, when moments became minutes became half an hour, I started to want to die—but I wasn’t going to drink, and that’s what counted.

Then I heard someone in the hall. Gemma, probably looking for her keys—and I was going to have to explain all this to her—

I sighed, went for the door, and opened it, and found Quenalith standing there, looking only a third as put together as she had when I’d left her, the scent of cloves heavy in the air.

“I walked,” she explained. “You can’t smoke inside of portals.”

Just seeing her made my heart quiver.

She was here—and I could keep her.

I put a hand out to take hers and pulled her inside the apartment with me. “What if I told you you wouldn’t have to smoke again?”

Her soulful eyes searched mine. “I would want to hear you say it a hundred times,” she said, and then I as brought her closer, she ran an arm around my waist. “No, actually, my zenuth,” she corrected, her voice low, “I would want to make you tell me.”

I wanted to swoon, just hearing the words, and I slid my hands up and around her neck in case I did, as hers circled my waist fluidly.

“You don’t have to be nervous anymore, Quen,” I said as she danced me backwards through the salt, towards the couch that was also my bed—only I’d had to fold it up to make room for the summoning. I went up on tiptoes and kissed her dark green lips softly, proving to myself she was really here. “No more smoking,” I said as I rocked back down.

She took a deep breath, her eyes blazing at me, then reached up to take one of my hands down, turning my wrist in to kiss it. It sent a row of goosebumps up my arms and made my spine feel weak.

“And you?” she asked, cupping my hand to her cheek. “Did you discover what I already knew?”

“What’s that?” I whispered. Whatever it was, I needed to know, desperately.

“That you deserve love, Becky,” she said simply, as her arm around my waist held me close. “Exactly how you are.”

I stared at her, feeling like I’d just seen my rawest reflection in a mirror, right before someone had thrown a rock through it, bringing it all shattering down.

Everything all came down to that, didn’t it.

After my parents died, me desperately contorting myself to fit into other people’s lives, chasing after the affection and affirmation I was scared I’d never get again.

I rocked back involuntarily, reeling, but Quenalith caught me—and I knew she always would.

Chapter 22

She spun me around until her back was to the couch and she could sit down, pulling me and all my dress on top astride her.

“I want to kiss you, Becky,” she said, beginning to do so. “And I don’t want to stop.”

“Oh-my-God-I-want-that-too,” I said quickly, stretching out over her for my phone as she started, her breath hot against my neck.

I dropped my phone, caught it in midair, and then texted Gemma with superhuman speed. Do not come home tonight.

I’m already downstairs. What’s up?

Quen’s mouth was on my throat and her fingers were finding the zipper at the back of my dress. Quen, I managed to type out, barely.

Gemma sent back a row of startled wide-eyed emojis.

“Tell Gemma I said hello,” Quen chuckled evilly, resting her teeth on me for a moment. “Better yet—tell her to go to whatever hotel she wants tonight, and I will reimburse her.”

Go to the Ritz! Quen’s treat!

I’m getting room service! flashed back in a heartbeat, and then my phone was lost in silk as I shuddered. I’d dropped it because Quen’s hands had dragged the top of my dress down, exposing me to her ravenous attention. Her hands were on my ass, lifting me off her lap so that she could nuzzle against my breasts, right before her dark-green lips sucked on a nipple as she growled.

I ran my fingers through her hair and lightly rocked against her, just holding her there, letting this new reality sink in.

Quenalith . . . a beautiful, smart, devoted demonic creature . . . loved me.

Not in a “We’ll hang out when it’s convenient for me, and as long as you make my mom happy” way.

No, Quen loved me enough to trust me to know myself. Even though it was scary for her, and even though it’d taken time.

I bowed my head above hers. “My zenuth,” I whispered, and she stilled, drawing her mouth away from me, looking up, eyes dark and clear.

“Say it again, Becky,” she told me.

I stroked a lock of hair off her face. “My beloved zenuth.”

