I regarded them with a glare, “Don’t get all in a huff. I’m not going to try anything.”
Marie gave them each a nod and they stepped back.
“I am not joking,” she assured. “This is a decision we made for the safety of our galere. You are more than welcome to join us.”
Celeste bit her bottom lip and clenched her fists. Bark sprang from the skin on her arms, no doubt caused by her perceived disloyalty of Marie.
“Of course we won’t join you,” I spat. “We had a plan. I will not sacrifice the safety of other Wilds and their missing loved ones to hide like scared incubi. What about our agreement? You agreed to help. We took out the Washington Hunter complex. The huldra are on the Hunter’s radar now!”
“And you retrieved your sister in the process,” Marie reminded. “You have no more reason to fight.”
The possibility of getting my mother back gave me every reason to fight, as did saving the mothers and sisters of other Wilds. None of them deserved to live under Hunter oppression. None of them.
“How could you betray us like this?” I said in exasperation.
“Why would we continue to fight?” A blonde succubus leaning on the kitchen counter asked. “We have no pawns in this game. They have taken none of our sisters.”
I shot her an icy glare. “That doesn’t mean they can’t or won’t.”
“It does when we have a place to hide,” she retorted. “It means exactly that.”
I shook my head and turned my attention toward Marie. “The huldras are outed. It’s only a matter of time before we’ll be found and have to flee. For all we know, the United States Hunters could be planning an attack on us all, locating our homes and planning to take us all out in one fell swoop.” We didn’t have time to hide and hope things worked themselves out.
“Then gather your coterie and come with us, underground. You’ll be safe,” Marie answered, looking at Celeste as she spoke.
“Are you kidding? What about the other Wilds, what about the harpies, and the mermaids, and the rusalki?”
“I will argue with you no longer. Out of our alliance and friendship, I allowed you to be privy to our plan. But now my sisters and I must prepare; the incubi will be here shortly after the sun sets. But Faline,” Marie added, “I do still see your kind as friends to mine. And because of that, I would like to help you.”
I threw my hands in the air, exhausted by her games.
“Aleksander,” she continued, “took a liking to you. He tried to hide it, but I could feel his desire and intrigue radiating like heat from a raging fire. He is an old incubus, I suspect many hundreds of years. But he has yet to learn to hide his tells.”
I sighed and rubbed my temples. “I don’t see how that can help me.”
“The incubi live in the dark, in the shadows, watching those who do not know they’re being watched. And at times, they sleep with the most powerful people in the world, people who know things, who utter secrets in the height of the kind of passion only an energy weaver can bring.” Marie stood and walked to the back of the couch, between the furniture and her bedroom. “Befriend Aleksander when he comes tonight, preferably in an intimate way, and receive more than the most pleasurable night of your life.” She rested a tear-filled gaze on Celeste. “When a succubus, and I assume an incubus, finds someone who embodies more than a conquest to them, but rather an interest and something deeper they can’t quite understand, they are likely to give much and ask for little in return.”
Marie moved to stand inside her bedroom with her hand on the doorknob. Deep red and orange tapestries hung on the walls behind her. Gold and red fabric, covered in gold embroidery, lay across her four-poster bed. Incense burned from an unseen corner and twisted its way past flickering candles, around her, and out toward us. “Please,” was all she said to my sister as they locked eyes. And that’s all she needed to say. Celeste took a deep breath, slouching her shoulders as she exhaled, as though releasing her anger for Marie on a breath. She went to the succubus.
The two Wilds closed the bedroom door behind them and Olivia and I made our way downstairs. I didn’t know if I’d pretend to flirt with Aleksander for the sake of helpful information. But I did know I had a few phone calls to make. And that whether or not I chatted up the incubus, I was screwed.
Twelve
“I’ve been trying the rusalki and the mermaids for hours, still nothing.” My aunt Renee released a heavy sigh. The line went quiet as we both considered our options. We’d called our sisters back home after leaving Marie’s apartment. We’d given them thirty minutes to talk and make a few phone calls before calling us back.
