Page 122 of Succubus

Joel pushes me back from him, holds me where he can see me. We are both kneeling. His eyes are flat with panic. “Oh God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he cries. His glasses are smudged, the blood vivid on his torn and dirt-stained white shirt.

“I’m okay,” I say. Slowly, I stand up. My feet support me, my legs don’t waver. I shake out my hands, wriggle my fingers, turn my head on the fragile-feeling stalk of my neck. Everything works. I have been put back together. It doesn’t make any sense. And maybe everything about this situation has gone too far beyond the confines of sense to ever be called back, but I can’t help myself: “Why?” I ask the goddess.

She glows in front of me, only a few steps away, her size still impossible to gauge somehow, the air rippling around her. She’s middle-aged now, profound looking, a sunset blazing in her eyes.

“Because I was wrong,” she says unblinkingly. “I wanted to punish him, but he is not the one being punished. And I do not love him anymore. Although . . .” She glances at Dick Face, considers. “Perhaps I still love him.” A coyote—or maybe a wolf? Where are we?—releases a yearning howl in the distance. The goddess smiles.

As she shifts back toward the boulder where Dick Face is lying, she briefly transforms into a hawk, golden wings spread, then becomes the young woman with the oceanic hair again. I think of Dick Face saying she had become a fish. I can imagine it now. I would prefer her as a fish.

She leans over him, strokes his neck musingly. “I am tempted to reignite him,” she murmurs. “To hear him sing once again.” And then, closer to his face, “If I reignite you, there will be consequences to the . . .” She says an unknowable word, and for some reason I suspect it is the same one Al meant when he said “the empty” during our first conversation. “Too much life in you,” she murmurs. “Breath of the ancients! Blood of the depth. Blood of the well. And not enough. Never enough. If only you were just another mortal.” She straightens, studies Dick Face’s supine body for a long moment, her head cocked like she is still a hawk. Then she reaches down in a flash and slices his chest open. Joel makes a truncated sound.

The goddess wrenches my father’s heart from its cavity and presses it, dripping, against her mouth. She closes her eyes momentarily, tips her head back, and seems to be drinking the blood from his severed heart. I am too stunned to feel anything at all. I simply watch.

“Thank you, my difficult lover,” she whispers when she’s finished, and the trees seem to shiver in response. She tucks the now desiccated organ back inside his body. “I will carry you with me.”

She glances over at us. Joel is gripping my shoulder like he’s about to shove me behind him.

“Oh,” she says, as though she’d forgotten about us entirely. Her ferocious gaze pins me. “The angel”—the word in her language sounds sharp, glinting like a blade—“has given up his ability in exchange for your life, daughter of my lover. Though it was not necessary. I had already decided to cure you.” Now to Joel: “Angel, I have taken your beautiful ability. It was offered in good faith, and I have accepted it.”

“No,” I whisper. I stare at Joel. “No, you need to be able to heal, to help people.”

He shakes his head numbly. His hands tighten on my arms. “I thought she would kill you.”

“But— ” I start.

“So.” The goddess seems to look at both of us at once, cocking her head in that eerily birdlike gesture. “I will rebalance it.” There are a thousand other words in each one she speaks. “For such a precious sacrifice, you may have a life in return.

“Each of you mourns a loved one whose life was taken by the other. You are bound together. You must choose together. One will be returned to you, and the one who took his life will be purified from this stain.”

I hear my own intake of breath.

I remember in a rush: Dick Face in the bar, blathering about his immortal ex-girlfriend, about “real” power. The old ones. This is what he meant. This is real power. The ability to wake the dead, to rework time, to rewrite history. Joel and I turn toward one another at the same moment, and I can see he believes her, too. She will do this impossible thing that balances at the top of a swaying tower of other impossible things. She will bring Adam back for him, or Grub for me.

For a moment, I’m chaotic with hope. My mind is a cacophony of it. I can almost see him again, in his black hoodie, his hair in strings, his wistful face. My brother. Grinning at me, confused and wondering and ready, so ready to be alive again. What it would be, to hug him for the first time. To offer him the world. To make it all okay. To make it all possible.

I’m tasting it—the sharp, bloody tang of frantic hope. His future, the years and decades of it, a feast. Decadent, overspilling the table. The piles of stupid little jokes he will make, the stacks of projects he will stay up all night working on, the love I will never let him go without, not even for a minute, ever again.

“Choose,” says the goddess, as though we’ve already taken too long. Her infinite voices are interwoven with shimmery threads of delight. Is she pleased with her own magnanimousness or with the inconceivability of the task she has set us to?

“Please, Tempest,” Joel says. He looks miserably out of place in the twilit forest, facing me, pine needles bristling in his hair. His eyes are slick with tears. I know he’s picturing Adam, picturing the brother he has always loved, for Adam’s whole life, from birth through boyhood, to manhood and the corrosive, unnatural illness that brought him step by step to the vicious moment of his death. Brilliant, gentle Adam, who might have nurtured generations of budding mathematicians, who might have solved some impossible problem and pointed a light into a previously uncomprehended corner of human knowledge.

I should let him have his brother. I should absolve myself of at least one of my crimes. Imagine, being washed clean of that death, rightness poured into the dark pit inside me, filling it up. If I let him have Adam, Joel will be complete again, that stinging, searching emptiness in his eyes I saw the very first time he mentioned Adam replaced with peace. And the woman who destroyed his brother, who made him want to destroy everyone like her, that woman would have to be forgiven.

But my own brother would be left as nothingness. So much less life lived than Adam. We never had any time together.

How can I give up the possibility of that time?

How can I give up the possibility of Grub?

“Please,” Joel whispers.

I close my eyes. Adam is in front of me, spectral, his quick and easy grin, his loose brown sweater, his dark hair like a boy’s, falling into his face.

Gravity increases inside my body, pulling everything with weight downward into blackness. I am shaking.

“Please,” Joel says a third time.

But it doesn’t matter. I can’t.