1. Shadows with a Sweet Tooth

Six Months After the Wish...

There was so much sweat on her skin. Not all of it was hers. It dripped from the ceiling, an animalic rain shower. The strobe lights masked so many of her movements.

It looked as if she paused every shift of her hips or turn of her head between blinks of white light. The racket of the club, a bass beat rattling through the air, made her synapses jump like beans in a tin.

The distorted music pouring from the speakers sounded mangled. It was a feeble mockery of the complex symphonies she'd enjoyed in the late Baroque era.

Thumps, false drums, and a rabid bass, with a single repeated line of dialogue, composed every song. Though the imbecile manning the music booth claimed he played a new offering every few minutes, she couldn't tell the difference between them.

They all thudded like an executioner's axe. A mess of sound that hurt more than it encouraged her to dance. No match for the harpsichord sonatas she'd devoured in Versailles.

Simplistic. Juvenile. Mortals pretending they were musical savants, soulless and much too loud. But it distracted everyone from noticing the demon among them.

She had come to the crowded club hours earlier  in search of a feed. A quick fumble in an alleyway would suffice to tame the hunger eating her alive inside.

Her succubitch, the demon who never shut up, kept up with her demands as Liora kept finding excuses to avoid the men and women trying to catch her eye. The 'music' put her off.

It vibrated in her molars like a dentist's drill. Cello suites hadn't scored this massacre. They'd employed only the electric shriek of rusting metal.

Everything in this place assaulted her senses in the worst possible way. A man's cologne clouded the air she breathed. Acrid and offensive—almond and AXE body spray. It adhered to her throat.

And clung to her skin, a veil of synthetic bitterness that made her teeth ache to scrape it off. Her stomach lurched, venom flooded her throat as bile tried to rise. She'd tasted better in the plague pits.

Her shadows recoiled, sticking close to her to escape it. For hours, they remained glued to her. Waiting for her to give up on this useless hunt and return to her safe-house.

Then their tendrils snuck toward an enticing smell and halted, wriggling wildly. She inhaled and froze mid-step, stumbling forward again as she caught herself.

Something colder than her burnt-sugar hunger hung in the air like a frostbite whisper. Forbidden, or maybe forgotten, but somehow familiar as Liora wove through the mass of writhing bodies.

It vanished as she moved away from the dance floor. A tap on her shoulder made her darkness hiss as she whirled to face the pretty woman, a girl really, and arched a cool brow.

The brunette smiled, winked, and leaned in closer. Liora held still, smirking. Stupid. It was stupid to approach a creature like her in a place like this. Beer and cheap wine fueled the girls' bravado.

"Can I buy you a drink?"

Her dilated eyes, hazel, too wide, twinkled with alcohol's dazed sheen. Ah. Mortals.

Only one or two cocktails away from ruining their entire lives, always. It made hunting too easy. She was nice to look at, had that naïveté some men would salivate to gain control of.

Her bobbed raven hair gleamed like liquid night under the club lights. Her tiny skirt was little more than pelmet.

Her scent carried notes of apricot and cinnamon, something salty underneath her sickeningly sweet perfume that seemed almost masculine.

She stifled a groan. Her inner demon clawed at her sternum. The girl was edible, but compromised.

Liora clenched her jaw. Her shadows, invisible to mortals, reared and watched her for their cue. She shook her head, forcing a coy little smile as she tucked a loose strand of copper hair behind her ear.

Her inner tormentor screamed at her.

She is offering herself up on a silver platter... fucking feast!

She didn't listen. The girl's pulse fluttered, a hummingbird flapping against the bars of its gilded cage.

Her sweat-beaded throat pulsed, ripe for the taking, the longer she stared, a lure that made her mouth water with venom. Liora's clawless fingers flexed.

She was a priestess itching to carve communion. One swipe of her talon, and the child in the brunette's womb would inherit nothing but debt.

While the idea was tempting, she didn't have to kill her in the end, and she could just take a drop of her doubled life-force to ease the chill creeping through her bones. No.

Some lines even demons shouldn't cross.

