Read Cast in Faefire: An Urban Fantasy Romance (The Mage Craft Series Book 3) for Free Online

news anchor. There were no subtitles, and the audio was quiet enough that Seth couldn’t hear it, but Lucifer must have been getting something out of it.
    Or else he just liked annoying Seth.
    Without shifting his eyes from the television, Lucifer said, “You’re a demon. I feel it all over you.”
    “I’m not,” Seth said.
    “Infernal. You’re drenched in infernal energy. Preternaturals, we’re all a family, even between factions—some of us more closely related than others. Shifters are closer to sidhe. Sidhe are closer to angels. And vampires are closer to demons. ”
    The door to the bar opened, allowing harsh daylight to spill through Rock Bottom. Protesting voices lifted in shouts again.
    Someone had come inside. It was impossible to see who it was at that distance. Seth doubted it was Dana McIntyre, but the mere possibility of it had him on edge. “Get to the point.”
    “Vampires are just this side of infernal,” Lucifer reiterated. “You’ll need to feed the way we do if you want to heal your body. I can hook you up with blood.”
    The revulsion was immediate and overwhelming. “No.”
    He’d spent years fighting to ignore his visceral reaction to spilled blood. Working as a doctor, the battle had been relentless—what a revenant friend of his called living in the eye of the storm. Always an inch from getting ripped apart by hurricane winds.
    Seth had strayed an inch too far from the eye of the storm in Sheol. He’d fed on Marion and still remembered the sweetness of death in her blood.
    He would never do that again.
    “Blood or meat, pick your poison,” Lucifer said. “Demons tend to go for meat over blood because it’s more substantial, but blood should do the trick. Bonus: it’s less likely to be fatal to your victims.”
    “ No ,” Seth said again. “I can’t do either.”
    “You can if you want to fix…that.” He flicked his fingers at Seth’s shirt.
    The cloth was loose enough that it didn’t suck into the cavity of Seth’s body. But it fell over his exposed ribs when he wasn’t careful. And he wasn’t being careful now. When Seth finally dared to look down, he could see the outline of bones. “There has to be another option.”
    “Blood can be extracted without murder. If that doesn’t work—if you need meat—then I can help you with that, too. Vampires aren’t bad people. I can tell you what we do to target the dregs of society nobody will miss.”
    The dregs of society that Seth had healed in his hospital.
    There was no such thing as a person nobody would miss. Everyone mattered. Everyone was important.
    “Thanks for your time,” Seth said, standing up.
    Lucifer watched him stand with obvious irritation. “You wanted a deal with the devil.”
    “I’ve made such deals before,” he said. “I always regretted it.”
    “The devil’s your last choice.”
    “Second to last.” If he couldn’t bring himself to deal with vampires, he could still turn to an angel for help. A specific half-angel who he would have preferred not to risk seeing again, even though he desperately missed her.
    “There’s one other thing we could do for each other. If you’re ‘human enough,’ I can take the ‘enough’ part away.” Lucifer tongued his incisors, which weren’t much sharper than an ordinary man’s. “I’ll make you a vampire.”
    The idea was only two degrees less revolting than being a demon. But vampires could survive on synthetic blood, and Seth couldn’t at the moment—he’d already tried that.
    He sat back down. “All right. We can talk.”
    “You need to do something for me before I’ll change you,” Lucifer said.
    “I told you, no deals with the devil. If you’re attaching strings then I’ll just ask another vampire to do it.” Someone like Charity Ballard, a revenant who would happily help Seth. He’d been avoiding her for as long as he’d avoided Marion, but it would be easy enough to track the thread of her life once he was ready.
    “I’m