The Demon Lover

by Juliet Dark

  I glanced behind me, hoping I’d lost it in the maze of trees, but it was right behind me, soaring above the tree line, so big now that it blotted out the sun. It was looking for a clear path to dive down at me. I had to lead it into the thicket, where the overgrown shrubs and vines were so thick that it would be trapped. I had to trap it in the Borderlands where it came from.

  I blundered on through the trees, not even sure I was going in the right direction since I’d left the path. When I’d last looked up the sun had been behind me. If I veered to the left I’d be going north—the direction I’d gone the first time I’d found the thicket. I dodged around a tree to correct my direction … and heard the flap of wings overhead. Something sharp grazed my cheek—talons stretched out to grab me. Ahead of me I saw the beginning of the thicket, the bare branches of the honeysuckle shrub twisting together in an arch. I dove under a low-hanging branch and heard the bird crash into the shrubs with an angry shriek. Black feathers filled the air around me like soot from an infernal explosion. I looked back and saw it stumble to its feet dragging one broken wing behind it, its awful yellow beak snapping at my heels. I ducked my head and crawled deeper into the thicket, pushing vines out of my way to block the thing’s approach.

  I had found the thicket all right, but my plan had been a little short-sighted. So long as I was bigger than the creature I couldn’t lead it into a space small enough to trap it. Instead I would soon be snared in the vines like a fly trapped in a web and then the creature would be able to pick my bones at leisure. Still I blundered into the underbrush, digging myself deeper and deeper into what I was beginning to suspect would be my tomb. It had been the tomb for other creatures—the small birds and mice I’d seen before—but as I dug myself in deeper I also found larger and stranger creatures: an animal that looked like a rabbit but had long fangs, bat skeletons with tiny human skulls, and a long sinuous fish tail that led, horribly, to a human torso. A mermaid? How had a mermaid gotten trapped in these woods? There must be a body of water on the other side of the door, which meant that I was close to the door. Perhaps if I could lead Mara to the door I could make her go through it. Today was the Equinox. If the door opened on the Solstice mightn’t it also open on the Equinox? And I was a doorkeeper … with a fairy stone in my pocket. It was worth a try. It might be my only chance to escape being killed by Mara. But first I had to find the door.

  I paused for a moment to listen and realized it had been some time since I’d heard the creature behind me. Had I lost it? Or had she circled around to cut me off? The thicket was full of tiny sounds: the rustle of twigs, the drip of melting snow, and, faint and distant, the rumble of surf—the sound of the ocean in a landlocked woods trapped in the thicket as if trapped in the whorls of a seashell. I crawled toward it, drawn by the strange mystery of it as much as by the slight chance of escape. As I crawled I noticed that the snow grew thinner and the ground softer, and my hands sank into sand. Around me, threaded in the vines, were seashells and fish bones that swayed and clanked like wind chimes. And then I was out in the open in a round glade.

  I stood up and looked around me. It was the glade I’d come to with Liam on New Year’s Eve. Across from me was the arched doorway; now, instead of being filled by the moon, it was filled with a milky blue-green mist—the color of sea glass. I stepped toward it … and heard a corresponding step behind me.

  I wheeled around and found myself facing a creature out of my worst nightmares. The bird-thing had begun to change back into human form but had gotten stuck in between. It stood on two legs, but those legs ended in scaly talons. Its body was stippled with black feathers. One arm hung fleshy and broken, the other—feathered—flapped angrily at its side. Her face was just recognizable as the girl I’d known as Mara, but for an ugly yellow beak and that horribly gaping mouth that opened now to scream at me. The long sucker-covered tongue lashed out like an angry cat’s tail.

  “Mara,” I said, willing my voice to be steady. “This world isn’t the right place for you. Wouldn’t you rather go back?”

  She squawked and beat her wing in the air. “What do you know?” she croaked. “We are starving in that world. There is nothing there to eat. Here …” The awful tongue snaked out of her mouth and writhed over her beaky lips as she took a step toward me. “Here there is such abundance that you waste it. These young people take drugs that deplete their life force. They drive in their fast cars half blind from alcohol. They have sex for entertainment and stay up all night pretending to study. Why shouldn’t I drink of their life force when they treat their lives so cheaply?”

