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Chapter 1
GAGE
“Hell yeah!” Dice announces, his eyes on his phone as I tirelessly sift through the endless amounts of bullshit.
This looks like a preschooler’s idea of organized chaos.
“Finally,” Dice says, trying his best to get me to question what has him so excited.
Not happening. I really don’t want to know what makes a horny incubus happy while he’s staring at his phone—one that is definitely hooked to the internet. Sick.
“I’ve been waiting for so damn long,” he continues, still doing all he can to get me to fold.
After several more attempts to bait me, I finally drop my head back in defeat. He’s never going to let me get any work done if I don’t give in.
“What?” I snap.
“Since you have to know,” he says in that damn annoying way of his, “the hashtag is back!”
I keep waiting for him to tell me what has him so excited, to explain why he’s smiling like a child on Christmas morning. I don’t have time to be patient either.
“Well?”
He frowns as though I’ve just stolen his pass to the chocolate factory.
“Well? Really? I said the hashtag is back. It quit being cool about ten years ago, but it’s cool again, damn it. And everything is better with a hashtag.”
Why in the hell did I get stuck with the incubus? Oh. That’s right. Because no one else can stand him. Assholes.
“Glad they brought it back,” I mumble dispassionately, hoping he drops it, but I’ve never been lucky.
“It’s an important part of daily life. Everything sounds so much cooler if you get to add a hashtag. You can rant about your day, then you add a hashtag and say something like fuck my life. Everyone laughs. My heart broke when people stopped using it.”
It must be nice to have nothing more pressing to be concerned about.
“What are you working on?” he asks, not sounding genuinely interested.
I need to be working on a spell that will forever leave him on mute. A smile graces my lips at just the thought of silence. However, I vent instead of ignoring him the way I probably should.
“Drackus sent over a detailed list of various dark users for me to track down. But the damn order of these documents are random at best. He’s always been terrible with organization. I still don’t know why Alyssa puts him in charge.”
“Probably because you aren’t there to handle things. You’ve sort of avoided them for over twenty years.”
“That long?” I muse, thinking about how that’s not long enough.
“Yep. Closer to twenty-two years. You’ve missed a lot in that time. They could really use you.”
The only thing I’ve had to miss is seeing Kane always touching the girl who broke my heart. I understand the fact that she loves him, and they have some weird bond, but that doesn’t alleviate the permanent damage inflicted on me. Nothing appears to help. At least not seeing them helps me to ignore it.
“I’m still running the dark user council, just as she requested. I don’t have to be there to handle those things. The only thing I don’t do anymore is run the Somage or live close by. But I’ll have to talk to them about these rogue dark users. This is an oddly large amount. I hope Drackus is wrong about this.”
“Why’s that?” Dice asks, confused.
“Because… This many dark users don’t go rogue unless they’re working an angle—which spells danger for the queen.”
Dice shrugs, looking as bored as always while continuing to play with his phone like an adolescent.
“Alyssa rewrote all the laws and enforces them. Some people have probably been plotting a rebellion for a while. It’s not like an army of dark users can take her or Kane down. They’ll shred them. People need to just get over it.”
He’s right, but I don’t exactly like knowing someone might be going for her. I told her it was stupid to change so many laws and enforce them so strictly so soon. A gradual process would have been better, but she wanted to save all the humans she could. Which, in our world, makes her a traitor for caring more about the weaker race than our own. Damn stubborn girl.
“Kane can’t convince her to loosen the leash just a little?” I ask him, knowing he talks to them on a regular basis. I only talk to Alyssa over the phone, and it is all strictly professional and need-to-know information that pertains to my duties. Nothing more. It’s easier that way.
“He’s tried to reason with her, but she’s adamant about people learning to deal with it. She’s not trying to be a tyrant. She’s compassionate. Too compassionate. Annoyingly compassionate. But in the eyes of the oppressed, she’s no different than a dictator with too much power. Rebellion happens when people see their liberties stripped away. You have to slowly steal all their freedom so that they don’t even realize they’re under your thumb. Like the humans do.”
I laugh lightly while shaking my head, and I return to my stack of madness.
“I really hate Drackus’s filing system—if that’s what you can call this nonsense.”
With a heavy sigh, I stand up and start to walk toward the kitchen, ready to drown myself in some strong coffee so that I might pluck up the energy needed to deal with this shit pile.
“Damn,” Dice says, rummaging through the hellacious stack of papers. “People still print things? Hasn’t he heard of—Bloody hell! They’re handwritten. In Old English!”
He bursts out laughing, and I roll my eyes. Stacks and stacks of handwritten pages are gathered in no real order, and shoved inside a box.
“It’s Drackus. In his mind, it’s still the Dark Ages.”
Dice’s laughter continues on while I grab my laptop, planning to convert the files to text tonight. Then I’ll message Alyssa and tell her to never allow her father to be in control of information distribution again. I’d use my magic on this mess, if the bastard hadn’t written it on protected paper—all of them bearing the etched symbol like a no-magic watermark.
“I’ll be working on this for at least two days. If not longer. So don’t annoy me, incubus.”
“It’s you and me until we meet up with Thad. Alyssa wants to know what sort of progress we’re making. She offered to send Ella over to help.”
What progress we’re making? Does that insinuate that he believes he’s being helpful? Hell, he just asked what I’m looking at.
“Ella?” I muse, distracted as I read one of the pages in my hand while waiting on my coffee to finish.
“Alyssa’s daughter, Einstein. Ella i
s good at deciphering all things Drackus. Kimber too, but Kimber is too busy to help.”
“No thank you. I don’t want either of Kane’s daughters anywhere around me. The last thing I need is for the king to get the wrong idea. I’m sure he doesn’t know Alyssa volunteered her, or he’d already be calling me.”
Of course the incubus starts laughing. “Well, Ella wouldn’t touch you. So no worries. Unlike her mother, she prefers the sweet boys. And Kimber isn’t technically their daughter.”
“Not by blood,” I murmur to myself. “But they raised her.”
“You really have been gone a while. They wanted to raise her, even adopted her, but she decided early on she preferred Drackus and Calypso, who adopted her from them. So technically you’d be dealing with Drackus, not Kane.”
He acts as though I was supposed to be keeping tabs on the happy family.
“No fucking thank you to that one either. Besides, they’re both too young and naïve. I don’t have time to educate someone as new to the world as Alyssa was. I’d be answering more questions than I would be sorting out this mess. So again, no thank you.”
