by A. H. Lee
Mal trembled. He pressed himself deep inside and finished with a flood of pleasure that communicated itself in a strange echo down their shared connection. The thread of feeding eased and then ceased. One day, he may not stop, thought Azrael. It was a risk he took each time he allowed this to happen.
Mal pulled back, watching his face. “What are you thinking?” Mal could read sexual desire like a musician with perfect pitch, but he could not actually read minds, and other emotions were often confusing to him.
Azrael raised a hand to Mal’s cheek. “That I wouldn’t change a thing.” And maybe there will come a time for public dancing.
Chapter 3
Mal
Mal had a habit of turning back into a panther after sex. It just seemed like a cuddlier shape, although he’d taught himself not to knead people with his claws. Bleeding did not make people feel cuddly. He contented himself with licking Azrael all over until he begged to be let up. Then Mal bounded around the room while Azrael put his wards back together. He waited impatiently while his master took a shower and dressed. Mal noticed that Azrael had chosen riding clothes.
“Are we checking the perimeter today?”
“Yes, I thought it would be a good idea before people start arriving,” said Azrael as he fastened his cuffs. He’d stopped at the bedside table, and Mal remembered that his collar was lying there. He’d been taking it off at night lately, but Azrael needed Mal’s magic for things like checking perimeter wards.
Mal came over and waited for Azrael to drop it around his neck, but Azrael paused. Mal could tell he wanted to say something, but he couldn’t seem to decide what. “Mal,” he said at last, “would you mind if I took a link out of your collar?”
Mal frowned at him. “Why?”
“It’s something for Jessica. I’d rather talk to her about it before I explain, but…would you mind?”
Mal shook his ears. “I guess not. It’s your focus.”
“But it’s got your blood in it.”
Mal flicked his tail. “It’s made of blood and magic, Boss. Yours and mine. If the wrong person got hold of a link, they could hurt us a lot. Is that why you’re asking me?”
“Yes.”
Mal put his paws on the bed and reared up to lick Azrael’s face. “I trust you. And Jessica. Do whatever you like with it.”
Azrael nodded. He cradled the collar in his hands and said a word that vibrated in the air. The collar fell apart.
There’d been a time when Mal would have given anything to see that collar disintegrate. Now, it made him anxious. Azrael seemed to sense this and reached out to rub his ears before continuing.
Mal watched, fascinated, as Azrael carefully selected a single link, then spoke the spell again. The collar reformed, running together like mercury. Azrael slid the extra link into his pocket and held out the collar to Mal. “Let’s go check the perimeter.”
Chapter 4
Jessica
Jessica hung suspended in the clear waters of a mountain spring, trying to see the details of an ancient tile floor below. Clouds of fish obscured her view, parted, obscured it again. They were teal and red and cream and orange—the same colors as the tiles. Jessica thought, although she could not be certain, that they changed color.
A girl swam by beneath her, naked as Jessica, her hair a shiny black ribbon in the clear water. Sunlight dappled on her strong arms and legs, kicking rhythmically. Jessica was reminded of the mermaids she’d once watched with Mal. But that had been in a pocket world inside a storybook. Yuli was real.
And even though she seemed preternaturally aquatic, even Yuli eventually had to breathe. She turned abruptly towards the surface and kicked upward. Jessica popped up along with her. Sound came back into the world—a flood of birdsong, the babble of the river and the nearby waterfall.
Jessica and Yuli gasped and grinned at each other in the misty spray of the falls, wet hair plastered to their heads. “I think it’s a bathhouse!” exclaimed Yuli.
“Oh!” Jessica had been thinking summer cottage, but maybe that was because she’d just come from one. “That makes sense.”
“That long part with no tilework is one of the pools,” said Yuli. “Also…you couldn’t see it from up there, but if you dive low enough to see through the fallen arch, there’s a statue inside…” She grinned. “Of two gentlemen, um, bathing each other.”
Jessica waggled her eyebrows. “Really?”
Yuli backstroked away from her. “Yes, they’re very devoted to cleanliness.”
“I need more details!”
“Then you’ll have to swim down.”
“That is not fair, Yuli!”
