Son of a Succubus Series Collection

by Dorie, Sarina

  “No. Abby is safe from the Raven Queen. I won’t tell her she’s a tree.” He’d lived with Baba Nata enough years to have a handle on making bargains with wicked witches. A wicked Fae couldn’t be so different.

  “What if she already knows about her being a tree and simply doesn’t care? Abigail is only safe if the Raven Queen doesn’t decide she wants firewood.” Gertrude waved a hand over the vision, and it faded. “Believe me. I know how Fae law works. I’ve studied their contracts. They only work it if it’s to their advantage. It will be full of loopholes, but not ones that benefit you. You need to come up with a better plan.”

  Lucifer stared at the puddle, wishing Gertrude hadn’t dissipated the vision so soon. “What do you suggest?”

  “People aren’t meant to be changed into plants. They lose themselves. For starters, I’d suggest figuring out how to sneak into the Raven Court’s territory without detection. Next you need a spell to change her back. Last—”

  “What do you mean? Abby is a tree nymph. It’s natural for her to turn into a plant. She doesn’t need a spell to make her human again.” He could hardly keep up with Gertrude.

  She didn’t bother hiding the impatience in her expression. “No Witchkin is meant to be a plant for this long I’d wager. She’s been a tree for—well—I don’t know. But I wouldn’t recommend it unless she were very powerful and knew what she was doing—and for a short amount of time. That’s the key. No more than a few days.”

  “Baba Nata changed me into a cat—and that isn’t even part of my affinity. It’s been thirty years, and I’m fine.” He held himself taller, quite proud of himself.

  “Yes, but a cat is active. A tree is passive. You’re always plotting what you’re going to hunt or whom you’re going to attack.” She raised an eyebrow with knowing. Apparently, he hadn’t gotten it past her that he liked to claw his enemies. Or simply people who annoyed him. “Abigail can’t think like a human—or anything close to it—while she’s in a tree state. Her brain is going to atrophy.”

  Vega was the one who had told Lucifer about his own mind atrophying if he remained as a cat. She’d warned him that thirty years was excessive. She was surprised he’d changed back to being human at all, even if it had been accidental.

  More important than his mind and his ability to think and behave as a human, there was the matter of his soul. She’d warned him his mind wouldn’t ever be the same if his soul deteriorated into that of a cat.

  What would happen if Abigail had transformed so thoroughly she had become more tree than human? He wanted to believe that her Amni Plandai affinity and heritage of being descended from tree nymphs like the leshi—who looked more tree than human themselves—would keep her from losing who she was.

  Gertrude was right about everything else. He needed a new plan.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Book of Secrets

  Lucifer didn’t know how long he would stay in his human form this time. He intended to keep his affinity fueled to ensure he was able to remain human.

  Part of that included a daily regimen of recreational activities with Gertrude, which she seemed happy about. Lucifer felt conflicted about spending so much time with a woman who wasn’t Abigail, but ultimately he didn’t know a more effective way to manage his affinity.

  He didn’t want to risk falling in love with Gertrude, and he feared he might be leading her into believing he would love her. On one of the occasions they were together in bed, and she was in the throes of passion, she said Felix’s name instead of his own. She was so consumed by the moment that he suspected she didn’t notice.

  “Well, this is awkward.” He drew back enough to force her to meet his gaze. “Are you … in love with my brother?”

  He had never questioned why she had taken him in as a cat and looked after him without asking for anything in return—unless sex counted.

  Gertrude’s cheeks flushed a rosier red. “Of course not, pet.”

  Before he could ask further questions, she kissed him again and bewitched him with siren magic.

  Ultimately he decided her feelings for Felix weren’t any of his business. So long as Gertrude’s unrequited crush on Felix didn’t interfere with Lucifer’s current agenda to remain human, he could focus on more important matters.

  His next goal was to make the most of his time as a human while he could.

  “There’s a secret room in the library with books that might be able to help us,” Gertrude confided in him. “But not just anyone can go down there.”

