“I know.” He folded his wings and tried to get inside the driver’s seat at an awkward angle.
I made the mistake of looking back at Greenwood Manor. Byron was standing in the door, watching me leave. I swallowed a lump in my throat. He kept a pretty good attitude, but he looked so lonely there.
I climbed in the car and reached for my seatbelt.
Just as Billie came down the one-way road leading to the house.
Shit. So close.
Chapter Six
Helena
I shoved my bundle under the seat of the car and tried to look nonchalant, and perhaps just a little wistful. “Hey, Billie. I just wanted to see what I missed. It’s a great house. A lot of work, but a great house.”
“You just have to throw some shade in there, huh?” Billie shook her head as she got out of her truck, having pulled up next to Graham.
“What? No! I really mean it. I love the house and I wish it was mine to transform. But you won it fairly, and…I wish you all the best.” I was trying to sound sincere because I was sincere, but I also realized that if she was thinking of me as anxious teenage Helena trying desperately to fit in and throwing her under the bus, that wouldn’t help.
“Sure,” she said. Then she jabbed her wand at Graham and said, “Tell me the truth. Why were you here?”
“To steal your treasure map,” he said, obviously compelled by her powers.
“Damnit, Graham!”
“I couldn’t help it!” he exclaimed.
“That’s what I thought,” Billie said.
Fucking surprise attack. Graham jerked back from her. “You forced me.”
“Exactly,” Billie said. “What the hell? What do you know about Nefertiti’s pyramid?”
“Nefertiti’s pyramid? You don’t even know what this thing is.”
“So you do know,” Billie said. “That was just a test.”
“Are you looking for this thing to use it, hoard it, destroy it, sell it…or what?” Graham asked.
Billie seemed like she didn’t want to answer right away.
“Helena, look at her eyes,” Graham said. “She’s ready to do battle for this thing and I don’t want to do battle.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because I don’t want to hurt her. And I don’t understand my magic, except that when it kicks in, I have more power than I expect.”
“I would probably hurt you,” Billie said. “I’m getting the sense you are a demon who doesn’t even know how to demon.”
“Once I learn, you’d better be careful,” Graham said, and I realized that I really did not enjoy hearing him threaten her. Not because I was worried about Billie, but because he sounded so sexy. Ohh, right, so that’s how he feels about me and Byron…
“We might be on the same side,” he said. “This council of yours, they want this thing, correct? And neither of you want the council to have it?”
“True,” Billie said.
I nodded. “That’s right.”
“I want to use it,” Billie said.
My eyes widened a little. I didn’t actually expect that answer, and it led me to my next awkward thought. She knows how to use it? I still barely know what it is. How in the world does Billie know when I’ve been struggling to figure this out for weeks?
“Use it,” I said.
“Yep.” She stood there defiantly.
“You aren’t worried about the consequences?” I wondered if I could tease it out of her.
“I welcome the consequences.”
“But what if the council finds out?”
“Oh, they definitely will find out, won’t they? And I know they’re gonna be mad, but I’ve never cared about making them mad.”
“What will they do when they realize you were the one who used it? That you bear the entire burden of responsibility?” I felt like I was playing twenty questions. “It’s called Pandora’s Box for a reason.”
Billie looked at me, her eyes hard and defensive. “Yeah…”
“So you don’t mind telling your grandchildren that you opened Pandora’s Box?” I asked.
She swallowed. “I’m not having children. I just want to destroy the council’s power.”
Was it just me, or did that sound a little ominous?
“All right,” I said. “I give. I know that these things are maps that fit together into a pyramid, but I don’t know what they do. I’m trying to figure it out. And I am not a big fan of the council either, at this point. I know you remember me as a girl from a famous family with my big sisters ruling the school, but I always hated that world. I ran away from it. That’s why I’m here. And my brother has actually been disowned and became a Wyrd warlock. At this point my parents think I might follow in his footsteps.”
“This is serious,” Billie said. “I’m not sure you’re ready to handle it.”
“I’m already involved. I have one of the pieces you need.”
“You have one of the pieces?” Her face lit with excitement and perhaps, some fear.
“That’s right.”
“Fine,” Billie said. “Why don’t you come into my house?”
I finally got out of the car and so did Graham. “Anyway, my ghost lives in your house.”
“Your ghost? And who is this ghost?”
“His name is Byron…something. His last name is demon-y, I can’t remember.”
“Byron? Deveraux’s friend?”
“You’ve met?”
“No. We never met. I knew Deveraux, that’s all. You might have guessed by now. In fact, I’m a distant relation on my mom’s side. We’re just the poor cousins. Deveraux was worried about who would inherit his piece of the box when he died, but I think he was afraid to change his will. He didn’t want any record of his ownership of the map. Plus he was so old, it was hard to get him to do much of anything. He just always told me I needed to retrieve the map when he died and keep it safe. He mentioned Byron might help me to understand the map but he never told me Byron was a ghost!”
