Page 4 of Beggars, Sin, and Wine

“Sorry, not sorry. Respectfully. If I have to be nice to her, you should have to suffer, too.”

“I am! She’s only bringing me food once a day, and she manages to forget a lot. I’m trying to get her pissed enough to open my door. I need her feeling righteous enough to forget that it’s instant stone if she comes in here and makes eye contact with me. I could steal her key and get us all out of here.”

“Won’t work, baby girl. I’ve got a window and you don’t. You need her alive to get out of here because the lock is biometric.”

“Fuck! How can they even afford that? I thought the church and the government cut off their funding?”

“Duh. Donations from people who don’t believe we were born like this and demons possess people instead of just being a nuisance most of the time.

“Thanks, I hate it. I wish your vocal cords were as functional as my eyes are.”

“It’s fucking weird. Something in here isn’t just disrupting our powers. Everything about me is meant to lure people in. If my looks and pheromones don’t do it, my voice will. I’m not complaining because I’m not trying to get mutilated like the vampire on the other side of me, but it’s almost like it’s opposite day with my magic and I’m repelling people.

“Remember that kid the good sister let down here with lunch one day? You couldn’t see him, but he was probably barely nineteen. His balls hadn’t dropped yet, and he was trying to grow facial hair and failing. I should have been able to seduce that kid into letting us all out without even flashing a little side boob and without any magic, and it was like something about me was repelling him.”

“You know, I don’t even know what you look like and you’re the only thing keeping me sane in here?” I said.

“Oh, my goddess, you just brought up my favorite topic. Picture how utterly gorgeous the child of a siren and an incubus would be and just know I’m a million times prettier than that.”

My stomach turned in on itself and rumbled. Jezebel could hear it in her cell. I’d mostly gotten used to one meal a day and being hungry, but Sister Mary Eugene was a sadist and she didn’t feed me yesterday, either.

“You know if this grate was bigger, I’d slip you food, right?” Jezebel said.

“I know. If I could use this stupid curse Athena gave me to get us all out of here, I’d do that, too.”

“Girl, I know. But you’ve got cursed vision and I’ve got semifunctional Siren vocal cords, so we’ll eventually figure a way out of here.”

I hoped so. Because there were people I had been counting on to get me out of here that hadn’t shown up yet. I knew they were probably looking, but I didn’t know if I could hold on much longer.

Ihad a bad feeling about this new job. We were going because we’d always show up if someone needed help to escape the Coalition. It was how they contacted us. I was doing this long before I rescued Benji and Pax. I had a whole network across the country. I’d save someone, patch them up, and set them up somewhere they’d be safe. Most of the time, they wanted to save Coalition victims in their new area.

Pax and Benji were different. We were pack. The three of us belonged together. We still hadn’t met the woman who would complete us, but she was out there somewhere. Benji and Pax joined me on every job once they were able to, but I was the face of all of this because I’d never been taken by the Coalition. As far as we knew, they didn’t even know my name.

It wasn’t hard for a supernatural to contact me, but only the humans in the small town at the bottom of the mountain we lived on really knew me. People were always contacting me, except for the month of Benji’s birthday, when most people who knew me knew that they needed to reach out to someone else.

It was highly suss for someone to call Benji about a job. Everyone knew I worked jobs with my pack, but I was much more famous than they were and we were okay with that. they had no desire to repeat their time in a Coalition facility. They were still calling them asylums. No one did that anymore, but it was kind of an apt name.

Most legitimate treatment centers had decent names and were run by people with medical training. That definitely wasn’t the Coalition. There was absolutely zero medical research that pouring chemicals in anyone’s eyes was going to do a fucking thing but blind them, but they sure as fuck thought it was going to get the demon out of Pax. Which was idiotic because that wasn’t even how demons worked, but they blinded him anyway.

Benji wasn’t being super forthcoming about this job. He was being typical Benji, telling us it was the most important job we were ever going to take. Which meant it could actually be important, or the person who contacted Benji was one of his Pokémon friends and their cat was missing.

You never knew with Benji.

We had several means of travel. If we were going somewhere with humans where it would be suspicious if they saw us using magic, we used the SUV or our bikes. Benji said this would be a magic trip, and he’d take us with his shadows.

The three of us ended up in a large, top-floor penthouse with three very strange men. They were arranged strategically on a couch and impeccably dressed. They were also very different.

The one in the center was tall, lithe, and insanely pretty. He had blond hair and bright-blue eyes and gave off vibes like he didn’t have to wait in line at a single club and the VIP section was always waiting for him.

To his right was another tall man dressed in all black. This one didn’t look like he went to the same clubs and hated the other dude’s music. He was channeling the goth vibes pretty hard and was rocking the guyliner. He was pretty fucking intense.

The other guy was completely different from those two. He was a fucking giant, for one. And where the two guys to his right were unnaturally beautiful, this guy was pretty rough looking. He had most of his face hidden by a pretty impressive beard and where the other two guys in front of us looked like they hadn’t done manual labor a day in their lives, he had callouses all over his hands and soot under his nails. He also looked like he dressed for comfort, not style.

It wasn’t just that I had no idea what these guys could possibly have in common. I didn’t know what they were. They all gave out massive amounts of power, but I’d never met another supernatural like them before.

“Which one of you is Di? I didn’t know you’d be bringing friends. Hi, I’m Benji,” he said, holding his hand out.

The pretty blond man fluttered his long lashes at Benji. He took his hand, but he didn’t shake it. He kissed Benji’s knuckles, which Benji seemed to like, but Pax and I definitely did not. Benji was ours.

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