by Jill Myles
There were a few trust issues.
Despite his wild side, there was something about Zane that . . . called to me. Maybe it was his roguish attitude, or his lust for pleasure, or the tender way he held me close when we made love, as if he was afraid I’d disappear and he’d never see me again. Or the fact that he’d turned his back on vampire-kind just to be with me. Heady stuff. Remy and Noah disapproved of him, but I kept coming back like a junkie needing a fix.
And even though I was completely goofy over him, I didn’t trust him to feed from me again.
Zane knew it and hated it. Vampires love succubi. We’re the blood equivalent of an aphrodisiac, so for me to withhold my blood from him, he considered that a grievous crime.
I considered it common sense.
Even if it did suck, a little.
For him to now point out to me that he was feeding—probably from another hot, turned-on female—was painful. My throat tightened. “So when will you be back home?”
“Not until late, I’m afraid.” Zane’s cheerful voice echoed through the phone. “Something has come up, and I’ll need to be out for most of the night.”
“But I need you here,” I said, hating the whine in my voice. “I have a problem.”
“Princess, I’d love to be there with you, helping you with your problem.” His low, sensual voice set my body on vibrate once more. God, I loved it when he said my nickname. “But I have a few things to take care of first, all right?”
“Fine,” I said, feeling the low pulse start in my groin again. My voice dropped to a low whisper as well. “You promise?”
There was a pause on his end, and his voice grew even more strained, rough. “I promise. I’ll see you soon, Jackie, and when I do, it’ll be just me and you.”
I was ready for that right now, and squirmed with anticipation. “Sounds great.”
There was an uncomfortable pause at the moment where couples normally exchange “I love yous.” We weren’t quite at that stage, so we muttered a few platitudes, then hung up.
Now I was turned on, lonely, cranky, and I still needed help with my pizza boy.
The doorbell rang, scaring the heck out of me, and Remy came in.
“Hey, doll,” she said, running a hand through her long fall of silken black hair. Her gaze settled to the man on the floor. “That your new friend?”
Count on Remy to make jeans and a T-shirt look über-sexy. Her darkly olive skin and gray eyes were striking, even in a tacky red shirt that proudly proclaimed PONY RIDE across her breasts. She looked completely put together despite the fact that it was late at night. I would have hated her if she wasn’t my new best friend.
Her eyes were bleached silver, which told me what she’d been doing before she came over, and the fact that she’d abandoned her new plaything for me spoke volumes about our friendship.
Succubi have to stick together.
“Thanks for coming, Remy.” I gestured at Mr. Cheese. “That’s him.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Ugh. I was kind of hoping he would be hot.” She nudged the unconscious pizza boy with the toe of one strappy red pump. “He looks more like a lump of dough.”
“Yeah, well, my lump of dough has nothing going on in the oven, if you catch my drift.” Feeling a little hysterical again, I picked up his hand and then released it. It banged lifelessly to the floor. “See? He’s not in there! I don’t know where he is, but he’s not in his body.”
Remy waved a hand and crouched next to the body. “They’re always in there. Maybe you just missed it.” Extending one finger, she very gingerly touched his forehead and closed her eyes, searching his mind.
A moment later, she opened them and stared at me, wide-eyed. “What did you do?”
I threw up my hands in despair, ready to start wailing. “Nothing! I didn’t do anything to him!”
“Okay, calm down. Don’t get upset. Let’s try and think this through.” She sat next to me on the floor and sniffed the air. “You have any more pizza?”
I glared.
Remy sighed. “Fine. Let me think. There’s got to be a logical reason for how you managed to wipe out his brain.”
I buried my face in my hands and moaned. “All I did was touch him with my finger, I swear. Just a tiny poke.”
“He looks like the type to have a tiny poke,” she quipped.
“Be serious, Remy. I just killed a man.”
“He’s not dead,” she said, patting my shoulder. “Don’t worry. He’s got to be somewhere. I mean, he’s not a ghost, right? That’s always a plus.”
