Her Soul to Take (Souls Trilogy #1)(11)

“Oh my God, you guys, don’t be so disgusting!” said Inaya, shoving Jeremiah’s phone away as he leaned forward to show me. “Too soon, okay, way too soon. The poor kid is barely in the ground.”

Jeremiah sat back, staring at his phone in such a way that my morbid curiosity only increased. “He must’ve really pissed someone off,” he muttered. “Right in the middle of the hall.”

I dared another glance back. Right there in that unassuming old building, someone’s life had come to its brutal end. Why? What could spur such a rage to stab a person nine times?

I frowned. The security guard, Leon, was still standing at the foot of the building’s steps, and I noticed the students walking past gave him a wide berth. Even from all the way across the quad, as I pushed my glasses up my nose, I could have sworn he was looking at me. At that distance, his pale green eyes caught the light peeking through the clouds and flashed, like gold leaf caught in the sun.

In French, there’s a phrase for the random urge to jump from high places, the irrational desire to swerve into traffic despite imminent destruction: l'appel du vide, the call of the void. Those sudden feral impulses tend to be shoved away immediately, but humans still experience them. What if you jumped? What if you touched the fire? What if? What if?

When I looked at him, staring at me, the void called.

What if?

“Oh, shit. I gotta get to class.” Inaya jumped up, staring at the time on her phone. She gave me a quick hug, and Trent helped her gather her things before he took her hand to walk her to class. “I’ll see you guys later! Rae, text me, we gotta do something fun soon.”

“Investigation!” I called after her. “We need to go somewhere haunted; I need content!”

“Rae, what’s your number?” Victoria pulled out her phone, the sparkling blue case sporting a dangling silver crown charm. “That way I can give you a heads-up if there’s anything fun going on.” She gave me a sweet smile. “I know it can be intimidating making new friends.”

I gave her my number, glad to see her so willing to be friendly. Out of the corner of my eye as I rattled off my digits, I noticed Jeremiah typing at the same time on his phone. I could have been wrong, but it seemed like he took my number too.

When I turned to head for my next class, my eyes swept along the sidewalk in front of Calgary Hall, but this time, Leon was gone.





There was only so long I could jack off in that vile concrete room before I began to feel more than a little feral. Demons have needs: the drive to hunt pleasure, to seek stimulation, is as necessary as food and water to a human. So as much as I hated the man, when Kent told me I was to guard the university campus when the semester started, I could have kissed his goddamn boots.

Could have. I didn’t. But it had been far too many years since I’d felt so free.

Kent’s sacrifice hadn’t just stirred his God. It had awakened the Eld, the ancient beasts of the forest who were sustained only by blood, magic, and pain. The God’s awakening was making them restless, and soon enough they would begin to creep from the darkest depths of the forest to hunt.

Kent didn’t need panic sweeping through Abelaum. It was my duty to keep the Eld away from the students, away from town. I was to dispose of the beasts when I found them, which wasn’t an easy task, but it wasn’t as if I could refuse Kent’s orders. I’d gladly kill any Eld I laid eyes on if it meant having their hunting grounds for myself.

The Eld would consume the flesh of humans if they could, but I would consume them in another way. Through pleasure, pain, and blood. Corruption. Temptation. Utterly perverse intoxication. Humans were the most pitifully willing prey. Too many of them lived such constrained lives, binding themselves to moralities that only served to limit their enjoyment of their short mortal existence.

Offer one an easy path to perversion, tempt them with pleasure’s darkest desires, and they made for easy prey. A feast of curious college students had been put before me, and I intended to eat well.

They were all wary, at first. Primal instinct told them what their eyes did not: I was dangerous. A predator. They kept their distance from me even when they couldn’t keep their eyes from roaming over me. It meant that the steps up to Calgary Hall’s closed doors, where I had set up my primary post to watch everyone milling across the quad, remained vacant.

Until she skipped up the steps without a care in the world, wide-eyed, vibrating with energy, smelling of sage and mint and warm skin.

She didn’t even glance in my direction, as if whatever primal instinct that drove her fellow students was utterly vacant from her, the feral guardian for self-preservation shrugging its shoulders and letting the little thing run wild. She was little — in stature but not in energy. She had a large camera held close beneath her chin, as if she was ready to lift it to her eye at any moment. Her black denim jacket looked too large, as did the leather boots on her feet and the stuffed book bag she carried. She wasn’t tall enough to reach my shoulder, but beneath her oversized jacket I spotted the pleasing curve of her breasts, her hips, thighs that begged to be gripped and left bruised.

Heat flushed through me. If I wasn’t careful, if I let myself give in too quickly to that need to hunt, to pursue, to tempt, my human disguise would slip and these poor mortals wouldn’t just be giving me space — they’d be running, screaming.