Stories from the Demons of Fire and Night World

by C. N. Crawford

  I glared at him. “I feel I should warn you that I haven’t had a snack in a few hours, and I’m feeling a little aggressive. You know what I’ve never tried? Roast reptile. Then again, I hear the meat is vile.”

  He took a step closer, forcing me back a step. “Aggression—something I appreciate well. But I’m curious. What are you going to do? Tickle us to death with your wings?”

  “Maybe a stiletto through your eye. I haven’t decided.”

  “Not very friendly, are you?”

  A feather fell from one of my wings, drifting to the ground.

  Seemingly entranced, his eyes tracked the movement, until his hand shot out. He caught it between the tips of his fingers. “Don’t you now that angels are supposed to be loving? Moral?”

  Warning bells rang in the darkest recesses of my mind. This didn’t happen often with demons, but it almost seemed as if his raw power was strong enough to vibrate through my body, curl around my bones. It beckoned me to my knees, and I fought the urge to kneel.

  An intrusive, terrifying sort of magic. He shoved the feather into his pocket, then continued to peer down at me. Up close, I could see that his amber eyes darkened to burnt copper at the edges.

  I sucked in a deep breath, considering my options. I could hold the fans before me and try to shove past his enormous frame. Or, I could threaten him with my hairpin—though I wasn’t sure he’d display the appropriate amount of fear at my threat.

  Fighting the urge to drop to the ground, I glared at him. “Angels should be loving. Got it. Thanks for the performance notes.”

  The strobe lights of Madame Francine’s pulsed over the perfect planes of his face, and he kept peering down at me, rooting me in place with his penetrating gaze. Whatever his game was, it struck me that he used his sheer, stunning beauty as a predatory tool, a way to control and distract his prey.

  I had no idea what he wanted from me, but my fingers twitched, ready to rip the hairpin from my tresses. I could ram it right through his heart before he knew what was hitting him. No matter what kind of demon he was, a blade to the heart would put him out of commission at least temporarily.

  “Do you need something?”

  He quirked an eyebrow, inching even closer now. “Not much, honestly. Just total conquest, the worship of the masses, and the end of the world.”

  The worship of the masses, the end of the world. His astonishing arrogance aside, his words sent an icy shiver of fear licking up my spine—so cold I actually shivered, goosebumps rising on my skin. It was the same sort of crazy shit my parents had talked about—except when he said it, I was left with the impression that he meant it. Never before had it been so clear to me that I needed to stay far, far away from someone.

  “But until then,” he continued. “Maybe I could interest you in a drink with me.”

  “No.”

  The stranger’s eyes took in the dimpled skin on my shoulders. “Oh, dear. Did I say something to disturb you?”

  “No,” I lied. “I’m just wondering how long you’re going to block my path and if I’ll need to stab you to get back to my clothes.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Are you threatening to lay your hands on me?”

  I was about to respond, but as I stared into his eyes, for just a moment, I saw a flash of stars whirling among the darkness. A pit opened in my stomach. When the stars dim and the earth rips apart…

  Shivering, I took a step closer, staring into his eyes. He wanted to scare me, and I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of dropping my gaze. “What are you?” I asked, steadying my voice.

  With a feather-light stroke, he ran the back of his finger down my cheek—a lover’s touch that tingled over my skin. Golden light whorled in the air around him. He leaned down, his breath warming the shell of my ear.

  “I’m your worst nightmare.” His whisper caressed my skin.

  My worst nightmare.

  I believed him, certain to my very marrow that he was telling the truth. I pulled the fans closer to my own body, taking a small step back.

  Then Marcus stepped from the shadows—or rather, leapt from the shadows. In a blur of movement, he was standing before the demon, fingers poised just in front of the demon’s heart.

  Sun-demon here had no idea just what Marcus could do with his fingers.

  “Is he bothering you, Ruby?” Marcus asked, without taking his eyes off the stranger.

  I ripped the hairpin out of my hair, and it caught in the flashing lights. “Marcus, my love. You know I can take care of myself.”

