The walk to the house was a lot longer than I expected. It felt like at least a mile, but that might have been the shock, and the general difficulty the terrain offered. It wasn’t that I was barefoot; it was the detritus. I know better than most that the ocean has a whole bunch of weird things living in it, and it looked like a lot of those weird things decided to take a ride with the wave. Now they’d found themselves in entirely the wrong place. Many were flapping about madly, gasping and dying and not at all clear exactly how far they were from the nearest collection of water. I couldn’t really help them, but I did my best not to step on them.
I was beginning to wonder what it meant that I could hear the banshee cries now, where before I had to climb up to the top of the island. I wondered if they were connected to the wave, and if so, how. And, I wondered if they represented a real danger, and not just a curiosity.
* * *
I didn’t want to admit it, but I was in kind of a lot of trouble.
There are certain things I learned how to do over the various millennia of my existence in order to ensure continued survival. One of those things was to always have a back door, and by that I mean I did what I could to make sure full retreat was an option. Basically, if for any reason a situation gets dangerous, I want to know I can drop everything, abandon whatever I was calling myself in whichever civilization I had ingratiated myself to, and disappear.
This meant avoiding situations where I was cornered. No deserts, no cities on mesas, no mountaintops… and no islands.
I broke the island rule many times in the past hundred or so years, for a couple of reasons. One, they didn’t represent the kind of isolation they used to, in the modern world. I owned an island for a short time, and I was okay with that because I was alone on it—except for a pixie, a girlfriend, and the occasional guest—so there was no civilization to worry about, and because I was in regular electronic communication with the mainland, which was only a short helicopter ride away. Likewise, I’d vacationed on an island a couple of times.
But this was my mistake: if Hawaii’s volcano wakes up or a huge wave takes out part of Indonesia, people know about it. That’s the joy of modern communication.
I couldn’t rely on that here, because I was living on a secret island.
I didn’t know who knew we were here, or if word got out that we were in trouble. Provided an alarm was raised onshore somewhere, I didn’t know who would come, or when. So far as I could tell, all the people who did know these things were dead or missing.
Basically, I was stranded on an island with no way of telling anybody I was stranded on an island. I didn’t know the island well enough to identify a source of food aside from the fish dying in the sun, and I couldn’t locate the nearest available fresh water other than the tank under my house. Unlike just about any continent, then, if left to my own devices indefinitely, I couldn’t survive here alone.
Oh, and I was doing my best to not think about it, but my girlfriend was missing, and I was worried she might be dead.
* * *
I was a tiny bit surprised the house still standing. The force of impact from the wave had to be considerable—albeit less than what hit the lower island, surely—but the building still looked structurally sound. I remember reading one time that the thing to do when a tornado was heading your way was to break the windows in the house to keep the wind from taking the house away. I was always dubious of this advice, but maybe there was something to it. Maybe the wave spared our house because we had no walls.
Unfortunately, as might also be the case in some hypothetical tornado scenario, the contents of the home didn’t do so well.
Portions of the place were semi-waterproofed, especially along the edge. We obviously got rain, and living on a cliff meant getting wind with that rain, so a combination of fine mist and actual raindrops generally made it five to ten feet inside. Everything kept in that area had to cope well with water.
We planned for that. We didn’t plan for the ocean jumping up and attacking. Not that there was a real way to plan for that sort of thing.
The televisions were destroyed. That was the first thing I noticed, which can be put in the pile of the weird things that come to mind along with brioche and soil quality.
A quick look at our upright closet—which was now neither upright nor, strictly speaking, a closet—confirmed that the clothes I’d fled in were pretty much the ones I was stuck with. That included footwear, which—again—I didn’t mind much, except I’d rather have shoes on when accidentally stepping on a jellyfish, or whatever other oceanic goo might be waiting in the hillside.
I found an unshattered drinking glass sitting in a cupboard that used to be in the kitchen, and was now lying on our mattress. The mattress wasn’t on the bed, but it was still in the approximate correct place for our bedroom. The bed itself was missing entirely. I sort of wished I had video footage of the wave strike, just to see what sequence of events could have resulted in the heavy bed being carried off while the foam mattress stayed in place.
I took the drinking glass to the kitchen and turned on the tap. What came out was fresh water, so I drank some of it, and then considered whether it made more sense to stay here and wait, or find a canteen or a loose bottle, and leave. That would mean knowing where I was going next, and I didn’t, but it was good to know I could. Then the water in the pipe ran out and got replaced by what was in the tank.
The ocean had compromised the supply. I would have to find fresh water elsewhere. That probably meant leaving the house.
There was also a question of food. The refrigerator was nowhere to be seen, but our freezer was still there. It had frozen meat in it. I was in the middle of considering what, exactly, I could do with a twenty-pound side of frozen beef, and whether it made more sense to leave it where it was and come back later, when I heard movement.
“Mirella?” I asked.
Someone was around the corner, behind the opaque center column that supported the roof and hid the bathroom, near the now entirely hypothetical front door. Whoever it was, they breathed, walked on two legs, and didn’t answer to Mirella’s name. I started to consider whether or not to look for a weapon—perhaps this was where a slab of frozen meat would be useful—when I got a response.
