It seemed like a recurring phenomenon that synchronized with the visions. Fortunately, for now, they weren’t permanent. I stifled the glimmer of hope that perhaps they would never be permanent in an attempt to prepare myself for the worst.
I ran downstairs, eager to get a hold of the Druid and tell him what I had accomplished and what I had seen. I looked around the ground floor and made my way into the banquet hall. Vita and Serena were grabbing lunch. The rest of the house seemed particularly quiet.
“Where’s everybody else?” I asked. A grin slit across my face at the sight of food.
The growl in my stomach reminded me that I hadn’t eaten and that I was positively ravenous.
“Somewhere in and around the house,” Vita replied. “Bijarki’s away. Field’s probably out flying.”
I sat down and helped myself to a full plate of food from the warming dishes. I tucked in, thinking I’d find the Druid after I finished my meal and tempered my loud stomach.
“What’s wrong with you two?” I asked, noticing their sullen moods.
“Nothing. Just tired.” Serena glared at her plate and stabbed a potato with her fork.
I didn’t persist. I figured I’d ask them both again later. Whatever they were going through, it was obviously still fresh.
Vita looked sad and dreamy at the same time. I figured it must’ve had something to do with Bijarki. Serena, on the other hand, was a bundle of raw nerves, and I wondered what was causing her so much pain, but I knew she would open up when she couldn’t hold it in anymore.
“I had another vision,” I said, changing the subject.
They both looked up at me, their faces lit with surprise.
“I had a vision on my own, to be precise. No intervention, no weird plants, nothing like that. I sat down, I tuned everything out, and I channeled myself into a vision of the present.” I beamed with pride.
“That’s amazing, Aida!” Serena smiled. “Amazing progress.”
“Yup, it is.” I nodded. “I saw three succubi meeting with the Sluaghs, but I couldn’t find out much more, other than a name. I’m not yet in full control of these visions, but I have to tell you, I saw enough of those Sluaghs to last me a lifetime already!”
“What do they look like? I’m having a hard time picturing them,” Serena said.
“They basically look like giant tapeworms,” I replied with a shudder. “They slither into incubi corpses and animate them like the grossest puppet masters I have ever seen. They’re weird. That’s all I’ll say. I’m just sorry I couldn’t see more this time.”
“You’ll get there,” said Vita, even as she looked unnerved by my description. “As will I, for that matter. We’ve made it this far, right?”
“We totally have.” I grinned. “Where’s the Druid?”
Serena’s face dropped at my question. I realized that whatever was bothering her was clearly related to him.
“I need to tell him what I saw,” I added.
“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” Serena replied, chewing furiously. “He can rot in hell as far as I’m concerned.”
“Whoa,” I raised my hands in a defensive gesture, surprised by her anger. “What did he do to make you this mad?”
Serena sighed and leaned against the back of her chair, a look of defeat drawing her eyebrows closer together. “He’s a jackass. That’s all. An absolute jackass.”
Jovi
A day had passed since Aida’s unaided vision, and a few days had passed since we’d returned from our trip up north to the Red Tribe. I hadn’t seen much of Anjani. She spent most of her time deliberately keeping her distance from me—keeping an eye out for the Daughter, or gathering her special herbs and roots from the woods nearby.
I was getting frustrated. I wanted to see more of her, and I had made it my mission to learn more about her kind just to get an upper hand in this unexpected dynamic between us. I’d read up on some of the books about the incubi and succubi in the Druid’s library just to kill time in between training sessions with Field, Aida, and Phoenix.
I’d come across a few interesting nuggets while studying the biology of the succubi. Their emotions were expressed through light cells embedded in their skin, which was why the succubi glowed when highly aroused or when they blushed. While in our case, the blood rushed through and reddened our cheeks as a reaction to certain events, the succubi’s light cells—the same cells responsible for that beautiful silvery shimmer—were activated. I found the process to be very interesting and decided that I wanted to see it again on Anjani.
That morning, I went looking for her. I checked the banquet hall, the gardens, and the study and ultimately found her in the greenhouse. She’d slipped back into her tribal leathers. My lower body seemed delighted by that decision. She was cutting some strange looking flowers with bright yellow petals from their stems and carefully placing them on a piece of dry cloth on the ground. They looked like snapdragons, but the petals’ edges were black.
I watched for a while as her fingers grasped each stem without touching the petals. She used a pair of small shears to remove them from the stems planted in a large clay pot. She crouched to better see what she was doing.
“Is it just me or are you trying not to touch the petals?” I asked.
She gasped and immediately withdrew her hands from the pot as if avoiding a flame. She cursed under her breath, then shot a death glare my way. Her gold and emerald eyes glinted angrily.
“You could’ve killed me!”
“Sorry I startled you, but how could I have killed you?” I asked. “Is gardening in Eritopia lethal?”
Anjani took a deep breath and stood up with her eyes closed, as if mustering all the patience she could find. Judging by the way her nostrils flared, she didn’t have that much.
“These are not ordinary flowers. They’re extremely rare and extremely poisonous,” she explained. “The toxin is deadly and spread throughout each petal. A single touch can kill me in under a minute.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I replied, mentally chastising myself. “Why aren’t you wearing any gloves, if they’re so toxic?”
