Page 42 of Succubus

We come around the corner into the crowded main area. A low, rust-orange ceiling, warm brown walls. Booths in a row, beautiful people talking, partially obscured by the high backs.

I glance down. I pause to read.

I’m pretty sure angels are demon hunters lorelei. Not positive but like 65%. Possible they don’t just heal people but they’re also on a mission to kill everyone like us. They have some weird power over us, like your stuff maybe. Like we can’t resist them? I saw someone say it’s “like a pull.” Unfair advantage. There’s some ancient shit going on here and I don’t understand it yet but you need to get the fuck out of town and ABORT SHERLOCK MISSION on this one. You’re in danger. I knew it. But I didn’t know just how serious. He’s right there Lorelei.

Which is of course when I see him.

He’s right there.

The man waiting for me in the last booth. The demon hunter.

The familiar curls. The glasses catching the candlelight.

He stands up as I come forward. He seems larger than I remember, even though I saw him so recently.

“Joel?” I whisper.

“Tempest,” he says.

PART II

CHAPTER 14

I can’t breathe. So I may die now, before anyone can try to kill anyone else.

We are steps from each other.

“I’ll be back in just a minute,” says the server, melting away.

“It’s you,” Joel says.

“You’re the demon hunter?” I gasp at the same time.

He stares at me. I see then that he is as shocked as I am, one hand lifted as though to push me away. As though to push great floating chunks of reality back into alignment.

“You’re— How can you . . .” he whispers. And then, like he already knows the answer and can hardly abide how vicious the truth can be, “Was it you? Are you the one Adam was with?”

“Yes,” I say. “But— ”

“Two years,” he says, before either of us can learn what my impossible explanation would have been. “Two years searching for you.” He stops speaking, but I wait for the rest. “You lied.” He looks away, his face losing its organization for a moment. He puts a hand over it. “You lied. You’re one of them.”

The piano plays a tricky galloping run that carves an abrupt zigzag canyon in the air, and my voice falls into it when I say, “I didn’t lie. I just didn’t tell you.” The walls of the happy din rise on both sides. “How could I tell you?”

“You didn’t even tell me you knew him.” There’s a kind of dark, retreating wonder in his words. Each one is a step further away from me.

Tectonic tremors course through my legs, shimmy up my spine. I am unstable, I may crash down, I may crack in half and split apart along preexisting hairline fractures. “What was I supposed to say—I’m a succubus? I put your brother in a coma because I slept with him?” I feel the people in the next booth glancing toward me as I get louder at the wrong moment. All the moments are now wrong.

I’m sickeningly dizzy, worlds colliding in my head, orbits upended, galaxies smashing themselves to dust.

“A succubus,” Joel repeats. “You’re the reason. The whole reason! And there I was, telling you how sad I am. How fucking sad I am.” He looks up, and his eyes are furious and drained shallow; his hands have tightened into fists. It’s an expression I could not have pictured on him before now; it doesn’t seem to fit.

“The whole reason?” I fight for balance. “For killing us?” I plant my feet, claim the same square of floor that has been trying to shake me free.

He nods, a cruel, condemning nod without any breath of hesitation in it. “Yes. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing. Destroying every last one of you.”

“You killed Grub,” I whisper. “You killed him.” The floor wins, chucks me forward. I lunge, fall toward him. “He was a child!”

The server is coming back toward us, but with clear purpose; the air is looser, he seems to move faster through it now that people have stopped talking in order to better watch us.