Page 119 of Succubus

I shake my head slowly.

“You weren’t fine? You said you were fine.”

I’m silent except for my teeth, which click together spasmodically like the branches in the wind.

“Tempest! Why would you let me— ”

“Cute,” interrupts Dick Face. “But boring. We’re done. Okay. So. Now what?” He plays with his hair, lifts it back as though savoring the weight of it. I know that feeling. “How about . . . this: Take the bow.”

Joel lifts the bow.

“You seem like a strong guy. Break it.”

Joel snaps the bow in half and the wood splinters into sharp fragments. His face is agonized. “Why did it work?” he asks me through gritted teeth. “After all that time.”

“Because I love you,” I say.

And there it is. The thing I’ve been suppressing with all my might. The thing that has been true—destructively, imperviously, irrevocably—since the beginning. Might as well be honest, here at the end.

I see his eyes change, the terrible sadness in them.

“Al told me,” I say through my numb lips and jittering teeth. “He was right. When I let myself feel it, it weakened me.” What a cruel curse. And what bad luck, falling in love with the only man who can kill me back.

“Oh God.” His voice breaks. “Oh God, I’m so sorry, Tempest.”

“Holy shit,” Dick Face barks, half laughing. “What is this, Romeo and Juliet?” He looks around like he’s expecting a reaction from his personal crowd. There’s a crunch of metal on metal from the street as a car runs into another car at slow speed, then muffled yelling, followed by hypnotized silence as Dick Face hums a few bars and more newcomers join us.

There must be twenty people gathered here now, fanning out along the sidewalk, idling under the bare trees, collecting on the curb like recycling. And they are all extras, I realize. Dick Face doesn’t even really need them. Joel is helpless. They are just backup. They are just here because Dick Face was afraid.

He isn’t afraid anymore.

“This is for my son,” he says, his voice plunging and boiling. He’s suddenly very serious. “For Fabian. For the rest of the ones you killed. They were all I had left. I’m going to make this painful. For them.”

For Grub, I think. But Dick Face doesn’t even know about him. Will never know about him. And everything is different now. Everything has changed.

The woman to my left is edging forward a little as though trying to get close enough to Dick Face to soak up some of his light. She has a streak of moisturizer on her nose. Her hair is damp from the shower and goose bumps stand out on her skin. I reach out and touch her arm. I try to meet her eye, but she seems to be looking right through me.

“Hey,” I whisper, “wake up.”

And her eyes click on mine. They focus. She looks startled.

Hope sears my chest.

Stupid, absurd hope.

But now Dick Face is saying, “You’re going to take that sharp end and push it into your skin. Right where your heart is. Nice and slow.”

Oh God. Oh God.

Joel’s hands shake as he lifts the broken bow. He’s fighting with all his strength against the force of the command. But he can’t stop.

“Wake up,” I whisper, grabbing the woman’s shoulder. My fingers hardly work. I trip backward. I hit someone else, an older woman, maybe in her mid-seventies. “Wake up!” I order directly into her face. Her eyes, intelligent beneath the film of Dick Face’s spell, meet mine, and surprise flares in them.

I hear Joel at the same moment—the quick, strangled release of his breath in a groaning rush. It is the sound of the end of a fight, of no longer being able to continue.

“Wake up!” I shout, the words like lava spewing out of me as my throat collapses around them. “All of you wake up now!”

Dick Face spins toward me. “Are you kidding me?” He’s ready to laugh again, to swat me away, but the people are responding. They’re moving; someone calls out, “What the hell is going on?”