Which only served to perpetuate the cycle of me spending all my time with my father and his scholarly friends, making me less and less like the other kids my age.
“I mean, I did get to be eighteen, though,” I said.
“Did you?” she asked, brows raising. “You were, what, three years into college at that point? Having lived alone like an adult since you were fifteen. How many eighteen-year-olds can say that? Most of them are still trying to figure out how to use the washing machine and do a keg stand at eighteen. But you will figure it out. If anyone can, it’s you,” she added before moving off to continue to re-stack books.
I was nose-deep in a book—realizing I was so engulfed in the content to remember I was supposed to be planning a lesson on it—when I felt a strange, prickly sensation on the back of my neck.
It wasn’t something I was familiar with. But, quite frankly, I’d read enough books to know what that usually meant.
That you were being watched, and some part of you sensed it.
Curious, my head lifted, and everything went blurry for a couple seconds before I remembered to pull my reading glasses off my nose so my eyes could adjust.
But when they did, I didn’t see anyone.
That was part of the reason I chose the part of the library I did. It was a niche, hardly-ever-used section on the second floor in a back corner. I could see everyone, but really no one could see me.
The only people I ever saw most nights were the librarians themselves, the custodians, or the occasional couple looking for a private corner to indulge in a public places kink.
I saw no shadowy figures as I looked around.
It was just the typical late-night crowd.
The big study groups had dwindled to the most dedicated of them, or the ones who needed to lift their grades the most.
I saw a younger version of myself alone by a back table in the main area. She had her slight body wrapped in black leggings and a giant camel-colored sweater to ward off the chill that you could reliably find in the library. She had two stacks of books in front of her—actual books and notebooks.
A couple table downs was a guy I’d never seen before, wearing a hoodie for the sports team he was on, burning the midnight oil to try to keep his scholarship.
There were a smattering of other people, but everyone’s gaze was either on books, on their phones or laptops, or on nothing at all because they’d fallen asleep at the desks.
No one was looking my way.
Still, there was no stopping the hair on the back of my neck sensation.
Shaking off the strange feeling, I grabbed my sweater and slipped it on, figuring maybe I was just cold, then getting back to work.
Eventually,—like I did many times in the past—I joined the ranks of the others who fell asleep at their desks.
It was right there, in that place, several hours later, when I startled awake and found someone standing there like they were waiting for me.
And he just so happened to be the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen in my life. Tall, fit, with a square jaw, dark green eyes with flecks of some other color that he was too far away to make out, and hair the darkest shade of red possible before it appeared black.
Yes. Gorgeous.
Supernaturally beautiful, if you will.
Even if there was no such thing as the supernatural.
CHAPTER TWO
Bael
No one would typically call me a go-getter. At least not on this fucking insufferable human realm.
Back in Hell, in my homeland, in the place I thrived, yes, I was a hard worker. I was the type to go above and beyond when it came to duty.
My brother, Daemon, was the family slacker. Both in hell and on this plane.
I never thought someone would compare me to him, but there was no denying that I’d been lazier than ever since being forced out of hell against my will, then getting stuck on the human realm.
So it didn’t surprise me that I was faced with shocked gazes when I’d jumped on the assignment that Ace, the lead demon in our particular group, had thrown at me.
To find a professor and pick her brain about the fact that, somehow, in a twist of fate that I still couldn’t quite wrap my head around, the “old gods” were waking up and coming back.
Which meant that everything I knew about reality, about life, about the after life, and my position in it, was wrong.
I’d always viewed the “old gods” like the Greek Olympians as stories the humans told themselves. I’d read the stories—like I’d read many of the other books that Ace had weighing down the shelves in his library—as tales.
Not facts.
No more real than their stories about houses made of candy and children being pushed into ovens.
I figured the gods were ways for the humans to teach lessons on life or morality, never meant to be taken literally.
Which was why when I’d read them, I hadn’t exactly committed much of it to memory.
But if the entire fucking world—and underworld—was about to be turned on its axis, I needed to do my part to figure out what the fuck was going on.
It had nothing to do with the fact that what I remembered best about one of the Olympian books I’d read was the author’s picture on the back of the book jacket.
She’d been photographed in a darkened corner of a library, her arms folded in a very posed way over her subdued black blazer. Her light blonde hair was pulled back in a somewhat severe bun which wouldn’t have been attractive for many people, but her face was delicate and beautiful enough to pull it off.
She looked young to be a professor. Though, admittedly, I didn’t know as much about those things as humans or the demons who’d been around longer did.
I’d been trying to learn as much as I could as quickly as possible, but it was generations of information that I needed to retain. So things like ages for higher education or to hold positions, yeah, it wasn’t exactly priority in my mind.
Young or older than I thought, she was beautiful.
And from what I remembered about the book, very educated on the topic of the old gods.
I mean, if Ace was sending me to her, she had to be one of the best around.
A college campus was a strange thing at night, it seemed. The institution itself loomed large and intimidating, as if daring people to seek knowledge there. But the people who milled around were laid-back and casual, laughing, joking, making out in dark corners.
By the time I got there, the faculty offices were closed for the night, but something inside me said that I wouldn’t find this particular professor in her office anyway.
She’d chosen the library as the backdrop to her book jacket photograph for a reason, hadn’t she?
With that in mind, I made my way around the campus, sticking to the shadows to avoid the security who milled around, looking for threats, and—in one circumstance—guiding a drunken, naked student back toward his dorm while he argued with him about which Power Ranger was the best. Whatever the fuck a Power Ranger was.
Eventually, I found myself in a place that I imagined would give Ace a fucking hard-on to step inside. The massive two-story structure that seemed to go on endlessly, nearly every inch of the place stacked with books.
Down the center of the library was a sort of study station full of long, wide wooden tables with little copper lamps giving off warm, soft lighting for anyone there trying to study late at night.