“What do you mean, a ghost?”
“You know. Casper? Beetlejuice? If he were a ghost, you’d see him floating around here, sweetie. A ghost can’t go back into his head, because the body is dead.” Remy tapped her chin with a long fingernail. “Hmmm . . . he’s not in his head.” She twirled a lock of her hair, her brows scrunched together in thought. “I don’t know what to make of it . . . unless . . .” Her eyes widened.
“What?” I leaned in, nervous. “What is it?”
“Unless you’ve been cursed.”
I sat up straight. Cursed?
CHAPTER THREE
When someone as jaded as Remy stares at you with horror, it tends to ruin your day a little.
When she remained silent, I prompted her anxiously, “What do you mean, I’m cursed?”
She blinked at me. “You know, voodoo, a hex—”
I interrupted her, my hands on my hips. “I know what a curse is. How do you think I’m cursed if all I’ve done is blanked out the mind of a pizza guy?”
“It’s not just him,” she said, getting to her feet and dusting off the seat of her jeans. “It could be any number of things. The last curse I remember was on a succubus named Victoria. Happened about two hundred years ago.”
“Victoria? I don’t know who that is.”
Remy’s beautiful face was unnaturally solemn. “That’s because she’s dead.”
“Dead?” Succubi rarely died. We regenerated bullet holes (I’d learned that the hard way), couldn’t drown, didn’t age. There were only two ways to kill a succubus. Kill both of her masters, (angelic and vampiric) and she would be instantly removed from the mortal plane and sent to Heaven or Hell. The other way to kill a succubus was sexual starvation. Not feeding the Itch would cause our bodies to break down in a matter of days, until there was nothing left but a dried-up husk.
“Victoria liked to play with power,” Remy said, gazing down at the pizza boy with sympathy. “Got off on it, was drawn to it, and actively pursued men that had it. She was constantly hopping from the bed of one vampire to the next, one Serim to the next, always heading after the man with the most influence, money, and power. One of her ex-lovers was a warlock, and when he found out about her cheating on him with a vampire knight, he cursed her.”
There were a lot of loaded questions in that simple statement. I wanted to ask what the heck a vampire knight was, and if warlocks really existed—but I kept going back to that “curse” thing. “So what happened to her?”
“Nothing, at first. But she began to notice when her powers began to increase.” Her gaze strayed down to the comatose pizza boy. “She began to wipe the minds of humans around her and grew stronger, more powerful. More irresistible to mortals. More everything.” Her gaze flicked back to me. “Her Itch was amplified, too.”
This sounded frighteningly familiar. “Let me guess. She had to have sex more often?”
Remy nodded slowly. “It was hard to tell at first—Victoria wasn’t exactly the most chaste of succubi, not like you or me.”
Boy, if porn star Remy was an example of chastity, Victoria must have been a hard-core tramp.
“Her curse made the Itch reappear every few hours. Then every hour. Then, even less time than that.”
Good lord. While I loved having sex with Noah and Zane regularly, the thought of the Itch being only an hour away was frightening. Even ice cream sundaes would get old if I had to have them every hour, o
n the hour. “So what did Victoria do?”
Remy shrugged. “She kept having sex, but it wasn’t enough. Her skin became gray and washed-out, her hair fell out, and her body began to thin. She starved to death right in the middle of an orgy.” Remy looked away from me.
“Oh my God.” I wrapped my arms around my body and closed my eyes—my eyes that were vivid blue, despite having sex less than a full day ago. “Do you really think I’m cursed?”
“I don’t know what else it could be,” Remy said softly. “That’s the only thing like this that I’ve seen in two hundred years. Victoria used to have the same problem with her powers and with touching mortals. She’d accidentally brush one with her hand, and their minds would just vanish. A few days later, their bodies would die of starvation. No one knew how she did it—it just happened. Suck powers out of control.”
“But . . .” I hesitated, thinking hard. “I touched Noah earlier. How come I didn’t suck his mind out?” A thought occurred to me, and I reached over and tapped Remy on the shoulder.