  “And you know I like to be a gentleman,” he said.

  The stranger seemed completely unperturbed. “Ruby. It’s been lovely to meet you.” He turned to walk away.

  It was cute when Marcus got protective of me, but I had to remind him of what I could do. And more importantly, I needed the sun-demon to know. As he turned to walk away, I narrowed my eyes and aimed. The hairpin struck him exactly where I’d wanted it to, pinning his $1500 sweater to the wall, just above his shoulder.

  He turned to look at me, and surprise flickered over his beautiful features, filling me with a sharp thrill of satisfaction. But in the next moment, his eyes flashed with white-hot rage, and my stomach dropped.

  He plucked the hairpin from the wall, twirled it in his fingers. He shoved it into his pocket, masking his face with a pleasant expression again. Flanked by the two reptiles, he disappeared into milling crowds of Madame Francine’s.

  Chapter 2

  The sun was setting on Brooklyn. Marcus had surprised my younger sister and me with a picnic in a botanical garden. Ivy and wildflowers climbed the rough bark of a towering oak, threading through its branches and reaching for the skies. We sat under the rosy canopy of a cherry blossom tree, its boughs rustling gently in the breeze. Nearby, lily pads gently floated in a pool of dark water.

  Now, at dusk, the sun tinged the sky with shades of violet and strawberry. Marcus was rare among vampires—a born daywalker, whose milky-white skin remained untouched in the light of day.

  As we sat on a small, red blanket, Marcus opened a wicker basket and pulled out a baguette, camembert, and strawberries.

  Hazel rested by his side, frowning at a book about a sorceress queen. Given how much she’d been talking about the book, I should have had the whole thing memorized by now. But I’d been making an effort to tune her out when she rattled off all the spoilers, because she had a tendency to give the whole plot away before I got to read it.

  I frowned at her, wiping a smudge of butter off her cheek. She didn’t look much like me—at fourteen, she was already six inches taller, with long, black hair that curled down her back. Only our pale skin and shared literary obsessions marked us as sisters.

  Hazel’s dark tank top was fitting her a little too snugly now, her skin showing when she bent over, and I yanked it down. I was pretty sure she’d never notice that sort of thing, and she’d wear the same thing every day if I let her.

  With her wide-set eyes and porcelain skin, she was beautiful, even if she didn’t know it yet. When it came to her appearance, the only thing she seemed to care about was adding little signs of self-expression: the safety pins artfully arranged in the shape of a star on the front of her shirt, the “tattoos” she drew all over her hands with black markers, the white nail polish that was actually Wite-Out.

  At last, she looked up from her book and peered into the basket, grinning. “Oooh. Chocolate graham crackers.”

  “Of course,” Marcus said. “I know you’re obsessed with them.”

  And that was my favorite thing about him. He always remembered what people liked. I could make one off-hand comment about a delicious lemonade I’d sampled at a shop, and within days he’d pick it up for me. He knew I loved surprises—that I loved sunset and strawberries and spending time with Hazel—and he’d arranged it all for us. So for just an hour or two, I didn’t have to worry about making rent money, or the bullies who’d been targeting Hazel in school and writing horrible things ab
out her online.

  I touched Marcus’s arm. “This is perfect.”

  The dying sunlight sparked in his dark eyes. “So are you.”

  My cheeks warmed.

  Hazel looked up from her book just long enough to roll her eyes. “Do I need to go somewhere else? Maybe you can just give me the champagne and I can sit by myself and drink it in one of those garden nooks while you both tell each other how perfect you are and then touch each others’ boobs or whatever.”

  Marcus smiled, his cheeks dimpling. “That sounds lovely and romantic. I’m so touched you noticed my boobs. Perhaps when you’re older you can give me some of your seduction tips.” It had been a few centuries since Marcus had lived in Scotland, but I could still hear his accent. “Have you picked them up in your books?”

  She rested her chin on her fist. “All I know is that if you want to get laid, you need to wear a kilt and kill people.”

