I’d love to shuck my clothing, bury myself under my covers and feel myself while Aiden’s smooth masculine voice instructed where my hands should go, but Dorian ruined that.

“Why not? And don’t tell me you’re shy. A shy girl wouldn’t ambush me in my office and fuck me like a drunken college girl.” Aiden laughed.

“I resent you comparing me to a drunken college girl; I’m more talented than that.” A day before Fiona and I left for Moon, I visited Aiden at his bar, Vain. The popular vampire club was packed, but I wasn’t going to let that spoil what I went there to do. I sauntered into his office, dressed in a black trench coat and not much of anything else. His eyes glinted with anticipation while I deliberately untied the belt and revealed a red and black bra and panty set I’d bought that day. We christened almost every square inch of his office that night, and the memory still sent heat to rush between my thighs.

“Indeed you are, my Gwen. Why don’t you tell me exactly how talented you are,” Aiden goaded.

“Just a minute, lover boy.” I laughed and covered the end of the phone. I turned to Dorian and asked, “What do you want?” The amusement on his face was evident. His gray eyes gazed me with a carnal curiosity.

“Holly says we have to finish the blood rituals tonight,” he said.

My eyebrows arched and my anger spiked. We’d only gotten around to summoning one spirit, there were at least ten more vials of vampire blood.

“Why can’t we do it tomorrow?”

“You have training with the witches tomorrow.”

“How am I supposed to train with them when I’ll be up all night summoning ghosts with you? Do they think I don’t need sleep?” My grumpiness was a concoction of weariness and sexual frustration, not to mention Aiden’s news about the vampire council wanting to use me as their personal Slurpee machine. I was being pulled in every direction, and one more tug would cause me to snap.

“I don’t make the rules,” Dorian remarked.

I let out an annoyed grumble and uncovered the phone. Unfortunately, phone sex with Aiden would have to wait. “Hey,” I said into the phone. Sorry, but the council needs me to finish something tonight. When does the VC need my answer?” I prayed for the day I could return to my crappy, nine hundred square foot apartment and normal life. I was a simple woman and life in Moon was anything but since I arrived. Regrettably, I didn’t think my life would get back to normal anytime soon.

“As soon as possible,” Aiden paused. “Has Ian contacted you again?”

“No. Fiona and Ethan worked a spell to block him.” I didn’t want to worry Aiden over the telepathic episode earlier. I could handle hearing his voice in my head so long as he didn’t have the ability to physically harm me.

“Good. I’ll call you tomorrow night.”

“All right. Sorry, I know we haven’t had a lot of time to talk.”

“Things are difficult right now. That just means there’ll be a lot of catching up to do when you get home.” His tone was sinfully seductive and tempted me to throw Dorian out of my room so we could continue with the phone sex.

“I look forward to it,” I told him, my own voice thick with want.

“I’m about to take a shower. When my hand is wrapped around my cock, it’ll be your body I’ll be thinking about. Goodnight, my Gwen.”

The click of the call ending didn’t make me move. I was so turned on all I could do was picture Aiden stroking himself. Obligations were a bitch.

I shook the image away with resentment. “Let’s get this over with.” My frustration found an outlet with Dorian who was sitting on the floor, the vials of vampire blood in front of him. His arms wrapped around his bent up legs, causing his t-shirt to strain against his bulbous biceps. I took my place on the floor in front of him; all the while thinking of Aiden’s soaking wet body in the shower.

“What’s so funny?” I snipped.

“Why are your cheeks so flushed?” Dorian’s innocent question was anything but.

I looked up through my eyelashes and said, “Shut up.”

He smirked but didn’t comment further. Instead, he picked up a vial of blood and handed it to me. “Do what I told you and concentrate on the death within the blood,” Dorian instructed.

The glass vial felt ominous in my hand, but I did what the Angel of Death said and concentrated on the feeling it emanated. Without thinking, I pulled the stopper out of the tube and dipped the pad of my finger in the blood. As soon as my skin made contact with the sticky liquid, a shiver washed through me. The feeling of death and despair surrounded me. My body shook against the icy coldness crawling through me.

“Call the spirits forward, Gwen.”