And the look she gave me then took my breath away—a blinding moment of effervescent glee—that then quickly faded into hunger.

“And how do you feel about screaming it?” she asked with complete sincerity, before hauling up the edges of my dress, complaining, “Too much fabric!” with a laugh.

“Don’t tear it—it’s my new favorite!” I squealed, giggling, moving to help her manage it, until I could feel her hands against my thighs, first crawling up and then sinking down inside my underwear.

“Quen.” I breathed her name, mesmerized in an instant. I caught hold of the couch behind her to steady myself, while my other hand curled into the soft, short hairs at the back of her neck.

“I didn’t expect to find you this ready,” she whispered, looking up, her eager fingertips exploring me beneath the sea of silk. She rocked back on the couch so that I was over her waist, and she was looking up at me like I looked at paintings sometimes, when no one else was watching—with unreserved awe. Her free hand cupped my breast, swiping my nipple with her thumb, and I wondered if she could feel my rushing heartbeat just below it.

“I’ve been ready for eleven months, thirteen days, and six and a half hours,” I told her, biting my lips to whimper as two of her fingers slid home, and I started to rock my hips to pull against them without thinking. “I just didn’t know it yet was all—and—I’m sorry for making you wait, Quen.”

She gave me an amused look and then wickedly licked her lips.

“Is that all?” she asked, while rubbing her fingers deep inside me.

I could already feel the walls of my pussy start to clench—like my lonely vagina didn’t trust the rest of me to keep her there.

“I . . . think?” I guessed, my voice going high as her thumb found my clit.

“Good,” she purred. “No more apologies, pretty girl. You did what you had to.”

Her free hand rose from my breast to wind in my hair, pulling me down to kiss me, making me moan into her mouth. Her tongue and her fingers were working me in conjunction, tasting me as she found new places inside of me to touch, her thumb rocking against my slick clit like it was a metronome, perpetually speeding up.

“Hmmm?” she asked, pulling back from me a little. I closed my eyes and gave a needy whine back, utterly enamored with her. “But if you must apologize to me, Becky,” she began, her voice rough and leading, and it didn’t matter what she said next, I was already nodding.

No matter how traumatic it was, I would do it—sing karaoke, ride the subway naked, or admit that I didn’t like Rothkos very much out loud on a gallery floor—anything, anything, as long as it kept her with me. I whined again, dying to know what else she needed, how best I could earn all her forgiveness.

Her lips brushed the shell of my ear. “Then come, Becky,” she whispered softly. “Come for your zenuth. Grab me and claim me and make me yours.”

“Oh, God,” I whispered, clutching my hands into fists, pushing back with open eyes so I could stare at her.

She was serious; that’s all she’d wanted, that’s all she’d ever wanted—I rocked my hips forward with an anguished sound and called for her. “Quen,” I gasped, starting to thrash. “My zenuth,” I named her, shuddering.

She writhed beneath me at hearing it, making a sound of deepest satisfaction, her jaw dropped, breathing hard.

“Yes,” she hissed, still working her hand to see me through. I shook above her, the dregs of my orgasm making me twitch and spasm, until she slowly pulled her fingers out of me and then wiped them off on my inner thigh.

I collapsed over her in a silky poof, holding onto her suit lapels for strength. “I feel like a dirty prom queen,” I told her, panting.

“That’d better be a good thing,” she pretended to threaten, even as her lips twisted into a grin of delight.

“It is, zenuth,” I promised, reaching for her tie.

* * *

It was almost dawn by the time we’d wrung one another out. Becky was dozing in my arms, our legs were tangled, and my shirt was open. We hadn’t fixed her dress, so her heart was on top of mine, and I would’ve sworn that I could feel it beat.

Then a buzzing sound began from underneath the couch.

“Wha?” Becky asked, pushing up, blinking—and then smiled, as if realizing I was really there.

“It’s your phone, I think,” I said, grinning back, before leaning over just enough to pick it up and hand it over.

