Page 17 of Succubus

It’s a blessing that he doesn’t want a relationship.

Joel stands up, too, and he’s just waiting there, holding on to the back of his chair, when I come in again and collect more things from the table.

“I’ll clean up,” he says slowly.

“Okay,” I say. “Ella!”

“But I’m going to get Eddy’s queen! I think. Maybe. I might not.”

“Pause the game. You can play it at home. Thank Joel for dinner, please.”

She looks up reluctantly. “Thanks, Joel. That was a really good cookie.”

This is fine, I tell myself as we walk home. This is the best I can ever hope for. I’m still vibrating, like his voice is strumming the thick strings of my ribs, and I can feel him say it over and over. Tempest.

I didn’t let him say whatever he was about to tell me next.

My phone lights up in my bag, and when I look, it erupts in a cascade of frantic notifications. Leaving my phone on silent is a luxury I can only afford when my clients are nowhere near their due dates. Grub apparently tried to video call me about twenty times while Ella was playing chess. She must’ve hit the red button repeatedly and, with some mysterious seven-year-old logic, not felt the need to mention it to me.

He’s texted: HE STRIKES AGAIN, with a link to a news report. An MMA fighter has been found dead. Seems like he stabbed himself with a historic $32,000 samurai sword.

This is really close to you Lorelei im telling you the demon hunter is in nyc. Everything is in a radius around that. I have a really bad feeling that ur in danger.

* * *

Grub’s face appears on my screen within seconds of me calling, a black knit hat pulled down low over his disgusting hair. He’s wearing the disturbing clown hoodie again, plus the hat is embroidered with an eyeball that has a knife stuck in it.

“Where were you?” he demands. “You’re always around at night. You freaked me out.”

“Ella’s friend’s house.” I hate myself.

“From the group?” He knows something isn’t right.

I nod, pulse jumping in silent confession. Ella is only tentatively in her bed after eating her nightly bowl of oatmeal and letting me count to the full one hundred while she brushed her teeth. Dee should be back any minute now, though, and she will take over.

“What are you eating?”

He’s chewing something, effortfully.

“Focus, Lorelei, a man is dead. The demon hunter is on the rampage. It’s a bloodbath.”

“Is this the first one that’s actually had any blood?”

He thinks. “I mean, technically, maybe. Yeah, I guess.”

“It looks like su— ” I start, and Grub cuts me off.

“I read everything about him; he wouldn’t have killed himself. He was all about hurting other people. There was something about him, I’m picking up on it, that made people want to fight him. He got in fights everywhere he went.”

“Because he was a jerk.”

“Because he made other people violent.” He widens his eyes significantly at me. No eyeliner tonight.

“He was an MMA fighter, Grub. Not everyone is using dark magic.”

Grub starts ticking off other “victims” on his ever-growing list. The woman in upstate New York who was running an “organic” makeup pyramid scheme with exceptionally carcinogenic products, the guy in Pennsylvania who was straight up just stealing jewelry and, once, a red Tesla. No one can remember anything about him, Grub tells me. Even his family members. The Brooklyn film student who left behind a string of broken hearts, many of them belonging to his professors.

“Kinda like you, Lorelei, just a little?” Grub teases. And quickly adds, “I’m kidding! Just if you sucked.” And then, cracking himself up: “Sucked! Sucked like a succ— ”