I glance down at Bastion on my other side, tracing the faint mark where my teeth had broken skin. “How does that even work?” I ask. “Why the bite? Why does that… seal it?”
Deimos shifts, his gaze dragging from the sky to me. “Because that’s where the truth lives,” he says quietly. “Blood carries power, memory, hunger. When he bit you, he gave you a piece of his essence, and you took it into yourself. When you bit him back, you gave it form. That’s how our kind recognize a mate—not through vows or magic words, but through blood shared in desire. It’s instinct older than Hell itself.”
I swallow, the answer sitting warm and heavy in my chest. “Then what about you?” I ask, as Deimos turns his body toward me. “How is ours… different?”
His mouth curves, not a smile so much as an admission. “Because ours wasn’t a choice,” he says. “I think it happened the moment I touched you. My power recognized yours like a key finding its lock.” He taps his sternum once. “That’s a mate-bond—old as the first fire. Blood can acknowledge it, strengthen it, make it louder…but it can’t make it. Fate does.”
Bastion huffs, not unkind. “I’m the bond you forged,” he says. “Him? The one that found you.”
I feel it then—the difference. Bastion’s thread is heat and weight, something we built with teeth and want. Deimos’s is gravity itself, the constant pull I felt even when I didn’t know what I was moving toward. One was chosen in blood. The other was written under my ribs long before I could read it.
I find Cassiel watching me. He doesn’t look away. There’s no bond between us yet, only a note held in the air, the promise of a door he won’t open unless I ask. His gaze is steady, almost reverent, and it lands on me like a vow spoken without words—patience edged in fire, restraint sharpened into devotion.
I turn my head back toward Deimos. “Tell me more. How are you different from me, besides—” I glance down at us, “—besides the obvious?”
He laughs, soft and dangerous. “Besides the obvious,” he repeats. “That’s a generous question. Where do you want to start? Anatomy, politics, etiquette?”
I flick my fingers up at him. “No. No. Not anatomy. Tell me about power. Dreams. Bloodlines. The things men don’t admit.”
Deimos lifts his head and turns so his cheek is almost against mine. The heat of him is a language. “Okay,” he says. “Start with dreams. Incubi and succubi both feed, yes. But we move differently. I can cross the thin places between sleep and waking in a way you can feel, taste—” he smiles at my expression “—but I don’t own them. I am a visitor. I can touch a dream, push at the edges, underline a feeling, accentuate a sight. I can make a fear sharper, make a touch seem like something else. I can play the dream like a lute.”
“And plant things?” I ask. My voice is smaller than I intend. There is a cavern in my throat that wants to be filled with certain words.
He shakes his head. “No. I can’t plant a thought that will root itself the next morning. I can’t write commands in the mind with ink that stays. I can wake a man thinking of devotion, lust, regret, but I cannot make him decide to go to a place or say a name tomorrow because I told him to. That is not my art. There are those who weave. Dream-weavers. Dangerous kind. They stitch scenes, thread phrases, plant motifs like seeds.”
My skin prickles in a way that has nothing to do with heat.
“The difference is this: an incubus like me can make you tremble, can show you a broken thing until you bleed for it. A dream-weaver can make you believe the blood was always yours.”
“Succubi can’t do that?” I ask.
Deimos’s hand finds mine and gives the smallest, almost lazy squeeze. “Not in the way a weaver does. Succubi are different. More direct. You are blunt instruments that carve into the coreof the thing you want. More dangerous, sometimes. Incubi—well, we are seductive, yes, but the strength often lies in our bloodlines. I say this with no modesty: my blood carries old favors. That is why I can push farther than a common incubus. My mother—” He halts, eyes darkening for a second, “—my mother was among the first to bind this hunger into shape. Her name bent the world once.”
I say his mother’s name aloud, not entirely sure why. It feels like touching a relic. “Lilith.”
Deimos’s fingers tighten for the barest instant. “Lilith,” he echoes. “Yes. She was… she was something else.” He releases my hand and turns his head toward the sky again as if it might answer. “You are strong, Lillien. Stronger than you know. The way you just bent us to your will—that was not a small thing. You forced us to submit.”
That memory makes my cheeks hot. I pictured their faces, the way their power had folded beneath mine. “I remember the way Bastion looked when he hit that floor,” I say. “Like a dog that found a reason.”
“He’s not a dog,” Deimos says, voice threaded with something softer than warning. “But he learned to worship in the right way.”
Bastion snorts in his sleep and a chuckle rumbles out of him. “Keep talking,” he mumbles, voice thick. Even asleep he sounds like a threat.
I turn to Bastion. “What about you? What do you do besides throw things and break doors?”
Bastion opens one eye. “That’s my résumé,” he says, sounding uncannily chipper for someone who is mostly a mass of muscle and menace. He props himself on an elbow, the motion a slow mechanical thing. “I’m construction, destruction, maintenance. My skin takes blows like stone takes rain. I can walk through fire that would bite you in half and only come awaysmelling like a bonfire. My endurance is stupid. I don’t feel pain the way you do. It’s there, but it’s background noise. I can keep going while everyone else folds.”
“And seduction?” I ask, rolling my shoulder so the memory of hands on it hums.
Bastion grins, all dangerous teeth and lazy arrogance. “I seduce by causing collateral. I make the room dangerous and then say, ‘Stay.’ You want someone to survive after I’m done, they will remember who stood with them. That becomes its own attraction.” He leans back, satisfied with his own philosophy. “Also, I have a nice ass.”
I snort. Deimos grins at me, wicked and fond.
Cassiel’s response is slower. He had been tense all night, closed like a book with pages torn out. He stares at the sky in that way angels have when they are rehearsing holiness.
“Cassiel doesn’t like to talk about himself,” I say.
Deimos’s brow creases. “Maybe he doesn’t. Or maybe he’s saving the story.”
