Page 19

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W hile Jae hunted fresh protein, the farmer arrived to collect his fee for tonight’s camp rental, which I peeled off Finnegan’s roll of cash. Grateful I hadn’t needed to camouflage a demon’s presence at the site, I then settled in for my calorie-dense MRE for my dinner. Chili mac. Andrew Dyer must have prioritized forging a friendship with us, considering he gave me the most popular and tasty ready meal from his stash for our trip. Henry had, at least, and the whole Dyer family seemed to respect whatever the child oracle felt was important.

I couldn’t disagree. While I didn’t know the elder Dyer brother well, I knew Henry. Maybe as only the pesky kid who kept getting into our displays at the botanical garden and otherwise snooped around the university campus, but I did know him. He wasn’t a bad kid. Just strange. No matter how irritating his endless curiosity had been, my heart had always melted a little for the boy who’d been an orphan, too. Most of FSU’s faculty and staff doted on him because the family patriarch, Dr. Elliot Dyer, had headed the biology department until his premature death and had bequeathed his extensive taxidermy collection to the school, which founded the campus Natural History Museum. Gossips still murmured that Henry had been born two years after Dr. Dyer had passed away, loud enough for me to hear those rumors as a student, but those troublemakers had never parted FSU from the Dyers.

I wondered if outing Andrew as a powerful sorcerer would.

Doubtful. Very.

Because I also believed some at the university must have been aware the children who had survived the subsequent loss of their mother several years ago weren’t mundanes. They hadn’t just kept the Dyer children’s secrets. They’d hired Andrew, who had become legal guardian to his younger siblings, to do carpentry jobs around campus. That had kept the family intact and financially afloat.

Most mundanes never gave magicals a moment’s thought. While state legislatures held the power to define our limitations, some more severely than others, federal mandate required the segregation of the minority magical population from the larger concentration of mundanes. We lived in ghettos and were restricted from an ever-widening list of professions. Many mundanes supported that. Magicals were weird, not like them. Some of their religions taught that the devil himself granted our powers and lamented that the persecutions, trials, and executions of the past had been outlawed. Other mundanes only sought to capitalize on us by charging higher rents for slum apartments or paying us less when they hired us at all. They added a few points to the interest rates on our personal and business loans, ticketed us more often. They stuffed court dockets with lawsuits rewarding eye-popping punitive damages against us.

Little wonder most of us struggled in poverty.

The military served as a hedge against that hardscrabble existence. They didn’t just accept magicals. They recruited us. Fire, rescue, and police departments in the smallest jurisdictions included battle mages in their ranks, too, but were they any different from the mundanes who took advantage of mundane laws to victimize us? Not in my eyes. To them, power was a weapon. We were tools, no more and no less.

A few mundanes welcomed magicals, though, supported and embraced us. Megan was like that, with the blessing of the FSU governing board. Though I was positive she’d never realized I’d hidden my druid powers, that wouldn’t have stopped her from hiring me. She gave jobs at the botanical garden to magicals and mundanes, to hell with the higher insurance premiums. Not just my old boss, either. Enough mundanes patroned magical businesses to keep the doors open. Most in the magical community drew their paychecks from selling charms, potions, and spells that made mundane life easier, but others, like the Towpath Café, provided non-magical services. Magicals shopped at magical businesses, but Griffith wouldn’t have been able to keep the Towpath going without a mundane income stream, too.

While I waited for Jae to replenish himself with his hunt, I built a campfire with wood and kindling I’d bought from the farmer. I stabbed at the flickering flames, ignoring the sweat that trickled at my temples because my demon’s needs ranked higher than my comfort.

I wasn’t mundane anymore, hadn’t been able to carry off that lie, but…I thought some legit mundanes were like that, too. Maybe the governing board at FSU, who had permitted Megan to hire magicals and knew the Dyers were as mundane as unicorn farts. Unlike the military or CPD, they saw us as people. Just people. They supported us, but they also protected us.

FSU had safeguarded the Dyers.

Perhaps, when my shit hit the proverbial fan, they’d shield me, too.

With the botanical garden bordering the nexus, I wouldn’t have enemies at my back once we returned to Cumberland, armed with a dragon scale and information Teddy’s clues had hinted at inside his grimoire.

By the time Jae returned with eyes glowing crimson to prove the success of his hunt, I’d already unearthed Teddy’s grimoire from the backpack. I wriggled in retreat a few inches as my demon thrust his feet into the campfire with a satisfied hiss. Sparks shot into the sky.

