Chapter 6
Julian
“So, who are you hiding up in that love shack of yours?” Gina drawled, her voice dripping with mischief as she sprawled across her velvet couch like we were here to talk pleasure rather than work.
The succubus’s apartment was a mess of color and chaos.
A little bit of bohemian chic with a dash of hoarder tendency, the place was full of souvenirs from all her past conquests.
The walls were cluttered with framed artwork, old photographs, and a few questionable artifacts that probably shouldn’t have been displayed so openly.
A ceiling fan spun lazily overhead, stirring the heavy warmth of the room. The scent of sandalwood and jasmine permeated the air, her signature scent for decades. It clung to everything, including the questionable taxidermy perched on the bookshelf.
She had a long, shapely leg draped over the armrest, and a glass of something amber and potent in her hand even though it was barely noon.
That was Gina. Hard to believe she’d been around as long as I had. Which was a very long time. Centuries. I honestly couldn’t remember my early days, and I had no idea when I was… born? Created? Summoned during a blood moon with a goat sacrifice? Who knew.
Demons like me didn’t come with birth certificates.
Just lucky souls without bodies who’d figured out how to give substance and solidity to our soulstuff so we could exist in and interact with the mortal plane.
Incubi and succubi were just a subset who needed to consume sexual energy to stay corporeal.
A little went a long way, and most of the time I indulged because it was fun. Much like the way demons eat food, it was entertaining and pleasurable, and that was essential when one existed for a long time.
Pleasure was the whole point. Without a body, you couldn’t taste, touch, or tease. And being stuck as a ghostly voyeur for eternity? No fucking thank you. That kind of existence would drive me utterly mad. At that point, someone might as well toss me into a soul shredder and call it a day.
Luckily, Gina and I didn’t have to worry about that.
Not as long as our current venture, Delerium, stayed open.
And our little den of sin was thriving. Technically, Gina wasn’t on the lease, or even listed as a partial owner—she claimed to be allergic to responsibility—but she’d been here since day one.
She did her part by luring… err, that is, enticing…
new customers through the door. She also helped organize special events and was technically on the payroll as the marketing manager.
“You’ve already met her,” I said, knowing that if I hid Lily’s identity, it would only make Gina more curious. A curious Gina was the type to try to steal Lily from under my nose, just so she could have a taste herself.
Gina didn’t discriminate. Gender was a suggestion, not a rule. She liked variety. And if someone wasn’t into women? No problem. Gina had a male alter ego named George who could charm the pants off a nun.
But Lily was mine. For now. And that meant making her seem as boring as a tax audit to my longtime friend and fake former wife.
“It’s Prax’s friend. I’m still not quite sure what happened. Either someone spiked her drink, or cast a spell. We’re leaning toward spell. But she passed out in the booth yesterday at Delerium.”
“Oh shit, let me guess. She is also a witch. Just like the ones who recently went missing.”
“You got it. So I offered to watch her until she woke.”
“Good call. We don’t need another visit from the cops. I have to actually be there to charm them, and the pair last time had some kind of counter spell.” She paused, noticing my look. “Aw, crap. They came by again, didn’t they?”
I sighed and told her what happened.
“And yes, they still had that counterspell, but Lily managed to sneak in a bit of magical influence, and some well-planned words, and they left. But that’s not all.
The only reason she was still there was that I had driven her back home, and her place was trashed.
They not only got through but broke all of her magical wards too. ”
“Oh shit! Do you think she’s the next target?” Gina had caught on.
“Yeah, I’m almost sure of it.” I leaned forward, voice low.
“I want to know what happened last night. They fucked with my camera. And I’m pretty sure someone cast a spell on her.
In my fucking establishment. Offensive spells should be immediately detected and countered,”—unless it was self defense, such as in the case of Lily protecting herself from grabby hands— “I didn’t get so much as a peep.
I need you to do what you do best and look into this.
And don’t say anything to anyone else in the operation. ”
“You think someone on the inside is in on it?”
I shrugged. “I hope not. But we can’t be too sure.”
Gina swirled her drink, watching the amber liquid catch the light shining in from the colorful stained-glass windows. “Rune’s late,” she muttered, side-eyeing her cell phone, which sat under a pile of knickknacks on her coffee table.
“Rune’s a DJ,” I said, dragging myself out of the armchair that had molded itself to my ass. I couldn’t get too comfortable because I had more errands to run before I could return to a sexy little witch waiting for me at home. “He operates in his own time zone. But he always pulls through.”
“You know he prefers to be called a sound mage.” Gina wrinkled her nose.