She wiped her face with a hand, keyed into it, then pouted. “Gemma needs clothes.”

“So do you,” I said, and laughed.

Then she looked around the room. “Oh—no—I need to move all her things back.”

I’d never been in Gemma’s place before, but now that I thought about it, everything did seem rudely shoved—and the remnants of “my” summoning were in the middle of the floor.

Becky had poured the salt I’d given her into a giant heart. I looked at it, charmed and beaming.

She followed my gaze and pinked. “I’m glad everything turned out, or that would’ve been awkward.” Then she looked back at me, eyes wide. “Did I even do it right? You didn’t leave me any instructions! What if I’d screwed it up?” she asked, then paused, blinking. “And how did you know I’d never opened it?”

I caught her face in both my hands. “Because if you had, you would’ve never questioned my love for you. And last night wouldn’t have surprised you as much—you’d have already known how I felt.” I placed a brief kiss on her lips, then swung us both more upright. “But let’s not scandalize your dear friend,” I said, reaching to fasten the buttons on my shirt as she stood, valiantly holding her dress up—how much more fun would it be to pull it back down?—and she shook a finger at me.

“No,” she said firmly, while laughing, having read my face, and she ducked back into what I assumed was Gemma’s bedroom.

“Am I allowed to show you where I live now? Here on Earth?” I called after her, kicking my shoes on and looking for my tie.

“Yes!” she called back out to me. I heard the opening and closing of a door, and I could see her squirming just out of view, pulling on less fancy clothing, adorably.

“Am I allowed to tell you you can live with me?” I asked her, as she changed.

“You can tell me anything you want,” she sang out.

I snorted, then grinned at spotting my tie, looped around the base of a floor lamp which had not had the structural integrity I’d hoped—I’d had to catch it with my tail when a helplessly tied Becky had almost taken it down after being eaten out.

“Fine, then,” I lightly complained. “I’ll woo you the hard way. Just ask Gemma which hotel she prefers.”

“I will,” Becky said, returning to be in the room with me, in jeans and a striped T-shirt, coming to stand by my side. She’d thrown her hair into a bun, but she still had that messy, just-fucked glow.

“Coffee?” I asked her, shoving the tie into my pocket and looping my arms around her waist. “A tour of my exceptionally nice condo, especially the bedroom? I think I can even manage to keep my hands off you for a few hours, if you want to sleep some.”

“I’d like all three,” she said, and kissed me. “But after we move Gemma’s furniture back.” She moved to another closet, pulling out a broom to advance on the heart.

“Wait!” I told her. “Hang on—” I grabbed my coat and started patting through my pockets, to pull out my phone.

“What are you doing?” she asked, looking baffled.

Most summonings were, by their nature, temporary—but this one wasn’t. Becky had finally summoned me back into her life, and I was never leaving it again.

I gave her a look somewhere between love and smug possessiveness. “I’m taking pictures of the most important piece of art in the world,” I said, as dour as any museum docent.

Her nose wrinkled and she laughed, putting down the broom and reaching for my phone. “Give me that, Quen,” she said, taking it from me, and wrapping her other arm around my hips. “Let me show you how to take a selfie.”

She grinned, and held the phone up, to capture both our faces inside of it.

* * *

Epilogue

My actual real wedding that I got to plan wound up being a casual affair on the roof of the MoMu with only twenty people or so in attendance. We included customs from Earth and from Quen’s favorite non-Earth plane, and there was an approximate three-pounds-of-salmon-to-guest ratio.

I wore a new, poofy, flowy white dress to walk down our makeshift aisle, and Quenalith was waiting for me at the end in a white suit with a sword buckled at her side and her wings out, looking so gorgeous I could die. We traded rings, which was an Earth custom Quen told me she found charming, and were pronounced—with no objections or challenges to combat, as I’d heard had happened the first time around—and she swung me back to kiss me deeply while friends took pictures.

She wrapped me in her wings when we stood up, her mouth went for my throat, and her hands searched up my back.

