Page 42 of Demonic Delights

The bedroom door swings open, and Roxana steps into view in unfamiliar underwear: black and skimpy with a lace bralette concealing her injured chest.

“Oh, it’s you,” she says, and in her voice, I detect disdain and disappointment.

“Who else did you think ...” I trail off as I comprehend her meaning. “Oh.”

She had thought, no, she had hoped, that I would arrive as the other me. As who I am when I’m not me.

I get to my feet, opening my mouth to confront her about her secrecy. But she turns around and walks back into the bedroom without another word. Despite the situation, I’m still a man, and—as any man’s would—my eyes stray down to her firm, heart-shaped arse.

My stomach sinks when I detect the fading purplish lines on it: marks I left on it with the cane during one of those episodes, nightmare-like, but all too real.

I follow her as if in a trance, my heart speeding up and the back of my neck prickling in premonition of something terrible that I can already sense is waiting for me beyond the door.

Only the bedside table lamp is turned on, and the curtains are drawn, so most of the room is cast in shadows. It takes my eyes a moment to adjust. And when they do, a blood-curdling scream tears from my lips, and I drop to my already battered knees for the second time tonight as memories crash down onto me from the heights of my oblivion.

That looming figure in the mirror, rising from the smoke, coming closer and closer to me. Short black horns, flaming red eyes, sharp teeth bared in a cruel gash of the mouth. Immense hands with long nails reaching out for me through the mirror’s surface.

I cannot escape him.

There is nowhere to hide from him.

He already has my body.

Now he has come for my soul.

18

ROXANA

“Iwish I could see you in your true form,” I told Sangrel yesterday, off-handedly, like it had just occurred to me and wasn’t all that important or thought-through.

We had just gotten home from the chapel, and the antechamber light burned brightly above our heads, deepening the lines in his face. I was depleted almost to the point of collapse. With the painkillers gradually wearing out, the fresh mark on my chest was starting to throb with pain.

I expected him to see right through me and refuse, but he smiled instead.

“What if I told you that you could not only see, but also feel the real me?”

I only grinned at him expectantly in response, inclining my head and biting my lip to show him rather than tell him just how much I was into that idea.

“My dark darling.” He cupped my face in the palm of his hand and ran his thumb over my bottom lip. “I’m going to ruin you for all mortal men.”

Now we’re in the bedroom, and I’m watching my husband’s familiar face change as Silas shrinks away and Sangrel takes control of its features. Desire is already tugging rhythmically at my clit, anticipation pulsating through my core.

“I can see you brought the mirror already,” he says when his transformation is complete.

“It’s a good day for it,” I point out. “February 24.”

It’s Dragobete, a pagan holiday celebrating love and the beginning of spring—the Romanian folkloric equivalent of Valentine’s Day.

“You’re right. The perfect night to stretch that pretty pussy of yours and make it weep for every drop of my cum.”

He’s towering over me with his arms crossed over his chest, muscles bulging. But intimidating as he is, I no longer feel a shred of fear in his presence. Maybe it’s because of the way he stands, his shoulders hunched a little, like he’s leaning closer to me in a pull of attraction; there’s nothing threatening in his posture. Or maybe it’s because I’ve learnt to associate his lopsided, predatory smirk with pleasure. In any case, even knowing what I’m about to do, I’m not scared.

He inhales heavily, glancing at the mirror propped next to the bed on a kitchen chair I’d lugged here from downstairs. A worried crease appears between his eyebrows. Then his eyes are back on me, radiating with a rare intensity.

“If we’re doing this, you’re going to be Daddy’s good girl and do exactly as he tells you, aren’t you?”

I take a step back and closer to the bed, its black satin sheets neatly made up and reflecting the bedside table lamp’s light.