Jessica considered trying to dive to the statue, but she didn’t think she could do it without a rest, so she paddled to the bank. “I’m still teaching you to swim,” said Yuli behind her.
“I’m taught!” proclaimed Jessica, hoisting herself out of the water onto a rock, just barely warm from the mid-morning sun. She selected a towel from the pile they’d brought, and pulled it around her shoulders. Her body had the pleasant ache of early morning exercise. The air smelled of earth and the faintly mineral odor of the spring. The water bubbling out of the deep section was quite warm, although it mingled with the cooler water churning down from the falls.
Yuli popped up beside the rock, moisture beading on her nut-brown skin and the swell of her breasts. “I would die of shame if you told anyone that I taught you to swim while you were dog paddling.”
She gave Jessica’s foot a playful tug as though to pull her in, but Jessica resisted. “I want to sit here a moment. Come sit with me.”
Yuli relented and clambered, dripping, onto the rock. She grabbed a towel to wipe her face, then a handful of nuts from their daypack. “I’m glad we found this place.”
“Me, too.”
Jessica turned away from the vision of the pool and waterfall—one of a series that tumbled from the bluffs on the highest side of the island. From up here, she could see where the water gurgled through wheat fields and on into the gardens around Azrael’s palace. It was all part of the Rapunzel—a river that wound like a silver braid through the Shrouded Isle.
Jessica and Yuli had followed the river through the gardens and off the palace grounds on horseback a week ago, looking for the waterfalls. They’d been delighted to find a grotto pool, clear as glass, with fish in the strangest colors and drowned ruins at the bottom.
“Just be careful,” Azrael had told Jessica. “I’ve worked hard to make this island safe, but we are surrounded by the Shattered Sea, and things change fast this close to the source.”
The “source” he referred to was magic itself—raw potential that bubbled out of the Shattered Sea for reasons even the world’s most powerful sorcerer did not understand. Nobody had ever learned how to distill magic from the waves, but all innate magic was stronger here, and the world was thinner.
The Shrouded Isle had been held by a malevolent naiad and other monsters before Azrael. He’d been the first human to take back the island since the Sundering. Remnants of a forgotten, pre-sundering kingdom still existed on the island—a kingdom that was mostly below the waves now, eaten by the sea during that cataclysm when magic had overwhelmed everything. The inhabitants of that lost kingdom had obviously used magic, but it had been tamer back then.
Jessica had grown up in the Provinces—the farthest from the Kingdoms of the Shattered Sea, just a step removed from the mundane world beyond. Magic worked unreliably in the Provinces. Jessica suspected that was part of the reason her succubus nature had lain dormant until she arrived on the Shrouded Isle.
Yuli, on the other hand, had grown up in the island kingdom of Caowah, next door to the Emerald Isles. People from her region were more accustomed to magical creatures and magical threats, but that didn’t slow them down. They even kayaked and swam in the Shattered Sea and boldly ate its fish. Yuli had killed a hydra with a knife once. She spoke of it as she might a shark.
She’d been Jessica’s s
econd friend here. Second after Tod, who was an entirely different sort of friend. Yuli loved books. She wrote novels, although she didn’t show them to many people. When she’d received the invitation to go as tribute to the Shrouded Isle, she’d welcomed the adventure. She’d joyfully thrown herself into dance lessons, etiquette lessons, parties, clothes, and sexual adventures with powerful people. However, her plans for her own future had never changed. “I’m going to use the money from my time here to open a bookshop,” she’d told Jessica. “Then I’m going to marry Terrance Pimbrook.”
He was Yuli’s boyfriend from back home, and she wrote to him every day. “The Shrouded Isle is kind of fake,” she’d said to Jessica once. “I mean, it’s amazing. But it exists to put powerful people in a frame of mind to be agreeable. I don’t mind being part of it for a while, but I want a life in the real world.”
In truth, the sexually charged atmosphere of the Shrouded Isle existed to feed Mal, who was the primary source of Azrael’s magic. However, Yuli wasn’t exactly wrong, either. Azrael’s goal in life was to keep peace in the complex world of the Shattered Sea. There’d been times when he’d done this by questionable means, but his court certainly existed to put powerful people in a frame of mind to hear reason. Jessica supposed that, even if she hadn’t gotten herself hopelessly entangled with Mal and Azrael, she wouldn’t have minded being a part of that, either. For a while, at least.
