May Sage - Little Morning Star: Extended

Roth

H e looked up slowly, his eyes blazing as he stared at the offending creature taunting him from the roof of the elegant Palladian structure. He was tempted to blast it into oblivion just for the sake of it but resisted. It wouldnt do to draw attention to himself.

One would think that birds would know better than to shit on Astaroth, the being they called Duke of Hell. As it turned out, in this dimension or the others, Parisian pigeons didnt give a damn.

He sighed and retraced his steps, heading back inside the hotel where he liked to stay when he visited Paris in the human realm. In the Underworld, he owned a house at that exact same spot, overlooking the Seine.

Oh non! Par ici, monsieur, nous avons des serviettes.

Leave it to the French to have towels at the ready for just such an eventuality.

Je ne crois pas, merci, he replied, perhaps haughtily, but he wasnt going to wipe shit off his hair.

He returned to the penthouse suite and headed directly for the bathroom, after turning on one of his three laptops with the flick of his hand.

Whoever said magic and technology didnt mix was an idiotboth worked on energy, which made them interchangeable as far as he was concerned. He couldnt bear the thought of having to traverse this world without it.

The laptop instantly resumed the music hed been listening to before heading outan enticing female voice, bellowing about lost love, filled the stately blue and silver rooms, decorated with Versailles court in mind.

There was a reason he liked that place.

People said he was a snob, an elitist bastard who cared about nothing beyond his contentment, and perhaps they were right. However, he dared anyone to live half as long as he had and bear the thought of another day without luxury, pleasures, and distractions from the oppressing monotony. But most importantly, without hope for more. Wasnt that the human way? Hope was their only constant in this world and far be it from him to capitalize on that hope as well.

Any minute now, something would give. It had to. The world had stayed stagnant, ever unchanging, for too long.

Any minute, he repeated to himselfa chant he whispered practically every day. The very thought of spending another decade in this world waiting made the very nerves in his body shudder.

Then, the music stopped playing, and one of his alarms rang, pushing a jolt of energy through his limbs as a discreet beep beckoned him to his computers.

He didnt bother turning off the shower or putting on any clothes, too entranced by the sound hed never heard before. His feet padded across the floor at a speed too quick for human eyes as he raced to the laptop. This was it. The time had finally come.

For two thousand years he had begged for the sound that rang out from his laptop. All of his patience. All of his sacrifice. It would finally be rewarded.

Lily

She knew she was imagining things. In this world or the next, Lily Star Morgan wasnt the kind of girl a guy like him checked out, yet shed felt a gaze on her back quite frequently over the course of the morning, and when shed been bold enough to turn, shed met his eyes a time or two.

Come on, Lil. Youre just paranoid or delusional. The annoying little voice at the back of her mind had a point.

She hated when it was right.

There was no way the new guywho had been ogled, then promptly accosted, by the beautiful trio of girls next to whom he now satwas paying attention to her.

He wasnt hot; hot was too common a word for a man of his stature, his composure. If someone had blown a trumpet and announced that His Majesty, the Prince of Some-Kinda-Country-Out-There, had arrived, no one would have raised an eyebrow. She certainly wouldnt have.

He wasnt gorgeous either. The term lacked maturity. One couldnt help picturing a pretty boy with a whitened smile and fake tan. He looked older than the average freshman, probably close to twenty-five. His gaze too intense. His overall features too handsome. When he smiled it there was something charismatic and yet sensual about it. After meeting the green eyes under his dark lashes, she couldnt possibly portray him without using that word. He definitely knew a thing or two about smoldering.

All that said, Lily wasnt particularly drawn to the newcomer. Shed lived through close to two decades without feeling the stomach-dwelling butterflies romance books went on about. Not because of living, breathing men, in any case. She had no issue going silly over the imaginary lover who visited her dreams most nights, however.

While she couldnt color herself impressed, she was still curious. Was he an actor? A model? The heir to a Fortune 500? There was something about himhe projected too much confidence to be an inconsequential nobodyhence why she could discern no logical reason why he would be looking at her.

Lily was

She sighed, resigned and a bit dejected, because if she was sincere, the most accurate word to describe her fairly and comprehensively was weird.

For a start, Lily was a witch; not a Wiccan, but a full-fledged witch, whose spells actually created visible, concrete results. She may not have looked like the usual stereotypewarts and all that jazzbut she exuded a vibe, an otherness that warned others to stay away. Which worked well for her staying under the radar plan but not so much when it came to fitting in.

It had been three months since shed started trying not to be a witch; in her effort to fit in where she was, she hadnt even cast a micro-mini spell, and, well, it wasnt exactly working out as planned. Lily felt on edge, restless, and irritated, which probably projected the vibe over a five-mile radius.

Ignoring the fact that she was able to conjure fire and wind to do her bidding, she was an average nineteen-year-old, really. Tall-ish, toned-ish, with light skin that hinted at an olive tone, suggesting an exotic heritagealas, her similarities to Mila Kunis ended there. Her eyes were a shade of blue too piercing to suit her complexion and her hair just couldnt make up its damn mind. Some strands were blonde and others, black; after spending most of her teens covering it under layers of dye, shed finally given up, and resolved to pretend that the multicolor mess was supposed to be a thing. It worked rather well with the leather-jeans-boots combo she had going on, firmly establishing her as an edgy weirdo no one normal would want to hang out with.