Free Beautiful Misery (Miss Misery) by Tracey Martin

I almost bailed. Multiple times. I was tired, achy, and still convinced I was crazy. But in the end, I never got farther than Lucen’s kitchen. I remembered the expression in his eyes when I’d told him I trusted him, and I slunk back into the living room.
    Intense, that w as the only way to describe it. His comment earlier in the day—that trusting him was the most erotic thing a human ever did to him—had been made lightly, one of his many quips. But the way he’d looked at me was anything but light. His eyes had stripped me down to my soul.
    In this case, trust wasn’t about baring a little skin. It was about baring everything.
    That was a scary idea. For most of the time I’d known him, I barely dared call Lucen a friend, though he was in truth. Just a dangerous, nonhuman friend.
    With a shiver, I pushed the soft, linen fabric of his drapes aside and gazed out onto the street. Lucen’s apartment was over his bar, The Lair, and his bar was located on prime real estate in Boston’s Shadowtown neighborhood. At night, the busy street glowed with lights—cool neons, warm streetlamps, and the white-gold streaks of headlights passing through. If I stuck my head out the window and craned my neck, I could just make out the logo for the Shadowtown T stop. But stretching that way hurt my broken body, and the warm air tasted heavy with smoke from the fires that had ravaged chunks of the city not so long ago.
    A couple stories b elow, a crowd undulated in front of the bar. They were a mix of satyrs, harpies, and Friday’s usual abundance of humans on the prowl for dangerous thrills. Very dangerous thrills. The harpies’ magic would arouse their jealousy, the satyrs would simply arouse, and with alcohol lowering everyone’s inhibitions, things could—and usually did—get sticky.
    As the evening wore on, more clothes would be removed, and while the harpies might get bored and leave, the satyrs would feed off all that sexual energy they inspired. Humans could get hurt. Enslaved if they succumbed fully to a satyr’s magic. Embarrassed later, at the very least, for doing regrettable things in public.
    I dropped the drape and headed to the kitchen, once more propelled toward the door by my lingering doubts. As one of Boston’s more powerful satyrs, Lucen was no different than his brethren enjoying all that lusty tension in the bar. And here I was, willing to overlook his predatory nature, his power that inflamed desires in people so strongly that they couldn’t resist acting on them.
    Satyr and human. Pred and prey.
    And what was I? Not one or the other, but something trapped in between.
    A friend who could be more if she had the nerve.
    I rest ed my forehead on the kitchen wall, staring at the lone wine glass on the table. When I’d decided to stay the night, but had gotten tired of seeing all the uncontrolled debauchery at the bar, I’d carried it up here.
    Lucen had stopped in to see me once, on a break an hour ago, and he’d refilled it for me. We’d had another one of our mostly silent conversations, and I could tell he was expecting me to bolt. But then, I was still partly expecting me to bolt, and Lucen could feed on all my emotions, not just lust. If I was nervous, he knew. The only thing he couldn’t tell for sure was what I was nervous about.
    Although Lucen didn’t know it, I was convinced his power couldn’t hurt me anymore. Oh, when he came up behind me and wrapped his strong arms around my waist, when I could feel his body heat seeping through my clothes, when I was pressed against all that deliciously hard muscle, there was no denying what I felt. It was pure, unadulterated lust. It thrummed through my veins in time with my pulse. I wanted to throw him to the floor and do all those wicked things I’d been daydreaming about for the past ten years.
    But it was worse than that. More than that.
    A few days I’d gotten into a magical brawl with some of Shadowtown’s nastier inhabitants, one of whom had