The Demon Lover

by Juliet Dark

  But at least I got to tell one truth. I’d spent half the night reading my new grimoire, paying special attention to the section on reversing a family curse. I’d been surprised and relieved to find out that it didn’t involve any bloody sacrifices or burnt offerings. It required only that I speak one sentence to Nicky and mean it:

  I forgive the pain your family gave to my family and release you from the pain we’ve given you.

  Pretty simple. Nicky would probably think I’d gone off my rocker when I said it.

  I pulled up in front of Honeysuckle House, thinking about the power of forgiveness and the pain we unknowingly cause others. In my head I heard the last question Liam had asked me.

  Is a lie really the worst thing if it’s told out of love?

  I looked at my house for a few moments before getting out of the car. It was a little worse for wear after the long winter—there were tiles missing from the roof and the trim around the eaves could do with a fresh coat of paint. And I really should replace the shutters. But there were also daffodils coming up in the front beds and the honeysuckle shrubs were filling out with tender green buds. This was my home now—for better or worse. My great-great-grandfather had set out from here a bitter and broken man, but somehow I’d found my way back and somehow, against all odds, I’d landed on my feet.

  I got out, but instead of going inside I cut across the lawn and walked though a gap in the trees onto the path. The ground was damp from the rain, but at least the snow was gone. I followed the trail to the glade in the middle of the honeysuckle thicket. The twisted branches were stained dark by rain. Against the new trembling green they looked like stained-glass windows.

  Like a cathedral, Dahlia LaMotte had written at the end of The Dark Stranger when Violet Grey and William Dougall find each other in a secluded glade in the forest. In the published book the scene ends with Violet accepting Dougall’s offer of marriage. In the handwritten manuscript there were a few additional lines.

  I turned from my earthly lover and watched my demon lover rise in the mist beyond the trees. I could see longing in his face, a longing matched in my own sinews and veins. He was made up of a darkness that spoke to the darkness inside me. If he called to me, I would follow. But he didn’t call to me. He lifted a hand—in parting or benediction I’d never know—and then he vanished into the shadows from which he came.

  A fine mist rose from the ground, filling the arched doorway. I stepped closer and the mist parted for me, curled around me, and caressed my face. I felt it linger on the iron key I wore around my neck and lap at the marks on my wrist Liam had made when I was willing to follow him into the shadows.

  He was made up of a darkness that spoke to the darkness inside me.

  Yes, Dahlia had that right. The truth—if I was going to be a stickler for the truth—was that I recognized something of myself in the incubus. Down at the pit of my being was a shadowy place, which had remained closed and hidden since I was a child, that was only now beginning to stir. The incubus had awoken it. And while I hadn’t fallen in love with the civilized man the incubus had made himself into, I thought I might have been able to love the wild creature of moonlight and shadow.

  I closed my eyes and breathed in the scent of sea air and honeysuckle.

  “No,” I said, answering the last question Liam had asked me. “A lie told out of love isn’t the worst thing.”

  Then, my face damp from the mist, I turned around and went home.

  THE END

  For L, who holdsthe key to my heart

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to my intrepid editor, Linda Marrow, for going along with me into the woods on this one. I am also grateful to Jane von Mehren, Gina Wachtel, Dana Isaacson, and Junessa Viloria at Ballantine and to Robin Rue and Beth Miller at Writers House, for all their invaluable guidance and encouragement. Thanks to my early readers Gary Feinberg, Wendy Gold Rossi, Cathy Seilhan, and Scott Silverman, to my daughter, Maggie Vicknair, for her advice on serial fiction, and to Jeremy Levine for his invaluable advice on baseball memorabilia. My husband, Lee Slonimsky, gets the warmest of mentions for his constant support and faith, and Nora Slonimsky has been a crucial source of feedback, reading every word practically the minute I wrote it, and cheering on the demon lovah, as he became known in our household.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JULIET DARK is the pseudonym of bestselling author Carol Goodman, whose novels include The Lake of Dead Languages, The Seduction of Water, and Arcadia Falls. Her novels have won the Hammett Prize and have been nominated for the Dublin/IMPAC Award and the Mary Higgins Clark Award. Her fiction has been translated into thirteen laguages. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her family.READ ON FOR AN EXCITING PREVIEW OF

  JULIET DARK’S NEXT NOVEL IN THIS SERIES:

  THE WATER WITCH

  PROLOGUE

  The dream began as all the others had, with moonlight pouring through an open window, shadow branches stretching across the floor, the scent of honeysuckle on the air.

