“CLAY.”

MY NAME floated to me in the darkness, carried on the whispered breath of an angel. Some part of me understood that I was asleep, poised on the precipice between consciousness and dream, but I was more than willing to surrender to the lilt of that voice.

Her voice.

I smiled and shifted position in the bed, rolling over and giving myself to the dream that taunted me from the edges of my mind. As soon as I’d released my hold on the real world, the dreamscape welcomed me in.

The air was rich with the scent of the magnolias trees that stretched endlessly into the air. The branches, each one overloaded with flowers, knitted together to form a canopy of white above me.

Not me. Us.

Standing in front of me, with her head tipped back to take in the view above us, was a girl.

No, not a girl, the girl.

She was a regular visitor in my dreams. Each night, we’d meet under the floral sky—at least for a few stolen moments.

With a smile on my lips, I watched her relish the dreamland sun. Her stance left her shoulder length red-gold curls spilling down her back. The soft light filtering through the canopy reached for the ends of her hair, igniting it, and setting flames among the fiery tendrils. A desperate desire to touch her built in the pit of my stomach, and I wished that tonight would be when things would change for the better.

The need grew to reach out and thread my fingers into her blazing locks—to run my hands through the multi-hued silk as I held her close—but I was pinned in place. The sight of her was enough to cast a spell over me, rendering me utterly immobile. Despite that, I longed to guide her gaze in my direction so I could pull her to me and kiss her until we were both breathless. My stomach flipped as I wondered whether this time, tonight, I might actually be able to glide my fingers across her body.

All I had to do was earn her attention somehow.

The air around the two of us grew warmer, and the scent of the warmed flowers became cloying—as if it were trying to reach down my throat and forcibly churn my stomach.

Damn it!

The dream was ending—I knew the sequence too well by now. I’d wasted time admiring the beautiful girl. Now I only had a few more precious moments with her before everything changed. I wanted to taste her lips and feel her—to have her under me, panting and desperate—before I lost her again.

Surely tonight will be the night I can finally make her mine.

Almost as soon as the thought crossed my mind, she lowered her chin to bring her gaze down to meet mine. Her lilac irises were incandescent in the muted sunlight and her lips tipped up into a knowing smile.

“Are you dreaming about me again?” she asked, amusement ringing clear in her tone.

Like every other time I’d had the dream, I couldn’t find the answer to her question. I couldn’t talk or move. I was caught by her spell, but couldn’t find it in me to worry about the implications as she stepped closer to me. This was the part of the dream where the little I knew of her from reality always gave way to pure, unadulterated fantasy. I waited for the shift with a desperate longing and a mouth so dry I couldn’t have forced myself to form any words even if I’d been able to speak.

She rested her hand against my chest, causing my heart to gallop. My blood raced through my veins, rushing toward the one part of me that most needed to feel her touch.

“Naughty, naughty,” she teased with a soft, sultry whisper in my ear. “You know you’re not supposed to think about me.”

Before I had a chance to respond—not that I was able to anyway—her hand moved from my chest and trailed down in a straight line over my stomach and onto my cock. An involuntary moan rushed from my throat as she bit her lip and cupped her hand over my length. My heart pounded so hard I was certain she’d be able to feel my heartbeat through her grip. A soft moan issued from her lips as she rubbed her palm against my jeans.

“This is what you want, isn’t it?” She gazed up at me through her thick eyelashes.

I wanted to nod and take it all, even though I knew I should try to shake my head and try to break the spell somehow. She pressed her body closer to me, face to face and chest to chest.

Continuing her soft ministrations on the outside of my jeans, she scraped her teeth against my earlobe. A shudder of pleasure ran through me at the sensation. Her breath was warm against my skin as she spoke.

“I want to tear you to pieces,” she murmured in her seductive tone.

She trailed one of the long, talon-like fingernails of her free hand under my chin, using it to twist my face toward her and forcing me to meet her gaze once again.

“You want me, don’t you?” she asked, words stolen from another mouth—a warning from within that the reality of Evie was just as dangerous as the harpy who’d once tried to seduce me had been.

