The key difference is fascinating: succubi are infertile. Incubi are not. The only reason the species still exists is because there are incubi out there knocking up human women.
This would seem to be an unreasonable sort of burden on the average incubus, but fortunately they handle it about as poorly as possible, so we’re all spared from having to feel badly for them.
An incubus won’t do what, say, an imp or a satyr would be expected to do, which is to go out, meet a girl, marry her, and father her children. The incubus was not put on this world to perpetuate monogamy and the nuclear family. What they’ll do instead is woo a girl, get her pregnant, and disappear.
What responsibility the incubus does feel for his children is best reflected in his choice of mates. They tend to gravitate toward financially well-to-do women with either rich families or rich husbands. It increases the likelihood their bastards will be taken care of, even if it’s by a cuckolded and resentful human man.
Of course—and this is the really interesting part—the abandoned bastard child usually grows up resenting and/or actively hating the incubus father for having abandoned them in the first place. It means an adult succubus despises all incubi and, interestingly, nearly all adult incubi loathe both other incubi and themselves.
When functioning properly, this is a reproductive dynamic in which daddy issues is an expected outcome. If people knew incubi and succubi were real, there would probably be an entire branch of psychotherapy devoted to them.
* * *
There was a walking path that terminated on the uphill side of our house. I was very familiar with it, as Mirella and I went on the occasional short-distance hike around the area, and the path was where we began. I say short-distance because we were never more than two hours from the home. I don’t know if that is everyone’s definition of short or not, but to me a long-distance hike would be one that required overnight plans and a way to catch dinner.
We started there. Bruno led the way, I followed and Gordana took the rear. This was not an ideal arrangement as I spent most of my time staring at Bruno’s backside, which really did nothing for me. (It was an impressive backside nonetheless.) It did mean if I wanted a conversation with the considerably less detestable Gordana, I could just slow down and talk over my shoulder, so it wasn’t too terrible.
“How far did you say we had to go?” I asked her, in a moment when Bruno was out of view around a corner I knew was coming. The path went in a winding uphill direction for a time before leveling off and circling around a large tree and meeting up with itself again. It was at that point I’d have to pay attention to where he was going, because continuing on the path would just loop us back to the house.
“It’s a long way,” she said. “I couldn’t say exactly how long.”
“But more than a day?”
“Possibly. We’ve planned for it.”
“Okay. So how’d you guys know the wave was coming?”
“We didn’t.”
“Aw, come on. The tsunami hit a few hours ago and you came from more than a day away. How’d you know?”
Bruno was in view again, having slowed on the other side of the turn. He caught some of what we were talking about.
“You’ll have your explanation when we get there, Adam,” he said. “Just keep moving.”
“I can walk and talk at the same time,” I said. “And how do you guys even know my name?”
“Enough with the questions. The talking will attract attention. We don’t want attention.”
The banshee cries remained consistent yet far away, but I couldn’t argue with the suggestion that whatever was making the noise was something I didn’t feel like meeting, or not yet. I would prefer to be better armed first, and in the company of more dangerous individuals.
I wasn’t feeling great about getting too far from the house. I couldn’t tell exactly where a day’s travel through the island’s jungle would even get me, geographically, because I wasn’t sure how easy the trip was or what kind of hiking skills to expect from my escorts. It was still a day of travel that could be taking me further from wherever Mirella was. That is unless the person who sent these two also sent someone for her. I felt like that was something someone would have told me already, though.
It was a little over an hour to the flat area and the circumnavigated tree. On the far end of the loop, Bruno hesitated, studied a couple of the trees in some detail, and then pushed aside a handful of low branches and motioned us to join him. He was sticking to a route that was what I would call unmarked, and to most people nonexistent. I could see the signs that at least two sets of bipeds had traveled this way recently, though. Those bipeds, I assumed, were the same ones now escorting me.
Tracking people and animals in the woods was something I was reasonably good at, having spent a whole lot of my life as a hunter. I could see paths that weren’t really paths—as distinct from the heavily traveled one we’d just gotten off of. What I was seeing, though, was not the same thing Bruno was seeing. His approach involved markings on the lower part of some of the trees. They were subtle enough to be missed if you weren’t looking for them.
Assuming the rest of the trail was marked the same approximate way, I could probably go it alone if I had to. I didn’t have to, but if we lost Bruno to some catastrophe, it wouldn’t be the worst thing ever.
On that point, he would probably not agree.
We were off the path for about twenty minutes when we heard the trill of one of the banshees that was close enough to cause Bruno to drop to a crouch and freeze. He shot a look back at us, the clear implication being we had better do the same. So we did.
“Have you seen one?” I whispered, to Gordana.
She shook her head no. She looked frightened. My first instinct was to hug her and protect her. Because: succubus.
