I nodded my head as though she could see, then stopped when I realized she couldn’t. “And?”
“Well, we think it’s wise to gain any information possible, especially in such dire circumstances,” she said, adding that last part as though it were an excuse to tell myself to keep the guilt at bay. Or maybe she had no idea how already the guilt of even considering such a thing as to seduce an incubus gnawed at me. “But, as usual, it’s up to you, seeing as you’re the one who’ll be doing the deed.”
“I’m not going to have sex with him,” I countered. As if I even had to remind her of my appreciation for loyalty above all else and how terribly I felt that I was becoming a hypocrite. Although, I had to remind myself, before Marcus came to me in harpy territory, I would have assumed the same as my aunt. A fabulous night of sex with an energy worker? Yes, please.
Renee scoffed. “Well, why the hell wouldn’t you?”
Before I could answer with some smart remark about keeping my head in the game or not being into tall, sexy Norse supernatural males, my aunt changed the subject. Or rather, she made a noise that changed the subject.
“Huh. You hear that, Abigale?” I heard from the other end of the line.
“I do, like tires on gravel,” my other aunt answered. “Odd. Let me see.”
Renee regarded me again. “No one comes to visit us. No one even knows we’re here.”
The sound of the front door opening followed her statement and then another, of boots running across gravel. “Go, go, go!” Marcus yelled and then the door slammed. “Now! They’re here. Is there a back entrance?”
“Who?” I asked quickly. “Who’s there?”
“Oh Goddess, Shawna, grab the dog,” Abigale yelled.
I heard the dog yelp right before what sounded like glass shattering.
“Olivia,” I called from our bedroom. She was already waiting at the door; she’d heard my earlier frantic question. She raised her eyebrows as if to ask what was going on.
I verbalized her expression. “What’s happening?”
Renee finally answered after the sound of three gunshots blared through the phone. “The Hunters,” she said on bated breath. “They’ve found us. They’re here.” I picked up the sounds of nature, the forest, across the line, branches snapping, boots thudding. Marcus’s boots.
My heart thudded with fear.
Another gunshot sounded, followed by Abigale’s scream.
Renee panted into the phone, “We’re on our way to you.”
And then the line went dead. I dropped to the floor and prayed to Freyja to keep my loved ones safe.
The Hunters were on my property, going through our things, maybe even destroying those items we held most sacred, those pieces of our foremothers passed down—all we had left of our lineage. They were there to arrest us. Our time of reckoning had come and if my next move wasn’t the right one, we may never get the chance to take them down.
Thirteen
Anxiety wound and unwound within me. Anxiety and rage. How dare they. Olivia looked to the ceiling and bit her lip. I sprang from my kneeled position on the floor and paced. We were too far away to help. We were helpless.
“You have to do it,” Olivia muttered, not looking me in the eye. “I know you have feelings for Marcus. I know, and I’m sorry we’re asking this of you. But there’s no other choice.”
She didn’t have to tell me. I already knew. I guess I’d known since Marie suggested it, suggested I seduce Aleksander. When my aunt agreed, I’d toyed with the idea of letting Marcus know beforehand, to keep it from being disloyal, to clear my conscience. Now I wished I could tell him, and I very much couldn’t.
The room darkened with the setting sun, the light traveling across the wall and vanishing altogether as Olivia and I stood there, planted in shock and worry, waiting for a phone call from our coterie.
“What if they didn’t make it out?” she whispered. Tears burst from her eyes and her head slowly rose to gaze me in the face. “What if it’s just us? Oh, Goddess.” Her knees buckled and she leaned against the door frame for support. “We can’t do this alone, Faline. We can’t get them back without help from the others.”
“I know,” was all I could say because she was right, all of it.
“What if the rusalki and the mermaids have already been captured? What if that’s why they weren’t answering their phones? They may already be locked up on Hunter compounds.” She took a ragged breath. “Or worse.”
I shook our shared thoughts of doom away. “We can’t…we can’t think like that.”
“Oh? Then how should we think?”
I didn’t have an answer for her, so I kept silent. My bounty-hunter brain kicked in, being as I was in an impossible situation. Giving up never helped anyone. We were huldra, fighters, protectors. “We should think like huldra,” I finally answered. “Stand up, dust our knees off, and push forward.”
Olivia wiped the back of her hand across her cheeks. “Does that mean you’ll try to get answers from Aleksander?”
“No, that’s not enough anymore,” I said, throwing my shirt off and rummaging through my suitcase for something low cut and tight. I had nothing fitting that description. “If the Hunters have taken the rest of our coterie, I need more than intel to get them back. I need the backing of every incubus and succubus in this town. I’ll convince him to help us.”
Olivia nodded her head and a shadow of a smile pulled her lips upward. “All right then, let’s go.”
She led the way as we left the apartment and made our way upstairs to Marie’s apartment.
Celeste met us half-way on the stairs; she’d been heading down to talk to us. “Aleksander is almost here, so I figured it was time for me to go. Marie said we can use the apartment complex for as long as we need it.” She peered down at my bare chest and then back up at me. “If you’ve changed your mind and decided to take Marie’s advice, I don’t think this is the most subtle way to go about it.”
