Page 21 of Inflamed By an Incubus

“Wouldn’t do that, mate,” Fenix said in the fae tongue as the male absently scratched at the black stitches. “Will only make them worse.”

The fae’s fingers paused and he looked down at the reddened skin, dropped his hand to his side and deflated, his shoulders slumping as he leaned against the wall.

Poor wanker couldn’t even sit down without hurting himself, had been on his feet for hours.

“How long have you been here?” Fenix moved to the glass panel, ensuring he had the male’s attention.

“A lunar cycle.” The male had to be one of the Hell brand of fae, evidently didn’t get out of that realm much given he was talking about months in terms of lunar cycles. He cast a wide-eyed look of almost-wonder at his cell and edged towards Fenix. “You speak my tongue.”

Fenix flashed the undersides of his forearms, revealing the markings that depicted his incubus lineage. “Because I’m fae and my dad didn’t do everything wrong. He taught me how to speak the tongue.”

And then when Fenix had been barely Tiny’s age, not even mature, his father had run off and Fenix had never seen him again. No great loss. He had stuck around longer than most incubi did when they sired a kid.

“They catch you in Hell?” Fenix looked him over, unsure what he was. There were a lot of different breeds of fae, some more myth than reality. This male could be anything from a nymph to one of the seelie.

Or worse, an unseelie.

Fenix had made damned sure he had never crossed paths with an unseelie.

They were vicious and often quite demented, and driven by an insatiable urge to bring down the seelie. Which Fenix couldn’t really hold against them since the Seelie Court wanted to destroy their darker counterparts too. Something about a prophecy.

It sounded a little like the relationship between incubi and succubi, a war that had been raging for millennia. Although, the war between his breed and their female counterparts normally played out in the odd scuffle and some vicious rounds of taunting each other. It was rare for them to go as far as killing each other. Mostly, incubi and succubi avoided each other.

If anyone asked Fenix, he would say that the succubi had a bigger problem with his species than his had with them, but then it had been a long time since he had bothered to spend much time in a fae town, where the outbreaks of violence between the two breeds were most frequent. In fact, it had been a long time since he had met a succubus.

Long enough that he might have shaken the hatred of them that had been bred into him from the moment he had been born.

“I must leave this place. They swore if I helped them through the portals that I would be set free.” The fae gazed longingly at the floor.

Fenix guessed he was thinking about Hell. Although it existed on another plane and not below their feet, even immortals thought about it being there beneath the crust of the planet because of how it looked—all black cragged lands that were still forming in places, gigantic volcanoes spewing lava to increase the landmass into the unending darkness.

“Yeah, well, they’re a bunch of liars.” Fenix glared at a passing hunter as he said that and for a moment the female looked as if she was considering giving him an earful but then she tipped her chin up and strode out of view. He slid a look at the fae.

The male was picking at his stitches again.

Fenix clucked his tongue, stopping him, and the fae looked at him. “How many did you ferry through a portal?”

The fae’s expression turned pensive. “Twelve perhaps. I do not remember the precise number. They tell me now that if I reveal the locations of another three portals that I can leave.”

“You going to?”

The male gestured to his stitches, sweeping his long fingers downwards in front of them. “I no longer feel inclined to do so.”

That was good, because Fenix didn’t like the sound of Archangel wanting to know the locations of the portals between Hell and this world. It unsettled him for some reason, made him feel the organisation was up to something and whatever it was, it was going to be bad.

Fenix snapped his mouth closed when two hunters marched a poor female of some kind past him, heading deeper into the cellblock. Hunger licked through him as he watched her, the bruises and welts she bore on her bare skin doing nothing to dampen the desire that rolled through him. He fought to tamp it down, swore he could feel his markings churning with the blue and gold of hunger as he tracked her with his gaze until she disappeared from view.

Gods, he was starving.

Hella’s tonic and the pills he had taken apparently hadn’t been enough to satisfy his hunger. He still wanted more. Ached to gorge himself on a female or two. He clenched his jaw and pushed back against that desire, because it wasn’t going to happen. He absently touched the spot below his hip where his pillbox would have been if he hadn’t been stripped of his clothing and forced to wear plain black cotton trousers.

A pill could have taken the edge off, but there was no chance of him getting one in this place. He doubted the hunters would reunite him with his pillbox if he asked it of them. Which meant it was only a matter of time before his incubus nature began to slowly steal control, his hunger bringing it to the fore to give it power over him and rob him of his humanity.

When he finally wrestled his hunger back under control, he returned his focus to the fae. The black-haired male was watching him closely again, that wary look back in his silver eyes. Fenix wanted to tell him not to worry about him, that he wasn’t a threat to any male in the area, but he didn’t get the chance.

Two white-coats stopped in front of his cell, one male and one female.

Together with Evelyn.

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