“How do you figure out if something is a hallucination?” Isabel glanced around her again, making sure that nobody had overheard her quiet musing. She could take a picture of herself, but somehow it didn’t seem like that would be adequate proof; she could hallucinate an image on a screen just as easily as she could the image of herself in a mirror. The only way to prove that something isn’t a hallucination is to confirm that other people see it, too. She would have to see if someone else thought she looked amazing, but she would have to do it in such a way that she could confirm at least a few specifics of what her eyes were telling her.
Isabel stood up from her desk and stretched against the tightness she could feel in her shoulders and back, looking around the office floor. Who could she ask? How could she do it? Isabel considered…. Alex? That’s who I can ask. Alex, the Project Manager for the copy department, he had never liked her. At least, that was the impression that Isabel had gotten from the man, who was about fifteen years older than she was, and almost as plain as she had been. Alex had dropped hints that she was homely in the past, remarking that it was a good thing that she wasn’t client-facing, and that she was exactly what people thought they would see when they considered a copywriter. “If he notices, then it must be real,” Isabel murmured to herself.
She spotted Alex walking near the conference rooms, headed towards his office. Isabel thought about a pretense to waylay him, as she tried to figure something that would justify being in his presence long enough for him to pay attention to her looks. It couldn’t just be a quick question – it had to be something that prompted a longer conversation. The Peterson brief, she realized quickly.
Isabel grabbed the paperwork from the client file and started across the office, moving to intercept Alex. “Hey! Hey, Al!” Isabel quickened her steps, and Alex barely glanced up from the notepad in front of him.
“What’s up, Izzy?” Isabel rolled her eyes; she had always hated that nickname, but no one in the office seemed to care.
“I need to talk to you about Peterson,” she said. “Do you have a couple of free minutes?”
Alex looked up fully from his notepad, and stopped short, staring at her for a moment. “Yes, of course,” he said, his voice more pleasant than it had been all morning.
“Can we step into your office?” Alex nodded slowly, looking almost as if he were entranced, or maybe drugged.
“Absolutely,” he said. “Come on in.” He gestured for Isabel to precede him into the office, and she did, glancing back in Alex’s direction as he followed her. As if today wasn’t weird enough already, she thought.
“So,” Isabel said, when Alex closed the office door behind them. “I’m having some trouble figuring out what they mean in a few places here.”
“You are?” Alex shook his head. “But you’re always so good at that.” Isabel raised an eyebrow at the compliment and plunged forward, sitting down as Alex somehow managed to get into the chair behind his desk without looking at it. He was staring at her almost without blinking. “What seems to be the problem? And how can I solve it for you?” He smiled, and the sight sent a tingle of both apprehension and pride down Isabel’s spine. She had seen a smile like that before, but never on Alex’s face. It was the smile like the ones on the faces of men at Underground – or at one of the few other bars she went to— – when they were about to make a move on her.
“It’s just that they’re contradicting themselves,” Isabel said, shrugging. “Totally opposite instructions in different places.” She handed the file across the desk, and Alex opened it, glancing at it for just an instant before turning his attention back to her.
“You know,” he said, leaning forward slightly and resting his chin on his hands, “I don’t know what you’ve done to yourself, but I can’t stop staring at you.”
“Thank you … I think,” Isabel said, smiling awkwardly. Well whatever he’s seeing, it certainly can’t be that far off from what was in the mirror, she thought.
“I would give you anything you wanted if you were to come home with me,” Alex blurted. Isabel sat back in the chair, staring at Alex in shock. He had never come onto her before. She had never seen him be anything but appropriate with the women in the office, at least in terms of flirting; his remarks about appearance had been somewhat irritating, but always just on the right side of HR standards. “Or …I mean, we could take a smoke break right now. My car’s on the top floor of the parking garage, and the AC is great in it.”
“That’s inappropriate,” Isabel said sharply.
“Of course!” Alex blinked and the slightly leering look in his eyes cleared, only to be replaced once more with the musing softness she had seen before. “I would hate to make you feel uncomfortable, Izzy.”
“Don’t call me that!” she told him, flustered and irritable in equal measures.
“Never again,” Alex promised. Isabel sat for a moment, staring at him gazing at her, and wondered what was happening to her. Is this just the way guys act around you if you’re gorgeous? Isabel decided to test the idea, weak as it was.
“I think I’d appreciate it even more if you’d call Peterson and tell them to send over new, clearer instructions,” she said; her voice sounded strange to her own ears as she spoke: soft and commanding all at once, sultry and amusing. “Maybe then we could talk about your car.” Alex reached for the handset to his phone. “Wait!” Isabel leaned forward in the chair. “Wait until I get back to my desk,” she suggested.
“Of course, of course,” Alex said, nodding agreeably. “Whatever you want.”
“What I want is to go home early,” Isabel said wryly, thinking out loud more than anything else.