After Marie’s heart-bashing news, Olivia and I regrouped in our temporary apartment and came to multiple conclusions. First, we weren’t hiding anywhere. Wilds had done enough hiding, and clearly that didn’t work out so well for them. So, no thanks.
Second, our sister’s infatuation with the succubi leader was way more than infatuation—a quickly growing bond we’d do well to respect, however hard that was going to be. And no, the difficulty wasn’t in the part that most may think we had issue with, the idea of a succubus and a huldra together long term. No, it was the idea of a huldra and anyone together long term. Before I ventured out of my huldra territory and into the great big world of Wilds, we Wilds never came into contact with one another. Not that I knew of anyhow. And though maybe mermaids were into hooking up with their shoal sisters, huldras weren’t. It’s one reason why being with Marcus felt so foreign, outside of the whole Hunter issue. Huldra do not do long term. And yet here Celeste was, falling head over heels for another Wild, a woman who could quite possibly be her perfect match.
And here I was…fighting my feelings for Marcus. Because even if the rules had recently changed, which I didn’t doubt they had, they hadn’t changed enough to allow a Hunter and a Wild a happily ever after. A revolution may be able to happen in a day, but changing minds about who can be with whom—yeah, that takes much longer.
This led me to my next question of Renee. “Have you and the others there had a chance to discuss Marie’s advice on my befriending the incubi leader?”
Renee huffed again. “Of course Marcus had no part of this discussion,” she assured me. I’d figured as much, but was still thankful she’d said so.
I nodded my head as though she could see, then stopped when I realized she couldn’t. “And?”
“Well, we think it’s wise to gain any information possible, especially in such dire circumstances,” she said, adding that last part as though it were an excuse to tell myself to keep the guilt at bay. Or maybe she had no idea how already the guilt of even considering such a thing as to seduce an incubus gnawed at me. “But, as usual, it’s up to you, seeing as you’re the one who’ll be doing the deed.”
“I’m not going to have sex with him,” I countered. As if I even had to remind her of my appreciation for loyalty above all else and how terribly I felt that I was becoming a hypocrite. Although, I had to remind myself, before Marcus came to me in harpy territory, I would have assumed the same as my aunt. A fabulous night of sex with an energy worker? Yes, please.
Renee scoffed. “Well, why the hell wouldn’t you?”
Before I could answer with some smart remark about keeping my head in the game or not being into tall, sexy Norse supernatural males, my aunt changed the subject. Or rather, she made a noise that changed the subject.
“Huh. You hear that, Abigale?” I heard from the other end of the line.
“I do, like tires on gravel,” my other aunt answered. “Odd. Let me see.”
Renee regarded me again. “No one comes to visit us. No one even knows we’re here.”
The sound of the front door opening followed her statement and then another, of boots running across gravel. “Go, go, go!” Marcus yelled and then the door slammed. “Now! They’re here. Is there a back entrance?”
“Who?” I asked quickly. “Who’s there?”
“Oh Goddess, Shawna, grab th
e dog,” Abigale yelled.
I heard the dog yelp right before what sounded like glass shattering.
“Olivia,” I called from our bedroom. She was already waiting at the door; she’d heard my earlier frantic question. She raised her eyebrows as if to ask what was going on.
I verbalized her expression. “What’s happening?”
Renee finally answered after the sound of three gunshots blared through the phone. “The Hunters,” she said on bated breath. “They’ve found us. They’re here.” I picked up the sounds of nature, the forest, across the line, branches snapping, boots thudding. Marcus’s boots.
My heart thudded with fear.
Another gunshot sounded, followed by Abigale’s scream.
Renee panted into the phone, “We’re on our way to you.”
And then the line went dead. I dropped to the floor and prayed to Freyja to keep my loved ones safe.