She slapped my hand away. “Hey! Quit that!”
I pulled back, remorseful. “Sorry, I wanted to see if it worked.”
“By trying to eat my brains?” She scowled. “You’re lucky that it doesn’t work on immortals.”
“It doesn’t?”
“Not that I’ve ever seen.”
I felt weak with relief. So I couldn’t hurt Noah or Zane. Good to know. The room fell silent, except for the snores of Mr. Cheese. “Do you think it’s reversible?” I looked down anxiously. What was I going to do if I couldn’t find out how to get him back in his body?
Remy shrugged. “If we can figure out how his brain left, I suppose we can figure out how to put it back.”
I focused on the positive. Good.
“But you need to get rid of your own curse first,” Remy reminded me.
Not so good. I collapsed onto the sofa and stared at the wall. “Who would have cursed me? Who have I pissed off enough to want to get rid of me?”
“I don’t know,” Remy said, sitting at my side and putting her arm around my waist. “But I think I know who might have more information about this.”
“Zane? Noah?”
She shook her head. “No.” Her voice was very small. “You know who I’m talking about.”
Aw, hell. I did.
Dealers.
If you ask anyone on the street what an angel is, they’ll call forth an image of a sweet, spiritual being with big fluffy wings that will guide you and keep you safe.
While the wings aren’t a crock, angels aren’t nearly as sweetly innocent as society likes to portray them. My kind calls them dealers because angels like to bargain, and the currency they like to play with is your immortal soul.
Deep down inside, beneath the Playboy Barbie exterior, I still had a soul. It could still be affected by what I did here on earth. And if I asked the dealers for help with something, they’d be more than happy to help me.
For a small price.
At least, it was small to them. Though the deal might be as simple as “Get this book for me,” they didn’t tell you that getting the book might mean that you have to murder someone or steal it from a child dying of cancer. But once you’d agreed to do the task, you had to, because lying to angels was the worst kind of sin to go on an immortal soul. And they didn’t forget a broken promise. Ever.
“Dealers? Do we have to? I’m still smarting from the hole that Uriel’s goons blew into me after the last deal I made with them.” Immortal or not, it’s damn hard to regrow your abdomen when there’s a hole the size of a dinner plate in it. I rubbed my stomach just thinking about it.
When I’d first become a succubus, Uriel tricked me into approaching the vampire queen Nitocris in her den. That had gotten me into serious trouble. Uriel had been chasing the halo of the first of the fallen—Joachim—and had pulled out all the stops to get it before the queen could. He’d even possessed a priest to try to get to me (and the halo). And given the fact that Remy had accidentally absorbed the halo and Joachim’s powers . . . well, I wasn’t in a rush to see Uriel again.
“I can’t think of anyone else able to identify your curse,” Remy said. “New City’s pretty light on immortals. Unless you want to take it up with the flip side—they’d have the knowledge you need.”
When she said the flip side, she meant the other end of the dealers: demons.
I shuddered. “No, thank you. At least Uriel’s got some sort of honor, wacky though it may be.”
After all, he believed he was doing something for the good of the Heavenly Host. The fact that giving him the halo would have wiped Noah and the rest of the Serim from the planet? Minor detail.
“’Kay. We don’t have to go to Uriel,” Remy offered. “If you go to a church, that’s directly asking for assistance. You always get the big guns in a church.”
“But angels can’t leave hallowed ground,” I pointed out. “Unless they possess someone. And I doubt they’re wandering around New City in borrowed flesh, just looking for the chance to say hi to me.”
“You’re right,” she said, crestfallen. “Angels hate possessing people. They think it’s gross.”
I didn’t blame them. I’d seen a few of their choices, and it didn’t look like much of a party.
Remy brightened. “But I know where we can find a few of the minor leaguers.”
“Oh? Where?”
She raised her finger in the air to punctuate her brilliant idea. “A graveyard!”