The hold she had on my cock tightened until there was nothing that existed outside of her grip. The sensation straddled the line between pleasure and pain, and she had the control to tip the balance in either direction. She smiled, possibly in response to whatever emotion she saw on my face or maybe because of the reaction my body had to her hold.

“That’s good, because I can guarantee you the time of your life. Being with me . . . it’s worth dying for.”

Her hands grew hotter, heating me from the inside out. I tried to pull away but was still unable to fight through whatever spell had rendered me immobile. Her smile turned to a snarl, and the canopy above us burst into flames.

“No!” I shouted as I jerked awake before the fire could consume us both.

 

IGNORING MY raging hard-on, I sat up and pushed back the hair that had fallen across my eyes as I’d slept.

Was it impossible to go one night without dreaming of Evie fucking Meyers?

I pushed back the covers knowing that it was useless trying to get back to sleep with the way my heart pounded against my ribcage. It felt like I’d run a marathon, not just awakened from a dream.

Whether my breath sped from fear of the monster within her or lust over just how hot the dream version of Evie was, I could never be certain. All I knew was that I wanted her in front of me for real. Nothing in the world would have made me happier—or more terrified—than for the dream to manifest itself in my bedroom. To be free to speak and react, to pull her to me like I always longed to do. To see whether her dreamtime utterances were fact.

Would one night with Evie be worth dying for?

I shuddered. Thoughts of Evie—literally the girl of my dreams—filled me. I imagined where she might be and what she might be doing. So many hours had disappeared while I remembered her heat and her lips, and recall the way she’d play with the end of her ponytail when she was nervous . . .

Why can’t I get her out of my head?

When I tried to focus on other things, she was there. It was as if she’d burned her image into my retinas and branded herself onto my skin the instant her body heated in response to my touch two years ago.

If she hadn’t disappeared so unexpectedly, I might be over her already. I had to laugh at my own ridiculous thought. Unexpectedly? Really? You accused her of being a monster. You called her evil. Did you actually think she would stay after that?

Climbing from bed, I scrubbed my face with both of my hands and blew out a breath to exhale my frustration. Regardless of my dreams, and of the easy way I could recall the time we’d had, it didn’t pay to dwell on thoughts of her. As she’d pointed out—at least in the vision that haunted me nightly—I wasn’t supposed to think about her. She was nothing more than a memory of a history long since passed. A time I should have buried deep inside by now.

Trying to convince myself of that was useless though.

She was sending me insane. She’d been such an integral part of my dreamscape for so long that I couldn’t even really be sure exactly how much of my memory of her was real and how much I’d fabricated in the years since. She’d morphed from the teenage girl I’d known into both a seductress and a monster. There was no way of knowing which she’d truly become until I found her again, and that search was more than fruitless.

I’d spent the better part of the last two years running searches in every database at my disposal, and I’d got bupkis. It shouldn’t have been so hard to find one girl and her father. Still, my mind wouldn’t let me just give up the search. Or maybe it was my heart. It was hard to tell these days.

After giving up on any thoughts of further sleep, I showered before making my way to the kitchen to hunt down some breakfast. I figured I might as well take advantage of my early waking to get in first. At least that way I could be sure that I actually got some food. My older brother, Ethan, was definitely taking full advantage of the unusual situation of a fully stocked pantry.

Unusual because it was the first time my family had lived in a house since my twin sister, Louise, and I finished high school. While we were still in school, Dad had wanted us to have some semblance of normalcy, so even though we’d still moved often, we usually stayed in one area for at least a few months—long enough to warrant settling into a proper house.

After graduation . . .

I was happy to be in a stable apartment again for a while and not have to sleep on a dingy motel mattress that countless thousands of other people had slept on—and worse—before me.

For the time being, we were in the personal apartment of Abraham Rogers, the leader of the New York division of the organization we belonged to—the Rain—and the warden of Bayview prison, which was more than just a typical prison.

