AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Abandoning my onion rings, I climb down from the stool and pull my magic forward, letting it wrap around my arms and snap between the tips of my fingers. He nods once at me and rips the door open.
Before I can fully register what’s happening, he’s tossing a succubus to the floor, boot on her throat. “Tarnley, careful.” I lunge forward as the young woman squirms against his hold.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” she chokes out, red-tipped nails wrapped around Tarnley’s ankle.
He ignores the both of us. “Why are you here?”
“I. Need. Help. Please, get off of me. I swear I won’t hurt anyone.”
Tarnley meets my gaze, so I offer him a nod, and he releases her, then steps back beside me. “Try anything and I will make you wish you were dead.”
“I’m not going to.” She stands and brushes the front of her jeans with shaking hands. Her thick, black hair is braided down her back, and her face is completely makeup-free, revealing a massive purple bruise on her cheek. Honestly, she looks absolutely nothing like a succubus. If it weren’t for the subtle magic lingering around her, I likely would have thought her human.
Typically, her kind dresses as scandalously as they can get away with in public, and this girl is wearing a sweatshirt and baggy jeans.
“Why are you here?” I repeat Tarnley’s question.
“I told you I need help.”
“How so?”
“The council is recruiting,” she says. “They’re looking for people to join their fight against you guys.”
While it’s not particularly surprising information, it does seem to prove that they didn’t run as we’d hoped the bastards would. “They said as much?”
She nods. “They sent letters with your pictures in it to every faction leader in the country.”
“I’m flattered,” Tarnley retorts.
I would love to focus on that, but right now, I turn my attention to the immediate concern. Why a succubus would be standing here in Tarnley’s pub, and why, if everyone is hunting us, they haven’t started here. “That doesn’t explain why you’re here.”
“My mother told me of her plans to join the council, and she attempted to pull me into it, too, but I told her no. Hence, this.” She gestures to the bruise on her face.
Surprising that she said no.“Why?”
“For one, the council has never done anything for me, and neither has my mother. She never understood why I didn’t want to be—her.”
“You are what you are, though. A succubus.”
“Not if I don’t go through the change.”
There isn’t much known about succubae, other than the fact that they are notoriously evil and seek to only cause pain and misery. No one knows their history—their origin—and until this moment, it was relatively unknown that they went through a change of some kind.
“What change?” Tarnley questions.
The girl flushes, cheeks turning a bright pink. She swallows hard. “Succubus can only mate with human men, just as incubus can only mate with human females. We are all half-human, and in order to become a true succubus, you must first feed.”
“As in?” Tarnley presses.
The girl’s color shifts from pink to deep crimson, so I decide to save her the trouble of telling him herself. “Sex, Tarnley.”
“Oh. Okay. Sorry.” He runs a hand over the back of his head and averts his eyes to the wall to our right.
“Not just sex,” she whispers the last word like it’s dirty. For someone like her, whose entire life has likely been learning about sex, it probably feels that way. “There’s a whole ritual where you must drink the blood of your partner. Once you do that, your magic is no longer dormant, and to complete the ritual, you use that magic to feed on the essence of your partner, which will kill them. And if you haven’t gone through the change by the day you turn eighteen, you lose your power for good and become human.”
“Really?”
She nods. “I don’t want anything to do with any of it. Iwantto be normal. To get to have a normal relationship, a normal job, kids—and absolutely nothing to do with this world.”
