by Dima Zales
Not chirps or screeches as per normal chinchilla vocalizations, but screams a wail I didn’t know his little throat could produce.
He then begins to shake as though having an epileptic seizure—or perhaps more apt, like he’s being put to death by an electric chair.
“Stop! You’re going to kill him!” I scan the room for something heavy to bang Baba Yaga over the head with.
“He’ll be fine,” the witch grits out. “He’s just an old and strong specimen of his kind, that’s all.”
The energy keeps spewing from her fingers, and Fluffster’s fur stands up in every direction, as though he’s turned into a porcupine.
In the next instant, his thrashing stops, and he collapses onto his side.
Baba Yaga’s energy pierces his lifeless-looking body for a moment, then ceases.
The witch looks pale as she grips the table with a shaking hand.
“You better be worth it, girl,” she says in a barely audible whisper. “I haven’t expended this much juice for fifty years.”
Ignoring the witch, I lean over Fluffster and put a hand to his chest.
His heartbeat is slow and his breathing shallow, but he’s clearly alive—which means Baba Yaga will also live, though how I could’ve killed her in revenge is an interesting puzzle.
“Bud,” I say to the domovoi. “Are you okay?”
He doesn’t respond.
“You better take him to his domain.” The witch plops wearily into a chair, her movements now more consistent with her age. “His domain is your home, in case you’re ignorant of his nature.”
“Thanks.” It takes all my acting prowess not to smack her in the wrinkled face. “I’ll go do that right now.”
Cradling Fluffster’s tiny body against my chest, I head for the door, leaving the carrier cage for Baba Yaga as a souvenir.
Koschei opens the wooden door in that very second, as though he’s the psychic instead of me.
I pass him without a second glance, and sprint for Ariel’s table.
“What’s wrong?” Ariel says as soon as she sees me. Then her gaze falls on my hands. “Is Fluffster okay?”
“He better be. He needs to get home, the sooner the better.”
“Of course.” She leaps to her feet. “Let’s go.”
Using her supernatural strength, Ariel pushes a path for us through the crowd. To my relief, the mobsters she all but assaults act as though we’ve grown invisible.
“The car. Now,” I shout at the valet as soon as we get outside. To reinforce my words, Ariel pulls out a twenty and thrusts it into the guy’s hand.
The valet hurries around the corner, and after a few long seconds, he backs into our street in Ariel’s Hummer.
“Floor it,” I tell Ariel when we get inside.
She does, and the tires screech as we torpedo forward.
Ariel must’ve learned aggressive driving in the army. The Hummer slices through the traffic like a tank; everyone, even the yellow cabs, yield to us, clearing the way.
To distract myself from an incipient panic attack from Ariel’s driving, I tell her what happened in Baba Yaga’s wooden office in minute detail.
“Thank goodness you had Rose’s protection,” Ariel says. “If Yaga had succeeded in her spell, she’d have complete and utter control over you. It’s even worse than the sire bond.”
Suppressing a shudder, I stroke Fluffster’s limp body. “What’s a sire bond?”
Ariel skids onto the highway, the car’s tires leaving a black streak in our wake. “If a pre-vamp drinks the blood of a fully-fledged vampire before dying, the donor vampire will be the resulting vamp’s sire—and the new vamp will have to do his bidding for a decade.”
“Wow. Why would a pre-vamp ever drink the blood, given the consequences?”
“It’s the only sure way for a pre-vamp to turn.” Without signaling her intent, Ariel switches into the middle lane—right in front of an express bus. “If a pre-vamp isn’t powerful enough, they may not turn when they die. They might just die for real—and the only way to find out is to actually die without drinking the blood of another vamp. Most prefer the certainty of the sire bond to the uncertainty of freedom with a chance of fatality.”
I ponder that kind of choice as we switch to the fast lane and accelerate to triple the speed limit.
Unlike mine, Fluffster’s breathing and heartbeat are unchanged—though I should be grateful things haven’t gotten worse.
The rest of the ride is a haze of adrenaline for me, and I only exhale a frightened breath when we get to Battery Park and Ariel hits the brakes for the first time since we left the restaurant.
With a jerk so violent that my bruised shoulder starts to ache again, we stop.
I hold Fluffster in my left hand as I open the car door with my right, breathing in the smell of burned rubber from the tires.
Ariel’s phone chirps with an arriving text.
She looks at it and winces. “I have to go. I’ll be back later. Can you text me as soon as Fluffster is feeling better?”
I nod and rush to our building.
If I weren’t in a hurry, I would’ve asked Ariel what that was about, but I have my suspicions anyway. It was probably another booty call from Gaius. Or is it a neck call, or blood call, if your “just a friend” is a vampire?
It may be my imagination, but the chinchilla feels warmer to the touch when we enter the building, and his breathing is more even by the time I exit the elevator on our floor.
Taking out my keys, I open the apartment door and walk into the kitchen. Placing Fluffster on the table, I examine him thoroughly.
His breathing is normal now, his heartbeat steady, but he still doesn’t reply when I call out to him.
