After all the shit I’d been through, it was easy to forget how much the world had changed.
A few decades ago, an experimental drug spill had resulted in humans being able to see the dead. It had also brought to light the existence of Reapers—demons from a place called the Underealm. The drug had affected Reapers too, killing many of them. Due to the drop in their numbers, the volume of spirits trapped on the earthly plane had grown exponentially, and so a new system had been born. One where humans worked with the Underealm to monitor and dispatch the spirits of the dead to the other side.
I’d worked in such a place for a while. In fact, my best friend, Fee, was a Reaper. Not just any Reaper, but one of the elites—a Dominus Reaper. I’d helped her out too for a while. But that wasn’t my life anymore. Working for the Magiguard in Necro City, being trailed by Jasper, and not having sex was now my life.
Three months without bedroom action and my body was ready to screw anything that moved. Anything and anyone.
Except Jasper.
He was never touching me again.
I turned the corner onto my street, pushed open the gate to my tiny, terraced house, and clipped my way up the steps. Being a realist, I knew it was too much to hope that Jasper would simply piss off.
But there it was again… Hope.
I stepped into the hallway but didn’t bother to turn on the lights. The drapes were open, and moonlight flooded the house. What I needed most right now was to slide into bed with one of my epic vibrators.
I needed to come.
I needed Jasper to fuck off.
I gripped the balustrade just as he pressed his chest to my back. He was a spirit. A malevolent entity, and yet his body was warm and solid where it made contact with mine.
He was powerful and dangerous, but he wouldn’t allow anyone or anything to harm me. Yeah, sounded romantic, but the truth was far from it. I was a thing to him. A possession. A way to remain anchored to this world and everything he did for me or to me was for his own gain.
But when he was close like this, my body forgot all the reasons why he was bad for me, because my body remembered all the ways he could make me feel so good. All the tiny details I desperately wanted to forget.
“You’re wound so tight,” he purred, breath hot on my neck. “I could give you the release you want. Just take off the amulet, Cora.”
My pulse beat so hard in my throat, I was sure the world could hear it, and my core tightened and throbbed, eager for his touch. Yes, my traitorous body remembered. It remembered his expert hands, his hot mouth, his clever tongue, and his thick cock.
“Let me fill you,” he said.
My core clenched, and a wave of desire and need washed over me, leaving me wet and angry.
I hated that I craved him. Hated myself for being weak.
No. Stop thinking like that. I wasn’t weak. I was in control.
I pulled away and plastered a smirk on my face before facing him. “I’m not the one who needs you, Jasper. You need me. You need to feed off sex.” And he could only get that from me, the sap who’d agreed to bind to him. “You need the energy it gives you to manifest continually. Siphoning heat and energy from a roomful of humans isn’t enough for you, is it?”
Already, he was beginning to fade away, and soon he’d be gone.
His eyes narrowed. “We had a deal, Cora.”
“Yeah.” I turned away and climbed the steps to the first floor. “We did.”
The deal had been simple. Sex with Jasper once a month, and he’d save my friends' lives. I hadn’t really had much choice at the time. If I’d said no, Fee might have taken the deal in my place, and she’d been through too much already. I couldn’t let her take on Jasper too.
But once a month had become weekly, then biweekly as he’d insinuated himself into my life, offering his aid in exchange for access to my body. He was a deadly addiction, an insidious craving, but now I had an off switch.
I shut my bedroom door, knowing instinctively that he wouldn’t follow me now. When he vanished like this, he was gone. I had no idea where, and I didn’t give a shit. All that mattered was that, for a few blissful hours, I’d be free of him.
I stripped off and pulled on my PJs. The urge to get off was gone. Instead, a bone-aching exhaustion filtered through my veins.
I crawled into bed and lay staring at the ceiling. There was a crack in the plaster just above my bed that ran all the way to the other side of the room. I should probably get it checked out, but I probably wouldn’t.
My hand went to the amulet at my throat. It was cool against my fingertips. A gift from Elijah Black, my unofficial warlock mentor. It had arrived in the post with a note that simply read:
For your pest problem.
I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t commission it like I preferred to let Jasper think. But Elijah knew just what I needed.
A Jasper repellent.
The amulet, forged by the powerful Grimswood Coven up north, was a protection ward. It kept Jasper from being sexually intimate with me. It disrupted the bond between us, so he couldn’t feed off my energy and use it to manifest.
I’d been worried about that. Worried that if he didn’t get what he needed from me, he might hurt other people, but Elijah assured me that while bound to me, Jasper could only siphon a minuscule amount of energy from others. Only enough to manifest for short periods. His power would be muted too.
But the flipside was, so would mine.
I was a novelty. Some would say an abomination. Heck, even I didn’t fully understand what I was. I wasn’t born; I was created by Fee.
They called my kind tulpas—beings created with the force of another person’s will. Except regular tulpas remained trapped in their creator’s subconscious mind. I was different because Fee was different. Powerful. And through her, I’d taken on a life of my own. I had power of my own, the ability to shift from place to place, the ability to harness what witches called miasma without the need to be linked to a coven like other witches.
I was an anomaly no one understood, and the amulet was fucking with my abilities. I would have shifted from the restaurant to my house, but I couldn’t make long journeys using my teleportation power without being drained. Even short trips took the wind out of my sails.
“Just take it off, Cora.” Jasper’s voice was a whisper in the darkness.
Seriously? “Piss off, Jasper.”
“Take it off…”
“Never.”
I pulled the covers over my head and closed my eyes, ignoring the desperate pound of my heart and the zing in my blood.
“Never say never, Cora,” he whispered. “Tomorrow is another day.”
I felt him leave and relaxed into the mattress.
I needed sleep.
A warm fuzzy feeling trickled through my veins; the delicious lethargy that came just before sleep tugged me under.
My phone buzzed loudly on the bedside table, jarring me awake. I could ignore it, slip back under and into dreams, but the guttering needed cleaning, and I was running low on funds.
Fee had insisted on buying me this house, but I insisted on paying for its upkeep.
Dreams would have to wait. I groaned and made a grab for the phone.
There was only one person who ever called me at this unsocial hour—because this was when the monsters came out to play.