“Too many buttons,” she quietly complained. “I’ll have to cut this off you later.”

I swooned anew—like always—then came to my senses. “You’re going to get my makeup on your suit if you’re not careful, Quen,” I protested, but not too hard.

“Ah, but see, that’s why I don’t wear any: I won’t get it on your dress,” she murmured, from the vicinity of my neckline.

“Hey! No fooling around in there!” Gemma shouted.

“I wouldn’t dream of it!” I shouted back.

“Because it’s already happening,” Quenalith said and chuckled darkly.

She laughed, and I laughed, and then she righted me, putting my hair back into place before refolding her wings and beaming at me with adoration.

After that came our dinner, toasts, and inside jokes, and then Craylock cleared his throat, standing to pull a neatly folded piece of paper out of his vest, before starting to speak to the demons in attendance in their home tongue.

I was learning some words, but it was slow going, so I looked to Quen to translate, and realized Craylock had her full attention, like she often gave me. Quiet, contemplative, intelligent—I imagined this was the Quenalith most of her demon friends had known in battle, before she’d entered her retirement.

“What’s he saying?” I quietly asked her.

She glanced to me, her eyes glittering with thoughts, then she slouched back some, wrapping an arm around me to take me with her. She stroked my hair out of her way, and put her lips to my ear. “That I should fuck you with hilt of my favorite sword,” she teased, pulling me closer as I snickered.

“So, like, normal Saturday?” I teased back.

She grinned at me, then she kissed my temple and started telling me the truth. “He’s telling the story of how I saved his life.”

I nestled up against her, with a nod. I’d heard it before; Craylock himself had told it to me. They were fighting some horrible creature with a thousand legs and a poisonous tail. It’d cornered him with a loop of its body, but Quenalith had arrived just before he was crushed to hack him free.

“And while, being new under my command, and me so much younger than him, he had up until that point felt my name was an affectation,” she said, giving him a grin as she kept whispering, “afterwards, he felt it well deserved.” Then I felt her hand tense and saw her brow furrow. “And now he is talking about Sheloi,” she said, and I knew it was true, I heard Craylock say her name.

I wrapped my arm across my chest to catch Quen’s hand on my shoulder and squeeze. I didn’t feel any jealousy toward Sheloi, nor did I fear her memory. As far as I was concerned, with as dangerous as Quen’s life before had been, Sheloi had kept her safe for me.

“He says she tamed me, which he was surprised by, but only for a time, because he saw how happy we were together. And that when I retired from service, it was only right, because he of all people knew I deserved to rest.”

I could tell from her expression that she hadn’t expected him to share anything of the sort—and that she had no idea where his story was going.

“But after she was taken from me . . .” she said, her voice drifting as she caught up with him. “He assumed I would re-enlist after my punishment. That I would go and take my anger out on the vastness of the planes, to camp every night beneath the stars, stinking like fresh blood, killing innumerable creatures until I myself died with them.” I heard her swallow, as he continued. “And so no one was more surprised than he was, when that was not the case—that instead of wreaking hideous vengeance unto death, I was humbled by my love for you. A thing that he would not have believed, if he had not seen it happening with his own eyes.”

And her eyes were now shining wetly as she translated. I quietly gasped, full of feeling on her behalf. My zenuth never cried. I reached up to stroke away her tears, and she caught my hand and kissed it before going on.

“And so now he believes I am the luckiest demon ever,” she said, watching me while she still translated. “That instead of being Quenalith the Conqueror, I am again Quenalith the Conquered. This time he hopes it is for life, for the universe’s sake—and that he knows, just as I once saved his life, that you, my zenuth, have in turn saved mine.”

“Oh my God,” I heard Kelsey sob from two seats away—which was when I realized Quen’s voice had picked up enough for our whole table to hear—and if it was making Kelsey cry, then it wasn’t just me being an overly romantic sap.

“I love you, Quen,” I told her, leaning up to kiss her, as I wound my left hand with hers so that our rings touched. “You’re in my stars now, and you always will be.”

