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The neon-lit beer-bottle clock behind the bar was mocking me. The barely visible minute hand?buried under layers of grime, strewn beer, and regret?inched closer to midnight. Despite my best efforts not to care, my palms were sweating.

It is just a regular night, I told myself.

I had promised myself that this year would be different. That I wouldn’t sit around waiting like some lovestruck idiot, wondering if this would finally be the Samhain my mate summoned me.

Spoiler alert: She wouldn’t.

She hadn’t for the last nine years, so why would this year be any different?

Which meant I had two options. Number one: throw myself into my incubus nature, feeding freely and finally accepting what I was. Number two: do the complete opposite and attempt to find an actual, real-life emotional connection with someone.

Option one was a no-go.

For me, feeding had always been about survival, not pleasure. Unlike most of my kind, I had never enjoyed taking desire from strangers. It was mechanical, a means to an end—just enough to get me from one Samhain to the next without starving.

When I was younger—and significantly more naive—I had this ridiculous idea that I would save myself for my mate. In hindsight, I had romanticized the whole thing, convinced that my witch would summon me the very first Samhain that she could, and we would figure out life, love, and passion together.

Looking back, I had no idea what I was thinking. Absolute idiot.

Who wanted a virgin incubus?Literally no one.The entire purpose of an incubus was to provide pleasure—and yet there I was, deliberately starving myself, waiting for a witch who clearly had better things to do than summon me.

That first Samhain was a sucker punch straight to the soul.

And I, being the tragic, lovesick fool that I was, nearly starved to death out of sheer stubbornness. If it hadn’t been for my friends, Ambrose, Blaise, and Lochran, I probably would have faded into the shadows like some pathetic incubus ghost story. They had convinced me to start feeding, listing off a whole range of plausible excuses for why my mate might not have summoned me yet.

“She’s studying.”

“She’s traveling.”

“She’s finding herself.”

And that first Samhain, I accepted it. I was happy for her, in fact. And none of my friend’s mates had summoned them that year either, so it wasn’t like mine was doing anything unusual. So, I shoved aside my romantic notions of us losing our virginity together, convinced myself that this was fine, and started feeding—just enough to survive.

And I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Nine years later, I was done waiting.

She wasn’t traveling. She wasn’t studying. She wasn’t “finding herself.”

She just didn’t want me.

So, this year, instead of sitting around feeling pathetically rejected, I was going to do something for myself. For the first time in my existence, I was going to try something radically different for an incubus—Option two.

I was going to try dating.

Dating and incubus demons went together like milk and vinegar—which is to say, not at all.

We weren’t a dating kind of species. We fed, returned to our realm, and repeated the cycle until our mate finally summoned us—or at least that was the case for my clan, who had a centuries old bargain with the Briar Coven witches. Other incubus demons found their fated mates by searching the mortal realm, waiting to just randomly stumble across them like something from a bad rom-com.

Feeding wasn’t enough. It never had been.

I needed to know what it felt like to be chosen—not because of my magic, but because someone actually sawme. Wantedme.

To watch someone lose themselves in my eyes—myrealeyes—not the face of whatever fantasy their subconscious had crafted.