Flames crawled across the floor and up the walls, heat climbing my spine, coiling around me like a hungry serpent. My fingers gripped the counter, and the wood blackened, a line of smoke curling up from where I touched the wood.
“Not now, you fucker,” I muttered. “Stay in your box where you belong.”
The blood bond flared again—fear, this time—and the creature seized the opportunity, surging toward her distress like a predator pouncing on prey. The demon was starving, deprived of violence and blood and chaos. And without the tattoos, without the ink and the magic, it was growing impossible to keep the demon contained.
Some of him had crept out the other night in the garden, turning me into a savage, nothing but a hard cock driving into wet, soft flesh, drowning in her taste as I spurted every drop of my seed into her.Full of the primal need to mate.
I took a breath, wresting the ifrit back down into his box.
Flames licked up my arms without burning me; fire could never hurt me, not now. I was immune to flame, but this house wasn’t. The cabinets above the stove caught fire first. Paint blistered, blue-tinged flames curling along the edges, and I staggered back, knocking into the table. Everything I touched began to smolder.
“Get… the fuck… back inside.”
The ifrit pushed harder.
For a second—just one—I wasn’t in control.
The world sharpened as the creature surged up my throat, racing for freedom.
My lips parted, and smoke curled out with my breath.
Yes.
“No.” I slammed my fist into the wall hard enough to split the skin on my knuckles, the pain allowing me a brief moment of control. Enough for me to stumble out the backdoor into the garden, into the slow, steady drizzle that snuffed out the ifrit’s appetite like a candle flame.
I sank to the ground, splashing into a puddle, back firmly against the wet brick wall where there was nothing to burn, my hands shaking. Water streamed down my face and my shoulders, soaking me and cooling the fire.
Water was my friend right now. My only ally.
“And that,” I said hoarsely. “That’s why I’m not going to Rocco’s.”
Why I’d been trying to leave, ever since I’d gotten back.
Because it was only a matter of time before my control slipped altogether, and I woke up in the ruins of a life I’d never deserved.
I rubbed my chest, closing the lid on the box, body going limp as the heat faded away completely. But the truth was staring me in the face. Without the tattoos, I was a walking time bomb.
The demon and I had spent years as the Overseer’s favorite pet. Brought out to fight whenever the audience demanded the sort of spectacle I could provide. Barely capable of short, intermittent moments of sanity.
Then I’d met Albrecht.
Old. Already half-dead when they tossed his broken body into the cell beside me. The Overseer thought I’d kill him that first night. I found him interesting instead.
Or rather, the ifrit found him interesting. It hardly mattered what I thought.
We’d watched each other for weeks. Me nibbling the skin off my fingers, and Albrecht telling me about his life, as if I wasn’t a half-mad monster who breathed fire.
Months passed before I realized I was… thinking again.Reasoningagain.
I asked him why he was there, and he told me he was avampire with Druid blood. A bloodline older than any in our species. So dangerous, he’d been condemned to the Pits.
I’d laughed in his face.
He offered to fix me. “You are broken,” he explained, quavering voice full of the kind of certainty that made me pay attention. “The witch put something inside you that does not belong. If you are not careful, that spirit will consume you.”
“Yeah, no shit,” I’d rasped, my throat ruined from years of breathing fire and ash. “Can’t you tell? It already has.”
“Not quite yet.” Then he’d ground small obsidian stones into a fine, black powder. Mixed it with his own blood, humming with something strange. Pagan magic, he’d explained. Strong enough to hold a spirit at bay. Strong enough to give me back my mind.