“Then you should do that,” Alex told her. Isabel stared at him.
“But then I won’t get paid,” she pointed out.
“Why not?” Alex looked genuinely confused.
“Because I won’t be working. I need to be here to get paid, don’t I?”
“Don’t you?” Alex looked so genuinely confused, so earnest, that Isabel started to feel afraid again.
“Are you saying I could go home right now and you’d just ... let me get paid for the day?”
“If that was what you wanted, then of course, I would,” Alex replied.
“Then ... I guess that’s what I’ll do,” Isabel said. “Don’t – don’t tell anyone you’re doing this.”
“No, that would be stupid,” Alex agreed. “I’ll just make sure you’re punched out at the right time.”
“Okay,” Isabel said, staring at him in shock. “Let me know what Peterson says.” She rose to her feet, and Alex looked her up and down; for a moment, his gaze almost made Isabel’s stomach turn over, it was so full of straightforward lust. “I’ll just go now. I’ll be back tomorrow morning.”
“Can’t wait,” Alex said cheerfully. “Maybe you could wear a shorter skirt?”
“I’ll think about it,” Isabel said, shaken. She turned on her heel and left the office.
Chapter Four
“This is absurd,” Isabel said to herself, pacing across her living room floor. “Things like this don’t happen.” She shook her head, reflecting on her drive home. She had been so distracted, so completely bowled over by the shocks of the day, that she had blown right through a red light. Predictably, a police officer had been right behind her when it happened. That, at least, had been more or less how Isabel expected her day-to-day life to go. Right up until the officer had walked up to her window, she had felt comforted by the regularity of the situation in spite of the knowledge that a red-light ticket was going to cost far more than she could afford.
As soon as the officer had leaned in to look at her, in the midst of asking about her license, registration and insurance, Isabel had known that it wasn’t going to be the normal process. She thought that Alex’s reaction to her newfound desirability was an isolated incident, but the same look of almost drugged enchantment had come over the middle-aged man’s face as soon as she met his gaze. “How are you t
his afternoon, ma’am? You look absolutely fucking amazing.”
It had to be more than just becoming attractive, Isabel thought as she continued to pace. She decided to test the luck she’d had with her boss on the police officer, just on a whim, thinking she had nothing to lose. “Thank you,” she’d said warmly. “I feel amazing, too.”
“I bet you do,” the man had said, his voice dropping low. “Any chance I can feel amazing?”
“Not today,” she told him. “But maybe you would be willing to do me a favor?”
“Anything you want,” the man – whose name tag read Reilly – --had replied. “Anything at all.”
“Don’t give me a ticket, please,” Isabel had suggested. “It would make me so very sad.”
“No ticket,” Reilly had agreed. Isabel’s shock at the strange turn of events had deepened.
“Maybe you’d be willing to drive alongside me, make sure no one else pulls me over for anything?”
“Of course,” Reilly had said. “I’d love to.”
When she’d arrived at her apartment building, Isabel had been at a loss for what to do with the enraptured officer. She’d finally decided to tell him to get back to his job, and he’d beamed at her as if she’d given him the best treat of his life and gotten back into his car.
“What the hell is going on?” Isabel glanced at herself in the big mirror she had put up on the wall opposite her living room window. She was as beautiful as ever. “It can’t just be the fact that I’m hot. It can’t be.” She had known gorgeous women, and while Isabel had heard more than once about their random triumphs, she had never heard of any of them getting off work early with pay, or getting out of a completely valid ticket, much less getting a police escort, just from asking.
Then too, Isabel thought, peering at herself more closely, she wasn’t just beautiful; she wasn’t even just gorgeous or stunning. As the day had worn on, every time she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw something newly captivating about her face. And she had noticed that her clothes felt just a bit looser than they had when she put them on. Not so much that she worried about them falling off, but enough to notice. There was something supernatural about how she looked, how she felt. That was the only word that seemed to fit what was happening; even if it was absurd to think of it that way.
Seized by a sudden thought, Isabel quickly undressed, throwing her clothes aside without paying attention to where they landed in her living room. She sat down on her couch and spread her legs, turning one out at the hip to look at the spot where she had noticed the odd mark only two days before. It was still there, but it had changed; it had healed, somehow, but two little spots lingered, pale pink like scars. “Bite marks don’t completely heal in two days?” Isabel brushed her fingers over the spots, and something rose up in her mind: she remembered watching True Blood a month before, and the marks the vampires had left behind. “No – no, that’s ridiculous,” she said, shaking her head dismissively at her own whimsy and looking around for her clothes to put them back on.
Isabel gathered up her office outfit and looked at it distastefully. It had been comfortable enough for sitting at a desk, but she was so shaken by the events of the day that all she wanted was to get into her pajamas. She strode into her bedroom and threw the ensemble into the hamper, pulling a pair of soft cotton shorts and a loose tank top out of a drawer. She didn’t expect for anyone to visit her, so there was no need for a bra or a pair of panties.
