Page 48 of The Prospect's Succubus
Jasmine shuddered, almost losing her shape, but caught herself. Her eyes locked on mine. She mouthed: Now.
I drove every ounce of will into the brand. The blue-gold glow went nova, searing through shirt and skin and chain. For a second, the chains turned liquid, the metal dripping down my forearms in ribbons of white-hot agony. Jasmine pressed her hand to my chest, and her form solidified, more real than I’d ever seen her.
We spoke together, not in words, but in the joint pulse of the bond. I felt her memories—old, twisted, full of hellfire and despair—but also the new ones. The nights on the couch, the stupid jokes, the way she’d looked at me after our first fuck and pretended it was just business.
The bond amplified. It didn’t just echo pain, it rewrote it. The agony of the chains became a lever, a wedge. I used it, pried apart the lock one syllable at a time.
Lilith realized too late. She lunged for Jasmine, but the space between them doubled, then tripled, stretched by the raw force of the bond. Jasmine grabbed my hand, and together we twisted.
The chains snapped. The sound was a gunshot, loud enough to drop every demon in the room to its knees. Lilith screamed, a sound that started human and turned animal, then something far worse.
Jasmine staggered, body flickering with static, but she stayed upright. I tore the last of the chains from my arms and used the jagged end as a weapon, swinging it in a wide arc that scattered the closest carnies back toward the shadows.
Lilith retreated to the far side of the dais, eyes wide, lips peeled back in a snarl. “You can’t,” she spat. “You’re nothing. You’re mine.”
Jasmine laughed, and it was the most beautiful, broken sound I’d ever heard. “Not anymore, bitch.”
The pavilion shook. Outside, the tide was turning. The gunfire faded, replaced by the roar of engines and the chant of men who’d just realized they could win. The shadows inside recoiled, the faces in the crowd starting to crumble.
Lilith made a last grab for Jasmine. I was faster. I caught her arm, and the moment our skin touched, the brand burned through both of us, her hell-mark and my new line fusing together in a white-hot weld.
I spoke the last line of Sera’s ritual, voice raw. The light exploded, drowning the pavilion in raw, blue fire. Every demon in the room howled, hands over their faces. The crowd disintegrated, bodies burning away to nothing.
Lilith staggered, her form melting at the edges. She reached for Jasmine one last time, and then dissolved into ash.
The silence returned, heavier than before. Jasmine slumped against my shoulder, her body barely holding shape. I pulled her in, holding her tight.
“We did it,” I whispered.
She shook her head, a ghost of a smile on her lips. “Good job, soldier.”
Torch
Two weeks out from the massacre at Carlisle, and the only thing I’d managed to do right was not die. Everything else, sleep, eating, talking to the RBMC boys without looking like I was two seconds from snapping a femur, was a work in progress. You’d think winning would taste sweeter, but all it did was leave my teeth feeling loose.
We spent the first week after the battle hiding out at a Red Roof Inn that smelled like Raid and wet carpet, neither of us trusting the calm. Jasmine holed up in the bathroom for hours at a time, soaking in water so hot it could strip paint. When she emerged, her skin looked almost human. Sometimes I caught her staring at her shoulder in the mirror, tracing where the brand had been, as if daring it to grow back. She said it didn’t hurt. She lied.
Jasmine kept saying she wanted a change of scenery. “I feel like a potted plant,” she told me, twirling a pen in her fingers,“and you’re forgetting to water me.” So I did the only thing that made sense. I drove us out past the last line of exurb, past the shuttered strip malls, up where the road gets skinny and the cell service commits suicide. The air in the Appalachians was so clean it made my lungs hurt. The club had a patch of protected land out here—technically for “training,” but everyone knew it was for hiding out when shit got biblical. There was an old log cabin on the property, barely bigger than a double-wide, but I’d retrofitted it with a gun safe and enough canned chili to survive nuclear winter.
Jasmine raised her eyebrows at the sight of the place. “You built me a house?” She said it like a joke, but there was an edge I hadn’t heard before.
“Don’t get any ideas. It’s not even wired for TV.”
“Perfect. Maybe I can finally get some work done.” She winked at me, then let herself in, boots crunching on the gravel.
The inside was dark, cool, and smelled like dry pine and old smoke. I flicked the generator switch, and the lights popped on with a reluctant whine. Jasmine made a slow circuit of the place, running her hands over the rough-hewn furniture, pausing to examine the knife marks in the kitchen counter and the three empty bourbon bottles lined up on the windowsill.
She stopped at the main beam, just above the entryway. “You’re so sentimental, Torch. Did you carve these for me?”
The runes were faint, but the eye adjusted. A line of Enochian sigils, then two more sets in Latin and something older—wards, protective circles, anti-possession stuff you can’t buy at Home Depot.
“Standard protocol,” I said, a little defensive.
She smiled, teeth white and perfect, but the dimple in her left cheek betrayed her. “You’re cute when you’re paranoid.” She turned and caught me staring, so I looked away and started dumping gear on the table.
The brand on my arm was behaving, but every so often it would pulse, a sharp tug like someone yanking my blood vessels from the inside. Jasmine’s brand was almost gone, but she kept rubbing the skin as if it was itching beneath the surface. When we got close, the air between us would spark, a fizzing static that was somewhere between erotic and flu symptoms.
I cleared my throat. “You hungry?”