“You’re going to be fine,” I tell the unconscious chinchilla. “Let me go take off my dirty shoes and turn off the light by the front door.”
My hope is that the prospect of saving on electricity would get a reaction from him, but no such luck.
When I get back to the door, I notice a package there. Felix must’ve brought it in earlier, which means he must be home.
Looking around, I see Felix’s favorite pair of sneakers here too.
If he’s home, though, it’s odd that he didn’t come out to greet me. Maybe he has his headphones on?
Then a see a dainty pair of stilettos that don’t belong to either me or Ariel.
Unless Felix decided to experiment with drag, he must be in the middle of an actual Netflix-and-chill date.
I take my shoes off, and my gaze falls on the package again.
It’s got an eBay logo on it, so it must be my VCR purchase—something I completely forgot about with all the misadventures.
Then I notice the name of the sender, and my eyes threaten to jump out of their sockets.
“How?” I mutter as I read it again.
The package is from Darian.
He would’ve had to list the VCR at just the right moment and at just the right price for me to buy it when I did. But why bother with such a charade? First, he sends me the VHS tape, then sells me a device needed to play it.
If I weren’t worried about Fluffster, I’d rip the package open right this second, but as is, I turn to go back to the kitchen—and that’s when I finally notice the scent.
A yummy scent I’ve smelled before, during my nearly fatal liaison with Harper the Incubus at Nero’s Earth Club.
Just remembering the encounter makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up—just as the magic of the smell wields its aphrodisiac effect on other parts of my body.
Like a hound, I let my nose guide me, and the scent gets stronger as I approach Felix’s room.
When I’m almost there, a strong sense of foreboding forces me to stop and take in a calming breath.
Only inhaling deeply turns out to be a bad idea.
It increases how much incubus juju gets into my lungs.
My mind is on the verge of going completely muddy, but with a sheer effort of will
, I stave off the unwelcome arousal.
How is this happening?
Why am I smelling Harper?
More than ever, I want my stupid powers to work.
Nero said I need to believe in myself, but the frustrating thing is that in this moment, I believe in my powers completely and utterly—except it doesn’t seem to do me any good.
The smell further intensifies, leaving no doubt in my mind as to its source—Felix’s room.
This is when the smell, or the stress of it, creates the strangest feeling ever.
Lightning bolts explode in my vision.
Did I just hit my head?
The lightning effect feels like it’s streaming from my hands directly into my eyeballs.
Just as suddenly as it arrived, the visual illusion disappears, leaving me standing in front of Felix’s door.
A moan reaches me from under the door. It’s hard to tell if it’s a moan of pain or pleasure—not that either is good, given Harper’s powers.
My body working as though on autopilot, I gather all my strength and kick in the door.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The door swings in with a bang, but no one seems to notice my arrival.
I stare at Felix’s bed, my eyes refusing to believe what they’re seeing.
Harper is here, sitting on top of a pale and naked Felix.
Except the incubus doesn’t look like himself.
The key word being “him.”
Harper is a full-on her.
Her naked body leaves no doubt of her deadly femininity. Her breasts are perky and firm, and there’s a definite lack of anything but female anatomy between her legs. Her makeup accentuates the pretty features that already stood out at the club, and I wonder how I could’ve ever seen anything but a woman when I looked at this creature.
“A sexy, yummy woman,” some part of me whispers temptingly, but I shake my head, doing my best to ignore that traitorous whisper.
I look under Harper, and it seems like in the few moments since I opened the door, the quivering mound of flesh that is Felix has grown paler and weaker.
Harper’s lips are hovering near Felix’s privates, and Felix’s erection looks like he took twenty bottles of Viagra.
“So, you’re a succubus,” I say out loud, hoping I break whatever spell Felix is under. “I thought you were an incubus at the club.”
Harper’s attention turns from Felix to me.
Her pretty face twists in a frightening smile. “You killed my girlfriend,” she says, her voice now distinctly feminine. “Now I’ll kill you and your boyfriend.”
“What girlfriend?” I want to say, but before I even get a chance to open my mouth, Harper opens her pouty lips, inhaling deeply, and some kind of blue energy leaps from Felix’s groin into her—leaving Felix a withered husk.
Seeing my horrified expression, Harper reaches into Felix’s chest as though it were a bathtub filled with warm water, rips out his shrunken heart, and throws it under my feet with a squishy thud.
I stare at the bloody heart, then at Harper, my brain not coping with the information my sensory organs are sending it.
Harper leaps up and lands on the floor next to the bed with a smack of her bare feet—one of which steps on Felix’s heart and squashes it flat.
Then she faces me.
The succubus stink makes the air around her shimmer, and despite my attempts not to breathe, her face turns so temptingly beautiful that a part of me longs to jump into her outstretched arms.
I force myself to look down at Felix’s dead body.
She did this.
She killed him.
The fury pulsing in my temples makes it possible to fight Harper’s deadly allure—and the monster seems to recognize this, because she drops all pretense of seduction, her face contorting in its own mask of wrath.
I curl my hands into fists, my nails digging painfully into my palms.
