by A. H. Lee
Incubus Yule
Incubus Series Book 4
A. H. Lee
Published by: Pavonine Books
Cover by Starla Huchton
© 2017 by A. H. Lee. All rights reserved. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This material may not be reproduced, modified, or distributed without the express prior permission of the copyright holder. Artwork is displayed by agreement with the artists. All artists hold the copyrights to their work.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 1
Jessica
Jessica floated up from the depths of a pleasant dream to the fragrant odor of coffee and the sharp scent of pine. The sun had not yet risen, and it was practically the middle of the night. Yet she was alone in the big bed that she shared with her two lovers.
Husbands, she corrected herself, but that still seemed surreal. She’d heard a few of the servants call her “Lady Azrael,” and that also seemed bizarre. No one would have known to call her “Mrs. Crowley” or any of Mal’s strange names. She still thought of herself as Jessica Charles. My name belongs to me, but they’ve certainly got my heart.
The three of them had been married for a little less than a year, and today would be their first Yule together. They would be celebrating the holiday in rooms that still smelled faintly of fresh paint and sawdust and magic. The move had begun over the summer, since, as Mal pointed out to Azrael, “Our bachelor days are over, and that shoebox you like to call a bedroom is no place to start a family.” Jessica had to agree, although she could see that it pained Azrael.
You are such a creature of habit.
However, once his old furniture had been installed in a lovely west-facing set of rooms, Azrael revived and appeared to take pleasure in renovating and decorating the new suite. He even decided, upon further inspection in better light, that some of his old furniture was only fit for burning. Azrael especially liked the kitchen, which had to be built into the rooms with a combination of creative engineering and magic. It was three times the size of his old kitchen, with a spacious breakfast room and an entirely separate formal dining room. “Because if the most powerful wizard in the world insists upon poaching his own egg every morning, he should at least not be able to turn around and set it on his dining table without taking a step,” Mal had said.
“I had to take a step,” Azrael had grumbled. “I had to take two.”
“Yes, during which you usually tripped over me.”
“I have tripped over you exactly twice that I can remember.”
“It was twice too often.”
Jessica thought privately that the bigger suite was an improvement simply because they didn’t exactly live alone. Lucy was spending more time outside her bottle than she had in years. Mal noted the fact to Jessica without bothering to explain why. The explanation was obvious. Lucy and Mal were getting along. Not all the time. Not in every way. But the constant threats had ceased. It was no longer unpleasant to be in the same room with them.
Azrael’s relief at this situation was evident. However, he still seemed surprised when Mal said one evening, in the dark against his ear. “You should give Lucy her own room.”
“Hmm? You think she’d like that?”
“I know she would. And clothes. You should give her some real clothes and jewelry.”
Jessica was confused. “The clothes she makes from magic are beautiful.”
“I know,” said Mal. “But her repertoire is limited. No master ever gives her anything to wear or any place to sleep, anything of her own. Why should he? Why spend money on clothes for her when she can make them out of magic? Why give her a room when you can just send her back into her bottle? When you can put her in a drawer like a tool you’ve finished using?”
“Mal…” Now Azrael sounded hurt.
“I know you didn’t think about it,” said Mal. “I know she didn’t ask. She’ll never ask.” He hesitated for a heartbeat and then added, “Don’t tell her it was my idea.”
Jessica reached across Azrael in the dark and stroked Mal’s velvet panther head. You are so good sometimes.
After a long moment, Azrael said quietly, “Thank you, Mal,” and rubbed his ears until he purred himself to sleep.
So Lucy got her own room, with her bottle left open so that she could come and go as she wished. And she got a steadily increasing supply of real clothes and jewelry. She didn’t say much about these things at first. Lucy was never easy to read, but as the days passed, she came to life in a way that Jessica suspected she hadn’t in a long time.
Lucy didn’t really need to eat. She didn’t even technically need to feed in the same way that Mal and Jessica did, because her bottle contained a little scrap of the astral plane. But she started sharing meals with them. She sat and listened to Azrael read some evenings. She stood on the balcony and smoked cigarettes that made Mal gag. She slept in a sunbeam in her dragon form and occasionally terrified the horses by sailing over their pasture. She read Azrael’s account books with the kind of attention usually reserved for novels and she taught Jessica embroidery. Recently, she’d found a chessboard and laid it out in the sitting room. She’d been trying to teach Mal to play, although he was hopelessly bad at it.
Someone had left the bedroom door open, and Jessica heard their voices faintly from down the hall. “Too impatient, Mal.”
“I would be patient if you would stop taking my pieces!”
“That’s the point of the game.”
Jessica smiled at the ceiling. It was hung all around the edges with garlands of pine and red ribbon. Azrael must have done that with magic when he got up. It hadn’t been there last night. The clean, wintery scent filled the bedroom.
Jessica sat up, stretching. The enchanted picture frame still hung over Azrael’s old dresser, showing a dim, frosty view of moonlit gardens. Across from it, a real window rose above a window seat, flanked by bookcases. Jessica called this “the reading nook.” A desk, loveseat, and several comfortable chairs made a loose crescent. The books had plenty of shelf space instead of lying in piles on the floor.
