“Say it again.”

The voice scraped out of the dark like a blade dragged across stone. Elias’s pulse slammed against his throat. Candles guttered around the chalk circle, throwing restless shadows up the bedroom walls. The air reeked of scorched herbs and his own nervous sweat.

He kept his eyes lowered. “I want you to be my girlfriend. Just for tonight. At the reunion dance.”

Silence stretched, thick and dangerous. Heat rolled off the thing standing inside the circle—tall, horned, skin the color of old blood, eyes like banked coals. The demon’s wings shifted once, the leathery sound loud in the small room.

“A girlfriend.” The word tasted foreign on...