Chapter 7 #2
I wasn’t sure if energy starvation took the same toll as physical deprivation, but there were symptoms. The incubus had a problem I’d taken it upon myself to solve.
No, it wasn’t nearly that altruistic.
Luxe called me chivalrous; maybe I’d let the compliment go to my head.
Colette finished wrapping my knuckle, then stood and stepped back. “I thought they fed on vibes, not flesh.”
She waved for me to watch my legs as she swung the passenger door shut. Walking around the hood, she climbed into the driver’s seat and donned the black cap and gloves she’d left on the dash. As she adjusted her hat in the rearview mirror, I offered a belated reply.
“I think he’s new.”
“Bien s?r.”
The keys hung from the ignition, adorned with a brass bullet casing salvaged from her revolver. Colette started the engine, and the Lincoln rocked into drive, rolling toward the stream of cars patrolling the Strip.
“No, I mean new, new,” I clarified. “He’s young. Fresh.”
“And sexy?” Colette eyed me.
I tested my bandaged finger, mentally recounting the evening from the moment I saw the incubus swathed in silks to the way he looked on his back, his face lit by the glow pouring through that barred window.
“Beautiful,” I murmured, mostly to myself, but of course, Colette missed nothing.
“You didn’t kiss him, did you?”
Glancing over, I found her wearing an apprehensive frown.
There were myriad reasons I didn’t make a habit of affiliating with incubi or succubi.
Their entire existence was based on predatory instincts, and they had supernatural gifts to further the cause of securing and subduing prey.
I wasn’t as vulnerable to those charms as a human, but I wasn’t completely immune.
And I refused to be fucking prey.
Accepting a kiss from an incubus was as good as giving consent.
Like a few of nature’s other hunters, sex demons secreted venom in their saliva.
Ingesting it put their victim under a spell and formed a thrall bond that could linger for weeks or months.
For humans, it often ended fatally, with their wills broken and bodies reduced to husks.
I was offended Colette even asked, like I would succumb so easily to the young demon’s charms. I wasted no time in assuring her.
“No, I didn’t kiss him.”
“C’est bien.” She bobbed her head.
We merged into a gap in traffic, heading north on Las Vegas Boulevard toward the Grecian Hotel, where I had a residential suite. Progress was predictably slow, and I settled in my seat while pushing my bloodied suit coat into the floorboard.
“I assume the deal with Livingston went south,” Colette said after a few moments of quiet.
I grunted assent. “His son caught him selling surveillance tech to private militaries. Wants to turn him in. He deserves every bit of what he’s got coming.”
I left out that the way Livingston had manhandled Cherry was infinitely more problematic than his dodgy business practices. Almost as problematic as why I’d felt the need to fuck him afterward, lick him and make him mine or some shit.
Colette tested her gloved hands on the steering wheel. “Well, you didn’t get back in the deal-making game, but you blew the cobwebs off your sex life, so… not a total loss?”
Cobwebs. I scoffed.
Sure, it had been a while since my last dalliance, but I hadn’t expected to stumble and fall into bed with an overeager incubus. Maybe I’d been deprived enough to be just as hungry as he was.
Still, the whole thing was absurd. I slept with a prostitute. Rather, I accepted sexual favors from a prostitute who felt like he owed me something when all he needed was a good meal. I was better than that. I should have been better than that.
“I shouldn’t have gone there,” I said, slumping. “Fucking pretty boys.”
Colette snickered. “That’s a little on the nose.”
I rolled my head toward her, not bothering to mask my fatigue. “Have you ever heard of noodling, Coll?”
She raised a blonde brow. “Like noodle making?”
“No, just noodling,” I replied. “In the southern states, they have these massive, mud-and-shit-eating fish that live in muddy, shitty holes underwater.”
“And you’re telling me this why?”
“Just listen. Some backwoods genius decided the best way to catch the damn things was to stick their hand in one of those muddy, shitty holes and wiggle their finger until a mammoth fish thinks it’s a worm and takes a bite.” I indicated my bandaged appendage. “That’s what happened to me tonight.”