  “I’ll be careful with the books. If they’re old, I can wear gloves.” He only knew about this being an important detail because Abigail had visited libraries searching for archaic texts that might hold an answer to his cure. There were special protocols for old books. Not that she’d found the answers she’d been seeking.

  “It’s not just that.” A crease deepened between her brows. “The door is warded. It won’t open for everyone.”

  “Oh.” His shoulders sagged. “It might not let me in because I’m not a librarian.” That would be just his luck.

  She looked away, her eyes dark with gloom that wasn’t usually there. “The thing is, I can’t get the door open.”

  “Oh.” The weight on his shoulders felt even heavier. “Why did you even bother mentioning it if we can’t get in?” He supposed she might want to use him for his magic. Gertrude didn’t speak of his affinity out loud, but surely if she understood Red affinity magic, as he suspected she did, she had to understand how powerful he made her.

  “Clarissa could open the door.” She mumbled the words, as if they shamed her to say them out loud. “She didn’t even try to use magic. The door just opened for her.”

  Clarissa was a Red affinity. He was a Red affinity. He understood now.

  “So I might be able to open this door?” Lucifer threw off his gloom like a cloak. He circled an arm around Gertrude’s waist, squeezing her to his side. “Let’s take a look at this door.” He was as excited as a cat with the prospect of catnip.

  Gertrude took Lucifer to the back of the library at night when all the students were supposed to be in bed. The door looked like it could have belonged to a closet, nothing special. She showed him how the handle wouldn’t turn. Lucifer tried, but it didn’t open for him.

  Gertrude gestured to the door again. “Keep your hand on the knob for a minute. It took Clarissa a few seconds before too.”

  Lucifer did so. He waited. The library was as silent as a graveyard, the only sound his heart thumping in his ears. The lock clicked.

  Lucifer opened the door, the wood creaking. Gertrude rushed past him, quicker than a cat avoiding a bath. Sconces on the walls flared to life as she descended a set of stone stairs.

  “What about the special gloves?” he called after her.

  She didn’t respond.

  He followed her down the steps, catching every cobweb in his face along the way. By the time he’d reached the bottom of the stairs, he recognized the scent of vanilla.

  He inhaled deeply. “It smells like Abby’s baking down here.” He passed an open door to a dark room and then another. A faint glow came from farther down the hallway.

  “It’s the fermenting of the ink,” Gertrude called from one of the rooms up ahead.

  He inhaled again. “I smell apple pie.” His belly grumbled as he remembered Abigail’s candy-coated crust. She’d always permitted him one bite as a cat but wouldn’t feed him more because he was supposed to be a carnivore. Yet he’d always wanted human food, specifically her cooking.

  His mouth watered.

  “That fruity smell is a dead body,” Gertrude said. “Mummified remains sometimes smell like berries or apples.”

  “Oh. That’s . . . nice.” That hungry feeling in the pit of his belly soured.

  He found Gertrude in a room full of books, perusing the spines.

  “Don’t touch the dead body in the other room,” she said. “Apparently Clarissa di
d that once, and it came to life and tried to kill her.”

  Lucifer had no intention of touching the dead. Necromancy had been one of his mother’s abilities. He didn’t know whether it was the necromancy that had caused his mother’s madness or her grief at losing his father and reanimating him with her succubus powers that had caused her to change, but he didn’t intend to find out.

  Necromancy was considered a forbidden art for a reason. The dead could stay dead as far as he was concerned.

  Gertrude removed a title from the shelf and hugged it to her chest as though the book were a dear friend. She radiated with Celestor magic almost as brightly as she had on the roof after absorbing starlight. It was rare for a Witchkin to be a double affinity—as rare as being a Red affinity like Lucifer was, but Gertrude was as much Celestor as siren with a water Elementia affinity.

  She heaped books into his arms. “This is an ancient text about shapeshifting. Here is a book about the history of the Raven Court and their magic—but be aware, it was published at least five centuries ago. It doesn’t have any modern history in it. This one is about wood nymphs, but it’s in Greek. Do you read Greek?”