Almost as soon as Isabel stepped out of her bedroom, dressed for a comfortable afternoon of existential horror and television, she heard a knock at her door. “Of course,” she said with a sigh, glancing down at herself. Whoever it was – Jehovah’s Witness, someone selling cable packages, or the building manager – they would just have to accept that people in their homes lounged around in pajamas. Isabel padded to the door on her bare feet, irritable at her pensive afternoon being interrupted. She unlocked the deadbolt and twisted the knob lock, not even bothering to look through the peephole before opening the door.
The man on the other side of it was definitely not a Witness, nor was he the building manager; and Isabel was fairly certain he wasn’t interested in selling her a new cable package either. For a moment, she stared at the gorgeous man, wondering why he looked so familiar. I could not have possibly met someone this good looking and forgotten how it happened, she thought. She took in his dark, shoulder-length hair, his hazel eyes, his broad shoulders and lean, muscled build, and racked her brain for a few heartbeats.
Then, all at once, it came back to her. Friday night, Underground. The man who had paid her tab, who had taken her to a late dinner – or maybe it was an exceptionally early breakfast – and then taken her in the back seat of her car. “Let me in, Isabel,” he said firmly, and before she could even think about the command, Isabel stepped back from the door, opening it wider.
“What the hell?” she shook her head, looking down at her hands and then at the man.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Oz said, stepping into her apartment. “You’re confused, aren’t you?”
“Confused and a little bit scared at the fact that I apparently don’t have the self-preservation instinct to close the door on a one-night stand who’s stalking me,” she said sharply.
“Sit down,” Oz told her. Once again, before she could even think about the command, she found herself obeying it. She closed the door and walked over to the couch, seating herself primly.
“Okay,” she said. “I think you need to explain what this is, and what’s going on.” Oz smiled slightly, his eyes gleaming.
“That’s exactly why I’m here,” he told her. “You’re in trouble, Isabel. More trouble than you know.”
“You know about what’s happening with me,” she said, realizing it in an instant. “The whole stuff that happened at work and with the cop.” Oz nodded.
“You will listen to me, you will hear me out, and you won’t interrupt with any questions until I’m done explaining. Is that understood?” Isabel nodded, in spite of the questions she could feel on the tip of her tongue, almost burning her lips. “You’re becoming a succubus.”
For an instant, Isabel opened her mouth to retort that what he was saying was ridiculous, but then closed her mouth just as quickly. She frowned…... she had questions, she wanted to say something. You won’t interrupt me. Anger kindled in Isabel’s mind, replacing the instinctive apprehension at the stranger’s arrival. Where does he get off making demands like this?
“Yes, yes, I know,” Oz said, smiling slightly, almost seeming to enjoy her discomfort, or at least amused by it. “Impossible.” Isabel nodded, wondering what kind of control that man had on her that she couldn’t bring herself to ask the questions churning in her mind. “You humans,” he said, shaking his head. “So obsessed with the paranormal but so unwilling to believe it when it happens to you.” Isabel raised an eyebrow and Oz looked up at the ceiling. “Since you obviously aren’t capable of listening without comment, you can speak,” he said.
“First of all: a succubus, really?” Isabel crossed her arms over her chest. “Second of all, how is it that you get to boss me around and I can’t help but obey you?” She swallowed against the tight, dry feeling in her throat. “Third: what the hell is going on and how did this happen to me?”
“Yes, really, a succubus,” Oz said, sarcastically mimicking her tone. “Because of the circumstances that triggered your change into a succubus, I and one other person have control over you. It’s a safeguard, to make sure that your kind don’t overrun the planet.”
“But a succubus is a kind of demon,” Isabel pointed out, grateful that Oz hadn’t thought to command her to silence once more.
“Succubi are created, not born,” Oz told her. “You are becoming a succubus because you had sex with an angel and a vampire in the same night.” Isabel blushed; only a short time before her one-night stand’s arrival, she had felt proud at the fact that she had managed to hook up with two guys in one night. Or if n
ot proud, then impressed at herself for the implied attraction both men had felt for her. But something about the way that Oz spoke made her feel petty.
“Wait,” Isabel said, her mind latching onto the significance of his explanation instead of the tone. “A vampire and an angel?” She shook her head. “Neither of those things exist, any more than succubi are real.”
“I thought you would say that,” Oz said. He reached down and pulled up the hem of his shirt. Isabel frowned as he tugged it over his head and let it fall to the floor before turning his back to her. A shimmery light glowed along his muscular shoulder blades, and before Isabel’s eyes, a pair of glorious-looking, gold-tipped, white feathery wings, began to appear, spreading out from the center of Oz’s back. Even when Oz turned around, Isabel could only stare at him, bemused and utterly shocked. She had to believe her eyes, right?
Love of A Dragon (Exalted Dragons Book 1) Page 48
