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Garrett snorts. “Please. All three of you—and Gideon, too—are control freaks. You get it from Damaris.” He winces and looks around.
I look around too, but I don’t know what we’re looking for.
“She can’t hear you,” Asher says dryly. “She’s three blocks away.”
“With her, you never know,” Garrett whispers.
“Who’s Damaris?” And do I want to meet her or avoid her? It’s hard to tell.
Micah smirks. “Our grandmother. You’ll meet her tomorrow. She’s on the village council.”
“You’ll be fine,” Garrett reassures me, even though I don’t know why I need to be reassured. “She’s happy about the cave.”
“Now,” Asher mutters. I feel like there’s a story there, but I want to get back to my earlier question before we start shooting off on tangents.
“You were going to tell me why nobody knows much about incubi,” I remind them. “Also, now that I think of it, do you not haveanyliving here? That’s… weird.” I know the place gets cut off by snow, but it still seems weird that nobody from my species lives here.
“One of my teachers at the school is a succubus,” Garrett volunteers. “But other than her—and she’s only here until June—no.”
“Really? None?”
Micah sighs. “Aside from Garrett and his staff at the school, and Zoe, the sorcerer who clears out the snow, there are only demons living here.”
I process that. “Is this payback for me teasing you before? You’re trying to trick me now?”
“It’s not that weird,” Asher protests. “It just… happened that way.”
“It’s weird,” Garrett tells him firmly, then turns to me. “What I’ve been given to understand is that demons originally liked to choose settlements based on how defendable they were.”
“That sounds sensible.” I have no idea if it is or not, but defending a settlement has to be a good thing, right?
“It is. But the most defendable places are the ones that can’t be accessed easily. For demons, that’s not a problem—they can teleport. But a lot of others don’t want to live somewhere that’s so hard to come and go from.”
I nod, getting it. “So it ended up being just demons living there.”
“Yep. When they moved here, to Switzerland, it was the same story—they picked this place because it’s away from human eyes and they don’t have to hide as much. But it’s cut off by snow for a quarter of the year—”
“What?” I lean forward. “Cut off? Like… nobody can leave? At all? Forthree months?”
“It’s not that bad,” Zac murmurs.
Garrett glares at him. “Not for you, who can teleport anywhere you like anytime you like.”
Micah leans in and whispers, “Garrett’s still mad because we forgot he’d be trapped in his house after the first blizzard.”
I turn to look at him and find his face only inches away. A tingly shiver shoots through me, the kind I haven’t felt in too long. The downside of passive feeding via nearby strip clubs is that I haven’t bothered to leave my house and have sex anytime recently. I wonder if Micah would be willing to end my dry streak.
“Why was he trapped?” I whisper back while Garrett and Zac bicker.
Micah shrugs. “We didn’t have a snowplow then. Or Zoe.”
It dawns on me what he means, that the snow was so deep, Garrett literally couldn’t leave the house. No wonder the whole village gets cut off.
It sounds perfect. No outside world to bother me, just uninterrupted time with my puzzles. Too bad there’s also no takeout delivery. Starvation would ruin puzzle time pretty quickly. No wonder there are only demons living here.
“But you have the plow now?” I check. The road was definitely plowed when we walked over here, but still… I don’t love the idea of starving to death. Or what if I run out of a number four bolt and need to run to the hardware store? I can’t do that if there’s snowdrifts taller than me at my front door.
“And Zoe,” Micah assures me. I’m still not entirely sure who Zoe is, but she seems to be part of the snow removal process, so that’s good.