“How do you know to be afraid?”
I asked this even though the sound was a little terrifying, and that fear didn’t necessarily require detailed explanation.
“We were warned,” she whispered.
“By the same person who told you about the wave?”
“Shh!” Bruno hissed.
Something approximately man-sized was moving through the forest to our left and uphill. It was wreaking havoc with all my natural impulses, because it sounded like it was about the same height as a human, but it felt like something heavier.
It passed soon enough. We stayed where we were for a few minutes anyway. Then Bruno stood up, looked around, and waved for us to continue. I picked up the pace until I was close enough to him to whisper properly.
“You don’t know what it is,” I said.
“No.”
“But you know enough to be afraid of it.”
“I saw your face, Adam. You knew enough to fear it knowing even less than we do.”
“Fair point. But you have nothing else?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you seem to know more than you should about things that only just happened. I’m asking if that knowledge extends to a detail or two about whatever we just encountered. Anything, even if it doesn’t seem important.”
“Only to avoid them.”
I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I believed him.
* * *
Sundown arrived before we reached wherever we were going. Exactly where that was would have necessitated—at minimum—an understanding of where we currently were, and I had no idea at all. We’d crossed two of the roads which ran up the hill, but the roads on the island were an illogical series of loops and whorls, so there was no way to use them to figure out where we were heading, other than up.
The roads were as they were because they had to reach the various private estates dotting the hillside, and given we’d been hiking a relatively straight path, I was certain that if we hadn’t crossed into private property already, we were going to be soon. Some of that property was guarded by people with guns. I wondered if my new friends were aware of this.
Nightfal
l also brought cooler temperatures, and I was still dressed in shorts, a t-shirt and no shoes, and everything had a lingering dampness from when the ocean knocked on my back door. I can’t get sick, but I’m pretty sure I can freeze to death.
All right, it wasn’t that cold. We were still in the tropics and everything, and I wasn’t about to lose a limb to frostbite. It was enough, though, to make for an uncomfortable evening, so I was grateful when a sweatshirt my size came out of Gordana’s bag.
“Nothing for you?” I asked, as she was still scantily clad. Her skin was shiny from sweat, and she looked like she was ready for a photographer.
“We don’t suffer from temperature changes as much as… as humans.”
“Oh. Yes, I guess you don’t.”
I’d really never thought about it, but succubi and incubi did spend a lot of time wearing very little clothing, so it made sense.
“Not that you are human,” Bruno said. “I mean, you aren’t really.”
“Sure I am.”
He smiled like we were both in on a joke of some kind, except he was the only one, so his expression turned to bewilderment.
“With your… lifespan, I mean to say.”
As he spoke, he started pulling things out of his knapsack: a blanket for the ground, a single waterproof sleeping bag, a handful of protein bars, and a tin box big enough to hold a pack of cigarettes. Bottled water had been emerging from Gordana’s bag for most of the day already, and now three more bottles came out. They were prepared for exactly one night in the woods. And possibly a smoke or two.
“I know what you mean,” I said. “You’re wrong, but I know what you mean. I’m as human as the next person.”
“Of course,” he said. “And so am I.”
I didn’t feel like debating him on the finer points of my humanity, because I didn’t actively care about what he thought either way. As long as he never decided I was bulletproof or bite resistant or something, it wouldn’t matter.
Our campsite was in a small cavity on the hillside. It was created by a combination of soil erosion and a dense root system, and was more or less the ideal place to set a certain kind of trap if I had a good knife, a few vines, a small collection of leaves, and an inclination to trap something. It wasn’t the sort of place one stumbled upon by accident, either. I was pretty sure they scouted it ahead of time.
“I’ll be honest, when I was promised food, water and shelter, this wasn’t really what I pictured.”
“It’s just for tonight,” Gordana said. “We can only carry so much between us.”
“We’ll be safe here, though?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“I’ll keep watch,” Bruno said. “While she keeps you warm.”
“I see. I did mention the girlfriend, didn’t I?”
“We can literally keep one another warm,” Gordana said. “Without euphemism.”
“All right, I guess that’s okay. But when we meet up with Mirella, you can be the one to explain this arrangement. If she kills you first, I may have enough time to get away.”
Sleep was a long way off, though, so in the dwindling light we sat in a huddle on the ground covering, chewing our protein bars and drinking our water.
I’m not in favor of whatever current food trend resulted in the creation and dissemination of protein bars. I appreciate their convenience, but that’s about all. I mean, up until very recently, new gastronomic inventions resulted in things that tasted better, not worse. Raw meat to cooked meat? Fantastic. Rotten meat to salted meat? I’m all aboard for the invention of bacon. New spices and ways to cook things, preservative concepts like pickling, these are all great ideas. And of course there’s the best idea ever: fermented drink for when there isn’t enough potable water.
