Page 92 of A Taste of Bliss

I can feel Grim coming to stand behind me. “He sure seems smitten with you.”

I don’t say anything because even though Simon’s okay now, that could have gone so horribly wrong. I could have gotten him killed.

“Bliss?” Grim asks, trailing a finger up my arm. “Any reason you’re trying to seduce the human when I’m here and more than willing?”

I shudder but not from revulsion. My inner succubus slut is stirring and wants to be unleashed. Goose bumps flair up along my skin and Grim takes notice.

“Want to get out of here?” he asks, his breath tickling at my ear.

I whip around and put some distance between us. “Sorry,” I say, forcing a smile. “I— I just can’t right now.”

Grim swallows and looks at the wall and then back to me. “Of course. No worries.”

I leave him standing there with no other explanation. Amelia and Reese have found themselves back on the dance floor, the center of attention, of course. Males of all types are gathered around them. Amelia raises her solo cup in the air. As she brings it down to take a sip, I grab it and down the whole thing in one go.

“Fuck, Bliss,” Amelia says, but I don’t listen to her. I grab Reese’s cup and drink that too. Then I dance with them. At some point some male comes up behind me to dance and I let him, thefeeling of his hands on my hips stirring my inner fae, but even as drunk as I am, I don’t let her out to play.

The party passes in a whirl of dancing and drinking and then at some point I’m in my bed and Amelia and Reese are each tugging off one of my boots, laughing their asses off.

I giggle along with them, but only for a moment before the drunken stupor whisks me off to sleep.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

PISCES

“You’re late,”the song wraith tells me as I come to a stop in an alleyway behind a coffee shop and some trendy restaurant.

I put a sleeve-covered hand over my mouth to try to quell the smell coming off the dumpsters nearby. “You’re surprised I didn’t rush to meet with you in a trash-filled back alley?”

The song wraith looks around, unamused. “I forgot you fae sometimes have overactive senses.”

“Can you not smell it?” I ask, genuinely curious. I don’t know much about wraiths and don’t have access to the kind of books that would educate me on them. And it’s not like I can ask my friends more. They might not think it’s odd for me to learn about the being that turned me, but I’m not a great liar. Shaun would know something’s up. It’s like he can smell a lie as easily as I can smell the rotten fruit discarded to my left.

“These upcoming shows are very important.” The wraith ignores my question. “You need to make sure to feed beforehand. And you should use your lure.”

“Lure?” I ask, even though I know what he means. Sirens can lure prey out to them. I’ve never done it before because I’venever needed to. But apparently I can lure an unsuspecting fae out and feed off them. It honestly sounds a bit unethical.

There’s another reason I haven’t done it before.

“I don’t know how.”

The song wraith glares at me. “Figure it out.”

He takes a menacing step forward. But I’m past being scared of him. He can’t do much worse than he already has.

“Pisces, in order for our deal to work, I need you at your strongest. The lure will increase your ability to connect to your fans tenfold.”

“I get it, but I’ve never figured outhowto. I’m not saying I won’t. I’m saying I can’t.”

The wraith shakes his head at me, annoyance flickering across his face. “It’s instinct. You don’t need to know—” he taps his head, “—you need to feel.” He taps his heart. Or where his heart would be. I’m not sure if wraiths have hearts. “You’ve done it before, you just don’t realize what you did.”

I’m about to ask what he means, but the wraith dissolves into nothingness. Fucking prick.

I’ve been sitting at the edge of an artfully human-made pond, trying to figure out how to use my lure. All that I’ve managed so far is luring a duck over to me, but I’m pretty sure that’s just because it thought I had bread. It left as soon as it realized I had nothing to offer.

I ponder what the wraith meant when he said I’ve done it before.

In all my time being a siren, I’ve never consciously used my lure. I’ve talked at length to my friends about it, but seeing as I’mquite possibly the only siren in existence, they had no idea how it worked. Evan and Shaun went to the fae council, searching in its vast libraries for any information on sirens, but since sirens are so closely tied with wraiths, a lot of the information was restricted. And what they were able to find, well, we questioned the validity of it. All of the books they could find had been written by Born fae, and not the open-minded kind.