“So, you’re saying… I have, like, powers. Actual powers?”
“Yes.”
“To… slay demons with.”
“That is exactly what I am saying. And, honey, I’m afraid to tell you, but absolutely everything in your life is about to change.”
“For the better? Or worse?” I’d been smart enough at that moment to ask.
“Oh, Dale. I think it might be a lot of both of those things.”
And, well, she’d been right…
CHAPTER TWO
Dale
“Ugh,” I grumbled, shifting my position for what felt like the twentieth time in ten minutes.
I’d endured a lot of pretty brutal training in my life, but in my humble opinion, there was nothing quite as annoyingly aching as a sore ass from sitting on it for too long.
And, well, it seemed like The Academy just got their rocks off by choosing a fleet of cars with the most uncomfortable seats imaginable. All the while knowing they were going to ask us to sit in them for endless stakeouts.
The sadists.
I was pretty sure this was a dead-end anyway, which made it all the more intolerable. I hated sitting still for so long. I wasn’t wired that way.
Well, no, that wasn’t exactly accurate.
I’d once been just as lazy as the next teen.
But then my entire life got turned on its head.
The years of relentless training afterward beat anything resembling laziness out of me. And I mean “beat” literally. At least some of the time.
Now, it was almost impossible for me to relax, to kick back and watch a movie, or scroll through my phone like a normal person. I had to be moving. I had to be doing something.
So these endless hours waiting on a lead that might never come were the surest form of torture to me.
Besides, when I was still for too long, my mind started to wander too. The last thing in the world I needed was for my mind to wander. That was because when I let it, it always made a beeline for thoughts it had no business thinking about.
Thoughts about him.
And how long it had been.
“Fuck,” I grumbled, slamming my head back on the rest, then doing it again for good measure. Like if I tried hard enough, I might be able to knock the thoughts loose. Maybe, if I was lucky, they would be gone once and for all.
It was a pipe dream. I knew that. But there was no way I could let myself stop trying.
Because there was nothing more un-freaking-natural than a demonslayer thinking about a demon. Well, in a way that didn’t involve something pointed getting driven into their gooey centers, anyway.
Okay. Strike that. There was one thing more unnatural than a demonslayer thinking about a demon.
Yeah, and that was a demonslayer fucking a demon.
A strange, strobe-like groan escaped me at that thought as I raised my cold hands to press to my heated cheeks as the images came flooding back. Hands sliding, gripping, slapping, twisting, pulling. A mouth and an intoxicatingly forked tongue doing all sorts of wicked things.
“Stop it,” I snapped at myself even as my body started to warm at the memories.
It wasn’t my fault, not really.
It wasn’t like I’d chosen to hurt any normal men I put my hands on. I’d tried a time or two again after that incident. I figured that maybe if I knew what my powers were that I might be able to control them.
That turned out to be really flawed thinking.
Because the problem was, I couldn’t do gentle anymore. My gentle could crush glass, could break bones.
I mean, you could only do so much damage to the opposite sex—without intending to do so—before you had to give up on being close to them.
Yes, sure, there were male demonslayers. In fact, there were a ton of them. They outnumbered the women fifty-to-one. The problem was, the bastards thought that because there were more men than women who got the call, that it said something about their superiority.
It didn’t matter how hot they were—and all of them were stupidly hot—, I couldn’t sleep with someone who looked down at me because I was a woman.
Which meant that I lived my life in a perpetual dry spell.
I mean, there were only so many times you could handle yourself before even that lost its edge. Sometimes you just needed to feel someone else, needed to really be able to lose yourself in the act.
I’d killed my most recent battery-operated device.
Alejandro.
He’d been a trooper.
He managed to last a couple months before he kicked the bucket.
It was a record.
See, they told us a lot about what gaining our powers would mean. Physically. Like how strong we were, how we were faster, how our reflexes were insane.
They conveniently left out that since all of our physical drives were stronger, that our sex drives were as well.
What did you get when you mixed a supercharged sex drive with a lack of sexual partners?