  “They’re not all like that,” I said, taking a step back toward the door. I could smell salt air mingled with honeysuckle. Was it always summer in Faerie? I wondered. I wanted to turn and look, but I couldn’t risk taking my eyes off Mara. “And I’m certainly not like that. I don’t take drugs or drive drunk …”

  “Ha! You’re the worst of all! You were willing to let that incubus suck you dry …”

  “You knew Liam was an incubus?” I asked.

  “Yes! I recognized what he was immediately, but he didn’t recognize me. He was so set on seducing you he barely looked at anyone else. And you—you were willing to follow him into the shadows. I can smell it on you.” Her tongue lashed out and grazed the bruises on my right hand, which I’d stuck in my pocket. “Those marks were made because your flesh was dissolving with his—and that could only happen if you were willing to go with him. I’ll tell you what.” She stretched her beaky lips wide in what I realized was supposed to be a smile. “After I suck you dry I’ll leave what’s left of you in the Borderlands. You can spend eternity in that hellhole with your boyfriend.”

  “Is it really that bad there?” I asked, turning slightly to look behind me through the door. The minute I turned Mara launched herself at me—as I knew she would. I drew my hand out of my pocket, slipping the fairy stone onto my finger, and shouted the opening spell: “Ianuam sprengja!”

  A cold wind rushed through the arched doorway and shadows stretched out toward me, sniffing at me, hungry for my warmth, my solid flesh … my very life. Was he there? I wondered, leaning toward the door, but then I heard the flap of wings at my back and I dodged to the right … just as Mara’s right wing brushed my face. She should have gone through the door, but instead a flash of light split the air above us, accompanied by a cracking noise and a shout that sounded like bucky frakking dent, and Mara crumpled to the ground at my feet.

  Confused, I looked up and found Frank standing over the crumpled body wielding a baseball bat.

  “Jesus, Frank, what are you doing here?”

  “Trying to save your life, McFay. You’re welcome.” He stepped over the body, reaching for me, but Mara’s wing struck him square in the chest and threw him back against a tree with a sickening crack of bone. Then she launched herself at me.

  I didn’t have time to dodge this time. She landed on me inches from the open door. She crouched over me, one hand around my throat, one wing beating the air above me. The awful mouth opened wide, the yellow beak stretching like Silly Putty, revealing rows of razor-sharp teeth gnashing together. Drops of putrid saliva fell on my face. I closed my eyes and prayed that it would be over soon.

  The pressure of the creature’s weight lifted so suddenly that I felt lightness in my chest. Was this what death felt like? I opened my eyes and saw Mara hovering in the air above me. She was wrapped up in a tangled skein of shadows … and then she was spinning, head over heels, toward the door. I rolled over just in time to see her crash through the door. The shadow hovered on the threshold, coiling back.

  “Quick, close it!” Frank was next to me, screaming in my ear. I looked down at the fairy stone on my hand … and pulled it off.

  A wind blew threw the glade, sucking all the air through the door. Frank grabbed me and held on to a tree trunk to keep us from being sucked through. A whirlpool churned just in front of the door. The coil of shadow that had banished Mara writhed i
n the air and then took a shape. For just a moment I saw Liam’s face hovering above me. I felt a brush of lips against mine, caught the scent of honeysuckle in the air … and then the coil of shadow melted and, with a loud crack and sucking whoosh, the door slammed shut.

  FORTY

  It took a long time to get out of the woods that day. Frank couldn’t put any weight on his right leg (it would turn out to be broken in two places) and he wouldn’t leave his baseball bat behind.

  “Are you kidding? It’s signed by Bucky Dent!”

  “Okay,” I said, lifting the bat in my left hand while using the right to support his weight. “How did you get it, anyway?”

  I meant how did he happen to get it before chasing Mara and me into the woods, but he responded by telling me a long story about how the bat had been signed by Bucky Dent outside Fenway Park after he hit his famous three-run home run to beat the Red Sox in a one game playoff to end the 1978 season.