The Hunters were on my property, going through our things, maybe even destroying those items we held most sacred, those pieces of our foremothers passed down—all we had left of our lineage. They were there to arrest us. Our time of reckoning had come and if my next move wasn’t the right one, we may never get the chance to take them down.
Thirteen
Anxiety wound and unwound within me. Anxiety and rage. How dare they. Olivia looked to the ceiling and bit her lip. I sprang from my kneeled position on the floor and paced. We were too far away to help. We were helpless.
“You have to do it,” Olivia muttered, not looking me in the eye. “I know you have feelings for Marcus. I know, and I’m sorry we’re asking this of you. But there’s no other choice.”
She didn’t have to tell me. I already knew. I guess I’d known since Marie suggested it, suggested I seduce Aleksander. When my aunt agreed, I’d toyed with the idea of letting Marcus know beforehand, to keep it from being disloyal, to clear my conscience. Now I wished I could tell him, and I very much couldn’t.
The room darkened with the setting sun, the light traveling across the wall and vanishing altogether as Olivia and I stood there, planted in shock and worry, waiting for a phone call from our coterie.
“What if they didn’t make it out?” she whispered. Tears burst from her eyes and her head slowly rose to gaze me in the face. “What if it’s just us? Oh, Goddess.” Her knees buckled and she leaned against the door frame for support. “We can’t do this alone, Faline. We can’t get them back without help from the others.”
“I know,” was all I could say because she was right, all of it.
“What if the rusalki and the mermaids have already been captured? What if that’s why they weren’t answering their phones? They may already be locked up on Hunter compounds.” She took a ragged breath. “Or worse.”
I shook our shared thoughts of doom away. “We can’t…we can’t think like that.”
“Oh? Then how should we think?”
I didn’t have an answer for her, so I kept silent. My bounty-hunter brain kicked in, being as I was in an impossible situation. Giving up never helped anyone. We were huldra, fighters, protectors. “We should think like huldra,” I finally answered. “Stand up, dust our knees off, and push forward.”
Olivia wiped the back of her hand across her cheeks. “Does that mean you’ll try to get answers from Aleksander?”
“No, that’s not enough anymore,” I said, throwing my shirt off and rummaging through my suitcase for something low cut and tight. I had nothing fitting that description. “If the Hunters have taken the rest of our coterie, I need more than intel to get them back. I need the backing of every incubus and succubus in this town. I’ll convince him to help us.”
Olivia nodded her head and a shadow of a smile pulled her lips upward. “All right then, let’s go.”
She led the way as we left the apartment and made our way upstairs to Marie’s apartment.
Celeste met us half-way on the stairs; she’d been heading down to talk to us. “Aleksander is almost here, so I figured it was time for me to go. Marie said we can use the apartment complex for as long as we need it.” She peered down at my bare chest and then back up at me. “If you’ve changed your mind and decided to take Marie’s advice, I don’t think this is the most subtle way to go about it.”
My current dark emotions allowed a hard laugh to sneak through. “I don’t have any shirts that’ll do the job. Neither does Olivia. I figured Marie might.”
“Come with me,” Celeste said, turning on her heel and leading us upstairs.
Olivia climbed the stairs beside me, behind Celeste. She shot me a glance that I knew all too well. I nodded.
“Um, Celeste,” I started. “Before we’re surrounded by a bunch of succubi, we have something to tell you.”
Our sister stopped on one stair higher than us and turned to face us. “Does it have to do with you changing your mind with the incubus? Because Marie said she felt heavy energy from down on the first floor. I thought maybe you were arguing with Marcus about it or something.”
“No, I was on the phone with Renee when the Hunters came to our home.”
Celeste’s eyes squeezed shut and she pulled her lips into her mouth. She tightened her fists before taking a couple breaths and letting them go. She opened her eyes. “Are they okay?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “I heard them run into the woods behind the common house, all together, but that’s all I know.”