“I am a succubus. I do not fear death. I dance around it. Gloves are for weaklings. I was raised to collect poison.”
I nodded, processing that information. An awkward silence ensued. We stared at each other. I felt bad for my ignorance of Eritopian flora and had no idea what to say next. The prospect of her dying from that flower still blared in my head.
“Just try to make yourself heard before you walk into the greenhouse next time, that’s all. Just in case I’m doing something like this again,” Anjani conceded. “You couldn’t have known, anyway.”
Relief washed over me, reminding me of just how easily my emotions were manipulated by the succubus. I had never felt so vulnerable before, and I wasn’t sure how to handle it. I’d been raised to be strong and fierce, and she seemed to effortlessly break me down without even trying that hard.
“What are you doing with those flowers anyway? Although I must say, the term ‘flower’ is far too pretty for how deadly these things are,” I quipped, hoping to relieve some of the tension.
She collected the poisonous blossoms in the cloth and pushed the flower pot back under the large iron table where it belonged.
“The flowers are called Death’s Kiss,” Anjani explained. “Their poison is the only thing known to expel a Sluagh out of its host and instantly kill it.”
I’d heard about the Sluaghs, but I didn’t have enough knowledge about them to fully understand what she was talking about. She looked at me and most likely noticed my blank expression.
“Aida described her most recent vision involving a meeting between Sluaghs and some of my sisters. They are deceitful creatures, filthy parasites feeding off the dead bodies of my kind. I cannot bring myself to trust them. So, I’m preparing for the worst-case scenario in which I may have to kill as many of these worms as possible,” she added.
“What are the Sluaghs, exactly?
I didn’t get too many details from my sister yesterday.”
“Sluaghs are parasites, basically. They live in the swamp waters and look like overgrown worms. They are extremely vulnerable in their true form, hence why they take over dead bodies of incubi and succubi. They animate the corpses like puppet masters and feed off them,” Anjani elaborated. “A mature Sluagh can occupy a dead body for a long time before the flesh dries up and the host becomes uninhabitable. It’s a strange process that we have yet to fully understand, but the Sluaghs have evolved to this point over millennia. For a long time, we didn’t even know they existed. We feared our walking dead instead.”
She placed the cloth bundle on the table and started cutting the red leaves off a small rounded bush in another pot. One by one, she placed them inside a mason jar, which she labeled.
“Your walking dead?” I asked.
“Well, yes. A long time ago, back when the world was still young, we buried our dead out by the river. We believed that the water fed the ground and that our dead helped nourish it further, giving life to flowers and trees. In some parts, the Sluaghs ran through the rivers. They would often dig into the bank and find the bodies. The next day, our villages were attacked by our dead relatives, walking and hissing and hungry for our flesh.”
I let out a sigh, picturing one such village and the horrible scene that Anjani had just described. This had once been a regular part of Eritopians’ lives. It gave me chills.
“It just so happened, a thousand or so years ago, that there was a succubi tribe living on the southern slope of Mount Agrith, where Death’s Kiss flowers grow in abundance. They had just settled there, after having been driven out of an incubus citadel. One of the two waterfalls of Agrith poured into a river we call Sol, and its waters were infested with Sluaghs, but the succubi didn’t know that yet.
“Soon enough, they lost a few sisters to a pack of shape-shifters and recovered the bodies. They buried them in the bank, as usual. The dead sisters came back at night, with black eyes and rotten teeth, demanding the flesh of the living. The wind was strong, and it blew over the Death’s Kiss bushes bordering the camp. Some petals flew off and got stuck on the Sluaghs’ new bodies. The poison instantly entered the flesh and expelled the worms. They died a most agonizing death, and the bodies of the sisters were once again still and lifeless. It was then that we learned about the Sluaghs’ true form and what they really were.” She put a lid on the jar. “Soon after, we began to study them and their ways. They can hold on to a body for years, cheating their way through unnaturally long lives.”
Some time passed before either of us said anything. I watched her quietly as she collected more herbs from various pots in the greenhouse.
“Why have you been avoiding me?” I asked, determined to address the elephant in the room.
She stilled and looked at me, eyes wide and genuinely surprised.
“I…I haven’t been avoiding you,” she stuttered. “I’ve been…I’ve been busy.”
“Yeah, busy avoiding me.”
I took several steps toward her, closing the distance between us. I wasn’t sure where my courage came from. She tilted her head back to look me in the eyes. I could hear her heart beating faster, echoing in my ears.
“No, I… Not everything I do revolves around you, wolf-boy,” she replied, looking away and blinking fast.
Gold and emerald flakes flickered in her eyes, and I could see her skin lighten just a little. She was starting to blush and, judging by the way she pursed her lips, she was having some trouble controlling her reaction to my proximity. The thought encouraged me to take another step closer to sense the heat emanating from her beautiful body. Whatever I was feeling for her was mutual, I just needed to get her to react and reveal it.
“It doesn’t take a genius to see what’s going on here,” I said, assuming a confident tone.
