Page 9 of Succubus

It’s sunny and safe feeling, but for some reason, I think of the demon hunter. The pretend serial killer Grub imagines is lurking nearby.

A demon hunter?

Come on.

Then again, how far-fetched am I?

A dirty white car glides to a near stop fifteen feet away, its windows tinted. I’m suddenly sure that it has followed us here. What will I do if the door erupts open, if someone leaps out? I grab Ella’s arm.

The car passes us.

“What’s wrong, Titi?” She looks scared.

“Nothing. It’s okay.” I release her. “Sorry, Els.”

Now that it’s gone, it seems like the car wasn’t particularly suspicious after all. But I can’t shake the feeling that something has been nudged askew. The delicate equilibrium of my life has unbalanced, and I am tipping toward a darkness I can’t quite see.

* * *

I stretch out in bed, my body a Jenga tower collapsing into a pile of aching blocks, and open my reading app. I can hear Dee doing the bedtime routine, counting aloud while Ella brushes her teeth because Ella gets stressed if she doesn’t brush the right amount. I flick past the award-winning novel I keep meaning to read— “A surgical evisceration of the rapacity of modernity”—and click into Mountain Rose, the story of a woman who moves home to a small town in the (you guessed it) mountains, secretly pregnant after a wild night with the powerful CEO she is pretending not to be madly in love with. He’s mysterious and aloof, and she’s going to be shocked when he follows her to Montana. . . .

Fine. I give in and google Joel Tav (again), and my phone buzzes in my hand like a warning. I jump, guilty.

It’s Grub. He’s done some digging, and he thinks the angel doctor is Joel Tav, who is a member of the local synagogue. He wants me to go there and stalk him. When I don’t immediately respond, he calls.

“We should probably forget about this angel thing,” I snap. “You can’t believe every random thing you read on the internet!”

“That’s why you have to investigate,” he insists. “Because otherwise how could anyone even believe in us?”

“No one does believe in us.”

“Okay, fair. Except the demon hunter. Who may actually be one of us. . . . Do you think it’s Dorothy?” An actively rude fiftysomething woman from freaksofnature whose DP is that everything anyone eats around her tastes rotten. And sometimes like feces. Whatever that tastes like!

“Hang on.” Ella is coming in to hug me good night.

“The kid?” Grub asks when she’s gone. He doesn’t like how much of my attention Ella gets. “Did you tell her yet to switch to electric bass? Violin’s a weak-ass instrument.”

“She’s seven.”

“When I was seven I started cutting myself.”

“Exactly. That’s what we’re trying to avoid.”

He considers. “No, wait. I think I was eight. My brain’s being slow.” He sounds mournful. “I’m getting that urge a little.”

When we don’t give in to our powers, we get punished for it. I get weaker, Grub gets slower. Cruelly, when Grub causes the people he loves to feel miserable, he gets smarter. He skipped a grade the last time he lost control of his DP. And I get stronger when—well, you know when.

“You’re smart no matter what,” I promise him. “Trust me.”

“Eh, maybe.” He needs a pep talk, so I do one. The theme is inner strength, which I thought I had a lot of until just recently.

“Sometimes I think we’re the only nice Dows out there,” he mutters.

After I hang up, I look at the results of my internet search. I click a link I’ve already clicked and reread that Joel did a joint program at Juilliard and Columbia, music and premed. Oh, and here’s an obituary for Adam, rising star in the math department at Princeton when he died. He is survived by his brother, Dr. Joel Tav. Just one name. Just the two of them, and then just one.

The coma was your fault, my brain whispers to itself. I try to argue, But maybe I’m not responsible for his death? For the truck?

You just want to touch his brother, my brain parries. His brother! You’re horrifying! You’ll kill him, too.