She used my hand to pull me up to standing, and then easily picked me up. I squealed but looped my arms around her neck without thinking.

“If all humans present could look away, please,” Quen asked. I felt her wave a hand beneath my skirts, and realized she was opening up a portal.

“Wait, wait, wait! Quen! There’s usually dancing! And cake!”

Quenalith lowered her lips and her next words were for me alone. “I would dance with you privately—and why would I need cake, when I have you to eat?”

I laughed and squirmed in her arms until she let me down, where I grinned up at her, absolutely ready for our future together.

“Because this is my only real wedding, Quen,” I told her, grabbing one of her hands in both of mine. “One more hour here, and then I swear you’ll have me for the rest of my life.” I pulled her for the small temporary dance floor I’d had installed off on the roof’s far side. “And because I wanted to show you this,” I said, gesturing at the sweet pink-stained heart I’d had inlayed into the wooden parquet. I let go of her hand and jumped into it, then held my arms back open for her to join me. “It’s the last time I get to summon you. From here on out you’re mine.”

She laughed delightedly and stepped into the heart and reached for me, wrapping me up in both her arms and wings.

“Yes, my zenuth,” she said, before kissing me. “Always.”

* * *

Thanks for reading! Please keep going for more a personal afterword and more book news/links - CA

Afterword

Hey.

My name’s Cassie.

And while I’m married to a man, I’m queer, or pan, or bi, whichever’s easier for you to think about.

So welcome to my little coming out party, which has been twenty years in the making.

I’m rather embarrassed that this is my first sheer FF book, although almost all of my self-published titles have FF scenes (or very lovingly written MFF scenes with tons of FF interaction…so you should probably go check them out when you’re done reading this….)

And all of that probably should have been a clue about my sexuality earlier on in my author-process for anyone who gave a shit, but it’s entirely OK as a reader that you didn’t—and you still might not, and that’s fine, too.

I just wanted to come out a bit in public is all, and this seemed like not only the best place, but more than that, it feels like it is time.

Because I’ve been carrying a weird weight around inside of me for a long while now, and I’d like to tell you all about it, right before I set it down.

I think you can imagine what it was like to grow up evangelical in Texas in the early 90’s, so I won’t spell it out for you. Just know that back then and there gay people of any flavor seemed so rare as to be practically mythical. (In hindsight, this could’ve been because I was not a particularly cool teen.)

So my first real experience with anyone outside of the hetero-norm was when me and my lab partner in freshman biology were discussing who we liked. She swore me to secrecy, up and down, and I—who had at that point never managed to successfully keep a secret in my life—super-ultra-promised I’d keep my mouth shut, and then watched in horror as she wrote down a girl’s name.

You ever have something so important happen to you that it’s branded on your brain?

That moment was like that, for me.

Not because it was mine, explicitly, but because for the first time in my short life I had a secret I knew I had to take with me to the grave.

Because to give voice to who she liked, to any of her hopes and dreams, would’ve been to blow up her life like a nuclear bomb. Her parents would have disowned her, made her homeless, or sent her away someplace to be ‘fixed’.

We weren’t even all that close—and that moment neither brought us closer, nor pushed us further apart. I didn’t magically start flying a rainbow flag or taking on my parents at the dinner table.

I just knew that she was trusting me on a level no one else ever had before, and I wanted to be worthy of her trust.

Fast forward ten years, to the early 2000’s.

I’d gotten married to the second man I’d ever had sex with, and things were generally fine, only now I lived in California and was exposed to all sorts of things I hadn’t been around before.

We were at a rowdy party one night and some of my friends were making out. I was drunkenly watching them and wanted in. I asked him if I could and he said absolutely not, which was fair, seeing as we were married and all, and making decisions while drunk isn’t stellar.

But for better or worse, that didn’t stop me—I snuck off and kissed a girl anyways. Just because I wanted to. He didn’t catch me, I didn’t get into trouble, and it didn’t change anything.

