Page 48 of Zodiac Demons

I’m so fucked.

Chapter 22

Summer break was supposed to be relaxing and a time to collect myself, yet I was the most high strung I’d ever been, the most stressed, and the most lost. I was in a great relationship. I had access to two people who I genuinely loved, even if none of us had ever said that out loud, and on paper, I had everything I could ever ask for.

But off paper, I was laying on Adrian’s couch, staring at the ceiling, wondering where my life took a wrong turn.

“So what do you mean you couldn’t shift? At all? Or just by your trigger?” Adrian asked as he settled into his arm chair.

“By trigger. I could still call on my Leo or extend my vampire’s fangs, but there wasn’t a hint of the Cancer anywhere in my body. I felt the moment it clicked and was supposed to trigger, but nothing happened. Like it was completely gone.” I was parsing out my own thoughts as I spoke, finding a still muddled sense of clarity as I put those words into the world.

“And this was after you…”

“After I fucked Lila on the dance floor at the festival, yes. Our girl has kinks. What can I say?” I stated bluntly, and his eye twitched. I wasn’t sure if his objection was fucking her in public or calling her ‘our’ girl, but there was no moment too serious to miss an opportunity to get under his skin. “She was fully shifted into her zodiac moon form at the time, but I wasn’t. Then the moment there was a situation where I should have been triggered—”

“A ‘situation?’” He raised a brow, and I raised one back.

“Yes, a situation. The need to protect is not a hard trigger to hit with that woman.” I waved him off before I continued. “I had nothing. No exoskeleton, no pincers, no nothing. The only shift available to me was my furry paws.” I demonstrated by shifting my lion’s paw and clawing his couch cushion beside me, accidentally snagging the fabric in the process.

“You’re replacing that.” He sighed.

“Obviously.”

“So then, what’s your problem exactly? We both have experienced the way we shift back after being with her under the moon, and I can say I’ve shifted afterwards to use my wings and noticed the lack of zodiac characteristics tainting my incubus form. It’s not that surprising to me that you can cancel the triggered shift prematurely by finishing in her without being shifted.” He broke it all down in the professorly way he often broke things down, and it almost made me feel like he had a point, and I was overreacting.

In hindsight, I’d never bothered to try to shift post-fucking-Lila on the full moon, as my Leo was the less useful of my bloodlines in a crisis. It was great if I was pent up with aggression and wanted to tear something apart and play with its entrails like a fleshy ball of string—which admittedly sounded good right now—but my vampire’s speed and strength covered everything I needed on a regular day-to-day basis.

Still, that didn’t mean I would be okay if I lost my lion completely. My vampire could only bite and drain people. My lion could physically eat them. I liked both of my gifts.

“My problem is we don’t actually know why we revert back. I’ve never shifted after sex on a full moon night before, but how do you know you can shift into that form again?” I bit my lip for a moment before I asked the real question that I wanted to ask. “Do you still have your Capricorn?” This was the main reason I contacted him, of all people. Aside the fact that he was the only other Alpha involved, he had also already fucked her on his birth month. Not getting to have birthday sex wasn’t preferable, but even I had fucking priorities.

My birthday only coincided with the full moon approximately once every nineteen years, so if that was all I had to do to avoid losing my Leo forever, I’d survive. I wouldn’t be happy about it, but I wasn’t a completely undisciplined swine.

Besides—she had multiple mates now. Watching her get fucked while getting myself off was always an option on those unfortunate months.

Like this one.

Sigh.

Adrian scrunched his nose, taken aback by the question. “Do I still have my Capricorn?” He repeated, because the thought hadn’t occurred to him. Similar to my Leo, his Zodiac side wasn’t one that he called on often. The wings of the incubus were far more useful than the hooves of a goat, and the horns could be pulled from either side. “I am the Capricorn. How could I not?” His words sounded hollow but unnerved at the same time.

“Then show me.”

I waited, as he furrowed his brow, and just when I was starting to think he might have lost his birth sign and couldn’t shift, he begrudgingly got up and started undoing the buttons on his shirt.

Right, no point in destroying perfectly boring clothes.

The only flaw of being a hybrid was that we couldn’t shift with our clothing like the full breeds could, who, conversely, could mask and stretch any inanimate thing that was touching their body under transformation.

I glanced away as he undressed and waited patiently.

Then after what felt like forever, I glanced back to see him fully shifted into the Capricorn, hooves and goat tail and all, calling on none of his incubus and all of his zodiac goat. He was almost cute. I’d like him better if he spent more time being fluffy and tolerable.

I nodded, then looked away again as he shifted back and redressed.

“So yes, I still have my Capricorn,” he confirmed, as he zipped up his pants and re-buckled his belt.

“I wonder if that’s all you have though.” That was a relief, at the very least. But then Ceto still had his Gemini, so maybe I was being paranoid. It would make sense that we couldn’t lose our birth months, but there was still something off about the way my body had reacted. Would I regain the Cancer on July’s full moon next year? Or had that been neutralized for good? I had no way of knowing, and the only way to find out would be time.