Page 3 of Virgin Lust

Sire.

I winced. I’d never get used to the title. Apparently, it was common for gremlins to find a master to boss them around. Considering I spent the first two decades of my life believing I was nothing more than human, I couldn’t get used to the custom.

“Wallis.” I warned.

“I mean,Boss. Sorry.”

No, he wasn’t. I hated being called boss just as much.

“Youareour sire. Why would we call you anything else?” Dirk, the grumpiest of the three gremlins, asked. He refused to call me anything other than sire.

“Don’t you three get tired of following me around?” I griped.

It was a game we had played for decades. I’d tell them to stop trailing behind me, but they wouldn’t listen. When they first entered my life, I meant what I said. Over the years, however, the ugly creatures grew on me, and the words were empty.

“Because of your human ways?” Marty, the biggest prankster of the three, asked.

I sighed, not bothering to answer.

“You need to let go of this world,” Dirk muttered and crossed his arms.

The gremlins longed to live in their Underworld, but because they wouldn’t leave my side, they were stuck in the human world.

“You don’t belong here,” Dirk added.

“I can’t stand demons.” I tossed the cards on the coffee table, and they scattered. “I like peace. You know that.”

“Here we go again.” Dirk exhaled. “Youarea demon.”

I know.

If I’d been human, I would have died a long time ago—sixty years to be exact. That hadn’t been my fate. Instead, I was alive and sire to three ugly creatures.

What would you think of your brother now, Tiffany?

Not that her opinion mattered. My sister believed I died in a motorcycle wreck. Since then, she’d aged, married, had kids, and grandkids while I remained unchanged—just a gruesome specter feeding on souls to survive. The same brother who visited her from the shadows and made sure she was doing all right. Although she no longer needed me, I didn’t stop needing her. She was all I had left tethering me to humanity, but three gremlins constantly reminded me I wasn’t human.

“I might devour souls, but I’m not like those in the Underworld,” I blurted out.

“One day you’ll listen. One day you’ll know your place is most certainly not here,” Dirk gestured at the rundown motor home we lived in. As a paid assassin, I could afford a life of luxury, but I felt most comfortable in a trailer similar to the dump I grew up in with Tiffany.

I knew where my head was. I wasn’t—I’m not—ready to change. My appetite, body, strength, and immortality were different. But giving up my humanity? That meant becoming a monster—something I wasn’t ready for.

I was stubborn. Really fucking stubborn. I’d been denying those little shits for decades. There wasn’t anything—or anyone—that would change my ways. I could continue rejecting their ways for centuries.

If I decided to live that long.

Pulling a cigarette from the pack on the table, I lit it and leaned back against the sofa cushion. I blew out a smoke ring, and Marty said, “Are you going to the human festival?”

“Ain’t got nothing to do with me,” I said, inhaling more smoke. What did it matter? My body didn’t succumb to sickness and disease the way humans did.

“It’s been years since I heard of the festival,” Marty murmured with a slight irksome thrill in his voice.

The witch, Melinda, had made it clear the festival was a twisted tradition that had to be stopped. So why was the shithead looking all dreamy, as if he were thinking of a faraway place? “Should I kill you, Marty?”

He turned his gaze to me and quickly bowed his head. “I’m sorry, Sire—I mean, Boss. I know what’s allowed and not allowed. The festival is a horrid thing, but if it’s the beginning of the end… What if such a thing reaches this world?”

“Like I said, ain’t got nothing to do with me,” I said more sternly.

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