Jae swept a glance at the book. “Does he speak of the dragon, then?”

I skittered my gaze around the campsite to ensure we remained alone. Nerves more than anything else, but I had to be sure. “A little,” I said, but I grabbed his wrist to stop him when Jae lifted a claw to pierce his palm to begin the blood bond between us that allowed me to study my dad’s magic. “I want you to see something first.”

He scowled at me when I pushed to my feet, grimoire in hand. “It isn’t far.”

Biking would’ve been faster, but judging by how low the sun hung in the sky, speed wasn’t important, so I retraced our quick route to the Passage trail on foot. When my demon shifted to move into the cover of the trees, I snatched his hand and shoved a zipped hoodie at him instead. “If you wrap your tail around your waist to conceal it, wear my sunglasses, and wear the hood over your head…”

My demon chuckled. “You believe I might pass for a human?”

I wrinkled my nose. Okay, when he put it like that, no. I was being ridiculous. Zero chance my short demon could be mistaken for a human being. I must’ve been high when I’d believed—hoped—we could disguise him before. But with a little magic…? “Cooperate please.”

Jae stood and endured while I dressed him in clothes I dug from the backpack. He didn’t complain or grouse when I adjusted the cotton of his sweatpants to better mask the armor on his legs. When my demon activated a sigil on his forearm that melted the plates protecting his thighs so the fit looked more natural, I grinned in satisfaction. I wrapped and anchored his tail around his waist under the hoodie, then yanked the hood down. I took the baseball cap off my head and settled it on the crown of his, which sort of worked. The curly mop of his hair hid the root of his horns and the points of his ears, but they still showed, if you really looked. I slipped my sunglasses onto the bridge of his nose, which concealed the red flash of his eyes. I stepped back to assess him, my glance sweeping up and down.

Maybe?

“We’ll just have to hope there aren’t as many train watchers on the viaduct on a weekday,” I said, nibbling my bottom lip pensively. “C’mon. The sun’s almost gone.”

My demon walked at my side to the trestle that had been repurposed for the GAP’s trail, and fate was with us because we passed no one on the path. With his claws retracted, Jae held my hand as we walked. Part of me wondered if he sought to trick anyone who might spot us. Couples frequently hiked together, safety in numbers. We’d sped by several on the Passage that day, and although gay partners still needed to be careful, seeing two affectionate guys wouldn’t have presented a red flag to mundanes or magicals these days. Much.

I just enjoyed it. Holding hands felt nice.

Sharing this with him, something that didn’t add to our survival but with the sole purpose of appreciating nature and beauty…well. My heart swelled because this? Felt like everything.

My muscles tightened in unsubtle alarm when we approached the platform to the Salisbury Viaduct to find a lone woman with a bouncing, happy golden retriever. They lingered on one of the memorial benches skirting a rest area dotted with historical plaques and informational markers set up by the park service. Jae squeezed my hand in silent reassurance, his pace not slackening, and as we drew closer, I too sensed the tingle of power coming from the woman and her dog.

A witch and her familiar.

Better, the faint strum of magic registered against my power. Of course, the bangle that deadened my magical signature still hugged my wrist and before we’d set out from Cumberland, my demon had relented. He wore a bangle as well. Safer if neither of us could be readily identified, and the smile on the witch’s face when she noticed us comforted me. The witch might sense something from us. The bangles weren’t perfect. They smothered the power inside us, but didn’t eliminate it. Jae’s disguise wasn’t the best, either.

We were no threat to her, though. That must be what vibe she took in and if she entertained any interest in reporting a strange couple on the trail, the warmth in her gaze gave me no sign of it. More importantly, the rapt adoration of the dog’s stare focused on Jae set my anxieties at ease. They were no danger to us, either.

Humans lied. Dogs didn’t.

Could’ve been worse. A lot worse.

A mundane might have turned us in as quickly as tapping hotline numbers into her cell phone. Instead, the witch greeted us. “The sunset’s starting. You nearly missed it.”

I squeezed Jae’s fingers. “He hasn’t experienced it before,” I said, but he wasn’t listening to me.

My demon’s attention glued to the horizon.