But then came protein bars, part of a larger movement toward blander food, and I think we’re just going in the wrong direction here.
I admit I’m spoiled. People just want to be healthier, and that’s great, but I’m an immortal man who doesn’t get any fatter; I could eat sticks of butter all day if I wanted and be totally fine. (Okay, I’d be on the toilet for the second half of that day, but you get my point.) Besides, we used to have protein bars, and they were delicious. We called it beef jerky.
Anyway.
We ate in silence. I wondered, again, where Mirella ended up and if everyone we knew from the lower island was dead. I also wondered if a warning went out. Nearby islands got tsunami warnings after regional earthquakes, and while I never actually considered the question before the wave came, I just sort of assumed we would get the same warning. But maybe not. Maybe this was another one of the drawbacks of living on a secret island.
There was also the question of whether a warning would have mattered. The lower island wasn’t really built to anticipate a disaster of this magnitude, but saying that implies there is a way to prepare for such a thing.
On a smaller scale, sure. Gordana and Bruno appeared to have been the recipients of advance notice, and to have benefited from it in the form of being alive and unmolested by salt water. I hadn’t devoted a lot of time to understanding how that could be.
Generally speaking, catastrophically large tidal waves weren’t deliberate creations, so they probably weren’t in on it. (I know: obviously. But if someone says a bank is going to be robbed next week and then it happens, the first question is always going to be, was the person who predicted it in on the robbery in the first place?)
I began to wonder if they knew all the way back before they trashed the hotel room with cryptic messages in dead languages, and if the oncoming wave was the reason they fled for the hillside. The timeline made sense.
It didn’t explain why they came to the island in the first place, though. Assuming they stowed away or employed some other secretive means to get to the island, the question had to be, why did they go through all that trouble to put themselves into danger?
That led back to the question of whose advice they were really following, and why, and what the deal was with the indecipherable stanza in dragon’s blood. What would be the point of a message they knew perfectly well nobody could read?
It hit me then, and I laughed out loud before I could help myself.
“What are you finding funny?” Bruno asked. His expression was one of somebody who felt more or less the same about protein bars as I did.
“You guys,” I said. “You don’t know what the message you wrote on the wall meant, do you?”
They looked at each other.
“Do you?” Gordana asked.
“No! But that wasn’t the point, was it? You didn’t put it there to be read. It was there because you knew who would show up to try and read it.”
“We didn’t compose the message,” Bruno said.
“You were there when it was written.”
“Yes. As you know, some of the blood was mine.”
“It was put there by the person you’re bringing me to see. That person didn’t tell you what the message meant either, did they?”
“No.”
“We asked,” Gordana said. “But she only rarely answers.”
“She didn’t know what it meant either,” I said. “That’s why she didn’t answer.”
“All right,” Bruno said. “And how do you know that, immortal man?”
“I know that because I just realized who you’re bringing me to see. You’re working with a prophet. And we’re all in a lot of trouble.”
9
Prophets can see the future.
Look, I know I’ve said a bunch of times that there’s no such thing as magic, and I stand by that statement completely, because in all my time on Earth I have yet to see something that didn’t end up getting explained eventually. Certainly, a lot of those explanations came many generations after the original observation, which is why people stick with the magic explanation, but that doesn’t make it accurate.
Also, some people’s minds just work differently. I’ve seen this often enough to appreciate it as an
actual thing that seems fundamentally true, on a… well on a wiring level, if I can use a modern corollary. Some of us are just predisposed to seeing mundane things in a way that confirms the existence of the supernatural from their specific perspective.
I’m very much tied to logic and observation, and have been since before those were concepts. As much as I respect the magic-as-reality viewpoint, I think it’s fair to say one of the reasons I’m still alive is because my brain doesn’t work that way.
Despite everything I just said, it’s also the case that there are some people in the world who get glimpses of the future. Please know that this is hard-fought knowledge I resisted for an extremely long time, as I have incredibly high standards of proof for a modern caveman.
The most common kind of future-seer is the oracle. These are women—they’re always women, don’t ask me why because I don’t know—who under certain altered states can glimpse, quite briefly, the future of a person. There are all sorts of rules about this: the oracle has to be stoned enough to enter the correct mindset; the person has to be ready with a specific question; the prophecy, once delivered, can’t be clarified and is wide open to interpretation.
Oracular declarations are always incredibly vague, and suffer from a deserved reputation of being badly misunderstood until too late. The famous Delphic oracle story is of the king who was told that taking his army across a river to engage another army would result in “a great kingdom falling”. He mistakenly assumed the kingdom in question was his opponent’s. It wasn’t; crossing the river was a huge tactical error, and the outcome was his own kingdom’s fall.
Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (The Immortal Series Book 4) Page 16