Watching my sister experience the pain new and fresh, after Olivia and I had sat in it a while allowing it to fester around us, was like experiencing it all over again. Tears sprang to Olivia’s eyes and I blinked a few away from my own.
“This can’t be happening,” Celeste said, shaking her head. She took a cleansing breath and straightened herself. “So then this is why you’re in need of a sexy top.”
I nodded.
She turned and continued up the stairs. “Okay then, let’s get that taken care of before the incubi arrive.”
As usual, Marie’s top-floor apartment included at least five succubi milling about. I wondered if she just enjoyed being surrounded by sisters or if they were more of a protection team, at the ready to combine their energy-bending abilities to make sure their leader stayed safe.
Marie breezed past the four succubi at the table playing cards and the other in the kitchen wrapping up food with only a nod of her head. Olivia asked the succubus in the kitchen if she needed help with anything and was quickly put to work chopping vegetables. Celeste took a seat at the table and asked to be dealt in. Marie and I made it to her room where we stood in front of her small, narrow closet. I didn’t know why I’d assumed she’d have a walk-in closet, it’s not as though she wore more than a robe all that often.
“This apartment building had been built in the early nineteen hundreds,” she explained when she noticed me searching for another closet door. “They didn’t have much need for large storage spaces, and neither do I.”
Marie studied each top for a moment before pushing it aside to view the next. “I admit, I didn’t expect you to come around.”
“On the Aleksander thing?” I asked.
She made a sound, as though she were concentrating on the contents of her closet too heavily to speak an answer. Her gaze rested on a red chiffon button-up, clearly see-through. She pulled it from its confines and held it up to my chest. “Clashes with your hair,” she finally said before returning her focus to the closet.
A question popped into my head and nagged at my thoughts. Her current distraction seemed to create the perfect timing to gather information from the succubi leader. Why not? She was picking out a top to help me do just that with the incubi leader, get information.
“So Marie,” I started.
“Hmm?” She kept on task.
“Why weren’t you truthful, about Heather, when I first came to you looking for my sister? You’d sent me to the mermaids and even led me to believe she may have been taken by the Hunters.”
“Oh, no, succubi are not untru
thful. If you believed she could have been taken by the Hunters, that was your own assumption, not placed there by me. I knew she’d run off, I just wasn’t sure where to. Of all the Wild Women, the succubi are the most honest, I believe.”
Marie lingered on another red top before shaking her head and moving to the next. “Our original foremothers were created by the great goddess Lilith.” She paused to glance at a large stone statue of the Goddess Lilith with her arms stretched out, holding circular symbols, with a snake wound up her body, hanging on the wall between her closet door and a shelf. “Within our foremothers she gifted her attributes of a thirst for knowledge, the ability to sense, read, and manipulate the energies of others, and the deep desire to live by truth. This is why we live by our own truths.”
I found myself nodding, though I doubted she noticed as she went back to working what she seemed to deem the important task of locating the most seductive shirt in all the world. I hadn’t learned much about Lilith, but I could already see why the succubi worshipped her.
Marie continued and it seemed that the females in the living room listened intently too, as though we were gathered for a bedtime story. All sounds of food-chopping and card-playing ceased. “Before the Hunters, we used our gifts for good. We pulled out the negative energy from humans, absorbed their hurts you could say, recycled their pain into the earth, and from the soil, drew positive energy to fill their void. We healed humans, and sometimes other Wild Women.”
“I bet townspeople didn’t much like that after the Inquisitors rode through,” I remarked, thinking of my own huldra history.
“No they did not. They asked us for help, but behind our foremothers’ backs they whispered, calling us demons, saying we’d sucked the life out of the people we couldn’t save. And of course, those rumors quickly became the village men’s excuse for being unfaithful to their wives; it became a seductive succubi’s fault for luring them and removing their free will. It wasn’t long before the Hunters took the upper hand and forced us to stop healing people.” Marie paused her perusal through her closet. She didn’t look at me and she didn’t seem to be studying the shirt she’d stopped on either.
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