The setting sun painted the sky in hazy oranges in every shade and hue, bleeding from one into another. Sparse clouds picked up a liminal pink reflecting down on us, casting us in a gentle air of magic. Not power, not as we sensed or measured it. This was true magic, nature in all its glory, captivating and awe-inspiring. Jae’s fingers curled with mine so I knew he felt it, too, the peace of this moment and this place. The comfort and splendor.

When I reached for the strengthening link binding us together, his admiration and appreciation of the dappled sky flooded through me. Warmed me to my core. Glee at giving this to him filled me, my happiness at sharing such beauty marrying with his reverence.

“Would you like me to take a picture?” The witch gestured to the mesmerizing sunset. “You two? Against the horizon?” She flashed Jae and I both a jaunty smile.

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.” Pessimistic about the burner phone’s camera, I pried it from my pocket, anyway. Tourists would take pictures, lots of pictures. We needed to protect our cover, but neither could I deny my demon the magnificent sunset. “Would you mind taking the shot from the viaduct?”

“Of course.” The witch pushed to her feet. “The best panoramas of the valley are taken from this side of the center.”

Lost in his wonderment, Jae allowed me to guide him onto the viaduct with little resistance, only thinning his lips when I turned him to pose for the picture. I draped an arm over his shoulders and, acknowledging the witch with my burner phone raised in expectation, my demon curved his arm around me. “On three,” she said and counted down.

Her finger tapped the phone several times and when her familiar jumped up to snuffle at my pocket, where I’d hidden jerky for Jae on the trail, I snickered. “Sorry, boy. I had treats earlier, but those are long gone.”

“Samson, get down, Silly dog,” the witch said with a teasing pat to her familiar. “How about a shot with a kiss? Very romantic. Your social media friends and followers will swoon.” She waved a dramatic hand to fan herself. “Me, too, honestly.”

I laughed, hoping the sound didn’t come across as nervous as I felt. A kiss? With a demon? The woman was a witch. A weak one considering how faint her power vibrated, but vast stores of magic wouldn’t be required to identify Jae as nonhuman. Granted, many magical beings dotted the earth, from the frightening dragon my demon and I traveled to meet to the lowliest of garden gnomes and every being in between. Even mundanes befriended beings when doing so served their purposes.

But Jae was distinct. He carried a trill of danger with him. Of power and cruelty.

Except now.

Because when he looked up at me, despite the shuttering darkness of the sunglasses, curiosity and expectation burned inside him. Toward me. I knew that because I experienced his interest through the ties binding us. And shared them.

“Sure,” I told the witch. “Let me just—”

I shifted my body in toward Jae, and my demon complied by curving into me as well. Heat bloomed wherever we touched, beckoning and seductive. I tucked Teddy’s grimoire under my arm and, freed, I lifted that hand to touch Jae’s chin. He didn’t resist when I guided it higher. His arm around my waist tightened, and he lifted on his toes, bringing his mouth closer.

Head spinning, I realized we were doing this. No casual peck to support our cover story, Jae parted his lips, his sly tongue darting out to wet them and something inside me clenched. Hunger. My curiosity. Frank yearning. Whatever it was, I wanted the kiss, to taste him and learn his flavor. The shiver that swept over him said he wanted that, too.

Before I could second guess it or torment myself with the countless reasons this wasn’t wise, I bent my head to greet that welcoming mouth. So much of my demon was hard—the taut bunch of his muscles, the sharp edges of his body armor, the whip of his tail when he was angry, the scrape of his claws. And his words. Little could be as harsh and biting as Jae when he was mad, which was often. I sometimes forgot he could also be soft. Warm. Gentle.

His mouth was all those things, the tenderness of his lips dizzying, and yet, the surety and stolidness of his grip at my waist acted as a blunt anchor, locking me to him and to this moment. Bewilderment flooded me. How could this short demon welcome my kiss and seduce me with his despite the cutting words and lethal warrior’s grace in which he moved? My senses pricked to tense alert, warning me of danger, but I heeded the alarms ringing in my heart and my head as thoroughly as I’d held out against Jae’s lure to me from the dryad’s circle. Instead, I leaned into him, desperate to feel his mouth beneath mine more fully.

He swept his tongue to sample my mouth. I trembled, every neural synapse in my dazzled brain firing at once. He tasted of bitter chocolate…and blood? The salty copper flavor should have shaken me, a stark reminder of what he was and who I wasn’t, but with my arm over his shoulder, I felt his answering shiver as our lips danced. He felt it, too, this befuddling exhilaration that made the world go away. What mattered was the seducing heat of his eager mouth, the immovable weight of him under my grip, and the earthy scent of sweat we’d both earned on our way up the trail.