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah. Sure. Just because his turntables are enchanted doesn’t make him a mage. I’ll give him ‘bard with bass drops’ at most.”
Rune wasn’t Delerium’s regular DJ, but we had him in every few months or so when he was in town to visit family. Ever since he got booked for some big music festivals around the world after the fall of The Wall, he’d been strutting around like he was hot stuff. Sound mage my ass.
“He’ll call,” I added.
Gina sighed. “Things were so much simpler back in the day.”
“Simpler, but not easier.” I reached over, stole her drink, and took a giant sip. She didn’t even slap my hand away or complain, which meant she was in full nostalgia mode.
“That I must agree with. The past was… It was something.”
The silence stretched, heavy with old memories.
Then Gina’s gaze brightened. “You remember Prague?”
“Which time?”
“The time with the cabaret. The one with the cursed piano and the bartender who kept hiding from his crazy wife.”
Ah. That Prague.
“We were pretending to be a young newlywed couple from Paris traveling the world after our wedding,” I said, the memory clicking into place.
It was good for those like us who lived a very long time to remember the past once in a while, lest we forgot everything we ever knew. It was so easy for the memories to slip away and be lost forever. Or at least until someone recalled them.
“I was Julien and you were Genevieve,” I added, pronouncing our names in an exaggerated French accent.
“I remember. It was the easiest way to blend in. I got to say, it’s much easier now to be female than it was before. But technology has made things both easier and more difficult.”
That it had. We no longer had the ability to pay with fake coins made from our soulstuff, taking it back secretly once pocketed.
Not to mention, all the cameras and phones everywhere made hiding magic so much more difficult.
Some even believed it was why The Wall, the magical barrier hiding magic and monsters in plain sight, had fallen.
Society had progressed past its scope of action.
As the years passed, it had become harder and harder to hide the fact that we didn’t really age, though we did a good job pretending to.
But aging meant it was more difficult to find new conquests, either alone or together, forcing us to move.
So we moved. City to city. Town to town. Always chasing the next safe haven.
We’d spent several decades in a small town at the foot of the Alps, where we met Prax.
Gina, who’d called herself Gwen then, had hunted with him for a while as I’d busied myself with a few mountain nymphs.
But we’d ended up back in Prague not long after, funny enough, living in the same building decades apart.
“Remember that time the old man recognized you?” I asked.
“Oh gods, yes. That was awkward! We told him I was the daughter, visiting my mother’s old haunts. He bought it. I think. We were lucky he didn’t recognize you.”
“Hard to notice little ole me when his eyes were glued to your cleavage the whole time.”
She snorted. “Perks of the job.”
“I’m glad we found Darlington.”
I couldn’t believe I’d been the one who’d originally resisted coming to the New World.
Even before opening Delerium, it had been much easier to find beings willing to exchange energy for pleasure in a town like Darlington, where most people either had magic or were monsters of some sort.
There’d been plenty of witches who also used sex to recharge their energy who’d been more than willing to trade with us.
Of course, we still ran the chances of a witch or wizard trying to bind us unwillingly. That was what had happened to Prax. But that was his story to tell.
Gina’s phone buzzed, vibrating against a crystal skull.
“Finally! Rune’s awake.”
The next hour was a steady hum of business.
Gina and I locked in the final details with Rune, who, true to form, requested blood orange vodka and a sound circle tuned to 432 Hz.
Weirdo. We arranged delivery of yet another shipment of top-shelf booze from our supplier, who didn’t even blink at the volume anymore.
It was all routine, behind-the-scenes work that kept Delerium humming. But even as I ticked off tasks, my mind kept drifting.
It kept circling back to Lily. Lily in my home. Lily curled up on my couch, probably wrapped in my favorite blanket.
I’d arrived at Gina’s the old-fashioned demon way, by blinking out of existence in my home and reappearing outside her door.
Which meant my phone was still at home, since solid objects didn’t travel with me when I dematerialized.
The part of me touching the object always had to be solid.
Now I was worried Lily might be trying to reach me and couldn’t.
Once everything was done, I stood, ready to leave.
“I’m heading out.”
“Going to check on your little witch?”
“She’s not mine,” I said automatically, then paused. “But yeah. I want to make sure she’s okay.”
Gina smirked, all knowing and smug. “You’re cute when you pretend not to care.”
I flipped her off affectionately. “You’re cute when you pretend not to meddle.”
She blew me a kiss and drifted over to her bar to pour herself another drink. “Go. Be with your witch.”
I rolled my eyes but didn’t argue. Then with a blink of an eye, I disappeared.