  “Jeez, Frank, you being a witch and all, couldn’t you have brought something magic to save me?”

  “Magic? Weren’t you listening, woman? The bat’s signed by Bucky fucking Dent. It is magic!”

  He continued to splutter about the magical properties of sports memorabilia, distracting himself (as I’d hoped) from the pain. Only when we were in sight of the house and Brock, Dory, and Diana were running toward us did he add: “The Bucky Dent bat was in my trunk. I carry it in case I run into any crazies on the road. I grabbed it when I saw that giant bird chase you into the woods.”

  His remark was loud enough to be overheard by the others and he repeated it as Diana drove us to the hospital. Frank repeated it so many times that I thought he might be going into shock, but then I realized he was just trying to preserve his cover by adamantly denying that he’d witnessed anything supernatural. When he was wheeled into surgery he winked at me and made me promise I’d make sure his Bucky Dent bat was safe.

  I stayed at the hospital until Soheila showed up. “Tell Frank I went back to make sure Bucky Dent was safe,” I said, getting up to leave.

  She looked at me strangely but settled in to wait for Frank to regain consciousness.

  Everyone looked at me strangely for the next few days. I think they were afraid I was in shock and would soon lapse into the depression I’d wallowed in after I’d banished Liam. When I told Liz and Diana what had happened they both looked guilty. “So it wasn’t Liam who was feeding on the students,” Diana said. “Or on Liz.”

  “I should have realized that I was always more tired after Mara had been with me,” Liz said. “I should have realized what she was.”

  When I paid a visit to Soheila after break, she told me she felt badly that she hadn’t recognized Mara for what she was.

  “You shouldn’t feel bad,” I told her. “She told me herself that even Liam hadn’t recognized what she was. What exactly was she, anyway?”

  “A liderc,” she told me, taking down Fraser’s Demonology from the shelf and opening it to an illustration of a chicken with a woman’s head. “It’s a sort of Hungarian succubus, distantly related to us lilitu. They shapeshift into birds—chickens, usually, but sometimes crows—in order to hunt their prey and then feed on the life force of their victims through close contact. Not through sex, as a rule.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.” I hadn’t liked the idea of Mara having sex with all her victims. “So she could have been the one making me weak, not Liam.”

  “That could be, but the fact remains that Liam was an incubus and you were having sex with him. Sooner or later he would have drained you.”

  How much later? I wondered, but didn’t ask aloud. I knew Soheila—as well as Diana, Brock, Dory, and Liz—were afraid I’d have some sort of breakdown if I thought that I’d banished Liam for nothing. But I wasn’t going to have a breakdown. At least not if I kept busy.

  As the days grew longer and warmer I subjected Honeysuckle House to an orgy of spring cleaning. I packed up Liam’s clothes and books and stored them in the attic. I dusted and scrubbed and washed all the windows. While dusting my desk I found a key that fit the locked drawer. Inside was another key—an iron key identical to the one Brock had made for me to send Liam back to the Borderlands. So he’d been sent there before—and then released. I wondered why and when.

  While cleaning out the pantry I dislodged a shadowy lump with the mop and quickly recognized it as the shadow-crab. I poured a bucket of bleach over it and it shriveled up into a gray film that I briskly mopped up. Then I ran upstairs and found Ralph sitting up in his basket, cleaning himself.

  “You’re back!” I ran down and got a whole mini Bonbel for him to eat. While I was gone he found his way onto my laptop and typed, Is the incubus gone?

  So Ralph had known all along. And he knew how to type! No wonder he’d always been trying to hop on my laptop. I told him the whole story while he ate enough cheese to bloat his stomach. Then he typed a single word on the screen.

  Sorry!

  I rubbed his little bloated belly. “It’s okay, fella, at least I’ve got you back. I don’t suppose you would have liked sharing the house with an incubus.” But Ralph was already asleep, snoring loudly enough to reassure me that he hadn’t lapsed into another coma.