  Marcus nodded thoughtfully. “I can manage both those things beautifully.”

  I poked Hazel on her upper arm. “Go back to your sorceress queen and her gnome army.”

  “Troll army,” she mumbled, swiveling to face away from us. She hunched over her book, no longer listening to anything we said.

  A floral breeze whispered over my skin, toying with strands of my hair. I plucked a strawberry from the basket, and bit into it, the sweet and tart flavors dancing over my tongue.

  “I have a job tonight,” Marcus said, his mahogany eyes catching the light. The golden flecks around his irises never failed to take my breath away. “I’ll be out late.”

  I took in his muscled arms, his sharp cheekbones, the powerful set of his jaw. He was a soldier through and through—but one without an army. Since he’d moved to New York a hundred years ago, he’d been working for a sort of supernatural police force, helping to keep demons in line when they started to feed on too many humans, or to keep the peace between warring factions of light and shadow demons.

  “Anything dangerous?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Since when has anything posed a serious threat to me?”

  I pulled another strawberry from the basket. “Cocky. I like it. Do you ever miss your days in the vampire army?”

  It had been nearly a century since he’d left Lilinor, the vampire city.

  “Yes and no. I was the only daywalker in the Lilinor, and people started to resent me after a while. To them, I wasn’t a real vampire. Our king, Ambrose, resented me. The only one who didn’t have a problem with me was Caine, the general—probably because he wasn’t a vampire.”

  “What was he?”

  “Incubus. Demigod. We were close, once, but I haven’t spoken to him in years.” Marcus’s brow furrowed, and I could see him thinking about something. “Lilinor has changed, though. Maybe we could go back there, you and I. And Hazel, too.”

  “Changed how?”

  “The entire city has changed, transformed from vampires into demons that can walk in the light. Fae, incubi, valkyries… They had to transform themselves in order to fight the Brotherhood.”

  I nodded. “Ah. The Battle of Boston.”

  “Exactly.” He shrugged, almost imperceptibly. “Maybe there’s a place there for me now, among the other daywalkers. I do miss it. I miss being part of something larger.”

  “I’m not sure I want to leave New York.”

  He snatched a champagne flute from the basket and set it before me. “You’d love Lilinor.” Gently twisting the bottle, he popped the cork. “Once, you’d have hated it—they lived in perpetual night. But now the sun rises over a sparkling ocean and sets over the old stone fortress. Food is cooked by fae chefs. It’s really quite extraordinary.”

  I sipped the champagne, the bubbles tickling my tongue. “Right. It sounds lovely. We can visit, but Hazel and I are happy in the human realm. She wants to be an archeologist or something.” I gestured at the park. “Plus, you can’t possibly tell me Lilinor is more beautiful than this.”

  “I want to go to the vampire world!” Hazel said, without looking up from her book. “Human boys are so lame.” Now, she fixed me with an intense stare. “Like, you would not believe how lame they are. They stink, for one thing, and for another, they’re basically monosyllabic. I want to meet some demon guys.”

  I shook my head. “No. You don’t need to meet demon guys until you’re eighteen, at least.”

  She nodded. “Four years, then. We go to Lilinor in four years, instead of college.”

  “See?” Marcus flashed a brilliant smile. “It’s settled. You can dance there, and I can kill fire demons and witch-hunters openly, like I’m meant to. Caine would have me back in the army in a second.”

  I brushed his hair back from his forehead. “Sounds dangerous. I’d rather you become an accountant or something.”

  “Yeah that’s not going to happen. I’d rather chew my own legs off.”

  “That’s a bit dramatic.”

  “I didn’t spend my childhood in Fife dreaming of sitting behind a desk thinking about numbers. I had a wooden sword, and enemies made of sackcloth and hay.”

  He hardly ever talked about his childhood, and I loved getting a glimpse into his past. “Did you spend a lot of time on your own when you were a boy?”

  He nodded. “It was either the hay soldiers, or my uncle was beating me for some offense I didn’t understand.”