  “You’re back,” I whispered. “I thought …”

  “That you had sent me away,” he whispered, his teeth gleaming pearly white as his lips parted. “You did. But it’s not too late to call me back. I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too,” I sighed.

  The moonlight cleaved the dark, carving a cheekbone out of shadow, which I longed to reach out and stroke, so achingly familiar was the face taking shape just inches from my own. But I couldn’t move. He was still only shadow hovering above me, but I could feel the weight of him, pressing down on me.

  “I can’t,” I panted. “It won’t work. We can’t be together.…”

  “Why not?” he cooed, his honeyed breath lapping against my face. “Because they told you I was no good for you? That I would hurt you? How could I ever harm you? I love you.”

  I breathed in his words and let out a long sigh. My breath filled his chest, each muscle rippling in the silver light like water running over smooth stones in a stream. I felt those hard muscles slam down against my chest, forcing the air from my lungs. He sipped the air from my lips, and the moonlight drew hands from the dark that stroked my face, my throat, my breasts.…

  I gasped and his hips bore down on mine. I was filling him out with my breath. All I had to do was keep breathing, and he would become flesh and blood.

  But I couldn’t breathe.

  He was sucking the breath out of me, draining my life.

  His legs parted mine, and I felt him rigid against me, waiting to enter me.…

  Waiting for what?

  He moved away, his body shifted lower. “You have only to call my name to bring me back,” he whispered, his breath hot in my ear. “You have only to want me to make me flesh again.” His lips sealed each word to my throat, my breasts, my naval.… “You have only to love me to make me human.”

  Oh, that. If I loved him, he would become human. It seemed a small thing. I was close, wasn’t I? As close as his lips were to my skin as they brushed along my inner thigh. Tantalizingly close. I had only to call out his name and tell him I loved him for the waiting to be over, for the teasing to end.…

  He was teasing me. The little nips on my thighs, the way he moved against me and then retreated. He was holding back, waiting for me to release him from his exile.

  “You’re trying to bribe me,” I said, my voice cold enough to chill the summer breeze moving through the window. His lips froze on the crook below my right kneecap and grew chill. His face appeared above mine, more shadow than moonlight, already fading.

  “I wouldn’t call it a bribe,” he said, his voice sulky. “Just a little taste of what could be.”

  “But it cannot be,” I said, trying not to let him hear the regret.

  He frowned. He furrowed his eyebrows and looked confused. He looked sweet when he was confused, like the little boy he must have been centuries ago before he became … this. I could have loved that boy, I thought, but then the con
fusion turned to anger.

  “Nonsense,” he hissed. “Those are just words.” His body curled into a coil of black smoke. “If you could feel what it’s like …”

  The coil of smoke whipped against the windowpanes, smashing wood and glass. Moonlight flooded in, only it wasn’t moonlight anymore; it was silver water rushing into the room, a wave crashing over my bed, the water shockingly cold after the warm breeze and his hot kisses. I still couldn’t move. I was powerless to save myself as the water rose around me. It began pouring from the ceiling and down the walls, into my mouth. As the waters rose, his face floated above me, watching without pity as I drowned. This is what I had done to him, his expression seemed to say. I had exiled my incubus lover to the Borderlands and condemned him to an eternity under water.

  I awoke, gasping in the moonlit bedroom, my body slick with sweat in the hot summer night; I’d never really feel warm again while he was trapped beneath all that cold water.

  ONE

  One of the perks of academia—the part that was supposed to make up for the low salary, living in a hick town a hundred miles from a good shoe store and a decent hair salon, putting up with demanding, entitled eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-olds, and navigating departmental politics—was getting summers off. I had always imagined that once I was established in a tenure-track job I would spend my summers abroad. Sure, I’d pin the trip on some worthy research goal—reading the juvenilia of Charlotte Brontë at the British Library, or researching the court fairy tales of Marie d’Aulnoy at the Bibliotèque Nationale—but there was no law that when those venerable institutions closed at dusk I couldn’t spend my evenings catching a show on the West End or listening to jazz in a Left Bank café.

  What I had not pictured myself doing during my summer break was swatting through the humid, mosquito-infested woods of upstate New York in knee-high rubber boots.

  I had known I was in trouble when I opened my door this morning to find Elizabeth Book, dean of Fairwick College and my boss; Diana Hart, owner of the Hart Brake Inn; and Soheila Lilly, Middle Eastern studies professor, on my front porch. The first time these three women had shown up on my doorstep together had been last year, the night before Thanksgiving, when they’d come to banish an incorporeal incubus from my house.

