Page 114 of A Taste of Bliss

Grim smiles at me, a mischievous look in his eyes. “Promise you won’t freak out?”

I raise my brows at him. “I’ll try my best.”

“I’m a hellhound.” I breathe in sharply but remain quiet as he continues. Hellhounds are created by lesser wraiths,considerably less powerful than a song wraith or a dream wraith, but still nasty things. “Stormy, Casper, and I were all turned together. We went hiking and got lost. A mountain wraith got to us.”

“Wow, no wonder I couldn’t figure you out.” I’ve never met a hellhound. I’ve not met a lot of Made fae, I realize. And I’m also realizing a lot of what Born fae learn about them isn’t right.

“There’s something else I should tell you too,” Grim says, turning a bit more serious. “At one point the fae council approached us, wanted us to hunt down wraiths for them. Hellhounds are sometimes able to track their magical signatures.”

I nod. I don’t know much about his species, but I do know that. “So what? You hunt wraiths and in your off time you play in a band?”

“Sort of. The band is actually kind of a cover for us.”

“Us?”

He nods, laughing. “Not everyone of the Phantoms is a hellhound, but we all are contracted with the fae council. We got into the metal scene because we love the music, don’t get me wrong, but fae flock to this community. Haven’t you ever marveled at just how many metal bands are actually fae? And where fae go, so do wraiths.” He winks at me. I’ve no doubt he can see the gears turning in my head as I process this.

“How many wraiths have you—?” I struggle to remember the right word. Caught? Defeated? Killed?

“Three,” he says proudly. “It might not seem like much, but it takes a while to find them, then some really complicated magic to banish them.”

“How do you banish them?”

“It’s different for different wraiths. And it depends on how strong a foothold they have here in this realm.”

I nod along as he tells a story about how the Phantoms defeated a river wraith they encountered playing in Brazil.

“We were able to track it by finding the fae that summoned the thing. A water elemental that wanted to try use it to become more powerful. Anyways, we should have been able to banish it without too much trouble since it had only been summoned to this realm once.” I nod, recalling some of the random facts I learned in school a while back and also my more recent research. A wraith can only come to this realm first if they’ve been summoned, then they can come and go as they please, but depending on how they’ve been summoned they’re usually controlled by the one who summoned them. “But this one was possessing someone, so that was tricky. Hard to banish a wraith while it’s inside a fae’s body.”

“Why would a wraith need to possess someone?” I can’t help but ask. I didn’t even realize that’s a possibility.

“Each time a wraith is summoned back to this realm, they gain more of a foothold, right? Well, until they have a really good foothold here, they aren’t fully corporeal. So when a wraith can’t physically interact much they’re known to possess fae.”

I think back to shaking hands with the song wraith. He certainly seemed corporeal. So how many times has he been banished and brought back, then?

Grim continues with his story, explaining how they basically exorcised the wraith from that poor fae. I sip on my lemonade, completely enthralled. He reaches over and takes my hand in his. “Any other questions?” he asks.

I think for a moment and smile. “Does everyone call you Grim?”

He laughs and presses a kiss to my hand. “Not everyone. Some people do call me Hayden. Though I’ll admit, it’s unusual.”

I laugh too. “Dericia would probably end up calling you Hay Hay.”

“She calls Taser Tay Tay, right?”

I nod.

“I’m surprised he lets her.”

“There really isn’t alet herwhen it comes to Reese,” I explain.

Grim grins widely at that. “I can totally see that.”

“What happened with you and Taser?” I ask, the smile falling from both our faces.

Grim sits up straighter, letting my hand go. His mood seems to darken a bit and I mentally kick myself for having brought it up.

He looks out at the crowd that’s formed around the food trucks as everyone tries to grab food before the first bands of the day start their sets. It’s the last official day of the festival, and usually the busiest from what I’ve heard. More of the bigger headliners are playing today, including the Phantoms.