“It’s not that passive,” said Hugh. “You could do better, sweetie.”

“The guy’s corrupt and going to Hell. How is this a problem for you? And you didn’t like my last boyfriend either. Maybe you should stop worrying about my love life and go back to figuring out how to get your latest secretary into bed.”

In what had to be a weird twist of the universe, none of my friends liked my current boyfriend, a dark magician named Dante. Dante’s morals were pretty nonexistent, and he owned stock in bitterness and cynicism. That would make you think he’d fit in perfectly with this group of damned souls, but for whatever reason, he didn’t.

“You aren’t meant to be with someone bad,” said Cody. We were all immortal now but were considered “lesser immortals.” That meant we had once been human before selling our souls into Hell’s service. Cody was young compared to the rest of us in our little circle. Hugh claimed almost a century. Peter and I had millennia. As such, there was almost a naïveté about Cody, a charming idealism that rivaled the kind I used to have.

It had been shattered when my previous boyfriend, a human named Seth, had left me for a friend of mine. Seth was a good soul, quiet and infinitely kind. He’d made me believe in better things, like that maybe there was hope for a succubus like me. I’d thought I was in love—no, I had been in love. Even I could admit that. But as a succubus, I brought a dangerous element to any relationship. When I had sex with a guy (or a girl—it worked either way), I stole their life energy, which was the power that fueled every human soul. It kept me alive and sustained my immortal existence. The purer the guy, the more energy I took. The more energy I took, the more I shortened his life. With Dante, I had almost no effect. He had little energy to give, so our sex life was relatively “safe,” and I therefore sought my fixes from meaningless guys on the side.

With Seth . . . well, that had been a different story. Sleeping with him would have had very detrimental effects—so I’d refused to do it. For a while, we’d lived on love alone, our relationship being about a lot more than a physical act. Over time, however, that had taken its toll, as had a number of simple relationship complications. Things had finally blown up when Seth had slept with my friend Maddie. I think he’d done it to encourage me to break up, hoping to spare me future pain. Whatever the initial intent, he and Maddie had actually gone on to establish a fairly serious relationship in the following months.

I hadn’t taken that very well.

“There’s no pleasing you guys,” I growled, beckoning the waiter for another drink. He ignored me, irritating me further. “You don’t like good ones. You don’t like bad ones. What the fuck does it take?”