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“Reminds me of the portraits done in my time,” he said, anger tightening his voice.
“In your time?”
With a lingering glance, he set my painting back with the others. “Tell me, Cole Matheson, why are you living in this hovel when you have talent like this?”
I shrugged self-consciously. “It’s been a little rough lately.”
Ambri was still strolling my place, hands laced behind his back, as if touring the world’s shittiest museum. He sniffed. “Alittle?”
“How do you know my name?”
“As a figment of your imagination, it stands to reason I know everything about you, does it not?”
“You seem pretty damn real to me.”
Ambri’s sharply arched brows came together. “Did you not just witness me in my demonic glory?You are dreaming.”
“Demonic.” I swallowed hard. “Okay, I’ll play along. Is that what you are? A…demon?”
“That’s one name for our kind. It has a sleek, sexiness I appreciate.”
“What do youwant?”
“An excellent question. I had thought my task here would be rather straightforward but now…” Ambri gave another glance to my paintings, then took the room’s lone chair—a ratty, wooden thing—and dropped elegantly in it. He crossed one ankle over his knee. “I’ll take what I want. Eventually. The lives of humans are pitifully short, even without our interference, so perhaps the better question is, Cole Matheson, what doyouwant?”
Now that his attention was on me, I felt every bit of it. His words were laced with danger, but the promise of sex dripped from them and emanated off of him like a vapor. I remembered a flash of last night; even terrified out of my mind, I’d wanted him. I came in my sleep…
“Are you a…what do you call it? An incubus?”
His eyebrows rose meaningfully, and he ran his tongue over his full bottom lip while his gaze raked me up and down. “I can be whatever you want me to be.”
Never in the history of the English language had nine words been so loaded with sex. Each syllable sank into the marrow of my damn bones. My heart was still thumping a hard, steady beat, but the outright terror had mellowed. Moreover, the incessant negative thoughts that plagued me all day and night had gone strangely silent.
Definitive proof this is a dream.
“So that’s a yes?” I said, leaning into this madness with curiosity. I couldn’t peel my eyes off of him and didn’t want to.
“It’s a distinctiveno. Incubi pretend to be something they’re not in order to get what they want,” Ambri said with disdain. “More powerful is the demon to whom a human knowinglygives.”
“You’re a demon with morals,” I said. “That’s cute.”
His gaze trailed up and down my body under the covers; I could practically feel the heat of it. “Do you find mecute,Cole Matheson?”
I glanced down. I was fucking hard again. I grabbed another pillow and covered my lap. “Dammit.”
“Don’t feel embarrassed,” Ambri said. “It’s what I do. An incubus feeds on the act of sex. I feed from the need. The lust. Thewant.” He cocked his head. “Shall I demonstrate?”
“N-no,” I managed, shocked and bewildered that I really wanted to say yes. The erection under the pillowbeggedfor me to say yes.
To let go…
Ambri’s knowing smile was something out of a goddamn fantasy. “Ah well, no rush. The night is young.” His gaze moved to the nightstand next to the bed and landed on my sketchbook.
“What is this?” He leaned over and picked it up, opened it to the sketches of him. “Oh…”
Finally, I broke my inertia and swung my legs out of bed, reaching for my book. “Give that here.”
Reality seemed to tear open right in front of me as Ambri dissolved into a swarming mass of shiny black beetles and thenreassembledinto a man near my flat’s bathroom, flipping through the sketches of himself. He looked over at me with a pained expression. Almost touched.
