Page 43 of The Wickedness of Man

Jax’s face squeezed together in tight distress. “…You always used condoms, Caleb. Did you… without protection this time?”

I couldn’t look into his eyes. Jax had been sneaking me condoms since I was sixteen. He’d preached at me constantly—it was his constant nagging and threatening that had made me so careful. I’d been sexually voracious since I hit puberty, just about. I’d always assumed it was just what happened to boys as they grew up. Every guy I’d ever known had been a horn dog, so I just thought it was normal. But if what he was saying was true…

I nodded.

“I didn’t… I didn’t have a choice, Jax,” I whispered as he pressed a hand to his mouth to stifle a sob. “I can’t explain. I think I was meant to?—”

“Did you at least stop before the end?” he asked, keeping his voice low. “Were you able to keep yourself from… finishing in her?”

I closed my eyes. Magda hadn’t walked in that building a human and walked out a demon… Dr. Lowe had set us up—the missing time, the beer, the hallucinations of Home calling me, if it was indeed true. I’d been under her spell before I’d ever set foot in the office. Her comments about expecting me… Not playful banter at all. She’d intended me to get there, have me find the girl… and finish whatever it was they’d started.

Because she knew something about me that even I didn’t know.

“…If it makes any difference, I didtry,” I said. “At least… initially.”

“Oh Caleb,” he turned and paced in anguish. “Both you and the young lady will become… You’ve no idea—none!”

“That’s because no one fucking told me!” I shot back. I was close to the edge of tears.

“I was trying to protect you.”

“Yeah, well, great fucking job,” I muttered, then flinched at the pained look in his face. “It’s not your fault. I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair.”

“Caleb—” Jax approached me slowly.

“You knew, though, didn’t you?” I asked him, my voice soft. I couldn’t help the pain in my tone. “You knew that was why he selected me. Because I’m…”

I’d expected a vitriolic response, but Jax strode toward me. “A cambion,” he replied. “Yes.”

“Who else knows?”

“All the bishops. And Benedict.”

“Which one?” I asked. “Just Harry? Or the archbishop, too?”

“Both.”

“Are they going to kill me?”

He stopped, breath hitching. “I… don’t know. The archbishop may have additional plans for you now that you’re… awakening.”

“Harry used me as bait to lure out a demon because he suspected that she’d be able to tell I was a—a what is it? A cambion?” I looked up at him. “Then my parents?—”

“Your mother was killed when you were a baby,” he said softly. “She was a succubus, your father an incubus. She had been hiding from the organization since before you were born, but they eventually… hunted her down. It wasn’t until several years later they found you and took you out of the state home.”

My whole life, I’d begged for information about who my parents were. Why I’d been put up for adoption. Why they’d never come back to get me—and now I knew. Because my mother was dead—killed by the very organization that had bought me like chattel later down the line. I’d just learned more about my birth parents in two sentences than I’d known for the past thirty years of my life. I closed my eyes, my chest constricting with pain. Something else snapped into my awareness, though.

“Jax… how does Harry know what I am?”

The bishop shook his head. “There are things I can’t risk?—”

“Jax, goddammit, he used me asbait, which means…”

Which means he was fully aware that she wasn’t ‘creating’ new demons, but rather, awakening cambions.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. She was playing fucking demonicmatchmaker.”I squeezed my eyes shut at the realization. The dual manipulation of the organization and the succubus. Somehow, it felt worse knowing that Carmilla de Mornay, or whoever the hell she was, had forced me to play into the organization’s hands without even knowing it. “But how? How did Harry know about me?Ididn’t even know about me!”

“Caleb, what I am about to tell you cannot leave this room. I mean it.” Jax sat beside me on the bed, staring woefully through those thick lenses.

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