Page 1 of Prince of Envy

Chapter1

Celeste

Ihadn’t meant to summon a real demon. The Ouija board was pink, for fuck’s sake!

The planchette I’d found in that blasted book had lifted off the board and spun in circles until the incantation I’d been repeating was done. With a hollow thud, it fell onto the cardboard, and the room swelled around me.

A menacing presence had answered my call, and when he appeared, my thick-headed self stayed still while every one of my self-preservation-having friends ran as fast as their fluffy socks could take them up the basement stairs.

I wasn’t brave or dimwitted. I was scared shitless and frozen in place when he stepped out of the shadows, gruesome, decaying, and reeking of death. The smell was so putrid that it choked the scream in my throat.

With each step, he grew taller until he was a jagged cliff that impaled anything that dared climb it. Haunting and treacherous, he cocked his head down at me, still on my knees. My legs were useless sausages.

“Speak, human,” he demanded. His voice was salt on raw skin.

“I-I . . .”

My friends’ screams from the upper levels of the house were muffled by the being in front of me. The being we had brought through what Ellen called “the void.”

“Your courage has gone, and your spine is as feeble as reeds. But you have summoned greatness. Do not squander it.”

He had reached out a corroded skeletal hand and lifted my chin until I was forced to my feet. He was still over a foot taller than me.

One second, I was swallowing down his rancid, hot breath, and the next, an impossibly beautiful man stood in the monster’s place.

Judging books by their covers was part of my job, and this creature with savage power was evil incarnate. Something about him reached deep inside of me and fomented every dark thought I’d ever had to my surface. Sins that I’d committed pooled in my belly to stir and ripple at the gentle caress of his fingers down my throat.

“Name.” Another demand from him, but his voice was as smooth as silk in this new form.

“Celeste.”

His gaze on mine was detrimental. If he pulled away, I would die of suffocation. My lungs would scramble to follow him, but only after my pounding heart had broken free of the prison within my ribs. He was life and death and all that was in between.

“My Celeste.” His fingers embraced the column of my neck, a perfect fit.

“Yes.”

Of course I was his. Right?

I’d called upon him from that blasted book I’d found in the archives. The one I was supposed to have brought to my professor but had said was missing instead.

It had called to me. I’d felt it. When I picked it out of the stacks, it wrapped me in a sensation that I could only describe ashome. Written just for me.

That was all clear to me now, in this moment, with his hand around my throat and his eyes so heated that I was going to melt into a puddle at his feet, then apologize for staining his soles.

I’d brought it to the party to show my friends and fellow occult-loving weirdos. To show them the meticulous journaling of a sixteenth-century priest who’d documented every exorcism he’d performed down to the color of the vomit each victim expelled.

What I hadn’t expected was for Laura to have brought a novelty Ouija board from the kink shop where she worked. The glitter penises between the letters and numbers showed it was a bachelorette party gag gift. It had even come with a list of questions to ask “the beyond” about your future husband. We’d taken turns asking the spirits about our partners or somewhere-out-there soulmates.

When it was my turn, all hell had broken loose.

Literally.

My body had been taken over so easily by some unknown force. I’d had the priest’s diary on my lap for safekeeping when words formed on my tongue and began twisting into phrases that sounded like Latin or Aramaic, a mix at my best guess. Languages I could decipher but could not speak in conversation.

“Please.” I didn’t know what I was asking, but he did.

“Don’t be frightened, my gift,” he said, his low voice a whisper feathering over my lips. “I have been waiting for you.”

---