Months in a damp cell in the basement of a castle would do that to you.
“Tiny,” Fenix hollered, sensing the male just beyond the dark wooden door. “I hope you’ve been keeping the house in order.”
Tiny peeked around the doorframe and blinked wide blue eyes at him, his sandy hair scruffier than the last time Fenix had seen the incubus-in-training. “Oh my gods! We all thought you were dead… this time.”
Fenix scowled at him for that. So he had a bad habit of disappearing for months at a time, leaving the running of his mansion in the hands of his subordinates. It wasn’t as if they needed him here.
“Any trouble?” By trouble, Fenix meant in-fighting, attacks from rival incubi clans, and general calls by the police about missing females.
Tiny shook his head, frowned when a thick hank of his wild hair fell down over the left side of his brow and blew it back out of his eyes. “Des has been taking care of everything in your absence. Rane and Mort have been busy.”
Fenix huffed. “By busy, you mean ferrying females to and from the local fae town for visits?”
Visits being a nice way of saying raunchy, week-long, no-holes-barred parties with the two older incubi.
Tiny grimaced.
Rane and Mort knew that he didn’t like them hosting groups of females under his roof, that his drawing rooms weren’t there to be used in ways that meant they had to be sanitised every time he came home and wanted to relax. He had taken the males into his home to give them shelter, but they had grown into, well, mature incubi.
With the hunger of an average adult of his breed.
“I told them to keep their parties to the fae towns.” Fenix undid his ruined jeans and headed for the left side of the grand twin wooden staircases that curved upwards to meet at a landing that overlooked the entrance hall and a chandelier that really needed a good dusting. He made a mental note to talk to Des about that. Or maybe he would make Rane and Mort tidy the entire house as punishment. A grin curled his lips and he paused halfway up the steps and looked back at Tiny. “Are they in?”
The scrawny youth shook his head. “Des is around though.”
Fenix shrugged off his irritation and made a mental note to talk to Rane and Mort next time he was home at the same time they were.
“Just tell them no more parties or they’ll have no more roof over their heads.” He had been intending to relax in his home for a few days, fighting the need to find his mate. Now, he just wanted to get clean and get back out there. He paused again at the top of the stairs and grimaced, and then cast another look down at Tiny. “And sanitise every inch of the house while I’m gone.”
“Where are you going?” Tiny called up to him as Fenix turned away from the banisters.
“Where do you think?” He tossed that over his shoulder and headed along the wood-panelled corridor to his right, moving swiftly towards his apartments.
At least they were firmly off-limits and so far Rane and Mort hadn’t dared break that rule.
Relief swept through him when he opened the door to find everything as he had left it and sniffed the air, catching only a faint musty scent that told him no one had been in his room for weeks at least. He strode to the right window of the two that flanked his enormous four-poster mahogany bed and lifted the sash to let some fresh air in, and paused.
The grounds were beautiful, bathed in golden evening light, the sprawling lawn perfectly tended and the low hedges that formed intricate patterns in the formal garden neatly clipped. Tiny and Des had been busy. The older incubus liked to spend a lot of the warmer days in the extensive grounds, taking care of it, and the last time Fenix had been home, Des had told him that he had been training Tiny in the art of gardening too. It was good for the young incubus to have a hobby. All incubi needed ways to keep their minds occupied, otherwise their nature steadily took over, luring them into spending more and more time pursuing females and pleasure.
Until it became an addiction.
Fenix sighed as he stared at the towering dark pines and firs that formed a thick forest around the grounds, stretching between the lawn and the distant mountains that enclosed the house on three sides.
He feared Rane and Mort were heading towards addiction.
He didn’t want to see either male sliding down the slippery slope towards being more incubus than human. Millennia ago, incubi had been more like the demons that history books and dictionaries portrayed them to be—dangerous, unscrupulous, and liable to force liaisons with females, taking them against their will. Incubi had slowly embraced their more human side though, learning to balance their needs so they could live among humans, enjoying everything the world had to offer together with other benefits that came from tempering their hunger.
Such as not transforming into murderous psychopaths in the throes of passion.
Of course, starvation could also turn an incubus dangerous.
Fenix raised his right arm and brought his fist up to his shoulder. He stared at the fae markings that tracked in a line up the underside of his forearm. The swirls, dots and slashes churned with blue and gold, a sign of his hunger. If he didn’t feed soon, he would start losing his mind.
He dropped his hand to his side and went to his dresser, slid the top right drawer open and grabbed the small gold and blue enamel pill box there. He flicked the lid open and froze when a solitary yellow pill stared back at him from its bed of black velvet. Not good. He popped it into his mouth and hunted through every drawer in the dresser, looking for more. When he didn’t find any there, he went to the nightstand and frantically pulled the drawer open. Pill bottles rolled back and forth, rocking to a halt. He checked every one of them and grimaced when he found pills in only one of them.
And even then it was only four.
Fenix hesitated and then swallowed two of them, reserving the rest for later. He needed to get more.
The three pills would take the edge off for a few hours at least, long enough for him to do his usual dance against his need to feed. He wanted no other female, craved only his Aderyn, and didn’t want to be disloyal to her, even when she had always told him he could feed on females as long as it never went further than kissing them.
Kissing another female felt good for a few seconds, while his hunger was being sated, but the moment what he had done sank in, he always felt dreadful.
Which is why he had sought out a powerful witch in the fae town in Geneva. All the rumours about Hella had been true. She had been able to create a pill for him, one that would keep his hunger at bay, giving him more time between needing to feed.
The pill usually worked wonders, but in his haste to follow Evelyn into Hell when she had been sent there with Archangel, he had forgotten to top-up his supply and had gone after her with a half-empty travel pillbox in his pocket. Not that it would have mattered. The demons had taken it from him when he had been captured.
It had now been months since he had fed, possibly half a year, and that wasn’t good. He could take all the pills he wanted, but they wouldn’t have the desired effect when he was this hungry. Whether he liked it or not, he was going to have to find a suitable host or he was going to start sliding down into that dark place where his incubus nature would dictate his actions.
Losing his mind and turning into a demonic bastard who would murder his host to drain every last drop of energy from them had never been appealing to him.