by Jasmine Walt
49
Reza
Every morning waking up with Alisa's head on my chest is a blessing. Every evening I lie down and pull her into my arms is a revelation. But despite her eager kisses and the deep affection in every word, something's missing or hidden. She hasn't responded to my declaration of love. Maybe she's just using my affection for the power I can give her. There's nothing in the superstitions that says that love has to be reciprocated for the bond I have with her.
That's probably for the better. As easy as it is to get caught up in her touch, in her fierce strength, she's still a mortal. I've got a thousand or so years ahead of me—and that's if I don't use the Mantel's power to slow my own aging. We'll love each other while we're together, and I'll make every minute with her count. I can't deny that some part of me thinks it's masochistic, falling for someone who will die a wink later in the grand scheme of things.
Perhaps I could show her how to use the Mantel's power to strengthen herself, to fight back the ravages of age. And for a moment, I imagine it, a millenia with her, her hair barely silvered by the centuries, only the faintest laugh lines marring otherwise ageless skin.
But the thought turns to ash in my mouth. The Mantle's power isn't without limits. We'd burn through it much faster, maybe not so fast as to expose the Well and its patrons to this war, but there's always another. There's always been another. Dalila first built the Well as a refuge during the final Gargoyle purge, when the Anguis hunted them to extinction and then murdered anyone thought to bear even a hint of their blood.
I know some of it is my canine instincts. Everyone in the Well is a part of my pack. Even Abel, who I clashed with more than once before, feels like family here. I'd fight for any one of them. Die, if need be. I don't know how I could choose. No. It's worse…I know I couldn't. But I also know, Bael help me, that if she asked, I'd drop the Well and everyone in it over the cliff into Charyndis. So I don't dare ask. I don't dare find out what she'd do when the chips are down. I don't dare betray my brother, my closest friend. I don't dare ruin my whole family, my whole world.
Not that I think she would push for immortality, not yet, anyway. She's young, still, vital. But even the most staid heart trembles as death looms ever closer. I've seen mortality turn kind men cruel, bend peaceful women into torturers. I'm terrified my power could corrupt her, make the both of us monsters, and that I'd let her.
I should have thought this through before I let Eren talk me into embracing my love for Alisa. I trust that it's worth the eventual pain, but how can I know for sure? Would I be better off—her, too—if we'd stayed apart and let our fondness peter out?
Alisa doesn't know that not all the research I'm doing with her is for the Well. When I have a moment here or there, I dig through old texts, trying to discover if any other witches had uncovered the secret to immortality so that she can stay with me. Along the way, I find myself doing a surprising amount of digging into her genealogy. Perhaps it's simply the sense that if I could answer the questions that still haunt her, I would have truly done something for her.
I'll find something, sooner or later. There's no secret buried so deep that it can't be dug up eventually.
50
Alisa
Reza kisses my forehead when I bring a plate of food up to him one brisk morning. He loops an arm around my waist and leaves it there while he eats, and I poach bites of his food. Although we're discussing the barrier spell we were attempting to rework the night before, it doesn't seem like his heart's in our chatter.
He says everything's fine, but I know better than to believe it. For weeks now, he's been quiet. His touch is as gentle as ever, and his love's played out over dozens of lustful encounters, but there's a distance between us, even when we talk magic and learning. Perhaps he's tired of playing the babysitter and the teacher. Perhaps he's tired of entertaining me, showing me the ins and outs of my powers and his so we can find tasks to keep me busy and find a way for me to feel useful at some point in my future.
“Can I get you anything else?” I ask him, in case it's simply that he's still hungry or something.
“Nope,” he says and tugs me into his lap to prove the point.
I trace the patterns forming under his skin, memorizing the sharp curves of the small pieces of bone implanted there. I still haven't figured out the specific spells used to shape them. I probably won't, either.
“Are you annoyed with me?” I ask for the tenth time. Both of us have been unable to give voice to what's truly wrong. I can't articulate why it seems like he's distancing himself from me, and he hasn't even acknowledged that he is.
“No, Lis. I'm just preoccupied. I've got errands to do. Kiss me good-bye, and then let me get dressed.” He cups my cheek, drawing my face to his for another breath-stealing kiss.
When he touches me, it feels like everything's okay. It's only when he talks that I have to wonder whether he regrets us moving so fast, jumping from declarations of affection to all but living together here. Maybe that's why I still haven't been able to actually say “I love you” back. He has to know it, but it's still not something that comes naturally to me to say; Reba was pretty stoic, and even Annie wasn't really the gushy type. It's just not something that comes intuitively to me. I'd say the words are the cherry on top of the sundae of truly being loved and loving, but even that's giving it too much credit. Like Reza already discovered, the words come after everything else already has. He gave his heart to me without so much as a statement of interest.
It stings being around him, knowing something's off but not knowing what or why. I'll leave him some space, get some distance from this. For my own good. “I'm going down for more coffee then. Don't forget about me when you're off running errands.”
Reza smiles, a little of his cocky self shining through in the lopsided grin. He kisses me again and then releases me with a swat to the rump. “Wouldn't dream of it. I won't be gone long.”