This was magic.

Not the druid power concentrated inside me, nor the exotic tingle of Jae’s demonic magic trilling at my senses. Both paled against the intensity of the lure drawing us closer, urging me to give into him and to us. I was not alone. Not anymore. Not if I did not wish to be. The links binding our separate, distinct magics swore that to be so, promised me that my loneliness was over. That I would never be forgotten, shunted aside, or abandoned again—if only I surrendered. Bliss could be mine, as well as companionship. A lover who would be mine as I would belong to him—completely. Trust? I need never worry or doubt that I couldn’t rely on the one who tempted me with his glorious mouth. Our kiss was as binding as any oath.

Shaken, I lifted my head from his lips and regretted the sunglasses that concealed his red eyes from a world that hunted us, for I could not stare into them and know Jae felt as I did, beguiled and more than a little scared. I didn’t need to read his gaze, though. The connection between us, forged in magic, exploded with strength and power. Though my demon equaled my stunned intoxication at our kiss, he held none of my fear or my trepidation. What I sensed from him, more than the dazzled awakening of our shared arousal, was triumph.

My demon’s giddy satisfaction at the trembling of our bodies and the stupor of desire that had fallen over me pushed me from him in a frantic jerk. I gained scant inches. His arm still crooked around my waist and I did not break our embrace. I could not remove my grasp on him anchoring me to his muscular shoulders. Every sense in me rebelled at leaving him ever, ever again.

But I could breathe.

My reeling head steadied enough to turn to flash a wobbly smile at the witch pointing the burner phone at us. “Get it?” I asked, grateful my gravelly voice didn’t quaver.

She smiled at Jae and me both as she lowered the phone and offered it back to me. “If the camera lenses didn’t melt.” She fanned herself. “Woo.”

Because protecting our subterfuge as a couple superseded everything, I checked the photo gallery with sparse taps at the phone and my heart rabbited inside my chest at the first shot.

The burner phone’s camera captured sharp pictures for such a cheap device. Peachy oranges streaked the sky in the picture, a vibrant and intimate backdrop for our clinch. We faced one another, our embrace familiar, my head bent to his. He’d lifted his jaw—I was a foot taller than my demon. No filter or photo trick could disguise that, but despite the height variance, we somehow fit? Against the backdrop of the stunning sunset, the darker embrace of Jae and I was painted in partial silhouette, but the rousing desire we’d both felt when our mouths met had etched into our faces, plain in the dig of our fingers pulling us closer, in the twine of our bodies coming together.

I had to agree with the witch.

Woo.

I showed the screen to Jae, who grabbed the phone from me and gawped at the snapshot as though it were priceless treasure.

Maybe I should have explained pictures before now.

Since I didn’t want to deal with my demon, nor the blowback from that kiss, I turned my attention to the woman we shared the trail with. “Thank you,” I said and cleared my throat to scrub the rough arousal from my voice. “Truly.”

“Not everybody is prejudiced against relationships between humans and beings,” the witch said with a saucy grin. “Romance of all kinds fills our ancient lore. I’ve even read tales of demons falling for humans. Love is love, right?”

Oh my God, I wanted to die. I glued what I hoped was a grateful smile to my face, though. “Uh huh. Yep.” I pulled Jae against me, despite his sly growl of resentment at my disrupting his study of the phone snapshot. “We’re usually more careful, but…” I let my glance sweep the slowly darkening sunset.

The witch chuckled, then sighed at the horizon. “Setting straight out of a fairy tale. How could you resist?”

How indeed?

Before we parted with the witch, she and her dog familiar heading north on the viaduct while Jae and I returned to our camp, she showed my demon how to scroll the pictures she and I both had taken on the camera roll and we took selfies with her before dusk bled into darkness. Despite my building anxiety over the kiss, I even grabbed a few shots of Jae and Samson, the witch’s friendly retriever who appeared to have fallen into instant love with my demon. The dog nuzzled Jae’s stomach, nipped his fingers, and showered wet kisses over his face when my demon crouched to murmur to the animal.

They were no danger to us.

Watching them depart the northwest end of the viaduct, Jae hooked a finger onto his sunglasses to dip them down for an unimpeded view. “The creature is more dangerous than the nexus hellhound.”

