Page 106 of Succubus

I nod.

She says, “It’s true? About curses? About . . . magic?”

“It’s true,” I say.

And then Mom gasps. And we are down the steps, where I can see them at last: the two of them, spread flat in the grass, their hands locked together as though they have, in death, become friends. The pain demon and the angel. As though they hope never to be parted.

CHAPTER 34

Don’t look, Els,” Dee cries, pushing Ella’s face down.

They’re an odd pair: the tall woman—is she Swedish? Danish? I don’t know enough to tell one Scandinavian accent from another—her pale hair fanning on the dark ground, her graceful wrists exposed above the tailored edges of her coat sleeves, and the squat, strange little man with his small, crowded face. His eyes are open and his expression is bemused, caught off guard. Death is only silence, he said. Her eyes are closed.

Mom is crying. “What happened? What happened to them?”

Dee speeds past with Ella. I take a few steps toward the bodies in the battlefield. I think of British and colonial soldiers lying side by side beneath this ground, companions in death. There is something so intimate about being enemies.

And just as I think this, the ground seems to shift, to rearrange. The transition is sleepy and fluid, as though the grass is a stream, trickling over the two shadowed forms. And then, with only a swish, a soft breath like a glad sigh, the earth subsumes them.

“Oh no, Al,” whispers Mom.

Something glints by my feet and I lean over—it’s my phone, face up in the grass. I pick it up and then Joel staggers, and I am at his side, but I can’t let myself touch him.

“Who was that?” he asks thickly.

“That was Al,” I say. “He was supposed to kill you. My father sent him. A demon.”

“Oh,” he says, hardly above a whisper.

“He was actually really nice.”

“Very painful, though.”

“Yes,” I agree. “That was the whole idea.” I add, “I wouldn’t let him. Kill you, I mean.”

“Thanks,” he says.

“Thanks for—all that,” I say, gesturing faintly back at the monument.

“I shouldn’t have sent— ” he starts, and I shush him.

We make our way across the field to the road. I hear Ella as Dee opens the car door and the light turns on. “Is that . . . blood on me?”

* * *

Dee and I sit together on the porch bench in the bright chill of noon, the usual leaf blowers roar-whining their way around the block. The sun pours itself through the last red leaves on our sidewalk maple, igniting each one.

I tell her everything. Again, starting from the beginning. And then the rest of it, the parts I concealed from her, starting from when I learned the truth about Joel.

This time, for the first time, she believes me. Although I can see it’s hard, even now.

“Dick Face is . . . sort of a demigod? Like in a Greek myth?”

I think of Grub. “Basically,” I say. “I mean, at least that’s the best name we have for it?”

“And all his children are cursed.”

“Right.”