Tempted by Demons: A Reverse Harem Paranormal (Brides of the Sinistral Realms) Read online

  Tempted by Demons

  Brides of the Sinistral Realms

  Lidiya Foxglove

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  26. “Priestess Awakened” Sample

  More Romantic Fantasy from Lidiya!

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Edie

  My housemates both perked up as I dumped the grocery bags on the kitchen counter and I knew they’d been watching my Instagram.

  Dakota grabbed one of my bags and started pawing through the Pocky.

  “That’s for tomorrow!” I snapped before she could tear open the package and consume my chocolate-dipped goodness. “Plus, I’m so tired. My boss was freaking out today. I need a lavender bath.”

  “Aw. I’m sorry. We can get pizza tonight,” Dakota said.

  I was already looking at my phone to see if my followers were excited for the “I try all the Pocky flavors” vlog I had promised. The selfie I took of myself in the candy aisle of H Mart already had 126 likes since I posted, which was good for me, but I still felt like it was behind some of the other foodie girls I followed. Ugh, what would it take to be popular?

  “Sounds good,” I said. “You know what I like.”

  “Do I?” Dakota pulled out a menu. “Sausage, broccoli…?” She looked at me blankly. “I remember the broccoli part.”

  “Plus red pepper and olives. Make sure it’s from Papa Antonio’s.” Mentally, I had decided this was the most photogenic pizza around.

  “I just want meat lovers and I don’t care,” Nicole said.

  “I’m so with you, girl.” Dakota picked up the phone. “Edie gets her own pizza.”

  Thank goodness they were taking care of it because I still had so much work to do.

  I turned on the hot water and dumped in a generous dollop of lavender bubble bath, sinking back into the water as I browsed my phone. First, I checked on all my work stuff. As the social media manager for a nonprofit, I got to spend a lot of the day guilt tripping people into how much migrating bird populations needed help. When I first took the job I sometimes woke up in the middle of the night freaking out about vanishing nesting grounds and trash in the water and invasive species, but I had read that people were less likely to solve problems if they felt hopeless, so I tried to balance a dire tone with a lot of cute pictures and good news.

  I had some weird nightmares though. There was a recurring one where I had a pet bird in a shoebox and I was trying to protect it from being crushed.

  I liked the job, though. I felt like I was doing something good for the world. Little high school Edie would have been proud. I was always the kid who agreed to things too easily, and worried about other people too much.

  I’d tried to get better about it for my own sanity, because my boss was draining the life out of me. She had some stuff going on at home, I think, but she took it out on me with regular freak outs. If we didn’t get enough donors for saving the birds it wasn’t just like “a bad day for numbers”, it was like I was personally murdering her two year old daughter twenty years in the future by ensuring the destruction of the entire planet.

  She had sent me one of her annoying strings of text messages:

  I’m so sorry for dumping all that on you today.

  Thanks for listening. I appreciate that you’re such a positive person.

  When you get in tomorrow, make sure you take care of that pile of paperwork. I couldn’t get to it. You’re the best. Sometime we need a Ladies Night, right?

  I felt like Diane was doing her best to suck all my positive energy like a vampire, or that she was vaguely annoyed that I actually enjoyed my life. Ladies Night? Oh, lord. I wasn’t even going to respond to that one.

  Then I checked on the comments for my latest video.

  Fuck.

  Not the troll again. I’d been blogging, vlogging, Insta-ing, tweeting, and every other internet verb you can think of since I first began my food blog in college. It started when I was homesick for the real food my mom made, while all my classmates were content to live on ramen and microwaving scary combinations of things they called “nachos”. I was always trying to think of tasty stuff I could make in ten minutes, and with the naiveté of an overachieving girl from small town Ohio, I thought I was the first person to have ever thought of making food quickly and posting it on the internet, so I started blogging about it. I soon found myself with a following, probably more because I was like an adorable little baby who didn’t know anything about life and I was so excited and I took a lot of pictures of me eating food, posing Harry Potter action figures around the food, and the cat who lived outside the market around the corner. Everything the internet liked.

  I was also used to trolls. If you’re a woman on the internet, you’re definitely used to trolls. They mainly said sexual things or made random political comments that had nothing to do with anything or they just trashed me in vague ways. I would delete, block, ignore, or whatever the appropriate response was, and move on. But this guy was really persistent and he had been popping up everywhere. He seemed pretty familiar with my work over time, and he was always belittling my appearance or things I liked. He had even changed screen names a few times.

  These were the charming comments that greeted me for my video “Whip Up This Coconut Mango Rice Bowl in Ten Minutes”:

  lol at white girl making worst thai food ever. your home cookin type recipes used to be good but now they sooooo bad.

  btw do u have adam lambert on in background? he ruinedd queen. you have the worst taste in music i’ve ever seen

  i think u are more about how u look on cam. you should use more whitening stripes or stay off camera

  also newsflash but you’re too old for that hairstyle

  He (or maybe ‘SwordGuru5’ was a she, who knows) had been doing this to me for the past two weeks and I had been trying to stick with my “don’t feed the trolls” policy.