I hightail it out of there, taking his plate downstairs with me.
Eren catches my dour look and refills my cup without me so much as asking. “Rough morning?”
“You could say that. I just—I don't know what's going on. It just—it seems like we're more roommates and fuckbuddies than anything else, and I don't think he likes that, either. Maybe Reza's tired of me already, or something.”
Eren's eyes narrow. He knows something.
“He is, isn't he?” I hate how flat my voice sounds. “He overstated things and wishes he'd slept on it. If he'd brought me here as a collaborator, we'd be okay, but because he wanted me here as his lover—”
Eren grudgingly steps out from behind the bar and hooks his arm over my shoulders. “Don't think too hard, Alisa. Reza's happy.”
Some kind of potent joy blossoms inside me at the idea that he is happy…but Eren's glib reply doesn't actually address any of my frustration. Tears well in my eyes, and I blink them back. Eren's stoic enough that I can't help but think that he would think less of me if he saw me cry.
He sighs a little too huffily for my tastes, and his arm tightens around me. I bury my face against his side, relieved that he can't see me. “That's the problem. You're both pigheaded.”
I snort, wetly. “That's comforting.”
“It's not my job to be comforting. You're both holding back and wondering why you each think the other is.”
I pull back to glare at him. “Excuse me?”
“Sister, I've got lifetimes on you. Just because I don't want to dip my toes in the dating pool doesn't mean I can't recognize varying forms of masochistic heartbreak when I see 'em.”
“Masochistic?” I can't help but laugh at his bleak outlook.
“Isn't it? The both of you want something static, something constant, without looking at the ways you deny or sabotage it. The problem isn't that you don't love each other, it's that you don't know how to love each other. You're wrapped up in being alone, and he's wrapped up in…” He trails off, likely realizing that Reza wouldn't want him to tal
k about it with me. I want to ask, but I'm afraid of what he might say.
In the end, I don't dare let the opening float by unquestioned. “What?”
“Never mind. I'm sorry, Alisa, I can't help.” Seeing him shaping my full name with Reza's lips only underscores the isolation. Maybe my friendship with Eren is what Reza and I will become once the initial infatuation fades.
He hugs me again, but I can't stop wishing it was Reza holding me.
51
Reza
After some time tracking the slippery bastard down, I finally have something to show Alisa. Or someone. His name's Noe, and he's an incubus, one whose mother was of her clan.
She looks up as the gate opens and Noe and I step through. I had to barter a favor with him to get him to come. We've had some encounters over the years, none of them pleasant. His mother was the witch I knew and played with as a kid. It bothers me knowing that; she deserved better than an anonymous dalliance with an incubus who was only trying to get her to carry his child. Even with Abel's help tracking Noe down, it was an endeavor. And I only got him here by promising him Eren and I would cooperate in helping him see if a friend of his was among our guests.
Alisa glances away, something tight and closed-off in her face. I don't like it in the least. Then she smiles, and the shadows in her expression are gone. “Reza.” She gets up to claim a kiss before turning away. She has no idea all this is for her.
“Lis, brought you a friend. Noe, this is Alisa. Alisa, this is Noe.”
She raises a hand halfheartedly.
“Alisa, Noe knew some of your ancestors. He learned magic from your great-great-something-mother. I want to say…I can't keep track.”
Her eyes light up, just as I hoped they would. “Really?”
He shrugs, fixing her with dark, hypnotic eyes. “I'll leave you two to it,” I say and gesture at the seat next to her. “Want anything to eat, Noe?”
“Sure,” he says, but his attention is on Alisa. I swear, that fucking manwhore never turns it off. If I have to watch him smile at her like that for another second, they're gonna be scraping telepathic sex demon entrails off the ceiling.
I make a face as I turn away, relieved to have the excuse not to look. As I walk past Alisa on my way to the kitchen, she reaches out to me, squeezing my hand as I pass. I breathe a little deeper and even manage a small smile. I may not be able to find out her parents' secrets, but at least she'll be able to learn the magic that's in her heritage from Noe, as close to the horse's mouth as it can get.
Their conversation floats around me in bits and pieces as I tend to business, including shoveling a plate of the day's special at Noe, a fish native to another dimension cooked on a wood plank carved from a tree from yet another plane. “So how old are you, anyway?”
“Don't you know that's rude to ask?” Noe asks but somehow manages to make the retort sound playful, almost flirtatious, rather than rude. “Any incubi less than five hundred is a baby in the grand scheme of things. Never ask one his age.”
She laughs, a silvery sound that makes me feel warm all over. “So under five hundred then.” I can't help but smile that she's still not backing down from the question.
“Slightly. But I've been in touch with them more recently than that. Even had an assignment with one, a second cousin or something, three or four generations back.”
Wait—three or four? If that's so, and he's directly related to Alisa, that means there's a likelihood that she has enough incubi blood to be reborn after death. We could have a lifetime together and then have centuries more. Provided that neither of us has another run-in with Morena or her Reapers.
It's a fool's hope. There's no way of knowing, not until it's too late. I don't dare tell her in case I'm wrong.
