Love is Always Write Anthology Volume 1

age.
    The Phoenix Club, although a pale offspring of its Hellfire sire, boasted not only some of the finest refreshment to be had in Victoria's Britain but also a great number of Her Majesty's most handsome subjects. Despite their more peculiar interests, the members of the Phoenix men's club were singularly well-bred. He cast a languid eye over the room, making a few selections for later that evening.
    Known to the membership as Lord deLancey, Ashe was nothing like his fellow Phoenicians. Not that he was not well-bred— his father was, indeed, a lord— and not that he did not share their interests— he, in fact, could exceed their depravity many-fold; nonetheless, Ashe was different.
    He was a daemon.
    Not some small spirit like the imps and gremlins whose essence the human artificers stole to power their machines, but a true power, an incubus, a daemon of lust and seduction. His mother, Ashtarte, was a succubus who had tempted the Nazarene in the desert; his father, Lord Nox, was general to Archduke Asmodeus; he, Ashtariel, was their only child. Daemon children were exceedingly rare as female daemons, loath to bear offspring, preferred to steal children's souls and deform them in order to raise them as their own. Ashe's mother had borne him to spite his father. Paradoxically, Nox had taken a liking to him, though Ashe found it difficult to consider his father's interest as anything nearly paternal. It was more an extended self-interest; Nox wanted the best for his seed.
    It had been his father's idea that Ashtariel spend time observing humans. That had been some centuries ago— the Middle Ages, in fact— so he had spent more time than his sire had surely intended. But humans were such entertaining— and seductive— creatures.
    Ashe laughed, taking another sip of cognac while exchanging glances with the Prime Minister's third son. Poor boy looked dreadfully hang-dog. He was almost certainly disappointed that Ashe had left him tied to the bench without bringing him to climax last night, although his ass had reddened quite prettily under Ashe's ministrations. Now the incubus again focused his preternatural attention on the young man, extending his infernal influence over the noble's conscious desire.
    The attractive youth arose and left his companions, making his way across the room to stand in front of Ashe. The daemon saw the young man's erection clearly outlined through his trousers. Ashe stubbed out his cigar and rose, leaving the smoking lounge. Perhaps tonight he would allow William to spend .
    ****
    This had to be the one .
    Melizander stood before an oaken door; banded with iron, the portal had more locks than Victoria's knickers drawer. To his benefit it also had a nearby bracket with a torch that he coaxed to life with the last of his candle. The torchlight cast gigantic shadows as Melizander pulled out his pouch of picks and probes. Fashioned of iron and bronze, they had been his father's— the last few good things to come from him.
    Milos Tristekedes had been a professor of mechanics at Cambridge. Melizander remembered sitting on his father's knee and watching as he deftly drafted plans and schematics, the young child entranced by the beauty of his father's drawings. Then Faraday's machine had split the world and changed the way things worked. And Doctor Tristekedes had changed along with them. Gone was the quiet, introverted scientist; in his place Milos turned hard and driven, obsessed with the new laws of physics. When once Melizander had sat alongside the great man, the younger Tristekedes now avoided the professor. When Melizander's mother grew sick and died, his father grew even quicker with back-handed reprimands and more fluent with snide disapproval.
    Not always fast enough to evade his father's increasingly frequent rages, Melizander had taken to hiding in their garden shed, until Milos found him there and locked him in. His refuge now a prison, Melizander, trapped in the darkness with his budding hatred and the unseen crawly things, had brooded over his father's censure. Three nights later, his maternal grandfather, Lord Wollstone-Croft, had found him huddled in the dark, dirty and cold.
    The two older men had yelled and screamed at each other in Milos' study, their angry voices rising through the old house. Milos' strident tenor battled with the bass notes of Lord Croft, while Melizander sat in a bath, the gray, scummy water cooling around him. The next day Melizander had left with his