It was just a kiss I put in my pocket for later, and an experience I’d gotten to have that I’d never had before.

The end of the 00’s, I’d gotten divorced from my ex and was telling my mom I was going out with a girlfriend and she had me slow my roll, double-checking that my girlfriend was a friend-friend (which she was) and not a girlfriend because of everything that would mean—probably the usual, me going to hell or something, more prayers, who can say.

But fun all-girls camping trips were just on the horizon and I was most certainly single….

And around then was when my freshman biology friend found me on Facebook telling me that she’d never forgotten that I let her write her crush’s name down and didn’t tell anyone, and how much that’d meant to her. She had gone on to come out in college, it blew up her life like we feared, and she wound up having to escape her family.

I already knew all that though, because her mom and my mom had caught up at the grocery store one day back home, and my mom had relayed everything to me with a very, “That’s too bad for her,” in a tone which I did nothing to discourage at the time.

What I’m telling you, was that I was a shit for decades.

I didn’t want to be the kid people prayed for, and I liked dudes plenty fine, besides.

Hell, I can remember being hesitant to drool on Kate McKinnon on twitter when Ghostbusters came out in 2016 because ‘someone might see’.

So was I a coward?

Absolutely.

I mean, I voted in all the right ways, and I supported my queer friends, giving them friendship and love, cash and couches to crash on…but I pretended I didn’t have real skin in the game because I didn’t want to ‘hear about it’ from anyone, and it was so easy for me to fly under the radar.

Then once I started to want to talk about things, and open up, well, I was married to a man again. And it wasn’t that I wasn’t still exploring that part of me (I was, my husband’s amazing) but like, I fell into the other camp of feeling, ‘but are you really queer enough?’ because my track-record of claiming the label was so situationally dependent and I didn’t know if I’d put in my time.

I mean, I was working in a place where we used a locker room, me and twenty other girls, and was it even a good idea to tell anyone I was bi there? It’s not like I was looking at them lustfully or anything, I just didn’t know how to make things not weird.

Internalized homophobia’s a motherfucker, even when you are queer.

At the same time though—I knew who I was.

So I started reclaiming it in small ways, in hidden places, amongst like-minded friends—people who knew me and cared about me, and who wanted me to be happy, no matter what, and they slowly gave me strength.

When I was a kid growing up in churches, our youth pastors had all these demonstrations for virginity: Do you want gum other people have chewed? I don’t think so! Or, look how poorly this tape works after its original stick! You don’t want to be useless tape, do you?

Southern Baptist shit was (and probably still is) deeply fucked.

All of those tortured metaphors were about not ‘giving things away’, trying to keep us and our teenaged horniness mint-in-box for our future partner.

What you don’t realize at the time though, while you’re listening and watching an adult man repeatedly rip duct tape off of his hairy arm, is that you have already given away things—things you didn’t even know you had.

Your freedom. Your choice. Your ability to move safely in a community and decide who you want to be with, and when, how, and how often.

And the more I started talking with friends about who I was, and how I saw myself, and who I wanted to be and be with, the more it felt like I was getting all those pieces of myself—given away when I was too young to know any better, really—back.

It’s a process for sure.

I don’t know if I’ve done it all the way yet. But writing this book and then this afterword feels big for me—although I super hope this feels low-stakes small-potatoes for you, because maybe you’re younger than me, the world you move in is different/better, or your families have always been spectacular. I fully realize I haven’t been carrying an anchor around, and yet I still would not wish this rock I’ve had in my shoe for 45 years on anyone.

So.

This really is me now.

Who I am. All the way. Exactly how I want to be.

Guys are rad, girls are rad, and everyone is sexy.

Nice to meet you all, and thanks,

Cassie

* * *

[Late May 2022 Author Newsflash!]

I hope you loved AITA? as much as I did!

I HAVE WRITTEN (or am writing right now and am almost done with, eep!) A PRIDE 2022 BONUS SCENE FOR THIS BOOK.

