Demon Mine

by Marina Simcoe

  I looked cautiously at the man on the bed in front of us.

  “Let him rest.” Sytrius shook his head, as if I had any intentions of disturbing the man, and gestured at the ladder. “Go first and let me in, please. I’ll need to be able to get in and out freely while you sleep.”

  I realized that he was referring to the amulet still hanging around my neck. Since the succubus incident, I had no intention of ever taking it off, no matter how large or unattractive I had found it at first.

  I climbed up the ladder and halfway through the opening of the trap door. The room was large, more than half of the space of the studio apartment below. The floor was shaped as a long rectangle, with the trap door entrance being roughly in the centre. The two longer walls inclined to met in the middle like an attic under the pitched roof, giving the two shorter walls the shape of triangles with one small oval window in each. It looked like a large indoor tent to me, and I had never been in a room like this before.

  I quickly got up the rest of the ladder and called over my shoulder.

  “Come in Sytrius. Just look at this room!”

  The bed was just a large, thick mattress laid on the floor by one of the walls with the oval window. It had light blue bed linens on it and a puffy comforter. At the opposite wall, under the other window, stood a small writing desk and a chair. The three feet tall bookshelves were running the length of both longer walls, filling in the space between the sloping walls and the floor.

  “Tired?” His arms came around my waist from behind.

  “Mmhmm.” The mattress with the comfy comforter was calling to me now.

  “Rest, beautiful.” He kissed my hair just above the ear, pressing me to his chest once, briefly. “I will be downstairs. Andras needs to discuss some things with me. Do not leave the room alone and don’t let anyone in. I will come get you for dinner myself. I trust the incubi in this house well enough, but I can’t rely on their self-control around you.”

  Chapter Thirty One. Dinner With Incubi.

  “Alyssa.” I was deep asleep when his voice pulled me back into reality. I knew I had to wake up even though I really didn’t want to. “Alyssa.” His voice was tender, coaxing. “Wake up, angel.” His hand stroked my arm above the comforter. “Dinner is ready.”

  Even the promise of dinner didn’t sound enticing enough to lure me out of bed right now. However, sleeping through dinner would make it only harder to get rid of my jetlag and delay my adjusting to the local time zone.

  “Okay, okay. I’m up,” I said, sitting up in bed but still keeping my eyes closed. I felt a light kiss on the tip of my nose.

  “Do you need me to help you get dressed, sleepy head?” Another kiss landed near the corner of my mouth.

  “No.” I shook my head. “I can dress myself, thank you very much.” Maybe he could put me under a very cold shower, though. My body didn’t seem to want to wake up otherwise.

  I stretched, raising my arms high above my head, and felt his arms circling my waist and pulling me closer. I opened my eyes to meet his, already heavy with lust.

  “Then get dressed. And quickly,” he breathed out in a hot whisper. “Or I will help you get undressed right now…”

  My breath caught, and I could only whisper a weak, “okay” in reply, not sure myself what I was agreeing to: my getting dressed or his undressing me.

  He pulled me closer to him and nuzzled my neck. “Come, we’ll miss dinner,” he whispered against my skin without letting me out of his arms.

  “Oh no! God forbid, I’d miss a meal, Mister Nanny!” I teased with fake horror. He stopped me by covering my mouth with his. The kiss was stronger this time, more insistent, and he broke it off way too soon.

  “You need to get dressed. Now,” he rasped, getting up with me in his arms. He put me down and handed me my clothes, then stepped back and folded his arms in front of his chest, as if to keep his hands from touching me again.

  “Alyssa, Andras wants to ask you for a favour,” he started slowly, as if still debating with himself whether to tell me or not. “I told him that I was against it, but he insisted that you should decide for yourself…”

  “What kind of a favour?” I asked casually. Despite his odd choice of clothing, Andras didn’t raise any suspicions in me so far. If anything, I was only grateful to him for helping us to get out of Canada. He most certainty had a right to ask me for a favour in return.

  “I’ll let him explain it to you at dinner. Just please keep in mind that you have no obligation, whatsoever, to do anything that Andras asks you to do.” I nodded to confirm my understanding, which seemed to satisfy him for now. “Put your sweater on too. We are eating outside.”

  Despite it being still early spring, here, in Munich, the evening was mild enough to have dinner outside. I felt warm and comfortable with just jeans and a sweater on.

  The patio turned out to be much bigger than what I could see from the inside. It took up the larger portion of the flat roof of the main structure of the house and went all around the studio apartment.

  I must have slept for at least a couple of hours, as the sun was now low over the horizon, treating us to the gorgeous rooftop view of a vividly coloured sunset.

  When Sytrius and I walked out to the large outdoor dining table, Andras was already there. He was in the company of two other men. One I recognized as the man who was resting in bed earlier, but the other one I hadn’t seen before. All three got up from the table when we approached.

  “Alyssa.” Andras bowed his head in greeting. He seemed to maintain his rather rude habit of addressing only me and ignoring Sytrius. Despite this and the abrupt way that Sytrius talked to him earlier, I didn’t think that there was any personal animosity between them, just the cool indifference that I had encountered at the incubi base during my captivity. Since life energy was scarce, they didn’t feel the necessity to waste it on good manners for each other. Well, at least Andras made an effort to be polite to me, and I appreciated it.

