Page 6 of Zodiac Demons

With a mortifying nod, he stepped out of Threads of the Magi, while I remained at my sewing table, staring blankly at the wall.

The sewing machine was still running, and I pulled my hand back suddenly when I accidentally fed my fingers directly into the needle.

“Ow, fuck.” I watched a small bead of blood slide down my fingertip. I closed my eyes and sighed. That can’t be good luck.

And good luck, it very much wasn’t, when I stepped into the hallway on my first day at Graves Academy, only to meet a painfully familiar pair of opal green eyes.

“Well, well, well, look who finally crawled out of his hole,” Omari, my elder half-brother, said as he approached me, with an equally muscular and unpleasant henchman in tow. We looked strikingly alike in our coloring, yet strikingly different in our builds and our facial features. I had my mother’s softer and smaller frame, while he had our father’s imposing, sharp features, six extra inches of height, and shoulders damn near twice the width of mine. “And here I thought you were going to hide behind the wards forever.”

One more year, and I could have gone through with this and avoided him completely. Why couldn’t I have waited one more year?

“You know this scrawny thing?” His companion, who had an Alpha scent of sulfur, asked. Probably a gorilla shifter, if I went by his physical build. I was almost surprised that Omari, the full-blooded Basilisk, as he was always so proud to note, would be associating with a shifter. Though our father had technically sired many offspring in his long existence, there were few still surviving and only one who was of his currently of his completely untainted blood. He was the last of our kind until Father chose to take new mates and start another generation. So long as he bred another Mediterranean demon, like an Asp or an El Naddaha, his Basilisk blood would prevail. It was only if he mated with a completely unrelated species, like Zodiac shifters or vampires, that Hybrids like myself had unfortunately happened.

“He’s my dad’s bastard son. You’d never know it just looking at him, huh?” Omari said casually.

“I guess I can see it. He’s got your looks at least.” His ogre nodded along like a typical crony. “Though he smells a lot more like prey,” he added to my mortification. That was the absolute last fact of my life that I needed either of them to latch onto.

“Oh?” Omari lifted a brow, then looked between us. That expression alone was enough to make me take an unsteady step back. I’d never figured out how to not show fear around him, and I suspected I never would. “I forget your kind can all scent each other. His mom was a shifter too. He probably smells like prey because he’s an Ome—”

“I need to get to class,” I said, forcing myself not to stammer, but needing to interrupt that statement immediately. Though I suspected the damage was already done.

I attempted to side step the both of them and find refuge in Business 101, but I didn’t get far before Omari caught me by the shoulder.

“Now now, I haven’t seen you since I moved into the dorms. You can at least be polite and meet my new friends.” Omari shoved me into the lockers and pinned me there with little effort. I glared at him through my glasses, wishing my paralysis sight worked on him. Him being of a full blooded line, he needed no such enchanted lenses to choose how much of his gaze to use, but he unfortunately knew I had less control over my own. “Beau, this is Ceto, Ceto, Beau. Beau is the linebacker on the Graves football team.” He glanced between us with a smirk, then he leaned in to whisper in my ear at a volume only I could hear. “He’s an Alpha from the Sobek line, by the way. Grandmother told me to keep an eye out for someone for you, and wouldn’t you know it, he and his girl need an Omega. Might even make your blood worth something.” He pulled away then ruffled my hair with threat disguised as affection. The pitying grin he offered was telling, before he looked over his shoulder at Beau and invited him into the conversation. “What do you say, should we recruit him? Maybe he’d be a good ball boy.” He returned a sidelong glance at me. “Since you don’t know anyone yet, it’ll be a good way for you to make friends.”

My eyes widened. Though he phrased it as a friendly peace offering, the reality would be anything but. “N-no, I—”

“I’m not sure he could handle carrying everyone’s balls.” Beau guffawed, his breath as bad as his Alpha stench. He eyed me with a hunger that was more than simply polite or curious. “Wouldn’t mind seeing him try though.”

“He’s at least half snake, so I’m sure he’d be a lot more fun than your last recruit.” Omari said, and I refused to acknowledge the obvious implication.

“I might have to test that.” They continued to speak as though I wasn’t right there.

“I’ll have a lot on my plate this semester. I won’t have the time,” I snapped, trying to find some sense of resolve around him. I took their moment of mocking laughter to jerk free of Omari’s grip, and shuffle toward the refuge of class.

“We’ll see about that,” Omari called after me, punctuated by more laughter, and I shook my head and told myself to just try to ignore and avoid him, just as I had for most of my childhood. Though I still tensed when he added, “I’ll see you later, baby brother. So glad you’re here.”

Well, that went exactly how I’d expected. He always pretended it was for my benefit that he was so rough with me, but when I was always the one crying and he was the one laughing, it was unsurprisingly difficult to see it that way.

Our schooling would only overlap one year, and that was going to be entirely too much.

Present Day

A large stack of books sat beside me on the desk in the Graves Library, while a book about something I couldn’t currently recall lay open in front of me. I stared at nothing, no matter where I was facing. My gaze remained unfocused in the quiet, closed library at midnight on a Saturday during summer break. I was the only one who would come here at this hour. This was a safe place.

I forced my attention to the page in front of me, needing that image to wipe out the ones bombarding my mind. There were words on the page, but none of them translated through my mental barriers. My first day at Graves was a perfect storm that had only continued to build in imperfect ways.

“I fucked up.” I spoke aloud to no one and nothing, then I sank my face into my waiting hands. “I fucked up so fucking badly.”

I shoved my fingers through my hair, pushing the loose strands tight behind my head, as I sank my face down to the desk.

I didn’t know how to face mother or father. Mother would be able to sense my mate mark had been completed from scent alone. I didn’t know how to tell them I was going to do everything in my power to reject the mark of a god tier demon who happened to be another founding family’s daughter. That I’d accidentally stumbled on Graves royalty, and I fell hard for her while I thought I was fighting my destiny.

Because my real fear was that they would approve.

They’d encourage me to keep her, surely. I wouldn’t have to go to the matchmaker anymore. I’d be free of my arrangement, while I’d have fulfilled my duty as an heir of the Arya bloodline. This was an ultimate win and should have been a good thing.

I couldn’t take on a second mate mark like she somehow could, so they couldn’t force me to keep seeking a fertile mate. They would have to accept that I was now with the Beta daughter of the infertile Lamia, even if that also meant I was with the Alpha son of Hidalgo Emery.