  He tried to remember the languages Baba had taught him for spell casting. It was all so long ago. “Um….”

  Gertrude went on, “No matter, I do.”

  “These aren’t the kinds of books we need.” He scanned the walls of shelves. “There has to be something here on how to become a powerful witch who can defeat Fae enemies.”

  “You can barely manage to remain human. Do you really think you’re ready to use that kind of magic?” She reached for another book, selecting one on breaking curses.

  She opened that one and began to scan the pages. Lucifer had thought Gertrude stunning when she absorbed starlight or when she radiated siren magic and her skin turned mother-of-pearl. But in actuality, he realized now, she had never looked more beautiful than she did when she was reading.

  He hoped he wasn’t falling in love with her.

  Her thirst for knowledge was sexier than the allure of siren bewitchment.

  They removed books from the secret room and read late into the night in bed in companionable silence. With Gertrude snuggled up beside him, Lucifer felt oddly closer to her while reading than he ever had during physical intimacy.

  * * *

  In the book, Curses for Fiends and Enemies, Lucifer found one reference that changed his understanding of the last thirty years and his own curse.

  Many curses are inactive unless set off by a trigger. It might be a location, temperature, or seeing a person. The tale of Sleeping Beauty is based on a princess whose curse lay dormant until she pricked her finger on a spindle. In the tale, her curse was broken by fertility magic. What the Morty-written books omit is that she also suffered from narcolepsy anytime henceforth that she pricked her finger on sewing needles, rose thorns, and other sharp objects. The curse wasn’t truly broken.

  To “cure” a curse, the victim has to figure out the trigger and avoid it.

  Lucifer showed the passage to Gertrude.

  She rubbed her eyes and yawned. “What do you think triggered your curse?”

  “The first time?” He struggled to remember details from thirty years ago. “I left Baba Nata’s mentorship with Abigail. I went with her into the Morty Realm, even though Baba told me not to. It didn’t happen right away when we passed out of the Faerie Realm. I think we ate dinner and fell asleep first.”

  “And the second time?”

  He had been in the forest with Vega, mating as a cat when he’d changed back into a man. He couldn’t recall whether they’d been on school grounds or passed through the almost invisible portal to the Morty Realm. It had been dusk, the forest filled with shadows. He hadn’t eaten or fallen asleep. It was afterward, as he walked through the forest as a man, that he’d changed back. It had been dark by then.

  “Vega assumed I changed back because I didn’t have enough magic stored up to break the curse for more than a minute or two,” he said. “That might be part of it, but it might have been because it was night. Or because we passed into the Morty Realm.”

  “That was what Baba Nata wanted you to avoid, wasn’t it? Leaving the Faerie Realm?” Gertrude tapped her nails against the hard cover of a book.

  He’d always known his punishment had been because he’d gone to the Morty Realm with Abigail, but he had assumed Baba had come up with the curse at that moment, not ahead of time with a trigger set in place.

  “It would make sense,” he said. “But there’s also the component of night every time I’ve changed back. Baba never told me her affinity. She’s good at everything, but I suspect she is a Celestor, even if she is a hedge witch, and most hedge witches are Amni Plandai or Elementia. I think her powers are strongest at night.”

  She nodded. “It’s very possible she used your own magic to make her affinity stronger.”

  “That means I’m safe from turning back into a cat as long as I don’t enter the Morty Realm and I keep my affinity charged at night. That was when Baba’s spell would be strongest.” He thought about the time Clarissa and Felix’s magic had accidentally changed him back and he’d been with Abigail for hours. Sexual activity might have staved off the curse for a little while, but he probably would have needed to have sex all night every night to keep from changing back if he had stayed in the Morty Realm. The last time he’d gone to the Morty Realm with Gertrude he’d been fine for a while, but as the witching hour had approached, his curse had returned. The two biggest triggers were night and being in the Morty Realm.