  After I scoured the house and made a list of more substantial outdoor repairs that I would need to tackle in the summer, I turned my attention to my students. I’d taken over the creative writing class again, so I had plenty to keep me busy. I was afraid they’d spend all their time bemoaning Liam’s absence, but the first time Scott Wilder (back from his medical leave looking drowsy as ever) mentioned Liam’s name, Nicky shot him an icy stare and no one ever brought him up again. Still, I saw Liam’s influence in their writing—in a new openness and sensitivity to language I hadn’t seen when I’d taught the class in the fall. He’d given them the confidence to experiment and find their own voices. Especially Nicky.

  She had written a beautiful series of poems on the theme of a young girl trapped in an ice palace populated by frozen guardians. Each one had a story to tell. I recognized in each story a bit of Nicky’s family history, a bit of the Romantic heroines we’d read about in class, and more than a bit of Nicky’s fears about her future.

  When I see how their dreams have gone awry, she wrote, I wonder how I will my fate mollify.

  May 2, Nicky’s birthday, was fast approaching, and I was no closer to averting the Ballard curse. To keep her close to me I hired her to take Mara’s place as my assistant. I showed her the charts that Mara had been keeping on Dahlia’s notebooks and she laughed when I explained Mara’s asterisk system.

  “She was a strange one,” Nicky said, shaking her head. “Kind of a prude. She was always so shocked when I stayed at Ben’s, but then she’d always sit too close—you know what I mean?—and ask the most embarrassing questions. I figured she was trying to understand our culture, but sometimes it felt like she was trying to suck up all my experiences. Anyway, it’s too bad her visa expired. Do you think she’ll come back?”

  “No,” I told her, hoping it was true. “I think she got all she could out of Fairwick.”

  Nicky completed Mara’s charts, but she also made her own discovery from the notebooks.

  “I think Dahlia LaMotte based one of her books on my family,” she told me in the last week of April. “It’s not one she ever published. It’s called The Curse of the Bellefleurs.”

  When I read it I thought I saw why it hadn’t been published. It had little of the romantic tension that LaMotte was known for and it didn’t have a happy ending. It told the story of two ambitious men who join forces to gain control of the railroads in a small upstate town. Andre Bellefleur proves the more ruthless of the two and drives out his partner, Arthur Rosedale, and Rosedale’s wife kills herself. Before Rosedale leaves for the west he curses the Bellefleur women with an urge to kill themselves after they’ve given birth to a successor.

  “It’s just like my family,” Nicky told m
e. “Except for the suicides. We Ballards prefer to decay slowly. My grandmother once told me when I was little that there was a curse and that’s why my mother acted the way she did. I never believed it … but lately … Well, there are a lot of strange things that go on in this town. A curse would be one of the less strange things. I just wish I knew how to make it go away.”

  Nicky also noticed a marked number of correlations between the Bellefleurs and the Ballards—a wolf’s-head cane sported by Andre Bellefleur that she said was identical to one that had been in her family until her grandmother had pawned it, the antique pink sèvres secretaire with its pattern of frolicking cupids that still stood in her grandmother’s room, and the same brown freckle in their light blue eyes. I, too, found a family heirloom in the manuscript. Arthur Rosedale sported a black onyx intaglio watch fob inscribed with a tree which sounded remarkably like the brooch my grandmother wore. Once I’d thought of my grandmother I noticed some other similarities between Hiram Scudder’s story and my own family history. Hiram Scudder had gone out west to seek his fortune—so had my grandmother’s grandfather. Frank had told me that one of the aliases Scudder had used was Stoddard. I looked through my old copies of Dahlia LaMotte’s books and found the name Emmeline Stoddard written on their flyleaves.

  It didn’t take a genius to make the next deduction. My grandmother was descended from the witch who had cursed the Ballards. Which meant she could uncurse them. If only I could convince her to, after telling her off the last time I saw her. The last person I felt like talking to right now was my grandmother. If her informants had told her about the incubus invasion on campus she wouldn’t spare me an embarrassing interrogation—or a gloating “I told you so.” But what choice did I have? Fate was offering me an opportunity to lift the Ballard curse, something Fairwick witches had been trying to do for decades. I’d just have to swallow my pride.