When Liora spoke, her voice carried two tones. Her silken seductress, tender and torrid, and her black-widow rasp, akin to the singing of a blade sharpened over a whetstone.

It was a duality she glamored until she needed it. Liora reached out and touched the other woman's cheek; a thrum of manipulative heat spread out from her palm into her skin.

The young woman stood petrified in place, grin glued on and gaze unblinking.

"Leave, child. Go home and forget you saw me." Her head cocked. "Perhaps refrain from drinking again. The bastard you're carrying will thank you."

The girl nodded dumbly, eyes glossed with Liora's compulsion as she ran like the hounds of Hell nipped at her heels.

Liora watched the girl flee, shadows slinking back to her like obedient pets. She sighed, hands fisting until her nails bit into her palms, and her mouth thinned as her teeth ached You are impossible. Let me out! Damn you, child!

Her succubus yelled as the girl escaped her sight.

You'd have fed me for a week.

She ignored her. She turned, scanning the crowd, and shook her head. The strobe lights fractured her reflection into a hundred Lioras, each more ravenous than the last.

She avoided looking at herself, head on a swivel as she moved. There was nothing for any of them here. The cold, familiar scent had vanished, but her shadows had memorized its trail.

They fluttered, eager to lead her to its source. She stood on the fringes of the crowd near the back door, twitching, sweating, and starving. Her insides felt like they were eating themselves.

Her dark magic again nudged her toward the exit.

"Fine," she snarled. "Let's kill something worth the effort."

She kicked the door open and stepped outside. The cool night breeze flirted with her loose hair. Her nose wrinkled against the reek of exhaust fumes it held.

Mist curled around her ankles, grave-cold and eager to drag her deeper. The streetlight at the end of her alley blinked, a dying star tattooing her shadow—twisted, tailed, and horned—against the wall.

Her inky serpents slithered toward another close blocks away, their movements unnaturally fluid, almost... hungry. The frost-rot stench of decaying roses thickened as she stood behind the club. It was both off-putting and attractive.

A sweet-putrid tang that reminded her of saints' bones crumbling in the Vatican's Grottoes. The brand hidden beneath her glamor roasted her collarbone. It was a throbbing that ended as soon as it began.

She frowned, pulse jumping.

Someone's dying for you, darling.

Liora bared her teeth. The demon tested her on her best, recently fed days, but when she went too long without feeding, it was nigh on impossible to ignore her demands. Her insides knotted and turned cold.

Her mouth filled with sweet venom, heat flaring bright low in her abdomen. She gave in to it, and said, "We'll make it worth their while."

Liora followed her dark snakes, jaw set. She couldn't risk a mortal stumbling across a magical creature's corpse.

It would out them all. She'd destroy the source, erase the evidence, and return to her suite before dawn broke. Her breath caught.

Her chest grew tighter than the whalebone corsets she wore when titled men courted freshly flowered young women with stiff dances and bragging about land ownership. The rime-tinged fragrance, the faint breathing—it struck a chord she'd long since plucked.

She searched her memory, but there were spots bare of lived moments. A piercing pain stabbed her skull as she tried to smash one open. It didn't budge.

Her growl cracked off the walls. She paused, hands steady, but her heart raced as her claws slid free. Obsidian, serrated, they gleamed under the streetlights and sharpened.

Her shadows peeled away, hissing as they tasted the saccharine decay staining the air. They'd always had a sweet tooth for doomed things.

The alley walls wept with moss, their bricks blackened by a century of sins she'd imbibed firsthand. A fine spray of rain drizzled from the mottled-metal sky. And a shiver traced her spine.

The atmosphere itself seemed to pause as she squared her shoulders. It had been ages since she'd come across a vampire in a city like this. They haunted small towns with forests large enough to take cover in when they grew too sloppy.

She typically gave the bloodsuckers a wide berth. A walking corpse had nothing to offer her but stolen, poisoned blood, and an existential crisis. It did not matter; she wasn't planning to drink from them.

Strange, though. She had spotted no hunters recently. Why had a vampire ended up here? Shadows bloomed like black roses as she stepped deeper into the alley, swallowing her whole."Make it quick," she told the darkness.

Her succubus purred, Make him beg.