Ash to Embers (Courting Shadows) by C.V. Larkin

word vomit spewing from his face had no relevance or usefulness whatsoever. She was looking for it. He just could not have been less interesting. And then he leaned forward to unbutton his jacket.
    "What is the tattoo on your wrist?" she asked. Her blood was backing up in her veins, flagging the internal response as anything but moderate. He blinked at her, looking put out that she'd interrupted him.
    "It's for my religion," he answered.
    Thought so.
    She should have known. The answer to his brackish aura was so simple, so stupidly straightforward she could have kicked herself for not catching it sooner.
    "And what religion is that?" she asked, playing dumb and waiting for confirmation.
    "I'm... a warlock."
    Bingo.
    The way he was all scrunched up in his seat screamed that he was trying to gauge or predict what her reaction would be. If he only knew. Bonus points for honesty though, stupid.
    "Not the best pick up line, is it?"
    "I don't know," he said. "Maybe I've never had to use it."
    "What do you use then?" She tried to make the statement come out neutral, but she was beginning to lose patience and every minute she kept the Oracle waiting was another minute she was going to suffer. She'd been hoping to spend as little time with that miserable prick as possible.
    "Maybe I use magic," Warlock Tom told her, leaning closer.
    Negative. He had maybe a little talent, just enough to notice. Every one of those cocksuckers did, but if he didn't have enough juice to recognize that she wasn't human, he didn't have much. Tian struggled to remain where she was to avoid shoving him out of her personal space. His breath reeked of stale Doritos and processed meat.
    "Really? Whose?"
    He took the flippant comment as the insult it was intended to be, face turning a bright angry shade of red. "You don't know anything," he sulked.
    Neither did he. This was new to him, the stolen power he'd traded for beginning to go to his head, even as it was starting to fade.
    "Maybe I don't believe you. Enlighten me," Tian said.
    "Fuck you."
    Take me to your leader, motherfucker.
    She shook her head settling for, "Not if you can't prove it."
    Not even if he could, but he didn't have to know that. Tian bit back the bile that rallied on the heels of the suggestion in her tone and something sly slid under his features like a shadow in shark infested waters.
    "And what if I can?"
    A phone buzzed against the heavy wool of his peacoat and Tom jumped like he'd been tasered. He whipped the thing out and stared blankly at the screen, eyes wide and pupils massively dilated. He was breathing hard, reacting to the Sidhe pheromones in her skin like any run-of-the-mill human, as if the shit were catnip. His hands were shaking as his thumbs flew across the display screen. The aphrodisiac properties inherent to her DNA were chipping away at his brain a lot faster than normal. If she had to hazard a guess, it was because he'd already been exposed to mammoth levels of the stuff.
    Tian licked her lower lip and felt the dread curling in tendrils at the back of her jaw. She let her mind drift, reassuring herself the result of what she was about to do was a means to an end. She placated herself with the lie that there was no way the kid in front of her was going to believe the next statement out of her mouth if she couldn't gift wrap it in the kind of heat and believability she didn't have to give.
    Tian drifted, knowing that she was already caught in the gravity of the crystalline image of the black flame male from the arena. She let herself linger over it, inwardly cursing the perfection of him. She'd already gone down in flames once and didn't seem to be doing any better now. Her whole body flushed, vibrating with need. The reaction was inconceivable. And better or worse, she'd instigated this new form of torture.
    Tian forced her derailed train back onto its tracks and placed a hand onto one of Tom's cracked out paws. His head shot up and he looked her straight in the