The air thickened, heavy with strange, unearthly electricity. Scarface blinked, his mouth going slack. Dreadlocks cupped his nose as if he smelled something sweet and wrong. Mohawk licked his lips, rising from the ground. Ash could hear their hearts pounding, their gasps hitching. He sensed the fear rising, sour and intimate. And underneath it… a burning.
“What the fuck…?” Mohawk whispered, sweat beading along his temple.
Ash drifted closer, so close that their breaths mingled. His gaze dropped. The man’s erection strained against his jeans,involuntary, shameful. He leaned in, lips almost brushing the shell of Mohawk’s ear. “Run.”
They bolted like kicked dogs, scrambling and cursing down the alley’s throat, slipping on trash and cracked pavement, until they vanished into the dark. Ash stood still for a moment, listening. The only sound left was the soft patter of rats returning to their feasts.
He turned. The man he’d been with was already stumbling down the block, tugging his coat closed without glancing back. “Coward,” Ash murmured, the word bitter on his tongue.
He reached into his jacket for the cigarettes, lit one with hands that didn’t shake, and leaned against the brick wall. The first drag scratched its way down his gullet, nails dragged over velvet. His jacket hung open, the moment gone. The night’s teeth gnawed at his bare skin. But the ache remained.
He exhaled, watching the smoke curl into the starless sky.This was it, wasn’t it?Night after night. Bodies. Mouths. Cocks. Always chasing the high, the hunger that never stayed fed. Stripping for the crowd, shaking his ass in the spotlight, being nothing more than a piece of meat, and loving it. Or pretending to. Maybe there was no difference anymore.
He stared at the glowing ember of his cigarette. Heneededit. Not just the sex. Thecraving. The pull. The surrender in another’s eyes when they gave themselves over. That moment of power, of feeding—not just on flesh, but on what lived beneath. That fleeting instant when someone lets you see their soul and call it rapture.
People talk about love like it’s salvation, but no one ever says how much of it is just two wounds pressed together, hoping not to bleed out alone. He had learned that early, younger than he should’ve. That the world didn’t hand out kindness for free. That beauty came with a price tag. That, sometimes, the only way tosurvive being wanted was to turn it into a performance; make it a mask, a mirror, a weapon.
Maybe that’s what he was. A need people couldn’t name. An appetite in the shape of a man. Whatever it may be, he didn’t care anymore. He only knew that if he stopped moving, he might curl up and crumble.
Flicking the ash to the ground, he tightened his belt and turned toward the club. He’d find someone else. Easily.Tooeasily.
But then—
A scream. High, raw, jagged as a torn throat. It ripped through the night, a shriek of wet terror, glass tearing silk.
Ash dropped the cigarette. He didn’t think. He ran. Not away.Toward.
The corridors stretched and shifted around him: rusted fire escapes, flickering neon signs, graffiti scrawled in dead tongues, spells no one still remembered. He moved with the instinct of a creature born in shadow, every shortcut etched into muscle memory. He grew up in these grimy, rain-soaked backstreets; he could navigate them with his eyes closed. But the scream had stopped. What remained was silence. Deep. Haunting.
He rounded the corner—and stopped.
A man lay in the dead-end passageway, naked and blood-slicked, arms flung wide, legs drawn together, a crucifix perverted into a pagan offering. His face was…gone. Not cut. Taken.
Ash staggered closer, his feet carrying him forward before his mind caught up. He dropped to his knees. “God…”
His breath caught. Heknewthis man. Knew that ankh tattoo on his shoulder. Recognition slammed into him, a hammer to the bare chest. “J-Jimmy?”
An ex-lover. A boy with a soft mouth and a gentle touch he took to bed once—no, twice; a rarity. James was a regular atthe club, handsome and well-liked. Now a ruin, unrecognizable, obscene. A broken toy of a cruel demon.
Ash reached out, touched his arm, fingers smearing crimson across the frigid skin. No pulse. James was dead. He stayed kneeling, frozen, the horror blooming through his body like a flower opening its rot to the stars. The sound of sirens drifted past him, distant and crisp as lightning. Some remote part of his mind told him he should move, get up and leave, but he didn’t. Couldn’t, even as the howling grew louder, the last trumpets of doom closing in.
Because something on the wall caught his eye: a symbol scrawled on the brick above the body, pulsing like a living wound. It called to him across space and time, Circe’s song impossible to resist. Ash stood up without thought, fingers lifting to trace the edge of the mark. The blood smeared across his palm, warm and slick, and for a heartbeat the glyph seemed to hum against his skin, a frequency felt rather than heard. Images flashed through his mind, dark, ancient, hideous, scenes from eons long faded from human memory. He jerked back, dizzy, his knees buckling under him.
Suddenly, the world lit up. Red and blue flares streaked across the alley walls. Doors slammed. Shouts came. The thunder in heavens above, the thunder of boots below.
“Freeze! Hands where we can see them!”
Ash blinked. The world snapped back into place, a rubber band stretched too far. He looked up at the cops etched against the blinding lights. A dozen barrels glinted, fangs catching the blaze, every one of them trained on his chest. He stood slowly, raising his bloodied palms in surrender.
“Well,” he muttered. “Fuck.”
And then the night began to cry.
Chapter Two
(1:47 a.m.)
Rick didn’t like being told what to do. Least of all by Jack Mallory. And sure as hell not at two in the morning on a goddamn Saturday. It wasn’t just a matter of pride, though he had that in spades—it was the nature of the beast: older, wilder, harder to ignore. Orders prickled at his skin the way wet ropes did, constricting, maddening. The tighter they pulled, the more he wanted to tear free.