My current dark emotions allowed a hard laugh to sneak through. “I don’t have any shirts that’ll do the job. Neither does Olivia. I figured Marie might.”
“Come with me,” Celeste said, turning on her heel and leading us upstairs.
Olivia climbed the stairs beside me, behind Celeste. She shot me a glance that I knew all too well. I nodded.
“Um, Celeste,” I started. “Before we’re surrounded by a bunch of succubi, we have something to tell you.”
Our sister stopped on one stair higher than us and turned to face us. “Does it have to do with you changing your mind with the incubus? Because Marie said she felt heavy energy from down on the first floor. I thought maybe you were arguing with Marcus about it or something.”
“No, I was on the phone with Renee when the Hunters came to our home.”
Celeste’s eyes squeezed shut and she pulled her lips into her mouth. She tightened her fists before taking a couple breaths and letting them go. She opened her eyes. “Are they okay?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “I heard them run into the woods behind the common house, all together, but that’s all I know.”
Watching my sister experience the pain new and fresh, after Olivia and I had sat in it a while allowing it to fester around us, was like experiencing it all over again. Tears sprang to Olivia’s eyes and I blinked a few away from my own.
“This can’t be happening,” Celeste said, shaking her head. She took a cleansing breath and straightened herself. “So then this is why you’re in need of a sexy top.”
I nodded.
She turned and continued up the stairs. “Okay then, let’s get that taken care of before the incubi arrive.”
As usual, Marie’s top-floor apartment included at least five succubi milling about. I wondered if she just enjoyed being surrounded by sisters or if they were more of a protection team, at the ready to combine their energy-bending abilities to make sure their leader stayed safe.
Marie breezed past the four succubi at the table playing ca
rds and the other in the kitchen wrapping up food with only a nod of her head. Olivia asked the succubus in the kitchen if she needed help with anything and was quickly put to work chopping vegetables. Celeste took a seat at the table and asked to be dealt in. Marie and I made it to her room where we stood in front of her small, narrow closet. I didn’t know why I’d assumed she’d have a walk-in closet, it’s not as though she wore more than a robe all that often.
“This apartment building had been built in the early nineteen hundreds,” she explained when she noticed me searching for another closet door. “They didn’t have much need for large storage spaces, and neither do I.”
Marie studied each top for a moment before pushing it aside to view the next. “I admit, I didn’t expect you to come around.”
“On the Aleksander thing?” I asked.
She made a sound, as though she were concentrating on the contents of her closet too heavily to speak an answer. Her gaze rested on a red chiffon button-up, clearly see-through. She pulled it from its confines and held it up to my chest. “Clashes with your hair,” she finally said before returning her focus to the closet.
A question popped into my head and nagged at my thoughts. Her current distraction seemed to create the perfect timing to gather information from the succubi leader. Why not? She was picking out a top to help me do just that with the incubi leader, get information.
“So Marie,” I started.
“Hmm?” She kept on task.
“Why weren’t you truthful, about Heather, when I first came to you looking for my sister? You’d sent me to the mermaids and even led me to believe she may have been taken by the Hunters.”
“Oh, no, succubi are not untruthful. If you believed she could have been taken by the Hunters, that was your own assumption, not placed there by me. I knew she’d run off, I just wasn’t sure where to. Of all the Wild Women, the succubi are the most honest, I believe.”
Marie lingered on another red top before shaking her head and moving to the next. “Our original foremothers were created by the great goddess Lilith.” She paused to glance at a large stone statue of the Goddess Lilith with her arms stretched out, holding circular symbols, with a snake wound up her body, hanging on the wall between her closet door and a shelf. “Within our foremothers she gifted her attributes of a thirst for knowledge, the ability to sense, read, and manipulate the energies of others, and the deep desire to live by truth. This is why we live by our own truths.”
I found myself nodding, though I doubted she noticed as she went back to working what she seemed to deem the important task of locating the most seductive shirt in all the world. I hadn’t learned much about Lilith, but I could already see why the succubi worshipped her.
Marie continued and it seemed that the females in the living room listened intently too, as though we were gathered for a bedtime story. All sounds of food-chopping and card-playing ceased. “Before the Hunters, we used our gifts for good. We pulled out the negative energy from humans, absorbed their hurts you could say, recycled their pain into the earth, and from the soil, drew positive energy to fill their void. We healed humans, and sometimes other Wild Women.”
“I bet townspeople didn’t much like that after the Inquisitors rode through,” I remarked, thinking of my own huldra history.
“No they did not. They asked us for help, but behind our foremothers’ backs they whispered, calling us demons, saying we’d sucked the life out of the people we couldn’t save. And of course, those rumors quickly became the village men’s excuse for being unfaithful to their wives; it became a seductive succubi’s fault for luring them and removing their free will. It wasn’t long before the Hunters took the upper hand and forced us to stop healing people.” Marie paused her perusal through her closet. She didn’t look at me and she didn’t seem to be studying the shirt she’d stopped on either.
