Chapter 8 #3
Thalia looked offended. “I do not live here. I told you, this is”—she gestured at the closed door—“her mess. I’d never settle for such a state.
I’m shocked you would think so.” She sniffed and glided into the kitchen where she pulled bottles out of a cabinet.
“There are parties, and I am drawn to them. Tasty, succulent things. Sometimes I become too sated to move on. Sometimes I linger.”
The aura surrounding Pippa now was warm and comfortable. Letting herself melt into it felt like she was sliding into a heated, blanketed bed. Pippa relished the sensation for a long minute. She felt . . . nice.
Thalia broke through her luxuriating.
“You are tired,” she said.
“Did your succubus powers tell you that?”
“The bags under your eyes did.”
Pippa glanced up at Thalia. She was leaning over the counter, propped up on her elbows and giving Pippa the sort of look a kind bartender would give a distressed patron.
“The past few days have been . . .” Oh stars, how was she going to finish that sentence?
Awful?
Confusing?
Deeply traumatic yet somehow honestly a little tiny bit nice because I haven’t ever had anyone help me like Maxim has?
Pippa settled on a high, noncommittal whine accompanied by a shrug.
Thalia braced her elbows on the counter and placed her chin in her hand.
“Ah.” Her robe slithered over her skin as if it was made of something too intangible to be fabric.
She gave a soft smile. “I’d better make you that drink, then.
” She shifted her robe into place, then grabbed a few glasses from a cabinet.
Pippa traced a crack on the counter. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d come back to New Hawkshead?” The last time she’d seen Thalia over a year ago, the succubus had blown her a kiss from a departing car. Off to grand locations and grander lifestyles, and the anonymity only a huge city could provide.
Thalia paused before setting the glasses on the counter in front of Pippa. Her gaze flicked up and met Pippa’s, the pale blue of her eyes seeming sharper than usual.
“Did they accept you?” she said instead of answering Pippa’s question.
A weight settled into Pippa’s stomach. “No.” And then, just like always, she forced herself to add, “Not yet.”
When Thalia looked all to the world as if she’d like nothing more than to shake Pippa by her shoulders, Pippa blundered on.
“I’m sure they’d be fine with me seeing you, though. You don’t kill. You feed off orgasm energy. It’s nothing like the type they worry about. You leave people sated and mildly hungover. I’m sure they—”
“Would still see me as a demon,” Thalia finished. She pursed her lips. “Ash Coven members don’t interact with demons. You might become . . .” She sniffed. “Biased.”
“Is that why you didn’t reach out to me? Because you don’t approve of me?”
Thalia let out a frustrated sigh. “I rarely approve of what you want to do with your life. That doesn’t mean I would ever disapprove of you. I . . . I would not want to get in the way.”
Pippa reached out and grabbed Thalia’s hands, then looked right into those pale blue eyes. “I will always want you to get in my way.”
Thalia gave a very inelegant snort. “I will hold you to that, Philippa Beverly.” Despite her air of nonchalance, she gave Pippa’s hands a firm squeeze that lasted long enough to count as a hug, then began to pour liquor into the glasses.
“So. The past few days . . .” She trailed off, then gave Pippa an expectant glance.
Pippa waved a hand. “I fought and killed a Tro’grath in a warehouse, then the next day got ambushed in an alley by a demon who I’d previously been on good terms with because apparently he’d gotten paid in, I don’t know, diamonds. Killed him, but this guy I work with was also in the alley—”
“To try and kill you?”
“No, because he was pouting after not getting a promotion.”
“Ah.” Thalia swirled one glass, sniffed it, then added a dash from another bottle.
“Anyway, the guy got hit and I healed him, but he’d seen everything, so I had to threaten him, but the next day he kept hounding me for answers, because he’s really into fantasy and magic and the fake idea of it all. But then we got attacked in the elevator by a Boe demon, and I got stabbed.”
She briefly wondered if she should tell Thalia about the poison and temporarily losing her magic. Yet it still felt too fresh, too raw. Somehow, the very fact that it had happened remained coated in the stink of failure. The thought of telling Thalia made her stomach twist in embarrassment.
Thalia slammed the bottle onto the counter. “You were stabbed?”
“Just a little,” Pippa said defensively. “Anyway, there was this whole thing with the elevator—”
“A ‘whole thing’?”