Yuli hadn’t said anything about Terrance since Jessica’s return to the island. Jessica sensed that something had changed, but she felt she had no right to pry. She was keeping too many secrets herself.
Yuli did not approve of Mal. She rarely said anything about him, but when she did, she called him “creepy.” Jessica didn’t think Yuli knew what Mal was. She probably thought he’d come to the island as a courtier and stayed as one of Azrael’s mysterious hangers-on. Jessica was sure Yuli had made no connection between the panther who often paced at Azrael’s side and the big, dark-haired man who showed up at the Revels and who had fallen into Jessica’s bed. However, Jessica doubted that telling Yuli the truth would improve her opinion of Mal. She was even a little afraid that telling Yuli the truth about herself might end their friendship.
People living in the islands of the Shattered Sea had little patience with monsters. Tod, after all, had nearly lost his life there when he’d been bitten by a werewolf as a child. It wasn’t his fault, but that hadn’t stopped his family from exiling him to Azrael’s court to prevent his likely execution. Jessica had gotten the idea that Yuli was more open-minded than most people in the island kingdoms, but that didn’t mean she would be able to accept Jessica as a succubus who was in a triad relationship with an incubus and a sorcerer.
Yuli shoved her own towel under her butt to make the rock more comfortable and stared at the beautiful view, impervious to her nudity. “It’s nice to have you back, Jessica. Nobody else wants to do stuff like this with me.”
Jessica smiled. “But…?”
Yuli looked at her in exasperation. “Alright, fine, I’ll ask! Why did you come back? Did you marry that lunatic? I can’t decide whether you’re acting married.”
Jessica burst out laughing. “I’m sorry. I’m not comfortable talking about some of it.”
“Yes, well…” Yuli shivered and reached for another towel. The fall air was cool even if the water was warm. “It’s your business; I know that. But you wrote me every week for a while and then you just sort of…stopped. I enjoyed hearing about all the places you visited. If you love that Mal fellow, I don’t care. I thought he might be messing with you, but clearly he’s serious. So, I admit I was wrong, and I’m sorry. Please tell me.”
Jessica bit her lip. “Mal is…tied to the Shrouded Isle. To Azrael’s work here. He wanted to come back, and after being gone for a few months, I did, too. We visited the Provinces. He met my family. But…it didn’t feel like home anymore.”
Yuli looked at her wide-eyed. “Are you going to live here permanently?”
That is a very good question. “I don’t know, Yuli. I’m happy right now.”
Yuli grinned. “Well, then, I’m happy for you.”
“How’s Terrance?” asked Jessica, trying to change the subject.
Yuli’s expression did not alter, but that in itself was odd. Usually she lit up like a lightbulb when she talked about Terrance. “He’s fine. Listen, I’m writing a story about carnivorous plants that take over the world, and a plucky band of children who save it. You visited the sentient forests of Karth, right? Tell me about them!”
Chapter 5
Jessica
Two hours later, Yuli had to go to a language lesson. Jessica had planned to return with her, but changed her mind at the last minute. Jessica got dressed and hiked the rest of the way to the top of the ridge, where water bubbled out of a jumble of rocks. She followed a faint trail to a meadow that looked down onto the rocky beach on the less habitable side of the Shrouded Isle. To her amusement, she spotted Azrael and Mal in the distance—Azrael on horseback, Mal loping beside him as a panther.
The horse was Azrael’s favorite—a ghost-gray mare with a beautiful, smooth gait. She paid no more attention to Mal than if he’d been a large dog. She was cantering in the surf, Azrael stopping now and then to run his fingers through the air. Arcs of blue light shot up whenever he did this, temporarily outlining a twisting net of spells that lay like a dome across the island. They were complex wards that protected the Shrouded Isle from incursion by magicians, other-worldly creatures, or any of the nameless horrors that might crawl or slither out of the Shattered Sea.
“They look happy to be home,” said a friendly male voice behind Jessica.