“Do you know what happens when healers can no longer heal?” The succubus with the snake tattoo on her scalp asked, standing outside Marie’s open bedroom door. “When empaths must live among hurting humans, but can do nothing to help them?”
I shook my head. Huldras never healed. We fought for the weak, protected those who needed protecting, but none of our abilities including healing, outside of learned trades.
“We gradually absorb the hurt. We become emotionally unstable, depressed, sometimes worse.” Her voice cracked and I wondered how many sisters among their ranks fought the battle against depression. “Our Goddess brought truth and knowledge to all of humankind, and how do they repay her? They make up stories about her, call her a snake, align her with negativity, the devil. Why? Because she believed everyone had the right to live their truth and be free of inner hurt?”
Marie cleared her throat. “That’s enough for now,” she said. “And anyway, I think I’ve found the perfect top for you. It’ll turn up the desire of your incubus.”
By the time Marie placed the black silk top against my chest, the succubus at the door had left and returned to playing cards. She scrutinized the shirt where she held it up on me and nodded in approval.
“Is that why Heather left, do you think?” I asked. “Why she left her galere? Because of emotional instability?”
Marie removed the top from the hanger and handed it to me. “You say the words as though they are an easy diagnosis when in fact they are as layered as this earth.”
“I’m asking because I want to know, because Heather’s choices have clearly affected us all.” I unbuttoned the front of the top and put it on, buttoning it back into place. The V-neck dipped low between my breasts. I thought to mention my own coterie’s current status, running from the Hunters, but while the worry plagued my mind, voicing the news to a non-huldra didn’t feel right, not until I received an update of some kind.
“You would not know the difficulties of running a matriarchal home within a patriarchal society,” Marie countered, moving to her open suitcase upon her bed and placing items from her closet in it. “You have no children or younger generation within your ranks. You cannot fathom the confusion they must endure in their raising, their questions as to why those outside their home do not operate like those inside their home, their immature assumptions that the world will accept and respect their personal truths the way their galere does. And then their backlash when you must create boundaries to keep them safe from a world they feel they do not need protecting from. You cannot imagine the difficulty in these things.”
“Is Heather your daughter?” I asked in shock and yet in a sudden understanding as to why Marie decided to join Heather with the incubi underground.
Marie placed a small statue of Lilith in her bag and zipped it shut. She stood the suitcase beside her. “None of us have one mother. The galere mothers each daughter so that each succubus has many mothers.”
She only answered my question partly, but seeing as it was Marie doing the answering, partly was more than I expected.
“Is Heather a minor?” I asked.
“No, she is eighteen,” Marie answered. “And yes, her choice to be with her heart’s desire over her galere is naïve, one she will grow to one day learn was unwise. But her feelings, her desire for safety and fear of the unknown future, those are shared by others in this galere.”
I sighed. “Of course we’re all afraid. It doesn’t mean we should hide away while other Wilds are being picked off. That’s what courage is, the ability to stand up to something despite our fear.”
Marie placed a hand on my shoulder. “I know something has happened very recently to those you love. I felt it earlier, and can feel the fear and worry draped like a heavy cloak on you now.”
A succubus peaked her head in and regarded Marie, “They’re here.”
Marie nodded. “Good, bring them up, invite them in.”
The shaved-head succubus left the apartment to fetch the incubi.
“But,” Marie continued with me. “Courage is an emotion that wells up within a person, urging them to walk a difficult path, to make a
hard choice. And as with any emotion, it cannot be defined in one way, but takes on the definition of the one experiencing it. You may believe standing against the Hunters is a courageous act. But we do not.” She left the bedroom and sat on her red couch in her living room, waiting for the incubus leader.
The sudden urge to argue with her, to make her see her huge error in judgement, welled up within me. I stomped into the living room. But before I opened my mouth, the front door opened sharply. In an instant Marie flicked her hand toward me and my anger dissipated, replaced with desire for the tall man who now stood in her hall. My whole body tingled as Aleksander’s eyes found mine and bounced to my chest. A smile grew across his face. I followed his gaze to see what delighted him so much and then groaned inwardly.
Now I knew why Marie had chosen the loose silk top. She’d planned to make me nip like a braless woman in the frozen food section of a grocery store. And at the moment, she executed her plan perfectly.
“Aleksander,” I greeted the incubus with a nod.
His eyes found mine again and this time they sparkled. “It’s good to know you’re happy to see me, Faline.” He spoke through his smile, his accent stronger than earlier.
His voice did hot things to me that made standing in the frozen food section in only a silk top seem like a really good idea. And his body…it was a tower of muscle that went on forever. This may be a lot easier than I expected. While I wanted to hate that, part of me didn’t. Not at all.
Fourteen
Marie wasted no time in leaving the apartment. With her head held high, she made her way from their brick building, through dark alleyways, while trailing a red, wheeled suitcase, her galere silently following behind her like a funeral procession. Except, instead of all black, most of the female members of the group wore ripped jeans and tank tops. Only a few incubi joined us. Aleksander walked alongside Marie at the front, and others sprinkled throughout the group. Us huldra brought up the rear, which was fine with me. I’d rather not have a bunch of unknown supernatural males at my back.
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