“No, not Mirella. I’m sorry.”
It was a woman’s voice. I didn’t recognize it.
“Why are you sorry?”
She stepped out from the corner: brunette, tall, incredibly fit, in shorts and a halter top and hiking boots. She was dirty, and her hair was a tousled mess, and she looked utterly fantastic.
She was a succubus. They fall out of bed in the morning looking ready for a photo shoot.
“I’m sorry, because I’m not her. I imagine she’s… with the wave, I mean, she may be…”
“Oh, no, I’m sure she’s fine.”
I was not at all sure Mirella was fine. I was on the cusp of panicking that she might be entirely the opposite of that. It was sort of annoying, because one of the great things about Mirella was that she was one of the most capable people I’d ever met. If there was rescuing to be done, it was typically her rescuing me and not the other way around. This was perhaps part of what I found so appealing.
She would turn up eventually. I was sure of it. All I had to do was convince the knot in my stomach it was true, and it would be.
“All right,” my guest said. She had an accent. It was gentle, but enough to give her a kind of sexy Russian spy flavor that she undoubtedly worked to an advantage.
“Are you Croat?” I asked, in Croatian. I hadn’t spoken it in many years, but I was fluent enough.
She looked surprised.
“I am,” she said, in English, “But I prefer this language. My name is Gordana.”
“What can I do for you, Gordana?”
“I thought… we’re here to collect you. I thought you would… no, never mind.”
“He doesn’t know anything, you cow,” said someone from behind me.
I didn’t know he was there. I should have, because I’m not supposed to be all that easy to surprise, but I was staring at Gordana and became distracted. This is what happens when you’re around a succubus, and it will happen regardless of whether you’re in a committed relationship or not. Mirella could be standing right next to me, and it would still happen.
In the same vein, the man who had come up behind me would have—had Mirella been there—commanded her full attention, because that’s how thing work with an incubus. This one was blond, muscular but not obnoxiously so, tan, with blue eyes and perfect cheekbones. If someone were doing a photo spread for a line of clothing targeting sallow urban Europeans who wanted to dress like they were rugged outdoorsmen, he’d be the man for the job.
He was standing on the other side of where our kitchen would be, next to the cooking range. The range—thankfully electric and not gas, as otherwise we’d be looking at a real risk of an explosion—had been relocated to the outside of the building, some five feet beyond the edge of the ground-floor platform.
“An incubus and a succubus in the same place and nobody’s trying to kill anybody,” I said. “This must be the end of the world.”
Nobody laughed, and Gordana’s expression was such that I became concerned that it actually was the end of the world.
“Listen,” the incubus said, “all you have to know is that we have food and water, and a place up in the hills that didn’t get hit by the wave. We are here to bring you there.”
“This is my brother, Bruno,” Gordana said with a little acid in her voice.
“Well, Bruno,” I said, “I appreciate the offer, but no thanks, I have a girlfriend to locate and I’m afraid that will be taking up all of my time.”
“You will need food,” he said, “and you will need water.”
“I heard you the first time. I’ll pass anyway.”
When it comes to matters not explicitly sexual, incubi can come off as real assholes. Actually, I think they come off as assholes all the time, but that’s me.
“You see, this is why you shouldn’t handle these things,” he said to his ‘sister’. They weren’t related, aside from being of the same species. This was obvious from looking at them. Not that actual siblings would have hated one another any more or less. “Now he’s suspicious.”
“You realize I can still hear you?” I said. “To be honest, I would have been 50/50 on it if she asked, but you’re not filling me with a lot of confidence.”
“Of course you would have. You’re a man. It’s how they get what they want. That’s why she sent her.”
“Yet she also sent you, and you are intolerable,” Gordana said.
“I’m here because we are both meant to be here. Don’t question these things, cow.”
“All right, number one, stop calling her that,” I said. “Number two, who is this person that sent you? Do I know her?”
Bruno just shook his head.
“This is complicated, Adam,” he said. “It would be better if we left here first and worked out the why, and who, and how, some other time.”
Bruno was dressed in khakis and hiking boots, with a loose sleeveless T-shirt, and a knapsack on his back. He had a handgun tucked into his belt. It was hidden by his shirt, until he lifted it to reveal the butt. This was how he planned on convincing me to go with them.
Oddly, knowing incubi tended to be assholes meant I was more tolerant of this particular approach.
“Oh, for goodness sake,” I said. “Put that in the bag, that’s about the dumbest place to carry it, and if you actually tried to use it on me I would just take it from you. Seduction isn’t going to work and neither are threats. Right now, I need to head downhill and see if I can figure out whether Mirella survived the morning, and maybe see who else made it. I’m not going to go uphill and away from her based on the say-so of two people I just met. Not without a little more. Why don’t you guys start at the beginning?”
“The beginning?” Gordana asked.
“From when you trashed the hotel room.”
They shared a look, but that was all. The silence was answer enough.
“That was you guys, right? Some of the message was written in incubus blood, I assume that was yours.”
