Page 78 of Succubus

He furrows his brow at me, maybe concerned about my hearing. “I can do more.” He lifts his hand very slightly and I shove it down again. His skin is oddly cool.

“No! No, thanks. That was—fine.”

He touches the place where I touched him. “Human skin,” he says. “I always enjoy it. Like a cloud. A warm cloud.”

Excellent. Fantastic. This is going really well. Thanks, Dad.

“So,” he says, tugging one of his earlobes with appreciative focus, “you are convinced.” He smiles, takes a breath. “The earth is moist here.” He looks at his RV, apprehension showing. His expressions are all transparent, slightly too big. “Maybe you would be able to bring me to the . . .” He utters a word I can’t understand, but I know he means Joel. “. . . in your own carriage?”

I’m going to have to handle this delicately. I’m not a wimp about pain. I have certainly lived with a steady slow-torture level of it for a long time. I have also been around it more than the average person, holding up laboring women as they endure extreme amounts, looking into their eyes and breathing with them and getting the bones in my fingers crunched as they clutch my hands through contractions and we make our vocalizations low and powerful together. I am familiar with pain. But I have never seen it like that boy on the sidewalk. I really, really don’t want to feel that, whatever it was. And I also don’t want Joel to die that way.

Yes, he has to die. I already know that. I’ve already decided. Several times.

He has to die. But my way is much more civilized. Much more natural. Kinder, more humane.

“You’re clearly very good at, um, what you do,” I say. “That was very impressive.” He looks at me with his lizard stare, unblinking and thoughtful. “But I’d prefer to kill the—can we just call him an angel?—myself. I started the . . . process.” An image of Joel, my hands spread on his bare chest, comes instantly to mind, and I wince. “So I think I should be the one to finish it.”

Al waits, seeming to think I have more to say. It turns out I do.

“Anyway, he knows something. There’s information he has that I want. Before he dies.” I’m speaking a little too quickly.

“I can get the information for you,” offers Al neutrally. “It is usually very easy, with the right amount of pain. And humans are so delicate.”

“Right, of course,” I say, on the verge of stuttering. “I’m sure you can. But I still think I’d like to handle it. I’m sorry that you were summoned unnecessarily. Is there anything I can do to help you . . . go back?”

His chin drops. He’s dejected like a toddler at the thought. “Oh. Well. It would be sad to leave so soon after arriving in this lovely body.” He strokes his knuckle hair proprietarily. “But also, I am bound to protect you. So even if you have claimed the . . .” He stops himself halfway through the harsh-sounding, unpronounceable word and tries again: “Ang-gale as your own to extinguish, as is your right, I will stay until it is done.”

It’s my right! Good! “Angel,” I correct.

“An-gel.”

But the staying part. We both look at the RV.

“Inside is a very comfortable sleeping nest,” Al explains. “And a bowl for emptying the waste of the body. It gets carried away and I cannot see where it goes. Maybe it is destroyed in the belly of the carriage.”

“I think you should come inside to use our bathroom,” I say, resigned.

He brightens. “That would be nice to use,” he agrees, and it’s clear he doesn’t know what a bathroom is. “And also, if you have anything for me to eat . . . I did stop along the way to catch some fish, but my body is already hungry again. The stomach doesn’t hold very much, unfortunately. My last one was a little larger, although all human stomachs are too small.”

I don’t try to imagine the proportions of a demon stomach.

* * *

It rains for a few hours that evening. I can hear Al downstairs on the couch with Mom, laughing uproariously—Al braying, Mom shrieking—as they watch something on her phone. I’m hiding in my room. Dee has taken Ella out for dinner, thank God. She seemed disconcerted by Al’s presence, but when I explained that he’d only be here briefly and that it was important to me to talk with him about Dick Face, she seemed unusually convinced. She agreed almost instantly to let him stay. You can never quite tell how people will react to things. Or maybe I’m just losing my ability to discern how people should feel and act in general. I haven’t exactly been within normal parameters myself for a while now.

It was a relief that Dee agreed so easily to Al, because I’m more than a little concerned that he might be motivated to use his pain skills on her if she decides to pose a problem.

I write to Dorothy, the fiftysomething woman in Chicago whose DP makes food taste like literal shit. Does she know any of the other groups? We need to get the word out to an accountant in New Hampshire and a painter in Ohio: They are in danger. I send some more messages—how can we reach them?

But no one knows who they are. Maybe Joel was lying.

He doesn’t seem like a liar. It’s his face. There’s that sweetness in it, a calm in the space between his features; you can’t quite convince yourself that this is a person who would wish anyone ill, let alone actively hurt someone.

But he has. And he will again. And I’m the only one who has any chance at all of stopping him. Except for a pain demon named Al who is discovering the explosive magic of YouTube in my living room. Al will stop Joel for good, if I just give him Joel’s address. If I just give him my okay.

I’m pacing. Actually, I’m walking in a small circle, which might be different from pacing. It certainly must look stupider and more futile.

Now music is blasting downstairs. It seems to be . . . a Beethoven sonata?