It is the, *ahem*, aforementioned sword-fucking scene at the end.

I AM ALSO GETTING SPICY ART MADE FOR IT.

So what I’m saying is you really need to get on my newsletter so you’re fully braced for when I get to share that!

Now…please keep scrolling for a teaser from Blood of the Pack: Dark Ink Tattoo Book One!

Blood of the Pack: Dark Ink Tattoo Book One teaser!

If you liked the heat in AITA? you’ve gotta check Blood of the Pack out. It’s my True Blood meets Sons of Anarchy love child, set in an all-nite tattoo parlor in Las Vegas, with my bisexual disaster vampire Jack, who is going to be your next book boyfriend. (He’d ask first though. He’s a consent king…right before he plows you into the ground.)

It’s *f*r*e*e* everywhere right now—so enjoy this first chapter, from his boss Angela’s POV and if you like it, go get one!

An Excerpt from Blood of the Pack:

I heard an engine turn the corner, startled, and the MMA fighter I was touching up a truly regrettable tribal tattoo on yelped.

“Sorry. Spine,” I apologized, peeking over his hulking shoulder to see Jack Stone arrive on time for work, possibly for the first time ever while in my employ. His black 1963 Lincoln Continental swooped through Dark Ink’s parking lot like a hearse.

Just Jack. I knew what his car sounded like. Even though our shifts didn’t overlap often – I’d heard it often enough to know it wasn’t a bike. And still….

I sprayed my client’s shoulder with cool water and wiped the blood away, trying to ignore the slight jitter in my hand. This was my job – this was my tattoo-shop – and I’d been doing tats for the past seven years in peace. I breathed deep and willed myself calm. I wasn’t scared and I hadn’t lost control, and if I kept telling myself that long enough eventually I might believe it.

I put the heel of my hand on the fighter’s back to steady it and stepped on the pedal to get the gun roaring again, starting where I’d left off, cleaning up some cheaper artist’s shoddy job. In no other profession was the phrase ‘you get what you pay for’ so true.

This time, the fighter twitched, not me. No way not to hit nerves when you were tattooing someone over bone. Tattoos on top of bone felt like you were getting stabbed.

A lot like getting menacing letters from your ex in prison.

Five minutes later, Jack was leaning over from the wrong side of the counter, purring my name. “Angela.”

I didn’t turn around. I knew where he was, of course, I’d just made it a habit to ignore him. Mostly.

“Hey, boss-lady, I’m on time, just like you asked,” he tried again. I snorted, stopped working, and looked up.

A gaggle of barely-old-enough-to-be-in-the-shop girls flocked behind him, flipping through flash displays, clearly whispering to themselves about him. He was stare-worthy. If you were into tall, lean but muscular men, black hair, brown eyes, and full sleeve tattoos, Jack was your kind of guy. When our shifts overlapped I had to remind myself he was off limits the same way that ex-smokers have to remind themselves to forget about cigarettes. I knew it was for my own good – I’d quit men that were bad for me a long time ago – but that didn’t make it any less hard.

It was also why I tried to ignore him. It was good for him sometimes.

“On time for once,” I corrected him.

“It’s winter,” he said, like that was an explanation.

I saw the post office truck pull into the parking lot behind him and my stomach clenched. “Yeah, of course,” I said without thinking, standing and pulling my gloves off. “Wrap him up, will you?” I said, sidling towards the hip-high swinging saloon door that divided our half of the shop from the client’s.

“My pleasure,” Jack said, setting his ass down on the piercing display case and spinning his legs over to switch sides. Normally I’d yell at him about that, but – I reached the door just as the postman did, opening it up to take our letters from him.

Junk mail, tattoo convention flyers, the electricity bill and – something stamped ‘Approved by the LVMPD’.

Goddammit.

I bit my lips and ran for the office. I stopped myself from slamming the door, just barely, instead whirling to place my back against it, like that would help keep all the monsters at bay, and slowly sank to the floor.