The curtains were drawn across the window at the moment, and not a hint of light shone around the edges. However, if the curtains had been opened in daytime, the view would have revealed not the gardens, but the stables and rolling horse pasture beyond. Azrael loved to sit at the desk and look out at his horses between letters. Jessica, who wrote almost as many letters herself, sometimes watched Azrael jumping his favorite mare and racing Mal back to the stables while she wrote. She’d attempted to draw them in her last letter to her mother.
Her mother’s response had mentioned snow. No snow here, thought Jessica with a sigh.
The Shattered Sea was warm and its islands quite temperate. They almost never got snow. Unless we have a freak storm. Such things did arise sometimes out of the strange magic of the region. Jessica secretly hoped for such a storm. The Provinces usually had snow by Yule, and the holiday didn’t feel quite the same without it.
There was snow in Faerie. Jessica had been trying not to think about that. Her promised visit with Ania, fulfilled last month, had been both satisfying and fascinating. “You ha
ve to come back when it’s picnic weather,” said Ania, “because this isn’t.” But it was sleighing weather. It was dense, soft fur robes weather. It was curling up and drinking mead in front of a crackling fire weather.
When Jessica returned, Azrael had run her through the magical airlock he’d made for visiting magicians, searching for any sign of contamination. Jessica had waited, hardly breathing, to see whether one of those silver eyes would open in her shadow. Nothing happened, however. After performing every test his magic could devise, Azrael grudgingly allowed that the Faerie Queen had not taken advantage. This time.
“I do not think you should return, though,” he told Jessica. “Faeries have agendas that are profoundly inhuman. She wants a foothold here. She always will. And even if she truly has no intention of using you to spy on me, spending time in Faerie tends to change people. There’s a reason stolen children who are rescued never stop trying to go back.”
Jessica could understand that. The air of Faerie smelled like nothing in the mortal world, and the strange country promised something new around every corner. Ania herself certainly wasn’t human. “She’s like a vine,” said Jessica to Azrael. “A curious vine that climbs into windows.”
“More like a weed,” muttered Mal.
“She is deeply connected to the natural world,” agreed Azrael. “But if she’s a plant, she’s an invasive species that likes to escape from garden pots and invade the countryside.”
That made Jessica laugh.
“Her deepest instinct is to send her roots everywhere,” continued Azrael. “You made a promise. You kept it. But I think it should end there.”
He’s probably right. Jessica pushed the snows of Faerie from her mind. She got up, and found a pair of new wool slippers laid out with her dressing gown. She smiled as she lifted her feet from the chilly wood floor and slid them into cozy softness. She and her new family had not been planning to exchange gifts simply because they’d all had so many lately. Wedding gifts had arrived from all over the kingdoms—some of them embarrassingly extravagant. In addition, Azrael had a natural inclination to feed and clothe those he loved. Over the last two seasons he’d given Jessica and Mal so many beautiful clothes that their closets were overflowing. They had every book they could desire at their fingertips and every luxury Azrael’s court could provide. Jessica couldn’t think of a single item she wanted.
Mal, on the other hand, did have one request. Azrael’s traditional Yuletide gift to his familiar had always been a day to himself. In the past, he’d allowed Mal almost complete freedom for those twenty-four hours. As long as he didn’t hurt anyone or leave the mortal plane, Mal could go anywhere he wished, and he did not have to account for where he’d been or what he’d done.
Naturally, Mal wanted to push things even further, now that he was off the leash. “I want to hunt a solstice goose. I want to take Tod.”
Azrael had not responded to this request immediately. He’d bitten his lip and drummed his fingers as he sat in the reading nook, thinking.
“What is a solstice goose?” Jessica asked.
“A mythological creature,” said Azrael.
Mal rolled his eyes. “They’re real. You know they’re real. And they’re delicious.”
Azrael shook his head, thinking.
“Solstice geese migrate between planes of existence,” Mal told Jessica. “They started showing up around the Shattered Sea after the Sundering. They’re rare, but not because they’re endangered…at least not as far as anyone knows. They just don’t spend much time in our world. They turn up around Yule and again in the summer—the solstices. Wards don’t seem to have much effect on them. No one knows exactly where they go when they’re not here or where they originated. I think they’re creatures of the astral plane and that they migrate between worlds.”
“There are other theories,” murmured Azrael. “They may go to alternate versions of our own world. Or they may migrate through time. They may go to the astral plane, though I doubt they originate there. They may go to Faerie. Or all of the above. We saw them once in the Shadow Lands.”
“Not the Shadow Lands,” corrected Mal. “The border. The estuary where the Lethe mingles with the Styx.”
“That’s even more dangerous.”
“I don’t want to hunt them on the river,” said Mal. “I want to set out baits here.” He turned to Jessica. “There’s a place in Aspiria where the local priests set out ‘offerings’ and solstice geese turn up pretty reliably.”