“Did he want to use it?” Graham asked. “Or just keep it safe?”
“He just wanted to keep it safe,” Billie said, taking a skeleton key from her pocket. “He was afraid of what it might do. I’m the one who wants to use it. I feel it’s my grand purpose in life.”
As she was moving to the lock, the door swung open by itself. Byron stood inside, waiting for our return.
“You must be Billie,” he said.
“Ohhh…so you’re the ghost.” Billie’s mouth opened. “Oh…gosh.” She laughed. “It makes sense that you’d be young, but Deveraux was so old, I was expecting an old man ghost too!”
“Ah, the perks of death,” Byron said.
“I guess we’ll be getting to know each other pretty well,” Billie said.
Oh no. Ohhh no. I wanted to stake my immediate claim to Byron, but my hands were tied. For one thing, I didn’t know where things were going with Graham. My head said I would have a much more realistic relationship with Graham, and I was already his sponsor to the magical world.
But there was something about Byron that compelled my soul. I wanted to solve his mysteries, ease his loneliness…
The second problem was that if I acted competitive to Billie she would take that as yet another sign that I was just a rich girl who thought I deserved to take things from her.
Byron glanced at me and patted my head. “I must warn you, I am likely to break your heart, Billie,” he said.
“What—are you two together? You’re not with him?”
“She’s with both of us,” Byron said.
“No, no…” I waved my hands. “I mean—I’m deciding. No, that sounds bad. I’m…I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“What about those other guys?” Graham asked, meaning the Sullivan brothers.
“Oh my goodness. Sounds like you do take after your brother then, from what I’ve heard,” Billie said.
“I don’t! And I’m older than him.”
“What is that supp
osed to mean?” Graham asked.
“It means she was born in a year that came before the year her brother was born,” Billie said, freely working the sarcasm. “Her brother is in a bond marriage, I heard.”
Billie was just causing me all sorts of trouble. But who got me into this mess to begin with?
“It’s probably about time you were just honest with yourself,” Bevan said. Yes, he had been hanging on my shoulder the whole time without saying a word, which was pretty common for him.
“I don’t want a bond marriage,” I said. “Can we get back to the mission?”
“Your brother has multiple wives?” Graham’s brows were sharply furrowed, and clearly his mission right now was getting answers out of me. “Is that common in the magical world?”
“Actually, um, he just has one wife. It’s the husbands who…split tasks,” I said. “And it’s not common for wizards, but it is common for demons, fae, and even ethereal spirits. It’s not culty or anything, I just don’t want anything like that myself.”
“So you have to choose,” Billie said. “All right, I see.”
“I wonder…,” Byron said. “But we’ll discuss this later. One thing I can warn you about this place is…the monsters are coming.”
“Monsters?” Graham said. “Like the ones we fought on the porch?”
“Worse,” Byron said. “As the barrier between worlds starts to crack apart, demons, fae, and ethereals will all rush in to claim the site and they will want a witch or a human to anchor the spot. Luckily, this is a minor spot so they won’t be terribly powerful ones.”
“That’s what I was warning you about,” Bevan said.
“Monsters?” Billie looked nervous.
“Don’t tell me you can’t handle low demons,” I said.
“I can. But…my work crew is all human.” Billie started tugging on her wild curls. “I usually just come in and sweep the place of magic the week before, then they get to work. They can’t fight off monsters.”
“Looks like you’re going to need a new crew. Luckily you have a witch and two werewolves who were already planning to work on this house…”
Billie looked anguished. “I hate this.”
“I’m sorry. I really am. Maybe it’s good if we work together, because I can make it up to you.”
“I have to confess something,” Billie said. “I can barely use a drill. I just check houses for magic, then I let my human work crew do all the hard stuff, and then…I decorate. What I’m mostly good at it is making people do what I want them to do. And decorating.”
An ominous skill, I thought. “Well, you are good at that,” I said, and I didn’t want to get on her bad side after watching her work over Kiersten and Caleb. “That’s okay! I love to decorate too. No shame in that. I still have to hire out plenty of stuff. It’s a gorgeous house. I can teach you how to do some basic jobs and we’ll knock it out.”
“Frankly, I don’t think I have any choice,” Billie said, and then we shook hands.
Chapter Seven
Graham
I let Helena and Billie walk the house. No need for my opinions. This wasn’t my business. For me, houses had always just been a place to crash.
I was getting tons of calls from my campaign manager so I just went to the porch to talk.
“What the hell are you doing that you are so slow to return my calls?” Sandra yelled after one ring. “This is the worst possible time for you to be gone! This is about a woman, isn’t it? It has to be. I think she can survive until after the election. This is not the time for you to be thinking with your damn dick. If nothing else, Graham, you might lose the damn election if the female voters think you’re no longer eligible. You’re like the boy band member of the house of representatives.”
“Boy band? Sandra, at least afford me the dignity of being in a man band.”
She snorted. “You know what I mean.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“What? This is not the time to be afraid of anything.”