“Peaches?” I blinked at him. “You believe that happy ball of fur is more deadly than a magical being equipped with razor claws and venomous fangs easily thrice the size and weight of Samson, the yellow dog?”

My demon pushed his sunglasses back into place. “The dog is cute. Peaches is not. We expect the attack from the hellhound.” He jerked his chin toward the retreating pair we’d met. “I might bend to accept a kiss from the yellow dog, who would rip out my throat.”

I arched an eyebrow. “When all this is over, we need to adopt a rescue from the shelter.” I snorted a laugh. “A small dog like a Chihuahua mix. In my experience, they’re mean as hell. Then you’ll know what genuine fear is.”

But this dog had accepted us, welcomed us. Loved us. Dogs did not lie, so for once we need not be afraid.

By the time we returned to Whispering Pines, true dark had fallen, and we both had shaken off the drugging haze of that wowser kiss on the viaduct. “We should move camp,” I said, my glance shifting from the embers Jae stirred to relight the fire, to our tent.

“Why?” My demon scowled at me. “The witch?”

I nodded. “She may have recognized what you are.”

“She did.” Jae curved those talented lips. “The creature liked me, though. Should the witch succumb to the temptation of a reward for locating us, the creature will stop her.”

“The creature is a dog.”

“Very powerful.” He nodded his wry acknowledgment. “I am certain my kind did not seize this realm, despite its vast resources, for fear of so fierce a being.”

“Dogs are cute. Affectionate and playful. They will almost always run instead of fighting.” I frowned. “We walk them and toss tennis balls for them to fetch.”

“You serve them with a willing heart. I, too, feel this enticement.” My demon sighed. “That is their most effective weapon.”

“Yeah, well, Samson is miles down the Passage by now. Let’s see if dad’s grimoire gives us more clues about how to approach the far less dangerous dragon.” I lifted the book in one hand while offering Jae my splayed palm in the other.

Concentrating on our mission helped me refocus my energy from our earth-shaking kiss on the viaduct to what might help us survive to enjoy other sunsets. The prick of his claw and my seeping blood on the magicked barb yanked my edginess from wondering what another of Jae’s kissed might be like, at least. I studied the pages for long hours. His hand locked with mine to disrupt the blood magic sealing Teddy’s book. Jae didn’t disturb me or grumble much. He fed logs into the campfire as I read, his feet buried inside the glowing coals.

Dad hadn’t written a lot about Obie, the dragon. Not a lot more than I could have learned in any newspaper or TV channel, anyway. Oberlin and Ricia, a pair of mated dragons, had appeared over Pittsburgh’s burgeoning cityscape about a century ago, initially nesting in a park where the Allegheny and Monogahela Rivers meet. That hadn’t lasted. Dragons tolerate humans sometimes, but the constant intrusion of boat traffic had prodded the couple to move their home nest a few decades ago, around the time I was born. Theoretically, magicals believed they’d secured a more isolated and defendable spot when Ricia produced eggs and the dragon pair began the prolonged process of brooding them, but we knew so little about dragons. No one could be sure.

What we knew was the mated dragons had hatched a dragonet before Ricia vanished. We knew because Obie had grieved and searched for his mate so intensely, he would have died in that process if not for the chirping of a baby dragon calling him home.

That’s what the media knew. What the magical community knew.

According to Teddy’s grimoire, Obie and Ricia had successfully hatched three dragonets and a sickly fourth that hadn’t survived a month. Obie and Ricia, in fact, had called upon Teddy to save the struggling baby. Dad’s hurried scrawls in the grimoire’s pages noted potions he’d brewed, many with exotic ingredients only a druid of his talents could have grown to maturity, including one variety of flower I suspected wasn’t from our realm at all. Nothing had worked. Despite the dragons’ diligence and Teddy’s care, the weak dragonet had died.

“Ri inconsolable, drives even Obie and surviving dragonets away,” my father had written, his words making my heart ache.

Demons differed from humans. That was no exaggeration. As much as I had liked Jae and cared for him, my demon was as alien to me as green men on Mars. His thoughts were darker, more violent, and prone to aggression. Our perspectives disagreed, our take on the witch’s dog familiar, Samson, exemplifying that. Whereas I saw a cute, friendly dog that inspired longing in me to adopt a dog of my own, Jae perceived the pet as a beguiling threat.