I felt I had the upper hand in this conversation, and I wanted to see what it would lead to. I could sense her pulse racing, blood swishing through her veins like a raging myriad of rivers after a storm. I lowered my head, leaving only a couple of inches of space between our faces. Her lips parted. My heart skipped a beat.
“You clearly have trouble controlling yourself around me, Anjani. Why don’t you just give into whatever it is you’re feeling?” My tone was low, and our eyes were locked.
“Don’t try your charms on me, Jovi, or I’ll stop holding my succubus nature in and unleash it on you. Believe me when I say you don’t want to play with fire. You will regret ever setting your sights on me,” she hissed.
“Why don’t you try it?” I dared to say.
“You wouldn’t be able to handle it,” she muttered and walked past me, toward the mansion entrance.
“You seem to think very little of me, and frankly it’s disappointing,” I replied, looking over my shoulder.
I didn’t mean the last part, but she had this way of riling me up. It was worth it, though. It stopped her in her tracks. She clenched her fists and turned to face me. Her eyes projected death in my direction, and I held my breath for a moment.
I may have just kicked the hornet’s nest.
She huffed and came right at me with large, calculated steps. I rooted my right foot into the ground and felt my muscles tense as my body prepared to defend itself against a physical attack.
But she kissed me.
My senses shattered.
Her lips pressed against mine.
I opened my mouth to taste the sweetness. My core incandesced, and my breath stuck in my lungs. I caught her face in my hands and deepened the kiss. She was soft and hungry, and I wanted everything she had to give.
The moment stretched long and hot.
She pushed me away, her lips tender and slightly swollen. Her skin glowed beautifully as she worked hard to catch her breath. I bit into my lower lip and relished in the feeling that washed over me as I looked at her, my eyes fixated on her mouth. Every fiber in my body vibrated, and I felt lightheaded. It dawned on me then that I was euphoric, and it might have had something to do with her succubus nature.
If that’s what Anjani in her full form felt like, I wanted more. I was instantly addicted and struggled with a growing tension in both my chest and lower body.
She put on a satisfied smirk, wiping her lips with the back of her hand. Her breathing was uneven, the only sign left to indicate that she was just as aroused as I was, despite her nonchalant attitude designed to make a point.
“See? This is what I meant. Weak.” She chuckled and left.
It took me forever to blink again. As I gradually returned to my senses, my feelings emerged with even greater clarity. I was head over heels with this marvelous creature, and I needed her to tell me she felt the same way, because I knew, deep down, that she did.
But I didn’t want to be the one chasing her around, like a lovesick puppy, and I wanted her out of her comfort zone, taking the leap along with me. I decided then to let her come to me.
Serena
Two days had passed since Bijarki had gone through the passage stone to see Hansa. Two very long days that I spent as far away from Draven as possible. He made it easy, though, keeping mostly to himself in his hellish study. I passed the day in the library, reading the many encyclopedias on incubi, Lamias, Dearghs, and many other fascinating creatures of Eritopia, including the extinct storm hounds. The more I learned about the latter, the sorrier I felt that I’d never get the chance to see one.
It was late afternoon when I got out of the library and went looking for Vita. I found her outside in the garden beneath one of the magnolia trees on the front lawn. Tall blades of grass waved in the cool breeze, while the sun set in deep shades of pink and purple.
I sat down next to her. She’d been spending a lot of her time outside, either practicing her fae abilities or tapping into visions of the future. She looked tired, but she wasn’t one to give up easily.
“How’s it coming along today?” I asked, plucking a small daisy from the ground. br />
“Not that great, but I’m alternating the sessions,” Vita replied with a sigh. “Mornings seem better for fire play. I need more energy to harness the flames and make them obey. I’m making progress on that end, but I think I still have a long way to go before I can do serious damage.”
“And the visions? Anything new?”
She shook her head, a frown pulling her slim brows together.
“Not much, just loose little snippets, nothing concrete. Draven said it’s natural for the process to be slow, and that I must keep at it. But I admit I’m lacking patience.”
The sound of Draven’s name made me feel uneasy. My soul was still healing from our last encounter in his study. I had a hard time accepting the situation, and the recurring memories of our moments together weren’t helping.
“I’m not fully focused,” Vita added. “Bijarki’s been gone for two days now, and I don’t know if he’s okay or when he’s coming back. I’m starting to get worried.”
Her confession made me push whatever frustration I had with Draven to the back of my head. She was suffering as well. I didn’t like seeing her like this. I stood.
“I’ll go check with Draven, to see if he knows anything,” I said, bracing myself to face him.
Vita looked up, surprise brightening her turquoise eyes.
“Are you sure? You’re not on the best terms with the Druid right now. I mean, there’s enough tension between the two of you to cut with a knife. It’s made breakfast quite awkward over these past couple of days.”
“Yes, it’s fine. Don’t worry about that. I can’t do anything about me and him, but I can at least do something about you and the incubus.” I sighed and went inside the mansion.
I reached the door to his study and paused, taking a few deep breaths for control. I had to play it as cool as I possibly could. Go in, ask the question, get the answer, leave. It was easy.