“Come sit down, assassin. Let me show you your fantasies,” she said, putting more force and more power into her voice as she stood up, her body swaying to an unheard song. A siren’s song. My lips curved into a smile as I stepped forward, having known all along that this was how things would play out. She was not the first siren that I’d hunted.
She began to slip the red lace off her shoulders as I moved towards her, my footsteps still coated in mists. “Siren,” I whispered from only inches away from her, “Incubi aren’t affected by your song.” Mist flowed from my lips as I spoke and covered her face, making her vision blur and her voice muffled.
She blinked and turned to run, but she felt the bite of obsidian across her back before she’d even taken a step. Crimson dripped from the black edge of my blade, a sharp contrast, as she tried to scream, but the mists covering her face muffled all sound.
She fell to the white rug that covered the floor. Turning over, she tried to crawl backward, away from me, leaving a trail of blood. Her mouth opened as she tried to scream again, but the mists flowed over her face once more as I stepped forward.
“You never had a chance,” I said in a low voice as I pulled back my hood. I knew that my green eyes were slowly becoming grayer, becoming more and more cloudy.
She didn’t know what she was looking at. She didn’t understand why I was different than anyone she’d ever met. The slightly too large eyes, the curved tips of my ears, or my sharper features.
And she wouldn’t know why she felt a throbbing between her legs even as she lay in a pool of her own blood. I knelt beside the half-naked woman, and she stopped screaming as I released my own tendrils of seduction through the room. A siren dying under a seductive spell seemed an apt execution.
She smiled as her eyes glazed over with lust even as I raised the obsidian dagger over her chest. Her hips thrust upward, desperate for a pleasure that she would never find. And then she screamed loud enough that even the mists couldn’t muffle the sound as my dagger moved through skin and muscle and pierced her heart.
With a single twitch, one of the last half-sirens died, and I withdrew the blade from her body, wiping the crimson on her lingerie and leaving the blade a gleaming black again.
A knock sounded at the door, and I stood up, giving the half-siren one last look as I dropped the daggers, letting them turn back to mist and appearing in their hartskin sheathes at my waist. Turning to the window, I exhaled, and mists flowed from my breath through the room, coalescing into a tunnel. The window, another in-between, turned insubstantial.
I ran through the tunnel, and as I reached the window, I leaped. The black cloak on my back fluttered in the air two hundred feet above the ground as I fell towards the building across the street.
I looked down at it as it raced upward to meet me, and I braced myself exhaling once more. As my boots touch the stone of the roof, the stone softened under me and absorbed my fall. When I stepped forward, I glanced back and saw only the barest of a footprint embedded in the stone.
I reached out one hand and touched a shadow. As I’d known, a warren ran here. A quick glance toward the window almost fifty feet above me showed a man’s face. A human face. A face that didn’t matter to a creature like myself.
Then I slid through the shadow into another world. I could go home now. Home to solitude. Home to hunger. Home to nothingness.
Chapter 1
Rose
Moonlight made silver halos in the frosty air around the lampposts on campus. The bags of books were heavy as I trudged back to the sorority house. Four days until everyone came back from winter break. The peace and quiet would end.
My sorority sisters felt bad that I didn’t have a home to go back to for Christmas. I was supposed to be sad and depressed during the holidays because my parents were dead. What was the point? I’d accepted that I was alone in the world long ago.
My feet moved slowly down the campus streets that seemed like a ghost town. Places that were filled with laughter and antics a month ago were now silent. The lights from classrooms were black. Everything that normally glowed with life and light seemed dead.
And I reveled in it.
The silence. The darkness. The solitude.
I’d grown up in a world like this. No one had been loud while I was climbing trees in the forest as a child. No one had shouted at me for no reason when I was learning to tie a fishing line. No one told me that I needed a boyfriend when I was learning to steer a sailboat.
A biting wind blew from the North, carrying snow from the tops of buildings through the air. The night was clear, and the moon was bright tonight. Full without a hint of clouds to cover its brilliance.
I let my mind wander and imagined being back in those woods. Instead of pavement, I felt the crunch of leaves on a game trail. Instead of car noises, I heard the swooshing of wings as a nighthawk took off.
Maybe I did miss those days, but it wasn’t because of my parents. It wasn’t because of Christmas. It was because I’d felt at home there. This city, any city, just never felt like home. No matter how many people I knew. No matter how many parties or events I went to. Not even when I’d joined a “sisterhood”.
I came to the street that separated the campus from the neighbors that
