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Chapter 1

Declan

F or Declan Lynch, sex was optional. Swimming was not.

He was the son of the demon Elrith, an incubus who made his living wheeling and dealing in the city of Lyric. But Declan had spent decades watching the ways his father used and abused the hapless humans in his path, and he wasn’t going to live like that.

Instead, Declan shut himself off from the world. He locked himself away in his penthouse apartment across the hall from a place shared by the youngest of his siblings, and he supported himself with freelance IT work.

He rarely went out, because when he did, people took note. Unlike his half-siblings, Jasper, Malcolm, and Sasha, Declan was fully supernatural. In addition to his father’s glowing red eyes, the tail he could hide or reveal on a whim, his hair was a brilliant shade of teal, and underwater, he could breathe through his skin. He could swim for hours without surfacing.

His mother was a sea nymph, an oceanid. She’d lounged on the shoreline long enough to catch Elrith’s eye, and nine months later, had returned to deposit Declan into his father’s arms to raise. After all, she was simply too busy swimming to bother raising a child—rarely was it in the nature of nymphs to parent, especially young, beautiful ones. And, well, Declan’s toes weren’t webbed, so out in the water as an infant, he was more a liability than a joy.

Elrith had not been pleased. He preferred to leave his children in the arms of their mothers until puberty, at least. Once their demonic sides awakened, he saw the value in having beautiful offspring, but while they were young, they were burdensome. At least he hadn’t tossed Declan out, but he’d hardly been warm and affectionate.

His younger brother, Malcolm, had been taken in by the ways that Elrith provided—the money, the flashy name-brand clothing, the opportunities. Declan, having grown up with access to all that, saw past the facade to the rotten core behind it.

But matters could have been worse. Elrith had never taken Declan from Lyric. He’d never removed him from a view of the shoreline that settled Declan’s wild heart, and when Declan locked himself away in his room to play on his computer, Elrith had left him alone. He might even have been relieved.

And when he needed to eat? Well, there were plenty of reputable, kind, patient sex workers who’d come lend him a hand. The best part about it was when they were finished, he paid and they left. The terms of the deal were clear, and no one went falling in love with him—at least not after he’d learned to never hire the same person twice.

An incubus could get by like that.

Declan needed to do something about Jasper. His youngest brother was decidedly not getting by anymore. He’d stopped eating. Stopped hunting.

It wasn’t that Declan thought Elrith’s way of doing things was the right one—he had spent too much on sex workers to say going on the hunt was no big deal—but Jasper had to eat. He had to eat, or he was going to waste away. He deserved better than to starve and die because of an accident of birth. Being an incubus, despite the common prejudices against demons, shouldn’t be a death sentence.

More than once, he’d thought about hiring a prostitute and inviting Jasper over, shutting them up together in his apartment and letting them go at it on his suede sectional. Nothing was more important than Jasper getting a good meal.

He’d talked himself out of it every time, sure that Jasper wouldn’t appreciate additional pressure. But he was worried, and he needed to unwind.

That night, the full moon rose over the ocean, reflecting in a rippling white orb back at him as he sank his toes into the sand. The call of the water was loudest when the moon was full, and Declan couldn’t help himself. There was plenty for him to worry about—a project for work, Jasper—but that night, for just a few hours, Declan sneaked out of his apartment, down to the shore, to steal time for himself. If he could just sink into the water, everything would seem clearer.

By the pier, he kicked off his shoes, shrugged out of his shirt, and left his trousers by one of the wide wooden piles. He preferred to swim naked, nothing between him and the water. The ocean took him in, held him up, protected him, because he was made from it. It was as much family as his siblings in the penthouse—more family, even, than Elrith, who had disowned him for buying sex that he could have hunted for. It was unseemly, he claimed, for an incubus to pay for sex.

It was past midnight, and while there was a drunk sitting on a dune down the way near the public entrance, watching the moon rise, no one was close enough to see Declan clearly.

At least, if there were, he couldn’t see them. But the whole way down to the shoreline, he’d felt like he was being watched. It’d started as soon as he’d walked out of the high-rise downtown where he lived, but no matter how he turned to look, there was no one stalking his footsteps.

It was nothing, he told himself. He hadn’t been out in too long.

He was in his head, on edge because he was worried about Jasper. And all those worries were nothing a swim couldn’t fix.

He walked down to the water’s edge and let the waves break over his toes, the cool zing of water calling out to the marrow in his bones. When he shut his eyes and inhaled, salt air filled his lungs, and the buzzing pulse of sound from the city behind him drifted away.

Two long strides, and he leapt into the water, his arms held together overhead so when he broke the surface, the water barely splashed around him. In a ripple, he swam out farther, to where the water was deep enough he could float.

Even though the moon pulled him, same as it did the tides, it wasn’t the reason that Declan did this at night. It was because the beach was quiet at midnight, and there was no one to see him, to want him, to forget proper sense and proposition him right there on the sidewalk. It was a lonely life, but Declan knew better than to let his guard down.

Only once he swam out far past the end of the pier did he actually feel alone. In the water, no one could catch him unless he wanted to be caught, and, well, Declan hadn’t allowed himself to long for anyone that way since he’d been too young to comprehend the damage he could do simply by standing in too close proximity to a human for more than a few minutes. He’d made them senseless, grasping, groping. Whether or not they wanted, or even really saw him, the allure of an incubus was too much for most mortals.

Thing was, no one he’d ever met had found a genuine reason to like him—none that superseded how beautiful he was. He’d ask, over and over, “Why do you like me?” And his partner would laugh like it was the silliest question they’d ever heard. They’d reach for him, grab hold of some part of his body and squeeze.

“Because you’re beautiful,” they’d say. And they’d say it with stars in their eyes, and a voice full of romance.

But it didn’t mean anything. Anyone could be beautiful, and none of them ever bothered to learn anything more about him than that surface-level appreciation.

When he surfaced, he threw his head back. Water droplets scattered over him in an arc, and he closed his eyes to let the moonlight fall over his skin.

Out here, being alone wasn’t such a bad thing, loneliness preferable to someone breaking the gentle silence. He kicked his legs gently, spread his arms out, and let himself float, moved by the gentle currents. The only sounds out there were the waves crashing far back on shore, water lapping around the pier. He sighed.

And then—then he felt the ripple of something moving under him. It was swimming. Fast. And it was huge.

Declan startled, dropping his feet to float perpendicular to the sandy ocean floor below.

Another rush of water danced across his thigh, and next thing he knew the ocean’s surface exploded around him. A wave carried him upward, propelled by the enormous body of a great silver dragon.

“Fuck me,” Declan breathed.

It was all he had time to say before he was caught in the beast’s enormous claws.