Harper’s throat unleashes an inhuman scream, and she leaps at me.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I throw a punch at where I think Harper’s face is supposed to be, but she moves too fast and my fist misses.
Then she pushes me—and I feel as though I got hit with a car as I fly at Felix’s sixty-five-inch TV.
I crash into the screen, the air vacating my lungs as searing pain explodes in my shoulder blade.
A sharp edge of what’s left of a video game console has pierced my back, I realize as something warm trickles down in a blood sacrifice to Nintendo.
Harper looms over me.
She must not like seeing me clutch at the edge of the TV stand, because she stomps on my arm—and the earlier pain becomes a distant memory as the bones in my forearm snap like gluten-free crackers.
Stars explode in my eyes, and my throat pushes out a vocal-cord-tearing scream.
Seeing my tortured expression, Harper smiles sadistically and stomps on my hand so hard every bone in it shatters as well.
This time, my scream comes out animalistic and hoarse. Some of my sanity disappears along with my voice, and I nearly—but unfortunately, not fully—black out. It’s as though my mind escapes from the pain into a little room in my brain—one where my thinking capabilities are diminished but not completely gone.
In this reduced mental state, my biggest worry is that I won’t be able to do my favorite card sleight of hand anymore, since there’s no way a surgeon, no matter how brilliant, will be able to make my arm heal properly.
Harper’s next kick lands on my spine, and something cracks there with an apocalyptic screech. She kicks me again, and the ocean of pain goes away completely—and I struggle not to think about what this means.
My nemesis grabs my ragdoll body and walks up to the window.
With a powerful thrust, she throws me through the glass.
As I fall, I marvel at how the shards of broken glass only hurt my face but nowhere else.
Morbidly, I wonder if that means I won’t feel the impact if I land on anything but my head—and then my body smacks into the ground.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I have a consciousness still, but I don’t feel anything.
Am I paralyzed?
No.
I’m bodiless, floating in Felix’s room and watching Harper look down from the window at my broken body below her.
“This is for Beatrice,” she says grimly and spits at my remains.
Something moves behind her—
I’m back in front of Felix’s door.
Where I was when that strange lightning from my hands hit my eyes.
A slew of semi-rational explanations swirl through my head, from a focal onset seizure to someone sneaking a mushroom into my morning breakfast.
I dismiss them all.
What just happened was exactly like my dream visions—only it happened when I was awake.
Of course.
My very first awake vision.
Nero’s heavy-handed machinations and/or my growing belief in my powers must’ve finally gotten me through this hurdle. In fact, right before the lightning hit my eyes, I was reflecting on how much I believe in myself.
Of course, if I just saw a vision, it means Harper is there, behind this door, sucking the life out of Felix.
Harper, who is a female, not a boyband-pretty stranger I nearly hooked up with.
Harper, who appears to have been the necromancer Beatrice’s girlfriend—which explains why she’s after me.
She’s out to avenge Beatrice’s violent demise.
She tried to get at me directly at the club—and then gained access to me via Felix. This must be why I felt that unease when I learned about Felix’s date. It was my seer Spidey sense tingling, not some kind of weird jealously—
A familiar moan reaches my ears—proof that everything is proceeding according to my vision.
An outline of a plan forms in my head, and though every fiber in my body screams for me to rush in and save Felix this very moment, I also know that such reckless
ness will lead to us both dying.
No.
My only chance to save Felix lies in Ariel’s room.
I dash there, praying my roommate didn’t take her gun with her when she escorted me to Baba Yaga.
My prayers aren’t answered.
The gun is nowhere in sight.
Fortunately, Ariel doesn’t carry her prized army knife with her, so I grab it and sprint back to Felix’s room.
As I run, I dig into my left pocket, find a large wad of flash paper, and spear it on the tip of the knife, creating a paper kebab.
Holding the knife in front of me, I grab a lighter from my pocket and prepare to strike it as I kick in the door again.
The door swings in.
I close my eyes and ignite the lighter.
Even through my closed eyelids, I can see that the flash paper goes off as brightly as it always does.
My hope is that the blinding light will create that stun-grenade effect that SWAT teams so often rely on in the movies.
Knife outstretched, I leap at the bed as I reopen my eyes.
I catch a glimpse of smooth female skin and stab between Harper’s perfect breasts.
Instead of reaching her heart, the blade slices the already-moving Harper’s shoulder.
Tightening my grip on the knife, I tackle her, and she lands on her back.
I pin her down like a wrestler, knife lifted to strike again.
Felix moans behind us. Hopefully, it means he’ll stay alive.
Time seems to slow.
Harper’s eyes stare into mine, and if looks could kill, hers would probably turn me inside out.
My knife slices down.
Her hand moves like a cobra, and she grabs the knife by the blade—cutting her palm in the process but preventing my lethal stab.
With a violent jerk that must’ve sliced her hand to the bone, she rips the knife from me and sends it flying under the bed, leaving a streak of blood in its wake.
I punch her in the face.
She smirks back. My punch didn’t even tickle her.
Then she pushes me—and I fly through the room.
With a horrible sense of déjà vu, I crash into Felix’s TV.