“I’m afraid I only win elections because women think I’m eye candy.”
She cackled. “Oh, Graham, who cares how you win them, as long as you do?”
Maybe she was right and it didn’t matter. Was magic cheating? Did cheating even matter if I planned to serve my country to the best of my ability? Was it still my country if I was from the demon realm? But talk about throwing integrity out the window on day one.
All of this was really starting to be the least of my concerns. I was still keeping a hand on my belt so my tail didn’t knock my pants off. I had just strangled a ghoul. And the woman all this was about seemed like she wasn’t completely opposed to pursuing Byron and me at once.
“I’m sending you a schedule of all the events I booked for you when you get here, and you need to hit the ground running. Sleep on the plane. And we need to tweet something about this new health care situation. Are you going to do it? Because I can get an intern.”
I was usually pretty hands-on with my social media but I didn’t even know what the ‘health care situation’ was. “Sure, I guess you can have Kate handle Twitter until I get back.”
“God. Promise me that when you get back you will be one thousand percent living and breathing this campaign until election day.”
“I will,” I said, but I felt completely fucked.
Byron walked through the wall next to me and it was a testament to how weird life had been that I barely jumped.
He glanced behind him. “Oh—sorry about that. I suppose I should use doors. But a ghost has a few pleasures and one of them is walking through walls.”
“I’m afraid to ask what the others are.” I grimaced. I didn’t know what to say to Byron. I wanted Helena to myself, but I also couldn’t help wanting to know more about Byron. He wasn’t my blood relation, but we had a tie, and we were the same race. Maybe I was the one who didn’t seem normal. He didn’t seem possessive of Helena.
“To walk into her dreams…that is my greatest pleasure.”
Oh, he actually answered. Good lord.
“But there is no guarantee I’ll ever have more than that,” Byron said. “So I want you to make her happy.”
“And if you do have more than that?”
“Then…we’ll figure it out.” He actually smiled at me, with a little mischief in his eyes. He really wasn’t jealous.
I’d grown up in the human world, where if another man checked out your girlfriend, you told him to back the hell off. And if your girlfriend was seeing another guy, you needed to have a talk. Maybe some people agreed on an open relationship, but I could never do that. I was afraid to have a serious relationship, but if I did, I knew I would want to be all-in. For the weeks I was back home working on my campaign, I was thinking of Helena.
“I’ll give you a tip as to how to change between demon form and human form,” Byron continued. “Don’t try to do it all at once. Just focus on the wings first. Then the tail. Then the horns, then the claws. And look in the mirror. For some reason, the visual helps. Once you do it a couple of times, it won’t be hard.”
I nodded thanks and looked at my reflection in the window glass. Might as well give it a try. I imagined the wings vanishing up into my back.
After all my struggling, the wings now vanished easily. I was surprised at how well the suggestion worked. Now I moved to the tail, and I could finally straighten out my torn clothes. “Thanks, man,” I said, still brusque with him.
“You remind me of Talin,” Byron said. “The thing about our race is that, despite our intense sex drive, we often have a lot of drive to do other things too. One leads to the other, I think. We have to have somewhere to put the energy since no one can have sex all day. In the magical world, we aren’t always given our due because we have that reputation for seducing the unwilling. But in fact, an incubus doesn’t prey on the unwilling, but the willing. And when we’re not doing that, we can be quite productive members of society. Talin was always trying to change the worl
d.”
“I never met my grandmother…”
“No. Talin died before you were born. But you’re more like her than you were like your father.” Byron added, “Be proud.”
“Some have told me I’m a little too proud,” I said, laughing it off a little. My face must have shown my wariness. I wasn’t used to friendly conversations with romantic rivals. Sometimes other men picked fights with me just because their girlfriends were checking me out. “So I guess you’re just used to this. All the needs that come with being an incubus, and the attention.”
“It’s what we do,” Byron said. “Although I might be a little too proud myself.” He leaned on the window frame that he had just passed through moments earlier. “Let me remind you, the Sullivan brothers will be here soon and our girl—”
“Is she our girl now?”
“We might be in for a little competition.” Byron raised his brows. “They know how to work together. If we did the same, then we’ll win her.” He shrugged one shoulder.
“So you’re suggesting we agree to…because otherwise Jake and Jasper might win her heart and they don’t have any qualms about sharing?”
“Exactly. Anyway, you could use a little mentorship, just like I once showed Talin the ropes at the library.”
“You’re very old,” I commented.
“It doesn’t matter how old I am. My life has been frozen. We’re practically the same age.”
I wasn’t so sure about that, just like I wasn’t so sure about any of this. I saw no way to balance my old life with this new one, no way not to destroy my old dreams and replace them with…well, I wasn’t sure what that would be either.
“I know this is new to you,” Byron said. “But it is inherent in your nature, and I don’t think you’ll have any trouble accepting it. I’ll make it comfortable for both of you. As you can see, I don’t want to compete with you. In fact, the idea of Helena having sex with you is thrilling.”
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