The answer rose before I could smother it.
“I need your help,” I blurted, fingers tightening on the hem of my slip. “Not with power or revenge or any of that. I…”.
“Help you?” he cut me off from my floundering, amusement curling around the words. “What would a mortal dressed like that possibly need help with?”
My cheeks burned. The outfit had been part of the ritual instructions—loosely interpreted, yes, but still—he didn’t have to say it like that.
His gaze dragged over me, slow and deliberate. I felt it like touch, every inch of exposed skin suddenly too aware of itself.
“I want a taste of your… pleasure,” I said quietly.
“Aye,” he said, something darkly delighted entering his tone. “I knowexactlywhat you think you need.”
He drew in a measured breath, unhurried, as if he was savoring something only he could sense. The sigils surrounding me pulsed faintly with my heartbeat.
“I can smell it on you,” he murmured. “I can smell your want. Your sweet desperate cunt. You’re practically hummin’ with need.”
My hands curled into fists at my sides. He wasn’t wrong, and that was the worst part. The humiliation burned hotter than the candles.
“You are a very needy little mortal,” he went on, clearly enjoying himself. “So starved you turned to things you barely understand and dragged me across the veil. Do you understand the kind of power I wield?”
I swallowed, forcing myself to glance at the book.
“I read—about you,” I managed. “I know what you can do.”
“Oh really?” he purred. “That little book tells you all you need to know about me? About what I can do to you?”
He laughed, big and dramatic, like an actor playing on an invisible balcony. The sound rolled through the hall, rattling something loose high above. He leaned closer, and the world seemed to tighten around the space between us.
“I could destroy you,” he whispered, the bravado thinning just enough to feel dangerous. “Ruin you so thoroughly you’d forget your own name. Take every last bit of that restless need and wring it out of you until you can’t even stand. Fill every one of your holes until there’s nothing left in you that can endure another second.”
His smile went sharp.
“And when I am sated,” he said, “you’ll be nothing but a trembling little cum-drenched rag of a?—”
He broke off mid-sentence.
His gaze dropped to the floor around me, following the patterns of chalk encircling me. His eyes tracked past my knees, past the main ring, and finally to the smaller circle behind me by the hearth.
I watched the shift happen, the amusement in his eyes sharpening into something wary as he followed one branching line, then another.
The other sigil. Myotherfantasy made flesh.
“Wait,” he murmured, curiosity cutting clean through the smugness. “What did you do here? Another summoning?”
A low, incredulous laugh slipped out of him as he straightened, eyes flicking from my face back to the tangle of symbols.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t be enough?” he drawled. “Or were you hoping to be taken apart by two of us at once? One creature not nearly enough to satisfy all those filthy little fantasies in your head.”
His mouth curved, wicked and slow. “Greedy, aren’t you?”
He leaned in, the air between us tightening, that velvet Irish lilt dipping lower. “Here’s the problem, little summoner,” he murmured. “You don’t call a being like me and then start taking applications for a second monster. I don’t share well.” His eyes flared, ownership written plainly there. “When you drag me across the veil for your pleasure, you don’t need anyone else. This is a mistake I should punish you for.”
The candles around the sigil flickered as if in answer. He took a step closer, the soft scrape of his boot suddenly much too loud in the quiet hall. For a moment, he only stared, following the curves of chalk wrapped around my body, the way one secondary mark intersected and twisted through the primary circle.
He crouched behind me to read and examine my summoning sigils further. “This isn’t right.” His tone sharpened. “You have this symbol backwards.”
“No,” I said, quick and cold. “I don’t.”