  The realization thrilled him and anguished him at the same time. For thirty long years he had remained as a cat. If bountiful sex had been all it would have taken to keep him human, he could have been with Abigail somewhere in the Unseen Realm between the Morty Realm and Faerie Realm. He could have spent that time with her.

  He might have been able to protect her when the Raven Court attacked.

  “We have to test this theory,” he said, rising from the bed. Returning to the form of a cat didn’t thrill him, but he had to know whether this was how Baba’s curse worked. If it did, there was a chance he could work around it. There was a chance he wouldn’t set it off again in the process of rescuing Abigail.

  “Where are you going?” Gertrude asked.

  He hesitated at the door. “I’m going to walk to the Morty Realm. Then I’ll wait to see how long it takes to turn back to being a cat.”

  “And then what?” Gertrude asked. “You’ll have to wait until the next full moon for me to change you back.”

  He could see her point, but he was anxious to test out this theory. He couldn’t very well help Abigail if he was at risk of turning into a cat at any moment. He needed to experiment with the limits of this spell.

  She patted the bed he’d only just vacated. Grudgingly, he returned to her side.

  Over the next two days, he was restless reading books. He snuck out early one morning before students and staff were awake so that he could slip out of the school without being detected. Gertrude was still asleep when he left. Had she been awake, he knew she would have talked him out of going—or used the honey of her voice to convince him not to go.

  The journey to the Morty Realm only took about twenty minutes through the forest. He hadn’t forgotten the signs to look for that surrounded portals. He’d always been good at seeing the ley lines invisible to Morty eyes. It only took one thread as thin as spider silk to lead him toward the portal. More lines of energy jumbled with it, crisscrossing and weaving together like Celtic knotwork as he came closer.

  The doorway to the Morty Realm reminded him of an arbor, two trees on each side of the path arched together and interlacing where they met above his head. Orange leaves as vivid as Abigail’s hair crowned the boughs. Lucifer stepped through, feeling the subtle shift in the air. It was daylight and autumn on the Morty side of the portal. Lichen hung from mossy limbs. Nothing looked different.
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  Only a Witchkin like him would notice the lack of magic. In its place, electricity hummed through distant powerlines, singing a song of warning to any Fae or Witchkin who might wander too close. The rumble of an occasional car passed on a road nearby. It was more difficult to see the ley lines leading to the portal on this side with all the interference. Someday Morty-made chemicals, plastics, and electronics might encroach on this spot and vanquish the portal altogether. For the moment, Lucifer didn’t worry about returning.

  He sat himself down against a tree and took a nap. Hours later, he was still human. He was hungry, but he hadn’t thought to bring himself anything to eat. He wondered whether his impulsive decision-making was due to all his years spent as a cat or because he had always been this rash.

  Lucifer supposed he could have walked back to the school to steal food. Hunting sounded more appealing. He stalked a baby bunny in the brush, but once he’d caught it, he couldn’t break its neck to kill it or sink his teeth into the flesh and eat it. It trembled against him and stared up at him with trepidation in those large eyes. He found the bunny’s mother and reunited them. It was what Abigail would have wanted him to do.

  Eventually night fell. Having an empty belly turned out to be to his advantage. His stomach didn’t cramp when he changed into a cat again. He didn’t fight the change this time. He realized he should have removed his clothes somewhere back in the Unseen Realm so that he could retrieve them more easily later.

  Gertrude would surely be vexed with him for losing another set of clothes. He was going to have to start planning ahead. He would never be able to help Abigail if he was so thoughtless.

  Something rustled in the brush. His belly growled. It smelled like rabbit. As a human, his conscience had kept him from hurting another living creature. Now that he was a cat, he was a predator, and he had no such qualms.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Education of an Incubus

  It was almost another month before Lucifer turned back into a human. In the time he was a cat, he roamed the school and forest freely, and he charged his affinity. When he returned to being a human, he loathed being cooped up in Gertrude’s room. He read books she set before him and tried to learn the human mannerisms she taught him.