AllFreeNovel
Share Us
THIRTY-EIGHT
Itook the box inside and put it on the kitchen table. Then, after a moment’s thought, I stuck it in the pantry on a shelf with the cleaning supplies and the mousetraps I’d bought and never had the heart to use. Great, I thought, I couldn’t use a mousetrap. What were the chances I was going to use an incubus trap on the man I…
Loved?
Did I love Liam? I’d never said it to him. I’d told him that I wanted him, but I’d never saidI love you.
Did I?
I opened the pantry again and took out a bucket, rubber gloves, and a bottle of ammonia. I filled the bucket with hot soapy water and went out onto the porch. It was a measure of how much I didn’t want to think that cleaning up vomit seemed a preferable activity.
I scrubbed until the paint started coming off the porch boards and I’d mixed a pint of my tears in with the dirty water. Then I brought the bucket and sponge back into the kitchen, washed them out in the kitchen sink, and put them back into the pantry. I took the box Brock had given me out, put it on the kitchen table, and opened it. I squeezed the two iron bracelets into the two front pockets of my jeans and slipped the chain with the key over my head, sliding the key under my shirt where it lay against my breastbone, cold and heavy as my heart. Then I sat down on the couch in the living room—not inthe library where Liam and I had watched movies and made love—and waited for Liam to come home.
The minute I wasn’t moving, my mind became active again. What if it was all a mistake? a desperate voice whined inside my head. Even if there was an incubus on the loose there was no conclusive proof that it was Liam. It could be some other size-thirteen-shoe, J.-Peterman-shirt-wearing old movie buff,notmy Liam.
I heard the key click in the lock.There!It was an iron lock and an iron key. If Liam was an incubus he couldn’t use it, could he? I was so excited by the discovery that I leapt to my feet and ran to meet him at the door. He was in the foyer, his head bowed, a lock of dark hair falling over his eyes as he closed the door behind him. He slid the key back into his wallet—a leather wallet with Eddie Bauer stamped on the outside flap—and he took off his leather cashmere-lined (Lands’ End) gloves, folded them carefully and put them in his (L.L.Bean) coat pocket. His fingers never touched the iron key or the doorknob.
He looked up. The lock of hair still lay over his eyes, like the wing of a black bird shadowing them. The late afternoon sunlight streaming through the stained-glass fanlight above the door threw a streak of red across his cheek, like a smear of blood. As if he’d been devouring something bloody and wiped the blood from his mouth.
“Callie! I didn’t see you there. What’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
He took a step forward and I stepped back. “Hey,” he said, his voice husky. “Are you upset I’m late? Didn’t you get my text?”
“Yes,” I answered, sliding my hands in my pockets. “What did the dean want?”
“Damned if I know. Honestly, I think she might be going senile…or she’s not entirely over her illness. First she wanted to talk to me about starting a poetry reading series. She had a list of poets and she wanted to see what I thought of their workand their ‘characters.’ I explained I didn’t know a lot of American poets personally. Then she got a call and kept me waiting while she took it and then she wanted me to call some of these poets with her. It was strange…but not as strange as how you’re looking at me right now.” He took another step forward—into a swath of blue light from the fanlight that cast a deathly pall over his features—and reached for me. I knew that if I let him touch me it would be all over. Already I could feel myself melting in his eyes. I’d let him kiss me and make love to me right there on the foyer floor. So what if he was an incubus? He wasmyincubus.
I pulled my hands out of my pockets and, as he reached for me, desire and concern mixed in his eyes, I clamped the iron bracelets around his wrists.
The effect was instantaneous. He fell to his knees like a puppet whose strings had been cut, his iron-bound wrists clanking loudly on the wooden floor. My name in his throat came out a scream of agony.
“Good,” I said, making my voice cold. “You can still talk. I wasn’t sure if you’d be able to, and I think you owe me an explanation.”
He lifted his head—slowly, painfully—and looked at me out of the hollow shadowy pits that his eyes had become. His skin, always pale, had gone nearly translucent. The only color in his face came from the play of light from the fanlight, which spread itself on the floor around him like stage lights.
“You know…what I am…What more…do you want to know?” he gasped through gritted teeth.
I knelt down so I could look straight into his eyes. “I want to know why you picked me and what you intended to do with me. When you drained me dry would you have gone on to another victim?”
He shook his head slowly, like an injured animal. “I didn’t…pick you. You…picked me. You wanted…me.” He took a long shuddering breath and then his words seemed to comeeasier. “You wanted me enough to give me flesh…Even as you were telling me to leave, I felt your pity for what had happened to me. And I heard you answering my question…”
“What question?”
“I asked you what more you wanted and you told me…in between the words of the banishment…you told me you wanted decency and caring and a man who really bothered to see who he was trying to seduce.” He looked up at me. “Haven’t I given you those things, Callie? I care about you. I tried to be all those things you asked for.”
I shook my head. “I didn’t ask for lies. All the facts of your life that you told me were lies. The whole story about Jeannie and Moira…it was all a lie!”
“I had to pretend to be someone else to get the chance to know you better. As for the story about Jeannie…that was what happened to me, with only the details changed to modern times. I did love a girl from my village who had a touch of the fey about her and could open the door to Faerie, but I was seduced away by a fairy temptress. You’ve met her. You’ve seen how powerful she is.”
“Fiona? The Fairy Queen?”
“Yesss.” He hissed the word. “She stole me away from my village. I was her captive. She kept me in Faerie so long I lost my humanity…I faded into a shadow…Only a human’s desire can give me flesh, and only a human’s love can give me a soul. But still I broke away…When the fairies were exiled from the old country, when we were on the march to the door, I broke away and came foryou, lass.”
Lass? He’d called me that once before when I first tried to banish him and he’d been betrayed into his true voice. The sound of it summoned the dream for me again.
The dream again rose up inside me: the long march, my comrades fading around me, the dark figure on the white horse coming toward me, his hands reaching for me…I looked up at Liam. The dark eyes were the same, the hands reaching forme were the same. I felt the iron key, hot now, burning against my bare skin.Turn right to send him to the Borderlands, left to free him.
“So you’re saying that I’m…what? The reincarnation of the girl you loved centuries ago? Is that why you want me? Because I remind you of her?”