That was easier said than done. The death within the blood was overwhelming. Whoever the blood belonged to, they had killed a lot of people. Instinct took over, and something inside of me commanded I take control of the ghosts. My body stopped quivering, a peaceful calm replaced the confusion. When I opened my eyes, a large cloud of gray hovered just behind Dorian’s back. The cloud separated and formed what looked like human shapes. It took less than three minutes for the fog to completely separate. At least fifteen spirits stood in my room, their bodies shimmering like a heat mirage.

Dorian turned to see what I called forth from the blood. “Good job. I’ve never seen a newbie pull that many ghosts at once.”

“I’m not sure how I did it,” I said flabbergasted.

“I told you it’d get easier. Once you learn to associate the feeling of death on someone, you won’t even have to think when you summon their victims.” The look of pride was hard to ignore on Dorian’s face.

I thought about every time I read the memories of the dead and what that meant. When Holly said I was more powerful than I realized, she wasn’t wrong. Reading memories of death was only the tip of what I could do. Mixed emotions gnawed at me. On one hand, I was excited I was strengthening my power, but on the other hand, I was scared shitless. My ability had everything to do with death and the feelings that came with it. When I interacted with death, I felt their despair, confusion and anger. It was tough to feel emotions that didn’t belong to me. I had yet to come across a ghost that was happy. Spirit walkers were nearly extinct. Either killed by the bad guys or driven insane, like Kye’s sister, we didn’t have a long life expectancy. Being a spirit walker didn’t come with a lot of perks.

With so many ugly emotions bearing down on me, how long would it be before they left permanent damage? My future would always be up in the air and that frightened me.

“Gwen?”

I looked up from the floor, my thoughts vanishing. “Yeah?”

“You did a great job, why do you look like a house fell on your sister?”

I snorted at Dorian’s Wizard of Oz reference. In many ways, I could relate to him. He was death, after all. He knew all the emotions doing this caused. Fiona and Aiden didn’t. It was nice I’d found someone this side of me could to relate to, but he didn’t understand the other half that was fearful of my gift. Or the part of me that wanted to return to Flora and run my shop like any other normal, red-blooded supernatural. I yearned for normalcy and tonight the revelation I would never be normal again was a sucker punch to the gut.

“Just taking it all in,” I told him and eyed the ghosts still hovering in my room. Their eyes were glued to me, their bodies still and lifeless. They were dressed in an array of different period clothing. Some wore eighteenth century garb while others wore more modern clothing. “What am I supposed to do with them?” I nodded towards the spirits.

“They’re at your command. You won’t need them until you guys go to war.” Dorian pulled another tube of blood from the rack.

“At my command?” I asked incredulously. “I can control them?” The news just got better and better. Controlling an army of ghosts wasn’t my idea of cool tricks. “Isn’t this wrong? Shouldn’t they be enjoying their afterlife in heaven, rather than being earthbound and controlled?”

Dorian laughed. “What a human thing to say. Heaven and Hell are subjective, Gwen. Do you think if you’re good, you go to a place guarded by pearly gates? And Hell is a fiery pit below the earth?”

I stared dumbfounded. The devil existed, vampires originated from him. Although I didn’t have proof of God, I believed He existed too. They were sort like yin and yang, good versus evil. They balanced the world.

“Heaven and Hell aren’t as pronounced as humans make them out to be. Yes, if you’re a good person then your afterlife will be good. And if you’re a bad person, your afterlife will be hellish. But they exist within the ghostly realm, parallel to the human world, not a mystical place. If these ghosts are still holding a grudge towards the vampires who killed them, then don’t you think we’re doing them a favor by giving them a chance for justice? They’ll return to their afterlives as soon as our mission is complete, no worse for wear.”

“How are their lives horrible if they aren’t in the Hell I imagine?”

“Think of someone sinister, someone who’s done all the horrible things you can imagine. Now imagine what it would be like to feel every single emotion of the people they’ve wronged. That’s how it is for them all the time, and it eventually will drive them insane. Can you envision an eternity of insanity? Plus, demons terrorize them just for the fun of it. They may not be dancing on hot coals, but they are in Hell.”

Can you envision an eternity of insanity? Replayed over and over again in my mind. Perhaps an omen, or just my paranoia getting to me, either way, it was like a broken record in my head.

After a few moments of torturing myself with Dorian’s words, I looked up. “What about heaven? What’s it like? Do we meet God when we die?” I was brought up in a religious family; my curiosity of how the legends of Heaven and Hell were different than the reality kept me from focusing on anything else.