Colette pondered that, like what I’d said was profound rather than absurd. “Are you saying the incubus’s mouth was a muddy, shitty hole?” she asked at length.
“I’m saying that place is.” I jerked my thumb over my shoulder at the Devil’s Dollhouse fading slowly into the distance.
Colette glanced back at the sign with the neon red demon swishing its tail back and forth. “I don’t know, Beck. It’s a pretty nice club…”
“It’s shady,” I grumbled, thinking again of barred-over windows and mattresses tossed on the floor.
“And shitty,” Colette added. “And muddy.”
“And I almost lost my damn finger.” I sighed.
After a few moments of silence, Colette clapped her hand against the steering wheel. “So, the incubus was the fish!”
“Forget it.” I waved her off.
The limo continued its sluggish advance along the Strip.
It wasn’t the first time I’d considered that walking might have been better than dealing with the hell that was Las Vegas traffic.
But Colette took her job of chauffeur seriously, and her task of bodyguard even more so.
I couldn’t have her drawing her revolver on the first pedestrian that bumped into me. Humans spooked far too easily for that.
Ahead on the right, the Grecian Hotel & Casino came into view.
Its white, windowed edifice loomed over the manmade river that wound throughout the entire property.
It had been called the Venetian years ago, before the demons took it over.
New management turned the Italy-inspired boat ride into a hellish tribute to the river Styx, and the sky-painted ceilings inside now depicted characters and scenes from the Greek pantheon.
I’d called the place home even before the renovation, but it felt cozier now. Taking the demon out of Hell didn’t take Hell out of the demon, I supposed. That infernal place would always have its hooks in me.
While I studied the fountain spewing black water on the Grecian’s front lot, Colette flashed another cheeky smile.
“What’s his name?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” Irritation edged my words. I thought we were done talking about the damn incubus.
Colette clucked her tongue. “You didn’t ask?”
“His stage name is Cherry,” I replied. “They don’t use their real names. It’s a… privacy thing.”
“You mean like you smashing your privates into his?” Again with the finger dicks colliding like bumper cars.
She giggled her way through it, going so far as to pucker her lips and make a noisy smooching sound before I muttered, “I’m starting to think you don’t know much about sex.”
“Certainly not as much as an incubus. He must be an expert.”
I barked a laugh. “No, no, I wouldn’t say that. Not an expert. He was… adequate.”
And reluctant. Shifting away from me like a shrinking violet until I started pegging his prostate.
Colette hummed an amused sound. “Sing his praises, why don’t you?”
“He’s pretty,” I admitted.
“You said beautiful.”
My expression soured. I had said that, but it didn’t bear repeating.
“Okay, pretty,” Colette allowed. “But bad in bed.”
“Not bad…”
“Not great?”
“He bit me,” I reminded her, waving my bandaged hand and hoping that would be the end of it.
Colette only smiled. “And before that?”
I heaved a breath, defeated. “Not great.”
Chuckling, Colette navigated the limo into our reserved spot in the property’s parking garage, and we parted ways. She had a room on the floor below mine, and tonight I found myself grateful for the distance.
I didn’t want to think about failed deals or my nonexistent sex life, but as I boarded the elevator climbing to the upper levels of the casino hotel, those were the only things on my mind.
Not the deal or the sex so much as how Cherry had looked curled up in the corner of his ratty bed, hugging his pillow like a child holding a teddy bear.
Apologetic, I’d thought, in the wake of having sunk his fangs into my finger. But was there more to it than that? More to him than bumbling come-ons and adequate sex?
I shook my head, ridding myself of such thoughts before they could take root.
It was a hookup, and the incubus was a whore.
One I would never see again because stepping into the Devil’s Dollhouse was a mistake I would not repeat.
I refused to be sucked into that muddy, shitty hole because I knew what the noodlers didn’t: every time they caught a fish, the fish also caught them.