Page 41 of Soul Redeemed

Somehow Calix envisioned the stage as something more dramatic. He’d never dreamed that he’d be fine one moment and desperately clinging to restraint the next.

Starvation was funny sometimes.

At the ding of the elevator, the doors opened onto the office wing of the club, and Calix led the three females down the hall. A strange sensation moved through him, something dark and carnal. He closed his eyes, and behind his lids, more fantasies played out like a bad movie.

Blood. Screams. Lifeless eyes staring back at him.

His body shook as he reached his office, and Calix gripped the doorframe for support. The small measure of control he’d clung to had begun to thin, on the verge of snapping away.

“Are you okay, babe?” The blonde set a hand on his arm, and against all of his instincts roaring inside his head to throw her against the wall and fuck the life right out of her, he clenched his teeth.

“Get. Out of here.”

“But you said—”

“Now! You want to die tonight? Get the fuck out!” Heat blazed across his skin as his incubus itched to break free, to take its natural form and hunt for food. Branches of red danced across his skin, while the demon inside of him pushed through his flesh. “Go!”

All three girls backed away and twisted on a dead run toward the elevators.

His senses piqued. A cold bite of excitement struck his muscles like a snake pumping wicked venom through his veins.

The chase.

It enticed him.

Calix’s nails dug into the wall as he struggled to hold on, to keep from going after the girls.

The urge took over.

He pounded down the corridor, amused by their screams that echoed throughout the hallway. How he couldn’t wait to hear them scream beneath him.

The blonde jabbed a finger against the elevator button. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!”

“Hurry! Nadia, hurry!” The brunette screamed.

When the elevator opened, all three girls piled in.

Calix pushed speed from his legs, watching the light dim as the doors closed.

He ran faster.

Determined to catch them, he dove headfirst as the doors made their final click, and the cold slam at the top of his head zinged down into his spine and nose, filling his sinuses with the warm tingle of pain.

He fell back onto the floor, and as he stared up at the rafters in the ceiling, they blurred and sharpened, then blurred completely out of focus again.

22

Zayne could handle the shakes—the agony in his gut that begged him to shoot up another dose of Abyzz. He’d been through withdrawals before. Many times. Usually only took the first buzz to feed that relentless monster before he was good again.

Watching a physical version of Shey slowly fade with his high, though, was something Zayne wouldn’t be able to take.

Digging the heels of his hands into his eyeballs, he sent up a prayer that she’d be gone when he unshielded his eyes. That whatever fantasy he’d had, however real it may have felt, was nothing but illusion. Like every other time he’d dreamed of Shey and she’d disappeared soon after.

The moment his hands fell away, though, his stomach sank.

In silence, she watched him from the passenger seat, head tipped with the kind of innocent curiosity that made him nervous. The kind that told him she had no idea that she wasn’t supposed to be there.

She wasn’t. Shey was gone. He’d had to come to terms with that a long time ago.