Page 127 of Pareidolia

Maybe he’s the devil, come to tempt me straight to Hell… but I know now that if I was given a path, I’d take it straight to the flames if it meant I could finally know what it feels like to be a whole person.

“Touch him.” Nox’s voice coaxes me forward, and I feel something cool tendril up the back of my shirt, wrapping around my waist and holding me like a lover as I brush my fingers against the wound on the man’s leg.

He lets out a little whimper and that tendril constricts—Nox’s arm circles my waist, his broad body pressing against my back.

Without thinking, I hook my fingers and dig into the place where bone spills from flesh, and the man screams.

My hand pulses black. Whatever it is that slid beneath my shirt snakes up my collar and wraps around my throat… and behind me, Nox lets out a rumbling growl before my entire world blows wide open.

Everything changes.

I can feel it. It’s an echo that spills through my fingertips and tears along my arm, sending those black, squirming things beneath my skin upward. They eat a line beneath my nerves and spill up my shoulder, and it drives that feeling deeper.

It’s just an echo.

Just a taste. A pulse of what I have to assume most people feel their entire lives.

The low groan that spills out of my chest has no place in a world full of most people, and the flex of my fingers as I dig harder into his skin and bone, trying to drag out another cry, is proof that I belong in the arms of the monster that leans closer and tears his claws into the man’s stomach in one sharp, quick motion that makes his entire body writhe.

“Can you feel it now, Aspen?” He purrs into my ear like he’s touching my dick and not tearing a man apart with me, and all I can do is lean back against his broad chest as I ride the sensation of emotion trying to lick along my frozen soul, trying to find a place in a mind that’s never had space for it before.

“Fuck… yes… I can feel it. It’s… it’s…”

Nox lowers his head, and a tongue that’s entirely too long laps out, running a cool, wet line against the sweat gathering on my neck, my cheek, my brow. “This is just a fragment, just the edge. It’s an echo of what true emotion tastes like.”

His tongue runs another slow line along the side of my throat, while that cool tendril I felt earlier slides from beneath my shirt—it’s a black, hazy thing, spooling out like some weird alien tentacle… and when I manage to tear my eyes from the dying man in front of me to look, I can see that it’s spilling from behind Nox.

From his skin.

My gaze jerks back to it as it circles around my waist again and then drops lower, sliding beneath my loose cargo pants and wrapping around my hips.

The first brush of it against my cock makes my fingers clench tighter, and the man on the ground in front of us writhes, shooting another surge of emotion through me. Nox’s hand in his stomach twists and then lifts, wrapping around me and flooding my nose with the scent of copper and something tangy and sickly sweet.

“When you pushed him from that tower, this is just a fraction of what he felt. Aspen…” The tendril around my hips tightens, trailing over my cock in slow, sure strokes that tell me Nox knows what he’s doing even if he doesn’t say it. “I could show you so much more. You could taste true emotion. True fear.”

More.

There’s more than this.

“I… oh, fuck,” I gasp. The man beneath us tries to breathe and it comes from his lips in a little bubble of blood. Those eyes that had looked at me so pleadingly before I let him fall look at me now.

Just as wide.

Just as desperate.

And then it’s like he’s falling again as his expression starts to fade, far away.

Far away.

And then empties as Nox’s shadow tendril snakes beneath my briefs and strokes along the length of my cock.

“I can feel how much you want this, little monster. How much you’ve craved this exact moment, this exact sensation. Let me give it to you.” He grinds against me from behind and I hear it again—the hum of his wings.

The lure.

The temptation.

“I—”