Page 16 of Whispers From The Dark

“I’m not sure I have a good enough sample size to go by, but they’re not the same. My favorite series has demons, but they have their own bodies and they have long, forked tongues⁠—”

“Oh, that pleases you,” I say, noticing how her soul flares with lust. But I lose all momentum when I realize what those books make her yearn for.

Release.

I only see a glimpse of her naked body in the shower, cold tile wall against her back, as her fingers flutter just out of sight.

“If demons intrigue you so much, with those flexible forked tongues, I’m surprised you’ve never sought one out.”

“Please, shut the fuck up and get me into my apartment,” she says, but there is heat pooling between her thighs. She knows it, I know it, she knows I know it, but I generously decide not to torment her.

With a flick of her scarred wrist, I unlock the door to her building, although if she tugged just a bit harder, it probably would have opened. The building isn’t maintained very well. She trudges up the stairs to her apartment and stills at the door. She doesn’t have a key for this one either.

“What do I get in exchange for opening this door?”

“What do you want?” she whispers.

“Only a few decades ago, humans would have tossed women like you into an asylum.”

“I don’t need you to mansplain historical misogyny and stigmatization of mental illness to me.”

“Demonsplain?”

She wishes I had a physical body so she could shove me down the stairs. I laugh, and I don’t miss the way it makes her body grow taut.

“Puritanical ideology took quite a few of my favorites and locked them away. Show me what you take for granted, Petra. Pull out one of your novels and show me what it makes you long for.”

She hesitates, not willing to voice her question aloud for a long moment. In the end, she only says it in her mind. You want me to read a book and touch myself?

“It is consistent with who I am, is it not?”

She thinks about it, pondering what it would be like to touch her body while I inhabit it, but she shakes herself out of the images far too quickly.

“I can’t,” she whispers, and I’m pleased when I realize the run-down sofa she’s imagining is her bed, and the reason for her hesitance is the lack of privacy and nothing more.

“Forget the book then, love,” I say, surprised by my desperation. There is little I want more than to watch her give in. It’s easy to see that Petra rarely prioritizes pleasure, and I’m on edge just thinking about how delicious her long-neglected urge will taste. “The shower will suffice.”

“This is bullshit,” she thinks. “Any other stressful day, I’d get off in the shower to help put me to sleep. And now, a demon wants me to do it, so I can’t.”

“Why do you feel as if you can’t, Petra?”

“Stop listening to my thoughts!”

“I couldn’t if I tried. You’re so…loud.” Before she can respond, I continue. “Do you ever touch yourself because you want to? Or is it only to lull you to sleep?”

For the first time, her mind goes utterly blank.

“I mean, of course I want to,” she says, and I struggle to stop myself from lifting her lips into a smirk. Petra notices, but she’s unable to say anything. “I want to, and I want to go to sleep. It’s a win-win.”

“I suppose it could be a win-win for you and me too. You get to relax, and I get to feed on your pleasure.”

She tries to keep her thoughts empty, and it’s quite impressive that she is able to muffle them. But I can still see glimpses of memories containing a haggard woman who shares some of her same features. In one moment, she’s shaming Petra for her job. In another, she’s tugging on a backpack Petra is holding, the worn material covered in pins and patches and marker. I assume she’s younger—maybe high school—and it’s confirmed when a teenage Petra stops at a mirror near the door, only a few years older than she was at The Crossroads. She picks at a blemish as her mom’s hoarse rattle follows her.

“Easy slut. The entire neighborhood thinks my daughter is a whore!”

Down the stairs and outside the apartment building, she shouts obscenities at her daughter in this memory. There are other—far more clever—ways to be evil, but Petra’s mother had chosen the easiest route.

I might be the devil-blessed Prince of Lust, but I believe in justice. It is rare that I find fondness for someone enough to make me want to eviscerate those who wrong them—and yet.