“Going to suck him dry again?” Cormal asked, face hard.
“I can see it wasn’t the time for jokes,” Perian admitted.
“But that’s what this is for you, isn’t it?” Cormal demanded, voice biting. “A great big joke? Why else would a carnalion come to prey on Mage Warriors sworn to slay them?”
The world screeched to a halt.
“What?” Perian said, stunned.
Cormal scoffed. “Don’t even bother. You think I haven’t figured it out? You think I haven’t seen the way you pull them to you? The way Brannal feeds you? The way you know who wants who and stopped someone who was trying to take something thatwasn’tdesired? How did you know something was going on in that room, Perian? The door was shut. No one was making any noise. I asked.” His eyes narrowed. “You got sloppy, and you might think that you’re dragging the whole lot of us around by our cocks, but you haven’t fooled me.”
Perian swallowed, mouth gone suddenly dry.
“I’m not—I’m not a carnalion.”
Cormal’s lip curled. “You just happen to be attractive to everyone and feed off sex, is that it?”
Perian felt like he was teetering on the edge of a cliff.
He shook his head, a little bit frantically. “I’m not!”
“Oh, Perian,” Cormal said, shaking his head, that ugly sneer on his lips, “you should have tried seduction before you tried to foolme.”
He moved so fast, Perian didn’t have time to react, the blow making the world go suddenly and abruptly dark.
Chapter Nineteen
Perian jerked awake in a panic, not able to remember, for an instant, why he was in a panic, and then it all came back to him in a rush. His head throbbed. He wasn’t near Molun or Brannal. Cormal had confronted him, and Cormal had attacked him because he thought, he thought…
He thought that Perian was a carnalion. And while Perian instinctively rejected the notion, pushed it away with everything he had…
He had a terrible feeling deep in his bones that Cormal might be right.
Not everyone who loved sex was a carnalion, of course; that would just be ridiculous.
(But he loved sex, the build up to sex, the act of sex, the cuddling after sex. All of it. So much.)
Carnalions seduced everyone, didn’t they? Perian had only had sex with Brannal since he’d met him.
(But he really liked those shows that Molun and Arvus put on, when he could… feed off their desire?)
Carnalions killed people.
Perian had never ever done anything like that!
And carnalions knew they were carnalions, surely. They weren’t raised… on a secluded estate where his father had kept most people away until Perian’s teen years, when he’d brought him to a house of pleasure and had him learn everything there was to know about sex and pleasure before bringing him back and keeping him secluded.
Perian sagged back against the bed.Fire and water.
Could you really be a demon and not know it? Didn’t they come from the demon realm? Could he have forgotten? But no, he remembered growing up on the estate, and he remembered being there since he was very small. Could… could demon babies exist?
It all sounded so unbelievable. Could Cormal simply be spiteful, and Perian was getting swept up in it because his head hurt and it had been a very upsetting few days?
Surelythat made more sense than Perian being a demon.
He remembered the feeling of Brannal coming to completion, the blissful satisfaction that rolled over Perian, howgoodit felt, so filling and warm. A sob caught in his throat. He really had been feeding, hadn’t he?
His mind flashed suddenly to the first time they’d had penetrative sex, to Brannal climaxing and then almost strangling Perian. It was something Brannal had refused to talk about. Perian hadn’t really understood, but he’d respected Brannal’s privacy and desire to put it behind him. But what if it hadn’t ever been about Brannal, not really? What if a Mage Warrior had suddenly thought that a carnalion was feeding from him?
