Page 3 of Ballad of Nightmares

Death scowled over the paper, but upon seeing Rolfe’s widened gaze, his comment stuck in his throat. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s the ravens.”

The sentence sent his chair legs hitting the floor. He bolted up and pushed past Rolfe to the windows overlooking the gardens.

Ravens and crows littered the sky in a frenzy. Swirling and diving in the pounding rain.

One thudded into the window directly in front of him, and he jumped back. A sink befell his chest as he stared at his white roses being torn apart.

When ravens fall,he remembered from the text.

The shadowed snake tattoo around his throat tightened for the very first time, constricting his airways enough that his eyes fluttered. He craned his neck in an attempt to stretch out the feeling and pressed a hand to the glass.

“Extra patrol teams on the grounds tonight,” he told Rolfe. His friend’s perplexed gaze met his, and he finished with, “Someone is here.”

Death didn’t settle in the kitchen upon his return, only going back to fill up his coffee and take the newspaper upstairs to his study. He needed to look through his emails before his assistant, Millie, arrived.

Luna followed him.

When he reached the top of the stairs, he heard as Rolfe turned the connected speakers on throughout the home, blasting the stuffy air with the beautiful sound of heavy metal music.

His emails mainly were from Millie. He’d kept his true identity secret for centuries now, and took his meetings in the darkness of his office on video chats. As he read through her notes—which were mostly unorganized—he took a piece of paper from the printer and began folding it up into a plane.

“Hell-ooo!” an impatient voice echoed from the foyer over the loud music.

Millie.

He didn’t bother taking his feet down from his desk as he tossed the paper airplane into the air and sent it flying in a downwards spiral over the second-floor banister.

He heard laughter come up the steps, a delightful yip carried over the stuffy air, and then Millie pressed the door open, not bothering to enter yet. He recognized the toy in her eyes that morning and wondered if she had found herself bound and kneeling at some woman’s feet the night before.

Millie leaned with a stretch against the doorframe, hand sliding up the wood, blonde hair falling over her wide blue eyes and out of the long braid over her left shoulder. “You rang, master?” she mocked in a sultry whisper, knee wrapping on the frame.

He eyed her in the light bouncing off her hips and waist dip. One of his favorite parts of every morning was teasing her and hearing about her exploits from the night before after she gave him the morning updates. Millie enjoyed her time at night, and sometimes he could hear the women she held on their knees as they begged for a god to end them. But Millie would bring them back with pleasure they had only ever dreamed of. He wondered how many times a week she showed off her demon form, let her black curled horns wrap into her long blonde hair or let her tail do mischievous things.

A whispered, coiled shadow slipped across the room and tickled under her chin, making her eyes roll with the coolness of the dark breeze. She smiled, and he felt his shadow flex its tattered wings behind him in the silhouette from the firelight on his desk.

“Morning, Milliscent,” he said finally, using her full name to pull her out of his spell.

Her sinister gaze dropped with an eye roll to the back of her head, and she pushed off the door. “Tease,” she muttered. “You know how much I like the cold shadows.”

“You’re late,” he said.

“Fuck of a celebration going on outside already,” she told him, throwing her purse in the chair. “I had to wheelie through the front gates to get people to move.” Her grin flashed. “Such beautiful screams.”

He settled more in the chair, hands landing in his lap as he surveyed her. “And this is different from every other morning when you… what, exactly? Ride in calmly?” he asked, voice dripping in sarcasm.

But Millie ignored him as she stalked around to his side of the desk and scooted herself onto the top, one leg exaggeratedly crossing atop the other, exposing her upper thigh.

He reached out and toyed with the hem of her dress. “You could always stay here,” he told her.

“And listen to Rolfe’s snores or hear your victims screaming every night? No, thanks,” she said, peering over at his computer. “Are you actually reading my emails?”

“You’re late,” he repeated.

Millie smiled coyly and shifted. He watched her in stillness, his shadowed wings flicking at the tips and following his even breath. Within a few seconds, she was spread eagle in front of him, and then she leaned forward, her breasts spilling from the top of her black dress as she said, “What are you going to do about it,Daddy?”

The umbra trickled the floor, warping and swirling over the decadent ornate rug and the legs of the grand oak desk, slowly curling up and up the dimming room. Those shadows reached her toes, her ankles, her calves—