“I’d accidentally blown out the brakes so we had to get out before it crashed—”
Thalia exhaled sharply.
“—then the guy and I went back to my apartment and he helped stitch up my leg.”
The succubus rubbed one temple and gave Pippa a look of such exasperation that it must have pulled a muscle. “After you were stabbed. In a crashing elevator. Does he have medical training?”
Pippa ignored this. “He’s a good person. More than I thought. He really wants to help, and even though he puts off this initial attitude of being a total asshole, he’s actually kind of nice to be around. It’s surprising.”
Even more surprising was that she was looking forward to being around him again. Being near him again. A little flare of excitement crept up her neck when she remembered that he would be at her apartment by this time tomorrow.
Thalia laughed softly. “He is making you blush.”
Pippa blinked. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“I’m intrigued by who makes you feel like this.” Thalia leaned forward. “Is he a warlock? A demon?”
“A human.”
“Oh.” The leaden disappointment in Thalia’s voice could have sunk a barge. She shrugged in a trying-not-to-judge-friends sort of way. “At the very least, I’m relieved he’s not another vampire.”
“I’ve grown out of that phase.”
“And we are all grateful. Have you fucked your human yet?”
No preamble, no segue.
Pippa did not want to think about fucking Maxim, even though her thoughts threatened to pounce in that direction like an excitable creature. His hands, his warm skin, the scrape of his jawline over . . . No. He was coming over tomorrow, and she couldn’t think these sorts of things.
“And look,” Thalia said with a devious smirk. “Now you drift away into fantasy at his mention. You must tell me something. It has been too long since I have felt such a sensation, and I wish to live vicariously through you.”
Pippa cleared her throat and opted for a diversion. “Maybe you’d feel that way again if you stopped trying to seduce co-eds.”
Thalia laughed, low and throaty. “Perhaps. I keep waiting for you to bring me someone of interest, Pippin, but you never do.”
Pippa put her head in her hands and groaned. “How is that my nickname?”
“Because you are short, no? Like the curly-haired creatures in the books on your shelf.”
For a brief second, Pippa wondered what would happen if she put Thalia and Jules in the same room.
It might be funny for a few minutes, what with Jules’s ensuing horror at barely landed culture references and Thalia’s discomfort at inappropriate, prying questions about whether or not demons really did have forked tongues and how beneficial they were for cunnilingus.
Whatever amusement Pippa felt at the thought of them together crumbled in the wake of realizing that, no, Jules should absolutely not know about this world. She should not know about demons, and magic, and creatures that lurked in the cold, quiet places of her nightmares.
Though Thalia had no way of seeing what was in Pippa’s thoughts, her wry smile hinted that at the very least, she knew the tortuous path they were taking. She didn’t comment, and poured one last splash of alcohol into both glasses.
Thalia began to hum. Her lips parted around a delicate melody, and Pippa watched, transfixed, as the succubus swept her hands over the glasses.
Long fingers stroked the air as if she were caressing bits of invisible cloth.
She’d once pretended to be a fortune-teller, traveling with a circus through Rome and luring patrons into her tent with promises of futures told and past lives reawakened.
It was all fake of course, since she didn’t have that kind of magic, but the patrons didn’t need to know that.
The way her hands moved, even when she’d demonstrated her act, had always reminded Pippa of weaving. Where Pippa pulled magic from her surroundings, Thalia took tendrils of it and stroked them into the shapes she wished.
Pippa blinked rapidly and looked away from Thalia’s hands when she set them flat on the counter. She continued to sing, and rolled her shoulders beneath her slip of a robe, her eyes half-closed. Then she shook herself and magic dusted off her body and cascaded to the ground like powder.
With her facade shrugged off, Thalia became taller.
Her shoulders beneath her robe were more angular, her fingernails closer to claws.
When she tipped her head back and sighed, her smile held eyeteeth that were much sharper than they’d been before.
Her hair was the same white blonde, but her pale, flawless skin was now a striking red.
Not bright, like the crimson of Jules’s favorite lipstick, but a deeper red.
A gentler red. It was the color of pomegranate seeds, of ripe cherries, of something full and heady and delicious.
A blunt-tipped tail the same shade as her skin snaked out from the hem of her robe and twisted in the air as if stretching after a long confinement.