“We ran out of the other kind,” Bruno said. “Had to improvise.”
“Adam,” Gordana said, “that is your name, yes? We have this correct?”
“You can call me Adam, sure.”
“Adam, Bruno is right. There’s a tremendous amount of information you do not have, but we aren’t the people who should be providing it. We can bring you to the one who you should speak to, but you need to trust us to go at least that far in our company. We have a long way to travel, and the hillside is going to be much more dangerous when the sun goes down.”
“Why is that? I’ve lived here a little while, the woods seem pretty safe.”
“That was before,” Bruno said. “This is after.”
“Please,” Gordana said.
“Tell me why the hillside is going to be more dangerous when the sun goes down.”
Bruno looked at me like this was the dumbest question ever.
“You’ve heard them,” he said. “You can hear them now.”
“The banshees.”
“If that is what you would call them, then yes.”
“What do you call them?”
“We have no name for them, but we know to fear them.”
“How do you know?”
“We were told,” Gordana said.
“It’s like you guys are trying extra hard to be as vague as possible, and it’s starting to piss me off.”
“Everyone downhill is dead,” Bruno said. “If your woman was down there, she’s dead as well. And so will you be, if you go that way.”
“If you want to live, you need to climb,” Gordana said, in case Bruno wasn’t being clear enough.
“Were you told this as well?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “And we really can’t tell you by whom, but you must appreciate the truth behind what we say, literally or not. Even if people endure downhill there is no food and no water, and the sun is hot and unkind. You are a survivor, Adam. If what we understand of you is true, this is your singular quality.”
She was right, which was a tiny bit aggravating. My own instinct was to head for the shelter of the trees. It’s what Mirella would do too, and if she was alive that was where I’d probably find her. Going down meant I was looking for a body, and I didn’t want to do that.
It was also a tiny bit aggravating that my erstwhile saviors were behaving as if they’d booked this meeting, months in advance, like it was on my calendar. If I had a calendar. That was a little weird.
“Yeah, all right,” I said. “I can’t stay here and I shouldn’t go down, so I guess up makes sense right now. Doesn’t mean I won’t ditch both of you if the need arises.”
I walked over to Bruno, who was closer, and extended my hand.
“Partners,” I said.
“Yes.”
He reached for my hand.
There’s a pressure point on the wrist. Grab it right, it feels like the wrist is getting snapped in half. I grabbed it right.
“Owwww!” Bruno exclaimed, as I took the gun away from him. I let go of the wrist, and he fell to one knee. Gordana, who was only a few paces behind us, froze where she was, which was wise as I had just armed myself.
“Some advice,” I said. “Threatening to kill me if I don’t come with you is stupid when it’s obvious killing me isn’t an actual option. Also, don’t show off a gun if you don’t know how to handle yourself.”
“I know how to handle myself,” Bruno spat. He stayed down though, his eyes to the ground, possibly anticipating a bullet to the brain. People who are expecting to get shot tend to duck their heads and tighten their shoulders. It’s some strange kind of instinct.
“I would rather you not do that,” Gordana said.
I laughed. “That was impassioned.�
�
She shrugged.
“He knows the way back better than I do,” she said. “We might get lost.”
I flipped the gun around and handed it back to Bruno. He took it, slowly, and got to his feet even more slowly.
“I would appreciate it if you stowed this somewhere,” I said. “If you’re right that nightfall brings danger, it might be useful. For me, not you. I know how to use it.”
“I know how to use it!”
He was of a fairer complexion than Gordana, so when he got angry, he reddened a lot more than he probably realized. He was beet-red.
“I’m not going to test you. Just put it away. If you’re worried it’s going to go off in your bag, I wouldn’t. The safety’s on.”
He glanced at the side of the gun to verify this, which said plenty: he looked in the wrong place for it.
* * *
The first step to really understanding just about any species is figuring out how the perpetuation of that species is carried out. For instance, imps are gifted storytellers, they’re all male, and they reproduce with human women. Satyrs, who also only reproduce with human women, are incredibly charmless. So, imps tend to strike off on their own, convince a woman to mate with them, and start a family that is largely isolated from the lives of other imps. Satyrs are socially close-knit, in closed communities where daughters are raised with certain cultural expectations.
This tells me a whole lot about imps and satyrs, their children and half-children (a half-satyr is sometimes—not every time—a werewolf) and so on, and that makes it easier to deal with them. In contrast, I know very little about demon families, and I know nothing about how pixies reproduce. I can tame a pixie, and I know how to kill a demon, but I don’t understand them.
When it comes to why incubi and succubi don’t get along, reproduction is the answer to everything.
They have a lot more in common than not. I mean, aside from being different genders in the same species. They both treat sexual intercourse like commerce, and treat being adored like a flower treats sunlight. (Adoration is more important. They derive much more pleasure from being wanted than from being bedded.) Their conquests—the heterosexual ones—are human rather than other members of their kind. They have the same approximate lifespan of somewhere close to eighty or a hundred years, and they look twenty-five for most of that life. And, they despise each other equally.
Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (The Immortal Series Book 4) Page 15
