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“Absolutely fucking not! I left you alone for less than twenty minutes, and look what happened.” Moon grabbed Chen’s wrist and forced the vampire’s no longer injured hand up in front of his eyes. “There is no way in hell I’m leaving you alone for hours on end. Let me inform you now, Mr. Vampire, that it’s going to be a very long time before you get anything that resembles privacy. You need me there to make sure you don’t get hurt.”

“Agreed.”

Moon’s eyes shot wide and his mouth dropped open.

Chen leaned in and placed a small kiss to the tip of his nose. “Every second of every day, I need you at my side.”

With a noisy sigh, Moon twisted and flopped on the ground, his head landing in Chen’s lap. “I can’t. You need to think about my heart. You say these things and I can’t go on.”

“Please, try,” Chen murmured, fighting the urge to laugh. “You were saying something about Sky. What exactly can the necromancer do to help us? Can he blot out the sun?”

Moon held up a finger. “As far as I know, no, he can’t. My idea is to go to his house by cutting through the underworld.”

Chapter 20

Moon Mullins

Chen was speechless after that bomb.

Not that Moon blamed him.

He’d been pretty speechless the moment he’d first thought of the idea. Sky had done a lot of dying-fish gasping on the phone when Moon had suggested it.

He’d been sure he’d never be able to top his “Drink my potentially poisonous blood to save your life” idea. But no, this definitely felt worse.

His plan to save Chen for a second time was to take a creature who had already died once into the realm of the dead. He had no clue how this was going to go. If Sky’s incoherent cries and sputters were anything to go by, the safe bet was bad. This was going to be very bad.

Did they have any other choice?

No. The longer they remained in the woods, the more Chen was in danger. The fae hadn’t seemed all that interested in Moon. At least, not until he’d begun killing them.

In his defense…they’d started it.

They should never have kidnapped a vampire. And they definitely shouldn’t have hurt the Zhang clan.

Most importantly, that King Ash shouldn’t have lain a finger on his sweet baby. His Chen-ge.

Oh, he was sinking fast now. There was no stopping this slide now. It was all King Ash’s fault. Hurting his grumpy vampire, leaving him dying in Moon’s arms. How was he supposed to harden his heart against that?

Chen Bo Cheng belonged to him now, and Moon took that possession seriously. This was why he was even considering this insane idea. He had to get Chen out of the forest.

“When you say the underworld…” Chen began after more than a minute of absolute silence.

“The underworld. Realm of the dead. The place where all souls pass through on their way to…well, whatever is next. I don’t know, and if Sky knows, I’ve told the little death witch to never share it with me. I don’t want to know.”

“You’ve been there?” Chen asked.

Moon shook his head. “Nope.”

“Has Sky?”

“Yes, but it was an accident.”

That got Chen’s dark, thick eyebrows to skyrocket to his hairline. “I beg your pardon.”

Moon sat up and returned to where he’d been sitting with his back to the rock wall. As much as he enjoyed lying in Chen’s lap, this was the kind of conversation best had sitting up like adults.

“The short of it was that Sky pissed off Zalramon, the king of the underworld. The demon dragged him off to the underworld to settle a bet. Sky won, and now he and the king are sort of low-key besties who watch BL shows and eat sandwiches together.”

Chen blinked at him. A few times.

“I think my grasp of the English language is failing me.” Chen pressed the heel of his palm to his forehead and rubbed hard, as if trying to force his thoughts to clear. “I didn’t understand any of that. Your friend made a bet with a demon and won? And now he eats sandwiches with that demon?”

Moon captured Chen’s hand and pulled it away from his forehead. He smoothed his fingers across the red spot Chen had created before leaning his shoulder on Chen’s, his hand still captive in Chen’s. “That’s the gist of it.”

A smile drifted across his lips as he talked about necromancer Skylar Wallace and his unique ability to summon underworld minions to do his bidding. Lucky for all living creatures, Sky didn’t have an evil bone in his body. Instead of trying to take over the world—or at least torturing his enemies—Sky liked to use his minions for running errands, helping with spells, and cleaning his house.

Well, there was that one time he’d used a minion to kill a vampire, but in Sky’s defense, the bastard was a very evil vampire and he’d fucked with Sky’s boyfriend. The asshole had deserved to bite it.