  I took a deep breath. “You never told me what happened to your parents.”

  “Both dead of the plague. I was the only one who survived. My uncle took me in, but he resented the money he had to spend on me until I was old enough to work.”

  My fingers tightened into fists. I’d seen the scars on Marcus’s back, the ones that had survived even his transformation to vampiric form. It was a shame my fae powers didn’t involve the ability to go back in time and beat the shit out of drunk Scottish uncles.

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t want to stand in your way completely. You could still fight sackcloth enemies.”

  “I don’t think they’d satisfy my bloodlust.”

  I frowned. “You do realize that normal people try to disguise impulses like bloodlust, right?”

  He opened his mouth, bearing his fangs. “What made you think I was normal, my darling? And anyway, you’d hate normal. You just don’t realize it. You need a man who can draw blood.”

  Absentmindedly, I plucked another blade of grass. “You must be scared of something, right?”

  He arched an eyebrow. “I’m not sure I know you well enough yet to betray my weaknesses.”

  “Oh, I already know your greatest weakness. And if you knew how to flatter a woman, it would be on the tip of your tongue.”

  “I’d rather you were on the tip of my tongue.”

  I cocked my head, studying him. “What do vampires fear?”

  He sipped his champagne. “Boredom. Unfulfilled dreams.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Whatever it is, I’ll keep you safe.”

  He ran the tip of his tongue over one of his fangs. Maybe he was right about the fact that I needed a man who could draw blood. The sight of his fangs always sent spark of heat through me.

  “There’s nothing I could do to persuade you to do something safer?” I asked. “What if I promised to wear the succubus glamour every night?” Closing my eyes, I summoned my glamour, letting it wash over my skin in a wave of tingling magic.

  When I opened my eyes, I knew my irises had gone dark. A faint hint of charcoal magic whispered around my body, and my skin had taken on a faint, golden sheen.

  Marcus licked his lips slyly. “Maybe I could be persuaded.”

  I ran my fingertips up his arm. “What is it about men and succubi? I look the same as I did before. Just with slightly different colors.”

  He took a sip of his champagne. “I don’t know. Succubi are just dirty—or so I’ve heard. I’ve never been with one, obviously.”

  “Right. You were celibate for several centuries before you met me, isn’t that right?”

&
nbsp; “Of course. I was saving myself. I wore hair shirts and whipped myself every night to cleanse myself of impure thoughts.”

  I plucked a handful of grass and throw it at him. “You are such a liar.” I bit my lip, shooting a glimpse at Hazel to make sure she wasn’t listening. “Though the self-flagellation thing is kind of interesting. I don’t suppose the succubus could see how that works?” I reached for him, stroking my thumb across his cheek, faint hints of my glamoured magic curling off my body in pale, dark tendrils.

  A ghost of a smile crossed his lips; his eyes darkened even further. But in the next moment, his body had gone tense. His gaze flicked to the skies, and his brow furrowed. He frowned, setting down his champagne flute.

  I turned, trying to get a glimpse of what he was seeing, but the sky looked normal to me.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He sucked in a sharp breath. “We should get inside.”

  “What’s happening?”

  Hazel looked up from her book, her muscles tensing. “What do you see?”

  “Fire,” he said quietly. “I see fire in the skies. Dragons, I think.”

  The hair rose on the back of my neck. They had come back.

  It had only been a few years since dragons had last razed the city to the ground, and we’d hardly had a chance to clear the rubble. Apparently, the truce we’d formed didn’t last long.

  Already, Marcus was pulling me up to my feet, spilling my champagne. But Hazel had frozen, her eyes wide with horror.

  I knew why, of course. This was how our parents had died. Hazel had been old enough to remember the screams that ripped through the city, the scent of burning flesh. She remembered the terror of running through the subway tunnels while the dragons hunted the city streets above.

  And now it was all coming back.

  “Hazel!” Marcus barked, his military training emerging in full force. “We need to move, now!”

  Clutching her book, her face pale, she leapt up. Her eyes were panicked as she started to reach for the basket.