Chapter 16

Chapter 16

I came back to consciousness like I was being ripped from a dream, and I found myself, once again, inside Lila, on top of her, and on top of…

My own roof.

By the fucking devil.

It was slow that memories of the night came back to me. I was practically in a trance when that full moon hit—when her perfect apple pie pheromones overwhelmed the entire restaurant. The moment she said yes, giving me permission she shouldn't be giving anyone—least of all in a public place—my trigger had been pulled to the stop, and I couldn't have held back if I tried.

But that was only half the problem.

I flew here.

Worse, my insatiable Incubus brain couldn't even wait to get here before I needed to bury myself inside her. If I'd finished mid-air, with the way her body once again completely negated and cancelled out my transformation for the night, I wouldn't have been able to orient myself fast enough to save us from falling to our deaths.

This was dangerous and reckless, and I was supposed to be the rational and reasonable one. What the fuck was I thinking taking her out tonight? I told myself I was protecting her from Marcus, but he was safer than I could ever be. The lies I'd told myself to justify being around this girl were abhorrent and completely unlike me. I hated who I'd become in her presence, and I was driving myself mad trying to wrangle back those constant urges. It was as though I wasn't in charge of my own mind or soul anymore .

Using my sane mind, body, and brain that were no longer influenced by the moon, I forced a partial shift, sprouting my large, bat-like wings from my shoulder blades.

They were clear of the usual scales that signified the constellation of Pisces was in full power. Right now, they were ordinary, soft maroon, more akin to my most natural incubus form than the blue fish scales I expected this time of year.

Curious.

Was she blocking more than just the moon with her power?

How unusual that a Beta, of all classes, would be able to manipulate my body and magic. The old stories and all known lore, over thousands upon thousands of years, had always painted Betas as a weak, ineffective, and irrelevant class of drones, without any influence on anything around them. And yet… Lila had power beyond anything I knew or understood. Hybrid species were new, yes, but something so hard coded in our DNA as A/B/O designations weren't black box technology with unknown outcomes. At the very least, we knew what happened under a full moon for any species crossed with a shifter, regardless of what their other half might be.

My Incubus blood gave me abilities and weaknesses that Marcus' vampire blood didn't have, but our shifter half reacted the same in spite of the nuances.

But I suppose none of us actually knew what her other half was. If she was forced into transformation under lunar exposure without a trigger, then she was undoubtedly half Beta, but I couldn't pinpoint these other odd characteristics. Especially since they didn't manifest in her body on normal days. I could always read emotions, and Marcus always needed blood, while Lila was, for all intents and purposes, human in between the full moons.

Maybe she just didn't understand the differences between normal and monster behaviors well enough to recognize whatever her gifts might be. It's impossible to know you're not like everyone else if no one has ever established a different normal to you.

The only respite I could find in this was that my catastrophically bad judgment meant she couldn't keep denying her own magic anymore. If this was the motivation it took to get her asking questions of her so called "human" parents, then this was worth whatever trauma and damage I'd caused.

That's what I had to tell myself, because I felt more like a monster now than I ever had in my first thirty-four years of life.

I lifted her gingerly, then I used my wings to loft gently to my front porch. I willed them away to enter my doorway, only to find my door was locked.

Because I'd planned to be out for a while and locked it like any sensible person, which would have been no big deal if not for the fact that my wallet and keys were back at the restaurant, along with my car and the clothing I'd ruined upon transformation.

With a heavy sigh, I partial shifted my wings again, and I brought her around to my backyard, where her nakedness would at least be hidden from the neighbors. I situated her comfortably on my patio furniture, then covered her with a blanket I kept in a bin for chilled winter nights. Once I'd assured she was resting soundly, I shifted fully into the Incubus, then launched into the air to go fix the rest of my mistakes.

Some days I really wished I could have been born as literally anything else. I could have been a rabbit shifter or a water fae, but no . I had to be the son of a predatory lust demon and a magic system that revolves around love and compatibility. How somewhere in my fucked soul had decided that was the perfect combination to go into a teaching profession, I'd never know. Though it had never been a problem until now.

Marcus is going to have a field day when he finds out about this.