Page 2

My own body felt so far away, sonot-mine, so corrupted. My missing soul craved a different type of sustenance; I only had to figure out what it was.

But I knew what it was. I’d always known.

I knew, but the knowing didn’t help me.

That half of my soul had already been claimed.

He’d stolen that from me, too.

I watched the green metal on the door of the building, and I choked on the blinding rage that rose within me, burning in my chest. I blessed the practiced skill of these fingers, so strong and long and foreign and deft, and yes, beautiful. They were beautiful. Everything about him was beautiful, outside and in.

Beautiful, complex… deadly.

Right now, I blessed the structure there, the knowing, the way I could wield every part of it, like a puppeteer pulling strings, making them dance the way I wanted, making them sing and fuck and eat steak and laugh like I wanted.

Thiswas the hunger that mattered now.

This was the only hunger I could truly sate.

The only one I would ever vanquish.

I hunted the black light.

I hunted the devil with the empty eyes.

I hunted, and I ran it down, dragged it to the earth, sank my teeth, tore out its throat.

And I ate.

I ate until I’d had my fill.

1

PROMETHEUS

Lucian Ward Rucker stood silently in the sterile, smooth-walled observation booth.

He was, uncharacteristically, alone.

He’d come without even Victor, which was practically an accomplishment on its own, and usually required tying Victor to a chair, or throwing him out of a moving vehicle and locking the doors. His longtime personal assistant rarely dared wander out of Lucian’s shouting distance for any reason… primarily because he was a spineless worm who knew precisely what would happen to him if he did not happen to be there when Lucian wanted him.

Still, the thing that bored Lucian about Victor was also the thing that made him invaluable. Loyalty was invaluable.

Unquestioning,unhesitatingloyalty was all that truly mattered in an employee.

In the end, it was the only true requirement. Anyone who broke that trust in Lucian was not only blacklisted from his companies, his personal presence, and any part of his social orbit, but they would be utterly and completely destroyed without mercy.

It was the reason Victor was still around, when most of Lucian’s employees were not. Lucian even brought the obsequious little toad with him on his honeymoon.

He smirked at the memory.

Gabriela had not been pleased.

Perhaps that had been the beginning of the end of his shortest marriage yet.

The death knell, of course, had been Gabriela finding him in their hot tub at home in San Francisco, a few weeks later, getting his cock sucked by that black-haired, teenaged starlet he’d met at one gala or another. He hadn’t specificallymeantto be caught that way; he’d thought his lovely, naive, doting,imbecilicnew wife would be at her modeling job in Zurich, or possibly Oslo, or… wherever… but she’d come home a few days early.

Well, or perhaps he’d gotten the dates wrong. He’d never listened that closely when she spoke of her work. Her work was trivial garbage, anyway, unworthy of him spending any portion of his mind on, so what did it matter?