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I scrambled backward on my bed, pushing myself into the corner, unable to tear my eyes away as the man took a step forward into a slant of moonlight. As he moved from shadow to light, his clothing changed.Hechanged. The elegant clothes somehow morphed into a velvet waist coat of blood red, black pants, and a white shirt with a ruffled collar.
The eighteenth-century…my brain supplied unhelpfully.
He came closer. The moonlight climbed up his chest, up his sharp chin that was now pale, bloodless white. Like porcelain. The light climbed higher, and a scream rose in my throat with it. His blue-green eyes were now black upon black. No whites, no irises, just…
Death.
As if all the light and hope in the world were being sucked into them and scorched in an inferno that never stopped burning. Eternal…
My sanity was already stretched to breaking when shadows stretched out on either side of him like wings. Because they were wings. Black feathered wings, glossy in the moonlight.
My gaze met those impossible black pits. “How…?”
This awful, beautiful creature was now standing over my bed. Fear paralyzed me, petrified me. I was hard as a rock all over, including my dick. It was as if my body had no clue what to do with what I was seeing and was short-circuiting.
“Don’t ask dull questions,” the man-thing said.
His accent was British; his voice was smooth black obsidian. Like his eyes, where I was trapped. Black eyes that held no irises, no pupils, but I felt them take in my erection tenting the bedsheets. A slow, lazy smile widened his mouth, making him both more terrible to behold and yet more beautiful at the same time.
“What is happening?”
“Let go, Cole Matheson,” the creature said. “This life…the pain, the failure, the loneliness… Let it all go and come with me.”
“Go with you…where?”
He bent down, his unnaturally white face inches from mine. I felt drunk, vision blurring under the intensity of his eyes, burning up in them. I wondered if he were going to kiss me or kill me. I was helpless either way, held in a thrall of terror, shock, and even lust. The heated vapor of his breath touched my lips and God help me, I wanted to taste it.
“Come with me and I’ll give you a new life. You’ll be powerful. Endlessly beautiful. Free…”
I couldn’t catch my breath. My heart was pounding madly, faster than any panic attack.
I’m dying. I’m going to die…
Black wings unfolded, blood rushed to my ears, and darkness took me completely.
four
I jerked awake, my heart pounding while my skin drenched my clothes in a cold sweat. A panic attack? A bit early in the morning for it but on par for me, all things considered.
Then it came back to me on a rush of black wings.
I frantically scanned my small place. Empty. Watery morning light filtered in from the window.
“A dream, dummy,” I muttered. “Of course, it was just a dream.”
An extraordinarily vivid dream where my imagination, led by dark and desperate thoughts, had turned a beautiful man I’d seen in the park into a…
Fallen angel? A demon?
I shivered at the image and then realized I was hard. Again. I’d been hard in the dream too, my body reacting to the fear, I supposed. I’d heard that could happen. But now?
I threw off the covers to discover I hadn’t just been hard last night but had come in my sleep. A curse fell from my lips, but I wasn’t surprised. I’d deprived myself of male company for years, and my current mental state left little energy for taking matters into my own hands. An apathy of despair had settled over me like a heavy coat. Terrifying as it was, last night’s dream had been the most exciting thing to happen to me in ages.
“Exciting.”I scoffed. “I thought I was going to die.”
There was no response in the emptiness and quiet. The demon-creature’s whispered promises filled my head and my pulse kicked up again. Just what—exactly—had my subconscious been trying to tell me?
A cold sweat came over me again. I’d given my despair and failure a physical form. Beautiful and dangerous, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.