  “Allow me to introduce my housemates,” Andras continued. “Zander.” He gestured towards the man whom I saw in bed earlier. He bowed his head to me a little too ceremoniously. His dark, almost black hair was neatly cut and styled, and his short facial hair was meticulously trimmed into a perfect goatee that looked like it was painted with black ink on the pale skin of his face. He lifted his clear, light-grey eyes at me, and greeted me in a low, almost rueful voice.

  “Nice to meet you, Alyssa.” I took a quick look at his hand outstretched towards me to make sure that his gloves were on before shaking it.

  “And Alfarr. “Andras swung his arm towards the other man standing at the table.

  Alfarr bowed low in my direction, holding one of his gloved hands pressed to his chest before he extended the hand for me to shake. He had light brown hair, just a shade darker than the dirty-blond hair of Sytrius. His hair was longer too, long enough to be put in a messy bun at the base of his neck. His beard was a little longer than the goatee of Zander but still short and neatly trimmed. His large blue eyes made his whole face look soulful and a little sad.

  “My pleasure,” he said, shaking my hand.

  “Nice to meet you …um…gentlemen,” I said and added awkwardly since they were all still standing around the table. “Please, sit down.”

  They might have looked like they were no older than 30, but they made me feel like I was suddenly transported to some formal social gathering taking place in 1920s, in the company of elderly gentlemen.

  Thankfully, the awkwardness dissipated significantly during the dinner. The big clay pot I spotted in the middle of the table held a deliciously fragrant lamb stew.

  “It smells amazing!” I said to Andras, feeling really hungry now.

  “It does, doesn’t it?” he agreed and pointed at Sytrius. “One of his many talents.”

  “You made it?” I turned to Sytrius in disbelief. I knew he could make decent scrambled eggs and bacon and assemble an amazing sandwich but the dish in front of me looked like
it required some serious culinary skills.

  “Yes.” He nodded and put a piece of artisan-looking bread next to my bowl of stew, avoiding my eyes. His bashful expression was too different from the self-confident, almost cocky attitude of late. “It’s a very old recipe, from the Middle East…”

  “How old?” I asked, narrowing my eyes in understanding.

  “I hadn’t made it for at least a few hundred years,” he replied, slowly raising his eyes to mine.

  “You remembered!” I breathed out with excitement.

  Any recipe consisted of a number of steps and precise measurements of ingredients. It required a certain mental effort to remember, especially if centuries had passed, I imagined.

  The other three men at the table were looking at us too now, also realizing the significance of our conversation.

  “You memories are coming back?” I said it as a question, but I already knew the answer.

  “Yes,” he nodded with a small smile, “I remember more. It’s like standing at the entrance of a long dark cave with a flashlight in my hand. Only now, the light of the flashlight is getting brighter every day, illuminating more and more of the walls around me, and I can see deeper and deeper into the cave.”

  “Oh, this is wonderful!” I exclaimed, happy for him.

  “Well,” he smiled sadly, “not all of my memories are wonderful. Actually, most are not at all.”

  “Doesn’t mean that they couldn’t be helpful.” Andras joined our conversation.

  Unlike Sytrius, who only had a glass of ice water on the table in front of him, Andras and the other two men had small bowls of stew that they ate from throughout the dinner. It might have looked like they shared the dinner with me to be polite, but I remembered what Sytrius told me about eating human food to suppress the hunger pains when they got unbearable. The stew, no matter how tasty, didn’t sate them in any way. It just tricked their bodies with feeling of fullness for a moment.

  I saw clearly the signs of starvation on their handsome faces. It was also the reason why they were in bed during the day when we arrived: to preserve the little energy that they had left.

  “Helpful for what?” I asked Andras, finally getting a good look at him.

  His dark hair was now tied into a ponytail with a leather thong, low at his nape. A few strands got loose and were hanging along both sides of his face, the ends reaching the edge of his jaw. The colour of his eyes in the warm light of the setting sun reminded me of the colour of dark whiskey in a glass illuminated by a bright light from within. The golden brown tan on his skin looked solid enough to attribute it to ethnic origin. However, I had learned about incubi enough by now to understand that they had no specific ethnicity, just like they didn’t belong to any human race. Instead, they seemed to have been created from a number of different features in combinations that would likely look attractive to as many human women and men as possible. Their looks made it easier for incubi to move across cultural beauty standards of humans, making them look appealing to a much wider group of people.

  Raim’s stunning blue eyes, for example, unusual for his darker complexion, did not come as a result of a unique gene combination, and Sytrius’s tanned skin that would never turn a shade lighter, even after centuries spent in a cave, was not a gift from some distant ancestor from Mediterranean.

  Generally, humans tend to find traces of different races combined in the features of descendants of mixed unions striking, exotic, memorable and attractive. Whoever did create incubi seemed to have known it and used this knowledge to give the demons yet another advantage to succeed in attracting human sources of energy.

