“Investigation!” I called after her. “We need to go somewhere haunted; I need content!”
“Rae, what’s your number?” Victoria pulled out her phone, the sparkling blue case sporting a dangling silver crown charm. “That way I can give you a heads-up if there’s anything fun going on.” She gave me a sweet smile. “I know it can be intimidating making new friends.”
I gave her my number, glad to see her so willing to be friendly. Out of the corner of my eye as I rattled off my digits, I noticed Jeremiah typing at the same time on his phone. I could have been wrong, but it seemed like he took my number too.
When I turned to head for my next class, my eyes swept along the sidewalk in front of Calgary Hall, but this time, Leon was gone.
There was only so long I could jack off in that vile concrete room before I began to feel more than a little feral. Demons have needs: the drive to hunt pleasure, to seek stimulation, is as necessary as food and water to a human. So as much as I hated the man, when Kent told me I was to guard the university campus when the semester started, I could have kissed his goddamn boots.
Could have. I didn’t. But it had been far too many years since I’d felt so free.
Kent’s sacrifice hadn’t just stirred his God. It had awakened the Eld, the ancient beasts of the forest who were sustained only by blood, magic, and pain. The God’s awakening was making them restless, and soon enough they would begin to creep from the darkest depths of the forest to hunt.
Kent didn’t need panic sweeping through Abelaum. It was my duty to keep the Eld away from the students, away from town. I was to dispose of the beasts when I found them, which wasn’t an easy task, but it wasn’t as if I could refuse Kent’s orders. I’d gladly kill any Eld I laid eyes on if it meant having their hunting grounds for myself.
The Eld would consume the flesh of humans if they could, but I would consume them in another way. Through pleasure, pain, and blood. Corruption. Temptation. Utterly perverse intoxication. Humans were the most pitifully willing prey. Too many of them lived such constrained lives, binding themselves to moralities that only served to limit their enjoyment of their short mortal existence.
Offer one an easy path to perversion, tempt them with pleasure’s darkest desires, and they made for easy prey. A feast of curious college students had been put before me, and I intended to eat well.
They were all wary, at first. Primal instinct told them what their eyes did not: I was dangerous. A predator. They kept their distance from me even when they couldn’t keep their eyes from roaming over me. It meant that the steps up to Calgary Hall’s closed doors, where I had set up my primary post to watch everyone milling across the quad, remained vacant.
Until she skipped up the steps without a care in the world, wide-eyed, vibrating with energy, smelling of sage and mint and warm skin.
She didn’t even glance in my direction, as if whatever primal instinct that drove her fellow students was utterly vacant from her, the feral guardian for self-preservation shrugging its shoulders and letting the little thing run wild. She was little — in stature but not in energy. She had a large camera held close beneath her chin, as if she was ready to lift it to her eye at any moment. Her black denim jacket looked too large, as did the leather boots on her feet and the stuffed book bag she carried. She wasn’t tall enough to reach my shoulder, but beneath her oversized jacket I spotted the pleasing curve of her breasts, her hips, thighs that begged to be gripped and left bruised.
Heat flushed through me. If I wasn’t careful, if I let myself give in too quickly to that need to hunt, to pursue, to tempt, my human disguise would slip and these poor mortals wouldn’t just be giving me space — they’d be running, screaming.
But I wasn’t about to let her simply walk away.
“Are you fucking lost?”
She turned slowly, wide brown eyes now narrowed, to look me over skeptically from behind thick-rimmed glasses. Her eyes lingered, her body’s sudden flood of nervous hormones turning the air pungently sweet.
Perfect.
“Not lost. It’s hard to miss the bright yellow tape pasted across the scene of a murder.”
She’d tried to sound bothered, but her tone shot up in pitch and betrayed her lie. She was nervous, intrigued. Just frightened enough to be wary. The bitchy smile she plastered on those black-painted lips was yet another falsehood.
I rather liked liars. It meant they were afraid of telling the truth, and I loved making humans face their fears.
I smiled back, and it seemed to awaken that sleepy primal guardian of hers. Instinct finally kicked a bit more fear into her as she caught a glimpse of my teeth. She probably saw them a bit sharper than she should have, but I was excited, and maintaining a “normal” human appearance was difficult.