Azrael passed a hand over his face. “Yes, and Aspiria is always having trouble with incursions.”
“We were served a solstice goose at a state dinner,” continued Mal happily. “It is the most buttery meat you’ve ever tasted. I want to hunt one!”
“They tend to show up at weak places,” said Azrael.
“So can I hunt them in the garden?”
Azrael snorted a laugh. “Nicholas has that spot locked up tight.”
“Then let me put spelled corn at the top of our mountain. It’s far enough from the edges of the island that it shouldn’t interfere with the wards.”
Azrael looked at him skeptically. “You think they’ll come to spelled corn?”
“I think they will if you make it. Come on, Boss. All I want for Yule is corn.”
Azrael laughed and looked at the ceiling. Before he could say the familiar, “I’m not your boss,” Mal added, “Partner.” He’d been trying that word out lately. Azrael seemed to like it. “Come on, Partner, I know you can make something a solstice goose would like.”
Azrael sighed. “I’ll make you some corn. Very potent corn. If we spend the next year dealing with a weak place at the top of the mountain, expect to hear ‘I told you so’ a lot.”
“Does Tod know he’s going on this goose hunt?” asked Jessica.
“Not yet,” said Mal. “Do you want to break the happy news or shall I?”
Jessica had laughed. “How about you.”
Tod and Mal had hunted rabbits several times over the summer in animal form. Tod had not expressed his opinion on this situation in any detail to Jessica, although he didn’t seem upset. Jessica thought it was good for Mal to do things with other people besides seduce them. She thought Tod could use a few more friends who wouldn’t be leaving the Shrouded Isle.
The “very potent” corn had been scattered yesterday evening. Azrael did not want it lying around any longer than that. Mal and Tod were planning to go up the mountain before dawn and wait in a blind. Any goose they caught could be prepared by dinner. If not, mundane geese were available. Mal had been so excited last night that he’d had a hard time falling asleep.
And he must have gotten Azrael up at three-thirty. Jessica went into the washroom. Dinner tonight would be extravagant, with or without a solstice goose, and she intended to do something interesting with her hair. But maybe I’ll just go see them off first. After cursory ablutions, she padded down the hall in her dressing gown and slippers.
Mal and Lucy were playing chess at the kitchen table. It was Azrael’s old table, complete with tea rings and numerous burns and scratches of questionable origin. However, it now had a leaf that made it longer and strangely untarnished in the middle. Lucy was wearing a white dressing gown with feathery lapels that resembled a boa and cuffs to match. The gown was real, and she loved it. Mal was wearing nothing but trousers, which appeared to be made from magic, along with his silver collar.
Azrael stood in the kitchen in his shirt sleeves and an apron, whisking something on the stove that smelled fragrantly of butter.
Jessica yawned as she came in. “Everyone’s up so early…”
Mal turned with a grin. “It is the morning of the great goose hunt!”
“Jessica,” said Azrael without turning, “did we wake you? I had to practically muzzle him to keep him from waking you earlier.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to come?” asked Mal for the dozenth time. “You’re not likely to see solstice geese very often.”
&nb
sp; “I am sure I do not want to watch you kill a goose,” said Jessica firmly, “solstice or otherwise.”
“Tod might kill the goose.”
“I am sure I do not want to watch Tod kill a goose, either. Lucy might, though.”
“I already asked her,” said Mal. “She thinks we’ll need rescuing.”
Lucy gave a non-committal shrug.
“Are solstice geese dangerous?” asked Jessica. She hadn’t heard this part.
“No,” said Lucy. “Scattering magical bait designed to attract otherworldly entities is dangerous. Solstice geese are harmless.” Her dark blue eyes flicked up at Mal. “Your move, dove.”
He looked back at the chessboard, did a double take. “How is your rook over there?”
Lucy showed him.
“Well…can I just…do this?”
“No, the pieces don’t move that way.”
“Well, then…” Mal tried something else.
“You can’t go off the board, either. Rules, Mal.”
He made a thwarted predator’s whine. “I hate rules.”
Azrael came up behind him, reached over his shoulder, and moved a piece.
Lucy gave them a disgusted expression. “Is this a team effort? I had not realized.”
“Partners,” said Mal sweetly.
A knock on their front door brought Mal bouncing out of his chair. “Tod’s here!”
Jessica went with him to answer the door. Tod stood outside, looking sleepy. Mal dissolved into his panther form the second he pulled the door open. “Let’s go hunt a solstice goose!”
Tod passed a hand over his face. “It is four in the morning, Mal. How are you this awake?”
He was bounding around the sitting room.
Jessica came forward and gave Tod a hug. “Merry Yule.”
He hugged her back, whispering into her ear, “Is this the worst decision I have ever made?”
“I don’t think so,” Jessica whispered back. “Lucy intends to rescue you if you get into trouble.”
“That is comforting.”
Azrael had come in from the kitchen, still in his apron and socks. “Good morning, Thomas.”