Most of the cells at Bayview, better known among our devotees as “Hell,” were filled with genuine human prisoners to offer the front we needed, but the rest had one singular purpose—to hold captive some of the most gruesome creatures imaginable. The creatures that we, as the Rain, where dedicated to eradicating. Usually, we just disposed of the beasts in the field, but occasionally some creatures proved difficult to destroy permanently. They were the ones shown our unique brand of hospitality for as long as it took for us to study the best way to weaken and kill them.

When I walked into the kitchen, Eth was already sitting at the table, hugging a bowl of cereal that probably could have fed a family of six. Sometimes I wondered things about my brother—like whether it was possible that he’d swapped appetites with a small rhino.

Despite the resemblance in our appearance, our tall stature, dark hair, and near-black eyes, which we’d both inherited from our father, there were some stark differences between us. His muscular build and ability to digest ridiculous quantities of junk food were just a couple of them.

“We’re out of milk,” he mumbled around a mouthful of brightly colored rings as he held up the empty carton as evidence.

“Nice. Thank you, asshole.” I flicked his ear as I walked past, before dodging out of the way of his speedy retaliation in the form of a fist. “What are you doing up so early anyway?”

He shook his head. “Dad and I just got in. I’m going to go crash as soon as I finish this. You and Lou have the day shift.”

The day shift alone with Lou wasn’t appealing, but I had little choice in the matter until the case was finished. 

Three days earlier, we’d been on the other side of the country, but as always, when Abe called, we jumped. Well, Dad jumped, and we followed. Together with the other leaders of the Rain, Abe gave us our cases, helped out with trouble, and kept our asses out of prison. Despite being among the Elite—families who’d been part of the Rain for countless generations—like my family, Abe’s position at Bayview ranked him above even us.

During his call, he’d explained that his son Benjamin had been failing to turn up for any cases for almost two weeks. At first, he’d thought it was just Ben being Ben. He always took full advantage of his position as the son of a ruling Elite family, and got whatever he wanted, which of course led him to want everything he couldn’t have. He’d been in more trouble than my brother and I combined, and that was saying something.

Thanks to Ben, Abe had spent plenty of time and money cleaning up messes—mostly of the drunk female at 3 a.m. kind. Ben, just like Eth, was always on the prowl, and no woman was safe when he turned on his charm.

With a barely repressed shudder, I recalled the few times the three of us had been out together. Both Ben and Eth cared about nothing but counting the notches on their bedposts. Personally, I preferred to go for something a little more long lasting. Not that any attempted relationship of mine had lasted long, especially when each one had felt like nothing more than a tawdry affair. It was just another way Evie had invaded my life. Regardless of how happy I thought I could be with a new woman, Evie was always there. Her memory, and the enchantment I felt for her, whispered in the back of my head, and ghosted between my sheets as an ever-faithful partner even though she’d never physically been there.

Abe had explained that three days after the first case Ben had failed to show for, he’d been spotted. The next morning, a fresh human corpse was found nearby the suspected sighting. When that pattern continued every few days, Abe had called us.

Despite having no solid leads, Abe suspected Ben’s disappearance was the work of a fae doppelganger from a fairy court nearby. The Rain had long suspected that there was a fae hideaway somewhere in the vicinity of Central Park, and possibly another in the Bronx area, but we’d never been able to find either of them. Once the details of the case were revealed, it became clear why Abe had requested my family’s presence.

Because of our history with the fae of New York, the case was personal for us. There wasn’t a single member of my family that didn’t want to see all of the fae parasites dead—preferably at our own hands. Abe knew our desire to destroy those filthy creatures would offer Ben his best chance for rescue.

“You didn’t have any luck then?” I asked Eth about the case as I opened the fridge to see whether by some miracle an array of tasty food had materialized overnight to replace what Eth had consumed the day before. Disappointed that it hadn’t, I grabbed the orange juice. There wasn’t quite enough to fill a juice glass, so I just drank it straight from the carton before wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.

“Nothing,” Eth said around another mouthful. “There was a sighting of him in a strip club, but when we got there he was gone. But there was another one left behind.”

Another body? Shit!