I threw the rest of the mail to the ground and opened up Gray’s letter.

Visit me.

Funny how it only took two words to blow my life apart. I bit the side of my hand to stop from screaming – but somewhere on the inside, a hidden part of me howled.

I tore his letter up – same as I’d torn the other three I’d gotten, starting two weeks ago, and threw the pieces of it into the trash. If only escaping Gray were so easy. I should’ve left years ago – given myself and Rabbit a head start – but then what? Keep running forever? When I knew Gray and the Pack would always be able to find us? No, instead I’d pretended that I’d had a normal life – that I was normal. I’d rolled the dice, praying that someone meaner and nastier than Gray would take him out in prison.

I should’ve known that no such person existed.

I’d lived in Vegas my whole life – you’d think by now I’d be a better gambler.

There was a quiet knock on the door behind me. “Boss-lady?” Jack’s voice, full of concern.

I stood and straightened myself out, opening the door a crack. “I, uh, didn’t know what to charge him – so I asked for two-fifty. That enough?” Jack asked.

It was way more than I’d have asked for. It was only a touch up, hadn’t even taken an hour. “He paid that?”

“I can be very convincing,” he said, and shrugged, searching what he could see of me with his expressive eyes.

“Stop that. If I wanted to tell you about it, I would.”

He leaned forward and pressed the door open. I could’ve fought back – could’ve closed the door – but I didn’t want to make a scene. But my office was meant for only one person, one desk, one chair, there was no way for us be in here and not be in one another’s space. In other circumstances I’d thought about doing things to Jack in here that’d make even the most jaded local blush, but now – I’d much rather he hold me and lie to me that everything was going to be all right.

“What was that?” he said, jerking his chin at the other mail still littering the floor.

“Nothing.”

He stared me down. Could he really read me? Or was he just one of those guys who made you think they could? The kind you had relationships with where you filled all the silences with too much hope?

“Seriously, Ang,” he said, his voice low.

I gestured to include the entire parlor. “It all says it’s for me.”

“Even the one from the Las Vegas Metropolitan police department?” he asked. “Don’t ask me how I know what stamped mail from prison looks like.”

Damn, Jack being Jack. Too smart for his own good. “It’s none of your business,” I said, as boss-like as I could, shutting down the conversation.

Jack took his cue. “All right, all right,”

“And I need to go.”

“Yeah, to your date, I know.”

I hadn’t told him I was going on a date tonight, that that was why I needed him to really-I-mean-it be on time for once. And he’d said it with almost precisely flat inflection, so I couldn’t really tell if he was jealous or whatever – and it didn’t matter, because I was with Mark now, anyhow. But some deep and secret part of me bared its teeth and wagged its tail.

He glanced down at the letters. “If anything bad comes of that, you let me know, okay?”

“Sure,” I lied, and pushed past him, out the door.

If you’d like to read more, hit up Blood of the Pack: Dark Ink Tattoo Book One, anywhere where books are sold!

Also by Cassie Alexander

Written with Kara Lockharte:

The Prince of the Other Worlds Series – hot, sexy urban fantasy

Dragon Called

Dragon Destined

Dragon Fated

Dragon Mated

The Wardens of the Other Worlds Series – hot, sexy paranormal romance

Dragon's Captive

Wolf’s Princess

Written as Cassie Alexander:

The Dark Ink Tattoo series – very, very hot paranormal romance

Blood of the Pack

Blood at Dusk

Blood at Midnight

Blood at Moonlight

Blood at Dawn

The House – a find your fantasy erotica

The House

Her Future Vampire Lover — futuristic vampire paranormal romance

Her Future Vampire Lover

Rough Ghost Lover — a sizzling paranormal erotica — DOES NOT HAVE HEA

Rough Ghost Lover

The Edie Spence urban fantasy series

Nightshifted

Moonshifted

Shapeshifted

Deadshifted

Bloodshifted

My most up-to-date bibliography is always here.