Chapter 1

“Um,” Justin said. “Oops?”

He and Kris were both looking at the remains of their bed, which smoldered pointedly back at them. The air tasted like smoke, definitely no longer like sex and sweetness and sweat. The large scorch-mark in the center suggested that they’d need a new mattress, and probably a whole new bed, in the very near future.

Kris ran a hand through his hair, did not sigh out loud—he’d liked that bed; he also loved his husband—and said, “Are you all right?” Justin took priority over the furniture, no matter the circumstances. The furniture knew this and did not mind.

“Honestly? I don’t know.” Justin, still naked and shaken, sat down gingerly on an unburnt corner of mattress. His hair, his faint horns, even his teeth, remained wreathed in flame, though some of it’d dwindled. He looked like the half-demon he was, even more than usual: fire and sex and magic and sensuality. “I don’t generally…”

“You don’t lose control.” Kris, also naked and unscathed because Justin had magically knocked him across the room just in time, sat down beside him. Held out a hand. His hip ached from landing on the floor and also getting old, but he could deal with that. “I know you don’t. Was it just the timing? The whole breakthrough power problem?”

“Maybe?” Justin put his answering hand into Kris’s, unhappily; his claws hadn’t quite faded into fingernails. His eyes were more crimson than their ordinary rich russet-brown; Kris wondered briefly if Justin couldn’tturn it all off, not completely, right this second.

He held Justin’s hand. He said, “Look, it’s a compliment, yeah? I’m just that good in bed, right, making you feel so good you spontaneously combust…”

Justin laughed, honest if hollow. “You are. I think…actually I think that was part of it? You, and me…we always do have, um, explosive sex. You always say you’re better at projective empathy, but you pick things up, too…you can’t not, when it’s that close and that strong, and I’m, well, me, so…”

“Yeah, but you’re mysex demon. Seduction. All that.” He drummed fingers over Justin’s. “Not usually a problem. More like, y’know, the best ever. Every time, love.”

“Yes.” Justin made a face, abruptly more human: unearthly sharpnesses ebbed away from teeth, tiny horns, cheekbones, fingernails. His hair stayed scarlet and cinnamon. “I think you’re right. About the best sex ever—I do love having sex with you—and also about the timing. They said it’d be hard, for a few weeks…unpredictable, me trying to push it all back down, the power not wanting to be pushed, you know, you were there…you heard them…”

“Hmm,” Kris said, not committing to an answer just yet. He had complicated feelings about Justin’s decision regarding demonic inheritance. Justin, in fact, had looked at the offer—to remain in the otherworld, to stand beside a lake of fire, to take up his mother’s heritage and power—and had chosen to stay half human. Had chosen to come home, to this plane of existence, full of New York City pizza and bagels and bookshops and rock music.

Justin loved all those things, he knew.

Justin had been told, then, that the power would both flare and fade. More, at first: that breakthrough problem. The more he’d used it, here in this world, the more he’d embraced it, the stronger he’d become: strong enough to make it all spill over, to crash through and drown his usual illusions and mostly-human disguises. It’d reached the point of being dangerous: if he opened otherworld portals without meaning to, if he could conjure up objects or people simply by thinking of them, casually rearranging the world on a whim, in a daydream, by accident.

If he deliberately made himself use it less, it’d never disappear but would weaken, like most unused abilities; he’d been trying. But sometimes he couldn’t help it. And sometimes the magic got a bit angry about not being used.

Kris, who loved Justin, had never wanted him to be less than himself. Leather jackets and love of family. Adoration of Filipino desserts—Justin had learned to cook from his stepmother, in that cheerful scholarly ramble of metaphysical physics projects and academic history journals and unquestioned affection that collectively made up the Moore-Bautista family home in upstate New York, and he could do amazing things with deep-fried bananas and fire-magic. Glitter-painted fingernails—when they weren’t stretching out into claws, though once or twice he’d tried painting those too. Editorial book projects and sometimes corsets and figure-hugging skirts and luscious high heels.

Magic laced Justin’s bones, Justin’s soul. They couldn’t pretend it didn’t.

Kris didn’t want to. Justin was his favorite person, his husband, and even before that had been a fucking delight to know and to love. The light of his life, in fact. The light he’d once forgotten how to recognize. Until Justin Moore had taken his hand and shaken his weary old rock-star heart back into beating faster.