  But this one was getting to me.

  I rubbed a finger on my teeth. Maybe my teeth did look bad. I’d been drinking more tea and coffee lately. I hadn’t really thought about it. God, I should pay more attention to these things. And I really hoped the recipe didn’t come across as cultural appropriation. I hadn’t called it “Thai” in the title, but it was possible that in the video I might have slipped and referred to it as a Thai dish. I watched it again just to make sure.

  No, I didn’t. Okay. But maybe I should address this comment.

  Hi! Sorry you—

  No, no, no. Nicole kept telling me I said “sorry” way too often. Delete, delete.

  Although this dish was certainly inspired by the flavors of Thai cuisine, it is just a basic recipe I make on a busy day and I was careful not to refer to it as ‘Thai’. I’m sorry—

  Fuck. I deleted that ‘sorry’ also.

  I have to wear pigtail braids because ponytails give me a head
ache and I don’t want to get hair in the food.

  But I didn’t have to defend my hair. No. Definitely not that.

  LOL, it wasn’t like that was a big hit or a Queen song I was listening to, you are very good at identifying this Adam Lambert you SUPPOSEDLY HATE.

  Should I send that? Nah, I shouldn’t.

  But maybe I should fight back, I mean, I was getting really sick of this dude. Of course he would just say some snarky thing back, but how long was I supposed to put up with this?

  I posted the response but I guess all my worrying over it took a while because Nicole banged on the bathroom door. “Pizza’s here!”

  Okay. Time for some #pizza #toppings #nomnomnom #fridaynight #girlsnight action.

  “Guys, do I need white strips?” I asked, coming out in my robe while thumbing through my feed.

  “What brought that on?” Nicole asked, dumping the package of paper plates on the counter and opening the pizza boxes while Dakota, who was not known for her strength, struggled to get the cap off a 2-liter.

  “It probably wouldn’t—hurt,” Dakota said through her exertions.

  “Oh god! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Hold up,” Nicole said. “No one needs white strips. The world somehow survived before they existed. Are you getting harassed again?”

  “Kind of, but maybe he has a point.”

  “It’s not Sword Guru again, is it?”

  “Um…”

  Nicole held out a hand to me. “Put that damn phone down. We’re eating pizza now anyway.”

  “Wait…crap, he responded.”

  u ugly ho. it would be hot to put my hands around your neck and strangle u. be careful because i know u live in dc. i’m not far.

  “Oh my god.” I held the phone at a distance like it was contaminated. “Oh my god, ew. Shit just got real with this guy.”

  “What?” Nicole saw my face and looked over. “Please. We don’t even live in the district so clearly he just looked at your profile, it’s not like he really knows. He’s just saying that to scare you.”

  Nicole had grown up outside of Baltimore and her mom was Italian while her dad was half-black, so she had all the “I’m not taking any shit” vibes of someone whose family has had to battle against taking shit for generations, even sometimes from members of their own family. It was most certainly one of the reasons I gravitated to her in college—like a shield. I loved hearing her yell at people—unless I was one of those people.

  “Well, it’s working! I’ve never said where I live! I’m careful about that!”

  “It’s pretty easy to figure it out just based on the places you talk about in the videos, if someone really wanted to know,” Nicole said. Good point. My heart stopped racing quite so fast.

  “Who is this?” Dakota asked.

  “That stupid troll. The one who keeps coming in and telling Edie she’s wrong about such-and-such and criticizing her appearance. Now he’s really taking it way too far.”

  “Oh. Whatever, that guy is so not going to do anything.” Dakota shrugged. She had brazen confidence, more of the spoiled-rich-girl kind. Her mom sold fancy real estate in south Florida. “It’s easy to say that.”

  “Yeah…I know.” I took a shake breath. “I’ve just never had someone target me so specifically before, and say such gross things. He’s popped up on every single platform. Usually it’s more like the drive-bys. I mean, he does know I’m a food vlogger and not like, a political reporter, right?” I took a deep breath and looked at myself in the mirror by the door, making sure I had a cute sort of disheveled-on-purpose look and not just ‘hot mess’, then I moved the paper plates aside and got out a vintage thrift store plate instead, putting my pizza on the adorable surface with cherries on the rim.

  While I was arranging the slice, Nicole grabbed my phone from the counter and put it in her pocket. “No,” she said. “Bad girl. No pizza photo. Don’t you need a break from all this?”

  “But my feed will want to know what I ended up eating for dinner! I mean, obviously I blocked him. At least until his next account…”

  “Listen to yourself. You sound like you’re in a cult. Your ‘feed’ does not need another photo of you shoving pizza in your mouth.”

