Page 1 of Priest

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PRIEST

The door slammed shut behind Priest, but he barely heard it. He was caught up in the vicious cycle of his never-ending hunger. It was something he’d learned to live with. The insatiable cravings that came with who—and what—he was. He wasn’t like Knight. He’d never known what it was like to exist as a human.

He wasn’t even good at playing pretend the way Jeremiah could when he needed to blend in.

Of course, his nature—being an Incubus Demon, which made him a pariah in the supernatural world—was the first thing that had bonded him and Jeremiah. It was the reason the rest of the team trusted him with their lives. He understood what it meant to exist outside of the polite, pandering social norms. To live with a strength that also made him a complete outsider.

But gods, he was so tired of beinghungry.

And he was so tired of never being satisfied every time he attempted to take his fill.

He appreciated Azriel’s club, of course. A den of iniquity, as the Angel liked to call it, and the perfect feeding grounds for lonely Incubi who needed a quick fix. Not that Priest knew many like him. They were one of the rarest beings walking the planet,and it was one of the reasons he wasn’t killed on the spot when he and Jeremiah had been picked up as children.

He was valuable. Powerful in ways even he didn’t fully understand and susceptible to coercion when he was too young to know better.

He’d lucked out growing up with Jeremiah instead of being captured and molded by some foreign power that would use him for their own gain.

And really,luckwas the only word for it. He should have been like the others: sold into the service of some royal family, brainwashed into thinking he was serving his own best interests as he destroyed the people he was meant to be protecting.

Instead, he became one of the founding members and the second-in-command of the Trident Agency, working his ass off for a lot of money and a fraction of begrudging respect from the people they served.

It wasn’t the worst life, but it wasn’t the best.

And life felt a little odd and a little lonely now that he was witnessing Jeremiah slowly but surely tumble into love with a Siren prince. He was happy for his best friend, but a small piece of him was terrified that the moment Jeremiah and the prince realized how good they were for each other, he’d abandon everything he and the other agents had built.

After all, the world the Tridents inhabited had no place for a royal prince groomed to rule a kingdom, even if he was abdicating his throne. So what would Jeremiah’s options be except to leave the agency behind?

Priest was steadfastly keeping that to himself, of course. He wasn’t about to cause an upset in the office dynamic before shit actually hit the fan. He told himself that maybe Jeremiah and the prince needed to scratch an itch, and it would all fizzle out once they took care of the threat against the royal family, and things could go back to normal.

But he also saw the way Remi made Jeremiah smile. The way he made the stoic, loveless Hellhound soften in ways no one ever had before.

Jeremiah’s heart was doomed, and all Priest could do was hope that didn’t mean the end of who and what they were to each other.

Taking a breath before stepping into the main club, Priest felt the last vestiges of his feed settle under his skin. If he didn’t know better, he’d say the effects weren’t lasting as long as they once had, and it was starting to scare him. Priest grew up with horror stories about Incubi like him, who could never find a steady partner. The unsatiated hunger drove them to irreversible insanity, and if that happened… his friends would have to take him out. There was no cure for that kind of madness in Demons like him.

There were no other options, and while he knew he had a while longer to spare, the walls felt like they were closing in on him.

Death was an inevitability, but he hoped he had a couple of centuries to live before it came to being put down like a rabid animal.

Shoving his hands into his pockets, Priest nudged the swinging door open with his shoulder to avoid whatever sticky, glittery shit was always all over the furniture and made his way past the stage, where a couple of Siren go-go dancers were entertaining a group in the front seats. Other dancers—he spotted another Siren, two Felidae shifters, and a redheaded Dragon with an impressive bulge in his thong that Priest had fed off a few times—were perched in laps, grinding against whatever patron had the biggest wad of cash that evening.

There were a handful of demons and a Hellhound monitoring the main room and watching the feeds from the “private” spaces.

Azriel might be a giant asshole most days, but he made sure his dancers were well protected, even if he wasn’t there himself. Few things could get past an Angel, fallen or not.

Priest could smell sex, and it settled under his skin, tantalizing and almost cruel because he couldn’t have it the way he wanted it. He’d learned when he was young that to truly satisfy his hunger, he’d have to drain a partner dry, killing them in the process. He fed on arousal and lust, but when he took from someone, it wasn’t just their pheromones he ingested. If left unchecked, he could turn their organs into dust, saturating himself with the very essence that made a person who they were.

He’d almost done it as a teen, when he’d had so little control over his Demon he could barely be trusted to go a store without supervision. Knight had pulled him from the brink when that happened, and he knew he couldn’t go there again. And yet… he kept torturing himself by hanging out at the Pearly Gates whenever he was in town. Meals were easy for him to get. It wasn’t like heneededto go to a strip club to feed.

He had no idea why he kept doing this to himself.

Well, okay. That was a lie, but it wasn’t one he wanted to admit aloud just yet. If he let himself think about the shop next door and the human who was almost always behind the front desk, he would start to spiral. And when he started to spiral, he got hungry.

And when he got hungry…

He got reckless.

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