She smiled. “I thought I spotted something in the trees. You shouldn’t spy on girls skinny dipping, Tod. It’s not polite.”
“I averted my eyes!” he exclaimed. “You should not go skinny dipping in isolated parts of this island without someone standing watch. Do you have any idea what Azrael catches in those spell traps? What if something got through? No, don’t turn around, please. Give me a moment to…change.”
Jessica sighed. He’d never let her see his wolf form, which she thought was unfair. She’d seen all the rest of him. Tod was one of the few people she’d felt comfortable feeding on in the early days when her demonic nature began to manifest. He was more resilient than a normal human, harder to hurt because he was a werewolf. However, Tod’s relationship with his animal form was very different from Mal’s. To Tod, it was a curse that had separated him from his wizard family, wrecked his innate magical abilities, and prevented him from going home for more than short visits. He was not proud of it.
“I wouldn’t judge,” said Jessica quietly. “I’m a succubus for gods’ sakes!”
Tod said nothing. Jessica had gotten the idea that the transformation hurt, although he’d never told her so. At last, he spoke again. “Alright, I’m good.”
Jessica turned around. Tod was sitting on the grass, barefoot in his trousers. He’d put on a shirt, but hadn’t buttoned it. His red hair looked a little wild. His pale, freckled skin showed stark against the grass. He had a sleek, lightly muscled build—deceptive, because he was very strong. His open shirt gave a tantalizing peak at the contours of his chest and stomach.
Jessica came to sit beside him. “Were you carrying those around in your mouth?” Unlike Mal, Tod could not make clothes from magic.
He gave an ironic smile and raised a bag on a string out of the grass. “Rolled up in there, around my neck. It works pretty well, although everything ends up wrinkled.”
Jessica leaned against his shoulder. It felt good to be home. Below them, in the distance, Mal and Azrael had stopped to investigate something on the beach. Mal began digging, sending up a cataract of sand. “See,” murmured Tod, “they’ve found one.”
Jessica watched as Azrael jumped off the horse. The barrier behind him sparked and fizzled, sending out random flashes of blue light up over the dome and across the sand. Mal soon unearthe
d a jar about the size of a human head. “Is that a spirit vessel?” asked Jessica, craning her neck.
“Yep,” said Tod, “a spell trap. And judging by the way Mal is acting, it has something in it.”
Mal was behaving like a hunting dog on point. He’d backed away from the jar and stood rigid, tail twitching. He and Azrael were talking to each other, but Tod and Jessica were too far away to hear what they were saying. Azrael made a crushing motion with his hands, and the vessel shattered. Something bigger exploded into view, almost as though it had been under the sand the whole time. The thing looked like a young girl, naked and in distress, her arms reaching.
Jessica gasped. “What’s wrong with her body?”
Her waist melded into a muscular, gray column. Then the rest of the creature flopped out of the sand, and the girl was just a stalk bobbling from its head—a meat puppet. The head beneath was fishy, massive, and full of teeth.
“It’s like an angler fish,” said Tod with interest.
Jessica clapped a hand over her mouth. “It’s like a horrible monster! Gods, I’m going to dream about that.”
“I wonder if it can make the lure talk,” continued Tod amiably. “Help! Help! I’m drowning!”
“Tod!” exclaimed Jessica.
“Jessica! This is why you shouldn’t go skinny dipping in the woods without someone on watch. There’s a good reason nobody lived here until Azrael came along and locked it down with Mal’s magic.”
Below them, Mal was dancing around the creature that seemed disturbingly agile on its fins. The child—the lure—on its head bobbled and flopped grotesquely. Jessica could tell that Mal was trying to keep the monster’s attention. Behind it, Azrael drew something out of his pocket—a weaponized spell, no doubt. He spoke to it, and then threw it onto the creature. The beast convulsed and shimmered with blue light. The great jaws went snap, snap, snap! Then it began to melt—first into a black ooze like tar, then, as Azrael continued to pour spells over the monster, into mud. Finally, the dissolving lump brightened into clear amber. In the end, the monster made a relatively small puddle. It lay on the sand in a discreet gobbet like mercury, unable to dissolve or mix with anything else.