  “Helpful in my quest for knowledge,” Andras replied to my question, his eyes fixed on mine. “I am trying to convince Sytrius to share his memories with me. Since the rest of us are losing our memories rapidly, I have been recording anything we have still left. It looks like his have reached further in time now than memories of any others whom I have encountered. Thanks to your company, I believe?” He tilted his head inquisitively, catching me off guard with his question, and I blushed violently when I realized what he was implying.

  I lowered my eyes into my lap, refusing to answer him despite the long awkward pause hanging over the table now.

  “Would that be the nature of the favour Sytrius told me you wanted to ask of me?” I finally asked with suspicion, meeting Andras’s eyes once again.

  “Close,” he said, and a cold chill I hadn’t felt for a while crept up my spine. Surrounded by a group of hungry demons, I suddenly felt like being in the middle of a pack of vampires who could jump on me and sink their teeth into my neck at any moment.

  “I will not willingly participate in some group feeding orgy,” I warned firmly and looked at Sytrius. Did he know about this? He looked back at me in astonishment.

  “Alyssa, please! No orgy,” Andras hurriedly reassured me. “Sorry for the misunderstanding. The favour I’m intending to ask of you… Well, there are actually two favours. Both of them require your willing participation. No one here would ever force you to do anything against your will. It’s my own personal promise.” He placed one of his gloved hands against his heart and lowered his head in a somewhat dramatic demonstration of integrity.

  “Okay.” I relaxed a little and felt Sytrius take my hand in a supportive gesture.

  “The memories that I have been recording, or the actual knowledge of our history that I hope to gain from them, I intend to use to write a proposal to our Council,” Andras continued. “A proposal to amend most, if not all, of the current rules governing our relationship with humans.”

  “You want to change that? And you think I can help? How?”

  “Yes, Alyssa.” He rubbed the dark stubble on his chin with his hand and continued, choosing his words carefully. “I would like to record your memories too. I believe that your participation in this project would not only lend my proposal the valuable perspective of a human who had been …in the role of a Source but also help move my proposal in the right direction and …generally speed the things up.”

  “You want me to recount my experiences as the Source held in captivity?” I shuddered just thinking about it, but then saw him dip his head in confirmation. “Andras.” I shifted in my chair uncomfortably. “I am trying to forget everything that happened to me there. I’m not ready to recount any of it and, most likely, will never be ready. I need to forget everything in order be able to move on with my life.”

  Andras nodded again, keeping his eyes firmly on mine.

  “I understand,” he said without a shadow of any actual understanding on his face or in his voice. What was done to me in the arena must have been an everyday occurrence to him. Sytrius told me that Andras used to be on the Council himself, so at some point in the past he must have been in the audience too. He truly was one of them!

  “Alyssa.” He made me look at him again when he placed his hands on the table in front of him and leaned forward to get my full attention. I recognized the intensity of his look – Sytrius looked at me like that often. Andras was watching my emotions closely now.

  Incubi were excellent manipulators by design. Andras would watch for any changes his words would illicit in me and could then adjust his argument accordingly.

  “The purpose of my proposal is to make the Council see that we cannot continue to exist the way we have been. More than 80% of our population is in Deep Sleep, suffering unimaginable pain. Of those who are still functioning, even the ones who are employed by the Council with guaranteed regular feedings are malnourished and near starvation. We are barely existing from meal to meal, unable to think clearly, to remember, to enjoy anything.”

  His words did trigger a compassionate response in me, like he was undoubtedly hoping they would. However, I was still determined to stay as far away from the world of demons as possible if I could help it.

  “I sympathize with your plight, I really do. I feel for all of you here,” I said sincerely with a wide gesture including all three
incubi in front of me. “But this is not my fight, Andras. No matter what happens to incubi now, they were here long before I was born, and they will remain here long after I’m gone. I only have one, relativity short life to live and, frankly, I don’t want the incubi world to be a part of it.”

  “Does it mean you plan to part with Sytrius too?” he asked quickly. Even near starvation, his reflexes were sharper and his thinking was quicker than could have been anticipated. I wondered if I would ever dare to challenge him if he was at his full mental capacity. “He is one of us,” Andras continued. “Moreover, he played a major part in what you’re trying to forget. Yet, I don’t see any animosity towards him in you,” he reminded me.

  Sytrius. A warm wave of feelings flushed over me just from hearing his name from someone else, and I squeezed Sytrius’s hand that I still held in my lap firmly. I wasn’t going to let Andras taint my feelings for Sytrius.

  “Sytrius is the one who got me out of there!” I defended him. “He is also the only one who actually apologized to me for what happened and for his part in it.”

  “I see how you feel about him,” Andras conceded in a calmer voice. “You care deeply about him, and it is beautiful.” He paused as if expecting a reply from me, inviting a discussion.

  Holding Sytrius’s hand tightly, I began to stroke the healing skin over his knuckles with my fingers, avoiding replying to Andras and now afraid to look at Sytrius too. How was I supposed to talk about my feelings to Sytrius with a stranger when I never even talked about them with Sytrius himself?

  “I would love to know more about your feelings for him too, if you agree to talk to me for my proposal,” Andras pressed on.