Page 39 of The Prospect's Succubus
“Jasmine!” Torch yelled, voice barely holding.
I locked eyes with Lilith. For a second, we were nose-to-nose. She looked at me, and I saw the tiniest flicker of regret, or maybe just disappointment.
“This was never about you,” I said and shoved her into the portal.
The gap snapped shut with a sound like a broken violin string. The fire winked out. The air went cold.
And then I passed out, the last thing I felt was Torch’s hand, ice-cold, pressed to my burning skin.
***
I woke on the grass, rain falling on my face. The carnival was gone, just wreckage and silence. Torch sat beside me, smoking a cigarette, his eyes fixed on the sky.
He saw me stir, and offered the smoke. “We did it,” he said.
I smiled, weak. “You did it.”
He shook his head. “You threw her in. That was all you.”
I reached for the cigarette, missed, then tried again. “She’ll come back, you know.”
He shrugged. “So will we.”
For a second, I let myself believe it.
I closed my eyes, listened to the rain, and let Torch’s hand rest on my arm.
We’d bought the world another night.
Torch
Jasmine writhed on my couch like she was trying to invent a new species of snake, one that swore constantly and shed more blood than skin. The brand on her shoulder had gone from angry-red to full thermonuclear, a palm-sized map of Hell burning through silk, epidermis, and anything else dumb enough to be in its blast radius. The smell was barbecue, if your idea of a cookout included napalm and old pennies.
My living room was a crime scene for ancient texts. Every surface was buried under books, crumbling Xeroxes, and rolls of grease-stained maps that traced ley lines through this city and a dozen others. I’d run out of pushpins two hours ago. Half the wall was covered in protective sigils, the other half with maps marked “AVOID” or “DEATH TRAP” in Sharpie. In between, the floor looked like a junkie’s living quarters: empty coffee cups, Chinese takeout cartons, and enough caffeine detritus to keep anentire precinct awake through Armageddon. The candles were there for the ambiance, and the impromptu fire safety.
I paced between the piles, phone glued to my ear, waiting for the other side to pick up. Vin’s voice finally crackled through, made metallic by layers of encryption and the shitty RBMC cell plan. The Lexington chapter of the RBMC was something of an outlier. We dealt with the shit most clubs had no idea existed. We’d gone from running guns and strip clubs to outright battles with all things demonic. We loved our club, our brotherhood, our bikes, women, and hunting down and killing things that go bump in the night. Tonight’s disaster with Lilith and all the shit she destroyed would be blamed on some sort of weather phenomenon. But we knew the truth.
“You up, Torch?” Vin sounded like he was fighting sleep with one hand and a hangover with the other.
“Barely,” I said. “Update on the Sera thing?”
A pause, then a click of a lighter. “She’s en route. Kane says she’s clean, but if she tries anything, I’ve got a shotgun full of angel dust.”
I grunted, then glanced at Jasmine, who’d managed to twist the throw pillow into a noose and was alternately strangling it and her own self-esteem.
“Anything else?” I said, voice flat.
“Just that you owe me big for this,” Vin replied, a shit-eating grin audible over the static. “I mean it, Torch. If I get shotgunned by an actual demon, I want two memorial patches. And a tattoo on your ass.”
I hung up on him before he could get creative. The phone went into my pocket. I started the loop again, checking the runes, then Jasmine, and then the door.
She caught my eye, face shiny with sweat and pride. “You know, if you spent half as much energy fixing me as you do color-coding your paranoia, I’d be up and killing again by now.”
“You’d be dead,” I said, and meant it. “Or worse.”
“Ah, the tender caress of bedside manner.” She grinned, though it hurt to move her mouth. “You know, the blue candles are totally clashing with the chalk. No one’s gonna take your nerd warfare seriously if you can’t coordinate.”
I ignored her and knelt at the edge of the sofa. The brand looked bad. The edges had crawled another inch, sending black veins down her scapula and over her collarbone. When I reached out to check the temperature, she flinched so hard she nearly took my hand with her.
