Page 3 of Snowed In with an Incubus

Sam held back a smug smile. A dark red heart sat just below the crook of her elbow. And in the middle of it in thin, loopy writing: BRANDON.

He waited until he was halfway through his linework to bring it up. “Bad boyfriend?”

“Ex,” she snapped immediately. Her gaze stayed fixed on the ceiling. Once she got in the chair, she was a surprisingly good client: no squirming, no complaining like he’d been expecting from someone with only one visible tattoo.

Then again, Sam thought. I haven’t seen her legs. She might be covered from ankle to thigh.

He forced himself not to look down at her legs. He had bigger things to focus on.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she continued.

Fine by him. He could focus on finishing the tattoo and ignoring the hunger. It was making his shoulders spasm as his wings tried to manifest; his tailbone was itching as the tail tried to grow. Even his scalp pulsed where his horns wanted to sprout. At least the tremors had temporarily stopped. He hadn’t even started on the color yet.

“No shit he was a bad boyfriend,” Jaz burst, thankfully wise enough not to move her arm as she yelled at the ceiling.

“I bet,” Sam muttered, bending lower over her arm. To hold her steady, he told himself. Nothing to do with her scent, which was only growing stronger the hungrier he got. Anger wouldn’t feed him, but it was strangely satisfying to smell it curling off her skin. Red hot and spicy, almost sharp enough to drown out the clammy taste of mourning and stinging pain. Those were less satisfying. Sam tried to focus on the anger as she continued.

“I walked in on him and my coworker—in my kitchen! It’s the day before New Year’s Eve! I could’ve had Christmas with my family! My cousin proposed to his girlfriend! I really like his girlfriend. They had strawberry champagne after she said yes, and I could’ve been there instead of putting up with Brandon’s weird uncle who kept trying to prove that I didn’t know about eighties bands for some reason!”

“That sucks,” Sam said as she paused for breath.

“It does! Now I have to go and stay with my aunt because she’s the only one who I can get to in this shitty little state, and she’s still four hours away! It’s going to be midnight by the time I finally get there!”

“Don’t know if you can call Alaska little,” Sam said reflexively. Then he paused. “Wait, you’re going back out there?”

She nodded fiercely.

“Might be dangerous,” Sam said. “They’re looking at closing the roads.”

“Danger is my middle name,” she hissed.

Sam couldn’t help it: he snorted.

Her green eyes narrowed. “What?”

“Nothing! I believe you. Jaz Danger.”

Jaz huffed. She squirmed in the chair for the first time. Sam held her arm tighter, but he needn’t have worried; Jaz’s arm stayed perfectly still as she shifted.

“Okay, fine,” she admitted. “My middle name is Susan.”

“Nice.”

She settled back into the chair. For a moment, the only noise was the buzzing of the tattoo gun.

“What’s yours?”

“Huh?” Sam looked up. “Oh. Uh. Sulfice.”

“Sulfice,” she repeated, face twisting at the strangeness.

He nodded. “After my dad.”

Don’t ask, he thought as he returned to the tattoo, dragging out the last of the circle. It was an old family name, and he’d never heard his dad get called that. He went by Sully.

Sam’s scalp itched. He didn’t touch it. He was wearing gloves, after all. If he touched his scalp to scratch where the horns wanted to erupt, he’d have to change them.

“Thank you for doing this,” Jaz said as he switched out the black ink for the first shade of yellow he had lined up on his workstation. “I don’t usually barge into tattoo studios at closing time.”