Page 10 of The Demon Court

Selene didn’t offer him a reply.

“That you were the beginning of something new. Do you know how impossible that is to a being over a thousand years old?” He laughed and the entire room laughed with him. “The last new thing I experienced was well over three hundred years ago. It was a young woman from Wolf Haven and she did this thing with her tongue that down right shocked me. Never experienced that before, probably never will again,” he added with a mutter.

“Am I not new?” she asked. Selene knew she shouldn’t play this game, but she found the faintest twinge of annoyance breaking through the ice.

She might not be unique, but he’d tracked her down, anyway. The ice broke just enough for her anger to guide her mind toward a solution.

He grinned at her, slow and controlled. “Not at all, pretty one. You’re just like all the rest.”

Oh, he thought his words would sting. They did not.

She lifted her piece of toast and crunched down on it. Taking her time to chew, she finally said, “And yet you’re here. Talking to me.”

Selene enjoyed watching his confident expression fall into one of confusion. Wrinkles even formed on that perfect brow. How many people got to see that face? So few.

He seemed to struggle to find words, another surprising thing to him, she was certain. So Selene took her time chewing her toast and then stood.

“Thank you for the delicious breakfast,” she sarcastically said to the tavern keep before turning her attention entirely to the demon spread out over the bar.

His slow, languid smile suggested he thought she had bent to him. Maybe there was a part of him that assumed he couldn’t sense her lust for some reason or another, but that she still felt it.

Selene’s confidence might be lacking in certain areas, but she was still a foundling of Silver Thread. Her mother was the High Priestess, and she had trained her entire life to lure him in.

She rested her own hands on the bar, just underneath his arms and close enough to his ribs to feel his heart rate pick up. Leaning in close, she said, “And I am the beginning of something new. You might not know who I am. You might not recognize anything different about me. But I assure you, Demon, you’ve never met someone like me before.”

And for good measure, she flicked one of his stupid horns just to see the gold dust fall off them.

“Of course. Glitter,” she muttered in disgust. “Goodbye, Lust.”

Selene left him with his mouth hanging open, still dramatically draped over the bar. She let herself feel for a small second, and with that came a rush of what felt like victory.

ChapterFour

He finished his tour throughout the towns with a flourish. And that was to say that he did so with an incredibly disgruntled expression and a boredom that made the other mayors wonder if they’d done something wrong.

Perhaps they had. They didn’t bring him a woman like the one who had confronted him in Greenbank. Accosted, that was the correct term for it. She’d nearly struck him and then had taunted his intelligence in the middle of a busy tavern.

He’d like to say that had never happened before, and it had been a while, but alas. Nothing was new anymore. Never was.

After he’d finished with his regular business, he’d headed back home. Returning to his own castle where there was a fair city surrounding its safe walls. Only the best were allowed to live in Lust’s Castle. They were the nobility, the rich, the beautiful. People who stood out in every town that he’d gone to and thus he’d brought them here.

He might be a vain man about his own looks, but he was as equally vain about those who surrounded him. He refused to allow anyone “lesser” to grace the halls of his home. His beautiful court of simpering fools who never left him alone.

The castle itself was a work of art. He’d had it built in a glade that led up to a cliff side. No matter what room he stood in, his eyes were filled with a different kind of nature’s beauty. On the eastern wing was a view of the mountain range that stretched high up into the heavens and as far along the ridgeline as mortal eyes could see. On the western wing, he could stare into forests that never seemed to end. To the south, the plains where most of the food crops were grown every year. But it was the northern wing that was his favorite. Because it had a view of the edge.

Every kingdom in this realm floated in nothing. Open air. Each of his brothers had been given their own kingdom, all of them connected through light bridges that were heavily guarded. Lust enjoyed standing at the edge and letting the wind play through his hair.

All it would take was one misstep, and he’d fall. Tumble right down into the nothingness below and learn just how little there was there. Or how much waited for him.

His brothers used to say there were creatures lingering in the depths. Monsters who had lived for thousands of years, starving in the darkness, waiting for a single person to fall. Sometimes, if he listened hard enough, he thought maybe he could hear their echoing groans.

But perhaps that was merely fancy.

An icy cold wrapped around his ankle, coiling up his body as though a freezing snake had decided to climb him.

“Affection,” he snarled. “I thought I told you to leave.”

The damned spirit never left him alone, however. The creature was little more than a wisp of a spirit at this point. Why it had wanted to cleave itself to Lust, made no sense to him. A spirit of affection needed to be around people who could at least feel that emotion. Otherwise, how did it feed?

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