Until he’d portaled to our realm, Jae had lived in absolute devotion to his tribe, whereas the broken dysfunction of my biological family was almost a norm in the magical subset of human culture. Demon prized their children as treasures. Ours? Too frequently rejected and tossed away.

We struggled to find commonalities, Jae and I. Vast understatement.

Still, we must have found something inside each of us that matched, despite our contrasting experiences and backgrounds. If we hadn’t, our kiss at the viaduct wouldn’t have happened or, if it had, the meeting of our mouths wouldn’t have produced such devastatingly intimate results. The mere brush of our lips would not have drawn us more solidly together, as though our hearts beat as one. Maybe it was our loneliness. I had no one. After whatever attack had driven Jae from the daemonica realm, he had nobody he could rely on, either. In that, we were twin sides of the same coin. Or perhaps our mutual distrust. Life had taught me the hard way the only person who could or would take care of me was me. I thought Jae had learned that bitter lesson, too.

For all that we disagreed and no matter how fiercely we fought each other…Deep down, where it mattered, my demon and I were not so different.

Dragons were a whole nother thing.

Case in point: female dragons were the stronger sex. While no female demon had ever portaled to our world and we humans thus knew little about them, Jae had never spoken of the women in his family or home world with fear or awestruck respect. When Skip had educated me about his lack of gender in his natural form? Jae hadn’t balked or shied from him. My demon wasn’t terrified of women.

Dragons were. Male dragons, particularly.

The females dragged reluctant mates to this world to nest and raise their young. Females defended their dragonets and their weaker male mates. Among dragonkind, women led. They guided. They fought and protected. We saw evidence of these gender roles in dragons marching through history. Smaller, weaker males tended to the dragonets while female warrior dragons hunted and destroyed any who threatened what she considered hers.

And Ri, the female mate and protector of Obie and their remaining dragonets, had vanished.

That he and his children had survived her loss was a miracle.

This world was not kind to widows and orphans. No one grasped that as thoroughly as I did, but this dragon, male or not, had figured out how to carry on. While I wouldn’t find the key to a single male dragon not ending up diced into pieces for sale on the black market whereas his more powerful female counterpart almost certainly had, I looked for any hint my dead father might have left me for approaching such an odd duck of that species. Preferably without dragonfire consuming me like a roman candle.

Or what recklessness Ri’s grief had pushed her to sacrifice her life for.

Who, or what, had mustered the power to kill a female dragon? Even one lost in the pain of mourning her child?

Teddy’s grimoire held no answers. The same monsters that had murdered Ri had snuffed out my father’s life as well.

When I found nothing in the grimoire to aid my quest to meet this dragon, I gave in to the demands of exhaustion and the burn of my gritty eyes. Though no other humans or beings were around, I shut Teddy’s grimoire and tucked it under my arm as I crawled into our tent for sleep. Jae shuffled around the campsite, stomping out the dying embers of the fire. The creak of the water pump broke the quiet, then the pouring rush of water dumping onto the last of the campfire. The quenching fire sizzled and snapped. The scent of cedar and smoke wafted in the night.

None of that surprised me. Jae was a demon strengthened by fire and would have benefited from dozing the night away inside the flames, but he didn’t require sleep like humans did. Back at my family’s home, he’d frequently roamed and scouted after dark, but he’d extinguished the fires he’d lit to rejuvenate him first.

What shocked me was the zip of the tent opening and the unsubtle nudge of Jae’s body as he crawled beside me. Bike packing tents needed to be smaller and lighter than regular tents—the mini-shelter for our pack outside rather than making room for extra gear in the interior wasn’t unusual. Jae was short, but dense with muscle and the body armor he seemed to never remove wasn’t comfortable jabbing into me. While I would never describe myself as a mountain of a guy like Andrew Dyer, I wasn’t tiny, either. Gyms were places for people not taking twenty-one credit hours while holding down a part-time job—I got exercise aplenty at work and hiking trails in any spare hours I could scrounge from my schedule. I wasn’t skinny. Jae and I made for a tight fit in the tent.

I couldn’t regret that, though. Would I have preferred not to be stabbed with the edges of his armor? Sure. But the sharp armored plates also reassured me. If danger came to us in the night, my demon would be protected. Ready. I could sleep secure knowing that Jae wouldn’t be vulnerable should our enemies follow us to this place.

If I shut off my swirling thoughts to fall asleep, that was.

Which wasn’t promising.

