Page 97 of Succubus

His healing touch, the way it kills us. It’s supposed to kill us. We’re supposed to die.

Is he right? Am I a disease? Not really human? Am I evil?

Al said no, I’m good. But I’m unusual for it. For trying to be good. The evil is very much there in me. And now that I’ve been feeling so strong, can I really return to weakness? I don’t feel noble, like he seemed to think I am. I feel like I can hardly last a day. I feel like I’m on the verge of splitting apart like dry wood, cracking down the center.

I shake my head as though a biting fly has landed on me and I refuse to be bitten.

My chest begins to ache as I push myself faster. I want the thud of my shoes on the pavement to blot out my thoughts, to fill my head with nothing but forward movement.

But I am home already, at the top of our little hill, the dried-out echinacea bristling against the porch, Piggie lounging, oblivious, in the chill dusk, the cold moon swollen just above the trees. I pant for a few moments on the porch, bent over, hands on my thighs, bile spiking in my throat. There it is, my limit. I almost didn’t notice I had reached it.

And then Dee is in the doorway, and light pours out of the house in a sudden river. I straighten as she says, “Fuck,” and I realize she’s regained her memory, she knows what I did, she’s furious.

But it’s not fury.

“I thought you were Ella,” she says. “We can’t find her!”

“What?”

“Mom got distracted. I thought she was watching her, I was upstairs. She’s just—gone.” She’s not panicking, that isn’t her way, but she’s incandescent with alarm.

“Did you check the nook?” A window seat on the stairs up to Mom’s room we turned into a little blanket cave for Ella.

“Of course. And the backyard. Why would she go outside, though?”

“She wouldn’t.” Ella doesn’t do things like that. Ella likes things to be predictable and safe. “Al is out looking for her, but he said he can’t smell her as well as you or something because she doesn’t have the right blood— I don’t know!”

I push past Dee into the house. “Ella!” I call, just in case she’s angry and needs to hear from me specifically.

There’s no answer.

“Is she mad at you for some reason?” Dee asks, as tuned in as always.

“Maybe.”

She doesn’t remember. She doesn’t know I hit Ella. It has been erased.

I don’t even know where to look; they’ve already looked. Here’s Mom, coming out of the library/art room/mudroom, frazzled and fraying, guilt radiating off her.

“I must’ve turned around for a minute, just a minute,” she emphasizes to me.

Dee holds up a banishing hand at this.

I turn on my heel, staring stupidly across the kitchen. And then I see something. Or rather, I don’t see something.

The skateboard is missing.

I left it right there, propped against the shoe basket on the other side of the bench by the front door. Ella was supposed to take it down to the basement, but she forgot, of course, and it’s been there since we went to the playground and got stalked by Joel. Since we met Al. The helmet had ended up in the basket with the shoes, as Ella’s outerwear tends to, but it isn’t there now. Her pink coat with the flying rabbits is also gone.

“She went out,” I say, and then I’m rushing outside again.

Where did she go? To the park? I whirl back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the house, startling a woman walking her dog. She tiptoes quickly away, around the corner.

“How long has she been gone?” I call back to Dee, who turns out to be right behind me.

“Not long—we’ve only been looking for, I don’t know, minutes, maybe—but I don’t know how long it took Mom to tell me. It feels long, it’s probably not that long.”

But I don’t see Ella.