I'm gonna have to get in touch with Lorelei, one of the older, more devoted succubus leaders. It's personal now. If Alisa's going to live on as…one of them…I need to do my part to ensure she has the best world possible awaiting her, free from violence based on her demonic clan.
If I tell her it may make her reckless. Daring fate to affirm her incubi heritage, she might refuse to fight or might take undue risks. So I won't tell her. Not if it might take her from me a minute sooner. It's no secret that the incubi scrap and recycle identities at a whim; the woman who returns from Limbo reborn, as her birthright allows, might not be the woman I've chosen to make my life with. And I don't think I'd blame her if that happened. I don't think I could resent her for their nature. I'd like to think I'd wish her well and let her walk onward to the new life she might choose.
It's another pressure I don't need, reminding me that whether or not my full heart is hers now, there's no true future for us.
I just have to make the present sweet enough to stain the bitter future with its pleasant memory. I'll build the best life I can with her and pray every night that we'll have her next life, too.
52
Alisa
The longer Noe speaks, the more I wish I'd asked Reza to stay with me. “I know how your parents died, or rather, I know why. Incubi aren't terribly familial. Both the process and the prospect of flashing leave us untethered in ways that few consciousnesses can really understand. But in its place, there's often a…yearning, I guess you'd call it. One of my—for simplicity, we'll call him a sibling—looked into his bloodline. He discovered Dalen. His was held up as a cautionary tale, a fable about the pitfalls of confusion, getting tied up, emotionally or otherwise, with humans. He was an incubus. One night—in what would have been, for your mother, indistinguishable from a dream—he seduced her. She was only one of many; she may not have ever realized what happened; most of our partners don't.
“Normally, that would have been the end of the story. But as I've said, we incubi often yearn for things we were told not to want, and he returned to her. I don't have particulars, but he managed a moment alone with you and came to believe you bore some of our lineage, which we had always been told was impossible. Incubi, so the legends went, were sterile creatures, hence the complicated ways we continued our species.
“That was never true, and, not to put too blunt of a point on it, but that lie forms the backbone of the impending civil…conflict. But that truth had not yet come to light then, and those who sought to keep its secret tried to silence Dalen. He knew he could not resist them—they were our oldest, in command of our fiercest. All he could do was protect the child he had accidentally placed in harm's way.
“So Dalen flashed himself, wiping away every shred of the man he'd been. When the elders found him, he was laughing like a loon and wouldn't stop. He laughed for ten years, unceasingly, through interrogation and torture, eventually passing from this world to myth.” Despite Noe's charismatic and cheerful tone, he shudders.
“They say he was the first experiment in the dire Hounds, that his mad corpse was turned into a legion of laughing assassins. But they stretched what remained of his mind too far, too thin, far beyond the breaking point—to a point that the pieces of him could never be controlled. They were a wave of death, crashing on all in their path. Only Morena knows what became of him after that.”
He stops and grins. “I think I'm getting away from myself. We incubi are, at heart, storytellers. What is seduction, after all, but two people writing a love story together.”
“Some more actively than others,” Reza says, setting down a flagon.
“So do you know how they died? I saw a sigil on the underside of their car.”
“Would you mind showing me?” Noe asks.
“Draw, with your finger, in the air,” Reza says.
Something inside me tingles with power that's not mine, but I hesitate. He takes my hand in his and begins with a line, and to my surprise, plasma congeals at the tip of my finger, hanging in the air like a glowing fog. It takes me a few moments to adjust, both to his touch and to the eerie sensation of trailing charged lines.
“I don't know it,” Noe says.
“I do,” Gene says, waving her hand throu
gh the floating sigil, causing it to dissipate. Abel nods in agreement but lets her explain. “I've seen it used before. A coven of witches Morena sometimes contracts with. They use them to make assassinations out in the flesh world look like accidents. They're a contravention of some of our treaties, so not many live to tell that tale. They're a pack of crazy, crazy, crazy bitches. I worked with them, once. I lost a hand. I mean, I was only borrowing it, anyway, but that's not the point. I could have lost a hell of a lot more. They were dangerous, even to those working with them.”
“I had wondered,” Noe says, smiling conspiratorially as though he were a cat grinning around a canary it had caught. It's impossible to take my eyes off his rugged features and crisp movements. He has to be the prettiest man I've ever seen, all power and temptation. No wonder Reza was uncomfortable leaving me alone with him. Of course, having seen Abel move, too, I'm beginning to wonder if it's an incubus thing, some pheromone or trait that amplifies their natural appeal to make them irresistible. It's unnerving, since I'm not really the type to perv out on a hot stranger.
“What?” I ask.
“That other part of the puzzle. I knew, from my sibling, that a striking number of Dalen's, um, to put it delicately, conquests, met untimely ends shortly after his demise. Their families, too. But my sibling managed to track an errant child who had escaped one of the accidents, somehow forgotten by the Elders, to a pair of witches.”
“Witches?”
“Yes. Your adoptive mothers. He left it at that, however, self-preservation winning out over his catlike curiosity. I hadn't wanted to know even that much, but some people just can't be convinced to shut up.” His eye glints, as if he wonders if that's him, at this moment.