If there was one thing that had changed since turning succubus a few weeks ago, it’s that my Saturday nights were never dull. After all, when I wasn’t having sex with a vampire or a fallen angel, I was trotting after the hottest immortal Ottoman woman this side of the Mississippi, on yet another one of her harebrained schemes.
As I watched, one of Remy’s tall red heels sank into the moist earth as soon as she stepped off the sidewalk. She flung her hands up in the air, wobbling to one side with a horrified expression. “Oh ew! I think I just stabbed someone in the forehead.”
I flipped on my flashlight, watching Remy struggle to shake the mud off her expensive shoe. “I sincerely doubt that they’re burying people two inches deep nowadays.”
She gave me a wary look and shook her pump again to dislodge the dirt.
“Speaking of, why couldn’t you wear normal shoes?” I was wearing grubby sneakers, myself.
“I didn’t bring any other shoes with me. When you called me, I didn’t think we’d be spending Saturday night in a graveyard.” Remy eyed our surroundings with distaste.
That made two of us. “You could have borrowed a pair of mine.” I followed as she wobbled through the grassy turf.
She gave a haughty sniff. “Yours were ugly.”
“You picked them out for me!”
“Well, they’re perfect for you. Ugly for me.” She gestured at the row of tombstones behind the tall iron fence. “Besides, we’re almost there.”
I shone my flashlight on the iron bars, ignoring the prickle on the back of my neck when an owl hooted nearby. The full moon was out and shining high, and the squeamish girl inside me was screaming in terror, even though I knew full well that there was nothing to be scared of. I mean, I regularly slept with the things that go bump in the night. I was immortal. Nothing could harm me in the middle of a creepy graveyard in the dead of night. Right?
Right?
Remy swore again as her heels sank into the ground, and she bent over to remove them. As she did, I noticed another flashlight bobbing along the walk, just a short distance from us.
“Crap.” I grabbed Remy by the arm. “Someone’s coming this way.”
She glanced down the walkway. “So what?”
“We’re going to get caught, is what.” I clicked off my flashlight and stuffed it into the waistband of my jeans. “And I would really appreciate not going to jail for trespassing in a graveyard.”
Remy snorted in a rather unladylike fashion. “No o
ne’s going to jail, you ninny.” She stood, handed me her shoes, then headed down the path toward the flashlight, hips swiveling and her hair swooshing around her shoulders in a move perfected in Pantene commercials. I could hear her faintly humming a cheerful tune.
Shoes in hand, I followed warily.
I approached the two of them just in time to hear the guard say, “The grounds are closed after dark, ma’am. You’ll have to come back some other time.”
“My boyfriend left me here,” Remy said, giving the fakest sob I’d ever heard. Porn stars weren’t known for their acting skills, after all. “And it’s dark and scary out here, and I twisted my ankle.”
Corny or not, nothing with a dick could resist a succubus in need. The man had his arms about Remy’s waist in the next moment and she collapsed against him, flinging her arms around his neck. He didn’t look like he was complaining. Confused? Yes. Rapturous? Definitely.
“Just calm down, miss. I’ll take care of you,” he said over her theatrical sobbing, then glanced over at me. “You have a friend here?” His soothing changed to confusion and suspicion.
“Oops,” said Remy, frowning at me for ruining things. Would you believe it’s a double date?”
At his skeptical look, she sighed. “No?”
“I can explain . . .” I began as the guard tried to untangle Remy’s arms from around his neck.
Remy dragged the guard’s face down to hers and plastered her mouth on his, locking him in a very long kiss. When it was done, he slid to the ground in a boneless heap.
Looking very pleased with herself, she glanced over at me. “Good kisser,” she said, then bent over him. “The passcode is an easy one, too.” Remy rummaged through his pockets for a moment, then emerged with his keys. “Just in case.”
She brushed past me and headed for the gate, all decisive motion and swinging hair. I glanced down at the guard for a moment more and felt the stirring of lust. He was a good-looking man. Maybe thirty, thirty-five. No gut, nice eyes behind the glasses . . .