Neither of us said anything as the potential repercussions of that sank in. So far there had been six victims, and all of their deaths had been covered up smoothly enough, but eventually the cover up would have to stop. At some point, probably when the numbers climbed into double digits, it would be a lost cause, and Ben would have to face justice for the crimes—even if Abe was right and Ben hadn’t committed them.

“We’ll find him,” I stated. My confidence came from deep within. We’d always had success on these sorts of operations in the past. In fact, my family had an almost perfect record. No one in the Rain would have argued the fact that we were the best at what we did. There was no reason to think this case would be any different.

I hoped that we could find Ben sooner rather than later. I wanted the situation resolved before anyone else lost their life. I also hated the thought of my friend trapped in a fae court somewhere, or that somewhere out there another innocent person would soon lose their life because we’d missed some clue.

Eth finished up his cereal before tipping the bowl to his lips and drinking the milk. “I don’t know, man, surely at some point we have to admit defeat.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “How can you say that? What if Dad had given up on Lou?”

Eth flinched at the accusation in my tone. Despite the years that had passed since Lou had been rescued from the fae and returned to us, her disappearance was still a major cause of heartbreak for our family. She’d been just a toddler when she was switched, and it had taken Dad years to get her back. We couldn’t give up on Ben after only a few days even though he was an adult capable of taking care of himself. If he’d truly been kidnapped, and wasn’t just trying to cause his father some grief, it was likely that he wouldn’t ever be able to break away, at least not unassisted. We couldn’t just abandon him to whatever fate awaited him at the fae courts.

A moment later, Eth had his stoic mask back in place. He brushed his hand across his almost military-short hair, flexing his muscles in the process as if trying to remind me that he could beat me into submission if we argued—or at least he thought he could. “I almost forgot you like to hold on to things forever. How long have you been pining over that girl who disappeared on you back in Ohio?”

It was my turn to react, but I tried to minimize the chance for him to see the impact his words had by masking my expression before I spoke. “One, I haven’t been pining.” I held up my hand, counting as I went. “I was concerned. She left so suddenly, and I was worried that something might have happened to her.” It was a lie. I knew exactly why she left and that, aside from the threat my family posed to her, she’d never been in any danger—if anything she was the danger. That didn’t mean I was pining though, not exactly.

Unless of course dreaming about her, being unable to get her out of my head, and needing to see her one more time was pining, which I didn’t think it was. Sure, I’d set up at least twenty different auto searches on every database we had access to, all with emails directly back to a personal email address I’d set up specifically for the purpose, before wiping the existence of them out of the Rain’s search log.

Maybe I’d even gone so far as to upload an image I’d lifted from my high school’s security camera feed into a beta version of some facial recognition software that I’d had a little input into the design of. I may have had alerts linked to all of those different searches so that I was notified by text and email the instant any of them resulted in a hit.

It was even possible that I’d scoured every single book and database available to me to try to research precisely what sort of creature she was. All signs pointed to something that seemed impossible due to their rarity in the world, a creature of fire and renewal, but it was also the only thing that made sense.

None of those things were the same thing as pining though. “And two, that’s got nothing to do with this so shut up.”

He laughed, knowing that he’d successfully gotten under my skin, which was probably the whole point of his comments anyway. “Keep telling yourself that, but know that there have been many, many nights when we’ve shared a room that I’ve heard you getting out of bed to go jack off in the bathroom at some ridiculous hour of the morning.”

I tried not to let him see that he’d hit too close to the mark with his observation.

“Why are you up anyway?” he asked, changing the subject in victory. “As you pointed out yourself, it’s early. It’s not like you’re in the bathroom having a good time.” He waved his open fist in the air in mimicry of an action he clearly knew well. “So . . .?”

I shrugged. “I just couldn’t sleep, and then I thought I’d be able to beat you to the little food remaining. Obviously I lost that race.”

He snorted. “What can I say? You snooze, you lose.”

I rolled my eyes. “You could at least—“

“There’s no point batting those big brown eyes of yours in an attempt to make me feel bad,” he said. “I’m going to bed, not out for more milk.”

I gave him the finger and tried to find something else to satisfy my hunger; at least the physical one in my stomach. My other hungers would have to wait awhile longer—maybe even forever.