Page 40 of Succubus

Maybe I’m paranoid.

But Grub is dead. And I watched Dick Face in his stained shorts, bending people to his contemptible will.

“Keep your bow in the middle lane,” I say. Ella’s face tightens. She is already at her breaking point, driven to the edge of furious defeat by the mere suggestion that she might not be getting something right.

How am I doing any of this? Grub is dead. I have no one to talk to.

I pick up my phone from the top of the upright piano. I scroll to Joel’s name. My thumb hovers over it.

No. Obviously not.

I go to my last conversation with Grub. It’s automatic.

What am I going to do? Text him that I really need to talk to him? That we need to put on a movie where a brilliant astrophysicist flies her tiny spaceship into a wormhole in an effort to go back in time to when her daughter was alive. We can put it on in the background while we talk about how he is dead now, too.

Ella squeaks through another measure, which sounds the same as the last one. Maybe she’s lost.

I am scrolling pointlessly, my eyes stuck on the screen. And then I stop. I focus. Check signal, he wrote. I totally forgot. I got completely sidetracked by the rest of it, the part about meeting someone. The part where he stopped because he was already dying, already gone. It must have happened quickly, because he would’ve written otherwise. Unless the demon hunter took his phone. Another real possibility. Which would explain how he found me.

I can no longer hear Ella’s violin. A humming, aggressive silence fills my ears. I stumble through pages of apps, get to Signal. I click on the link Grub sent, I follow the instructions, download a “decoder bot.” I select the file he emailed me. I run the program.

“Is that enough?” Ella asks.

“Fine,” I say.

“Really?” She sounds like she’s getting away with something.

I nod. It says it has decrypted 0.3 percent of the file. This is going to be slow.

“Can I watch a movie?” she tries.

“Do the podcast. The . . .” I’m forgetting the name. I remember: “Once Upon the World.”

“Okay.” She puts her violin down on the nearest chair. She studies me, her eyes concerned. “You look sad, Titi.” She says it tentatively, as though she suspects this may be rude, or presumptuous, or just not something children should say to their caretakers. Sometimes she is so fine-tuned, so alertly aware, it stuns me. I feel tears fill my eyes like I’m a pitcher pouring from the inside. I turn quickly away. “I’m okay, baby.”

“Are you really okay?” Outside the living room window, our dogwood tree is purplish red and the patch of visible sky is obliviously blue. The colors seem wrong, callous.

“I’m a little sad, sweetie,” I choke.

Her arms instantly go around me, and she hugs me so hard I think one of us is going to bruise.

* * *

I am on the New Jersey turnpike, driving to the city. It’s 7:03 and I meant to leave much sooner, to be there really early, for a stakeout. The obvious move. But Mom forgot she was supposed to cancel her yoga club tarot night, and by the time I could get through to her friend Joyce— Anyway, yes, I missed the stakeout. I am late to what may be the most treacherous, important event of my life. That is what happens when you are responsible for a child. You can’t get out of the house even when you really need to kill someone. Even when it’s someone very evil.

* * *

Parking is impossible. I parallel park in town sometimes, but when I try it here in a too-small spot that turns out to have a hydrant in it anyway, the guy behind me starts honking like I’m committing a crime. I end up in a garage that charges a shocking amount for a couple hours. Then I’m walking to the speakeasy off Seventh Avenue.

It’s 8:04 and chilly.

He will already be there. I know that.

Stay strong, I tell myself, the words meaningless mush in my mind. I fish around in my bag for my pepper spray in the cute pink canister. It feels small under my fingers, and when I lift it, a loose Band-Aid comes along. I carry them at all times in case Ella gets a scrape or even an imaginary scrape.

Dick Face said I could do this. But he was really drunk.

This is a terrible, ridiculous plan. It’s not even a plan at all.