  “It’s not about me shoving pizza in my mouth, it’s about the experience!”

  “Nicole’s right,” Dakota said. “You’ve gotten really obsessed with all this stuff. And now your day job is a bunch of tweeting too. You rented this house because it had a garden, right? I didn’t want to say anything, but when you bought cute gardening supplies just for your pictures, I was thinking, uh-oh.”

  “I didn’t buy them just for the pictures,” I said. Although of course I had. They cost like, five times more than the basic ones.

  “You’ve turned into one of those crazy people with a curated life,” Nicole said. “Like those freakish moms with a perfectly clean house who makes muffins every day and dresses their baby in hundred dollar outfits.”

  “I have fans because I’m real!” I insisted, feeling defensive. “I have people who have been following me since my first blog!”

  “But you didn’t used to get so upset over internet stuff back then,” Nicole said. “Because you had a life. The whole reason you started the blog was just to make some decent food for yourself and show it to other people and make it fun. Now you’re like a zombie. Dakota and I go places on weekends and you’re like, ooh, but I have to blog! My fans are waiting! My brand! What ‘brand’? Who’s paying you? You don’t even make money on endorsements. You get like five thousand views. You’re doing this for literally no reason. You haven’t been on a date in a year.” She was looking right in my eyes and getting an intense tone of voice that I was way too midwestern polite to achieve even if I wanted.

  I had a moment of total freakout.

  Nicole and I met in my college dorm; she lived across the hall and we hit it off because at the time we both loved all the same supernatural TV shows and would have popcorn parties with anything vampire or witch related. She helped me with my early attempts at cooking videos. Back then it was just a fun way to unwind and cope with the weirdness of college and my homesickness. She had known me long enough to be the kind of friend who is allowed to yell at me (even if I would rather that she didn’t).

  I had cried on her shoulder for all my bad relationships, too. My first college boyfriend, Joseph. He was a sexy, broody punk musician and my parents hated him but he wrote songs about me, until it all turned into a super nasty breakup because he was kind of abusive in a passive-aggressive way I didn’t notice at first. Outdoorsy, bearded Bryon was next: so ambitious and idealistic, and he shared my passion for doing something good for the world—but, in the end, also selfish as hell when it came to us. He started sort of expecting me to do his grocery shopping for him after a few months of dating. Then there was Cole, who was nice, good-looking, pursuing his doctorate, the complete opposite of Joseph, but he just didn’t light a spark in me.

  It seemed like it just kept getting more heartbreaking and difficult to meet people with every breakup.

  I had just stopped dating. In fact, last year on Black Friday I broke down and ordered six different sex toys on a killer sale. Like a sex toy was a replacement for the life I had once dreamed of, with a wedding, a partner, a couple of adorable children…

  Why am I doing any of this?

  How was it that I was twenty-nine, single, working for a boss that dumped all her depression on me, and my great escape was basically my college blog evolved into a multi-platform life where I was a relatable caricature of myself, fixing my hair in slightly disheveled braids and putting on cute pajama pants, laughing off mistakes and shooing Dakota’s cat off the counter while I got excited over trying a new kind of lentils?

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know why I’m doing anything right now! Sometimes I feel like I don’t even care about birds. I used to care about everything and it’s like I’m dead inside. Oh god, I think I might be havin
g a midlife crisis now.”

  “It’s maybe like your Saturn’s return,” honorary hippie chick Dakota said.

  “It’s okay,” Nicole said. “But do you agree with me that you need a detox from this?” She held up the phone.

  “Yeah…,” I said, trying to take it back.

  Nicole shook her head. “I’m keeping this phone for the next two hours and we’re watching a movie. We’ve got delicious pizza, trashy soda, beers, and vegan ice cream…for some reason.”

  “Because it’s good,” Dakota said. “And I think I’m lactose intolerant.”

  “You just ordered pizza.”

  “Well, I can’t help it that pizza has cheese,” Dakota said.

  Nicole rolled her eyes. “Anyway…you can do that, right? We won’t look at our phones either. We’ll turn them all off for two hours. We’re having a retro night.”

  I took a deep breath. “Sounds good.”

  I settled in with my pizza and we decided on a comedy with a lot of SNL ladies, which should have been enough to hold my attention, but instead I found myself itching to tweet my reactions to the movie. Then I started wondering what was going on with my damn virtual world. I wondered how many likes my post from earlier had picked up. Had that troll commented again? More texts from my boss? Would she be mad I hadn’t texted back? I imagined her sending me like twenty texts that were progressively more angry and how I would explain my lack of response and what I would say to calm her down. What if my dad suddenly had a heart attack and my mom was trying to call and she couldn’t get ahold of any of us?

  I saw my laptop sitting on the kitchen counter. Nicole would kill me if I picked it up. But…like…I could just check…