As exhausted as the day’s hard pace had depleted me, no matter the gluey burn of my overworked muscles, my eyes were wide and my senses on full alert to every cricket’s chirp and rustle of nocturnal animals in the surrounding greenery. My aching body tensed and bunched at every slight noise.

I could not sleep.

Insomnia was a constant companion of the dysfunctional. I earnestly believed that. I hadn’t managed a genuine night’s rest since I was a boy, before I’d lost my father to violence and my mother to an endless stream of liquor bottles. By the time I’d couch-surfed, homeless, my senior year of high school, my nights had devolved to coping with my persistent insomnia cycle. I’d already developed tips and coping mechanisms to gain more rest. Cutting back on my caffeine intake. Not eating after sunset. Meditation. Once I’d aged enough to tap into my trust fund to provide shelter for myself, I’d trained myself to climb from my bed when sleep alluded me, so my body would recognize it as a place for sleep. That’s why I’d befriended Finnegan. He, too, had paid the dysfunction tax of insomnia, so we two co-sufferers had met many nights over our shared house’s kitchen table to hope for sleep that rarely came. I’d learned from him to eat a handful of raisins after sunset because they were a natural source of the melatonin supplements I’d been taking and included tryptophan, too.

If our pack had included dried fruit, I’d missed that searching for my MRE earlier, but none of my other tricks worked, either. I hadn’t expected them to. Once my body had acclimated to constant danger, I’d known rest would become a distant memory regardless of how exhausted I became or how dearly I needed to recharge.

Jae endured no such hardships. His marathon plus run today had wiped him out. Demons may not need sleep the same way humans did, but he was done in. He dropped off as easily as flipping a light switch.

Psychopath.

I frowned in the inky darkness, though, because…That made little sense?

Demons didn’t require as much sleep as humans. I’d noticed that from the start. While I’d tossed and turned, chasing the slumber that eluded me, Jae had taken off to explore and reconnoiter the territory surrounding my childhood home, if not attempting to break our bond and find an escape for us both. He’d slept little. Once we’d realized I needed a link to his blood to unseal Teddy’s grimoire, he’d frequently dozed at my side when our seeping palms had pressed together, but even then, he’d scantily rested, a part of him always alert and ready for danger.

I’d never heard these soft, snuffling snores before. Not from him.

Skip snored like a chainsaw. His sonorous exhalations could rattle the glass in nearby windows.

But not Jae. Not until tonight and even these whispery, gentle puffs of breath, hot on my neck…Part of me melted at the vulnerability, the humanness of his snores. Instead of wriggling to turn my back on the disruptive sounds, I snuggled closer to my demon instead. Surprise lit me up when, lost in his dreams, he cuddled deeper into my body, his clumsy hands drawing me around him in a sheltering cocoon. He shoved his nose into the crook of my neck, his tail wrapping around my abdomen to hold me fast to him. His scent of crackling campfires and earthy sandalwood soothed me. Many complained that demons stunk of sulfur. Maybe my Jae had at the beginning? I vaguely recalled that stench from the dryad circle, but that warning fragrance had frittered away. Now he smelled delicious. Comforting. Smooth, with a hint of amber and old leather. Sweet, if a demon could ever be described so innocently.

He smelled like home.

Tucked to my front, with his arms around me, his fingers grasping, he felt like home, too, but no home I’d ever known. Not since I was ten. Maybe not even then. As a child, I’d never realized the infinite dangers surrounding me. My parents had guarded me from the cruelties of the world then. Now I knew the ugliness that preyed on me and everyone else, had become intimate friends with the jeopardies that threatened me every moment of every day and hazards that imperiled my every breath.

Jae didn’t shelter me from the risks we faced.

But he was no less a haven for me. His warm breath at my throat and the sly scrape of his claws on my sides tugging me nearer still, the tickling brush of the curls crowning his head at my chin. They all reassured me I did not face my enemies alone. I had him.

We hadn’t finished the binding magic. I’d begun it with my ill-conceived oath to him at the botanical garden and that wouldn’t—couldn’t—be completed without my demon swearing his oath to me. He’d been careful, my Jae, to offer me no promises, though the binding magic would not mature and grow until the ties connecting us strengthened.

Words were only words. I hadn’t learned incantations as a boy. My father had taught none to me because words just focused intent and, for the powerful, concentrating our will was no obstacle. Magic came from the spirit, from our hearts.

Mine beat in synch with my demon’s.

And because it did, I finally slept.