  Only then they hadn’t been tricked out in knee-high rubber boots and fishing tackle. I knew that Fairwick was big on fishing. The town had been plastered with FISHERMEN WELCOME! signs since Memorial Day. There was a “Small Fry Fry-Up” at the Village Diner, an “Angler’s Weekend” at the Motel 6 on the Highway, and a “Romantic Rainbow Trout Dinner for Two” at DiNapoli’s. Out-of-town RVs with airbrushed vistas of rushing streams and leaping trout had been clogging Main Street for the last few weeks. Our part of the Catskills was apparently the fly-fishing capital of the northeast. Still fishing seemed like a rather mundane activity for these three women. The dean, as I’d learned this past year, was a witch, Diana an ancient deer fairy, and Soheila was a succubus. A reformed, nonpracticing succubus. But still. A succubus.

  “What’s up?” I asked guardedly. “Is this an intervention for my plumbing? It has been making some strange sounds.”

  I was only half joking. One of the reasons I had opted to stay home this summer was to get some work done on my old Victorian house. Since I’d been forced to banish my boyfriend four months ago, I’d thrown myself into an orgy of home repair. I’d been breathing dust and paint fumes for weeks. Today I’d been waiting for the arrival of Brock, my handyman (who also happened to be ancient Norse divinity), to fix some broken roof tiles when the doorbell rang.

  “No, dear,” Diana said, her freckled face breaking into an awkward smile. When the three of them had come to banish the incorporeal incubus from my house I’d joked that they were there for an intervention, but when four months later Diana and Soheila had come to break it to me that my lover, Liam Doyle, was that same incubus and that he was draining not just me of my life force but a dozen students, the joke hadn’t seemed so funny. I think they all felt a little guilty when we found out Liam was innocent of attacking the students. But he’d been an incubus, and you couldn’t go on living with an incubus. Could you?

  “I’m afraid we have a problem that only you can help us with,” Liz said.

  Since I’d been hopeless at most magical spells so far there could be only one thing these women could need me for.

  “You need me to open the door?” I had learned over the past year that I was descended, on my father’s side, from a long line of “doorkeepers”—a type of fairy who could open the door between the two worlds. By a lucky—or perhaps unlucky, depending on how you looked at it—coincidence, the last door to Faerie was here in Fairwick, New York. So far my unusual talent had cost me nothing but grief and trouble.

  “Yes!” they all three said together.

  “What do you want me to let in?” I asked suspiciously. The last creature I’d let in from Faerie had tried to eat me.

  “Nothing!” Diana insisted, her freckles standing out on her pale skin the way they did when she wasn’t telling the whole truth. “We want you to let something out. A lot of somethings, actually.…”

  Liz sighed, squeezed Diana’s hand, and finished for her. “Undines,” she said. “About a hundred of them. Unless you can help us get them back to Faerie they’re all going to die.”

  “It’s their spawning season,” Soheila explained as we tramped through the woods that started on the edge of my backyard. “It only happens once every one hundred years. The undine eggs …”

  “Eggs? Undines come from eggs?” I asked, appalled. The only undine I knew about was the water nymph in the German fairy tale who marries a human husband and then, when he is unfaithful to her, curses him to cease breathing the moment he falls asleep.

  “Of course, dear,” Diana answered, looking back over her shoulder. The path obliged us to walk in twos, and Diana and Liz were up in front. “They have tails at this stage so you couldn’t very well expect them to give birth.…”

  “Okay, okay,” I interrupted. Although I’d written a book called The Sex Lives of Demon Lovers, I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to know about the sex lives of fish-tailed undines. Thankfully, Diana took the hint and left out the more graphic details of the undines’ sex life, concentrating instead on the life cycle of their young.

  “The eggs are laid in a pool at the headwaters of the Undine.…”

  “Is that why the stream is called the Undine?” I asked. I’d heard of the stream. The lower branch, south of the village, was popular with fishermen, but the upper branch, which had its headwaters somewhere in these woods, had been declared off limits by the Department of Ecological Conservation.

  Liz Book sighed. “The locals started calling it that because of a legend about a young woman who lured fishermen into the depths of the trout pools and then drowned them.”

  “They probably just fell in after a few too many drinks,” Soheila said. “It’s true that undines seduce human men—if they get one to marry them, they get a soul—but they don’t kill them unless they’re betrayed.” Soheila pushed back a vine and let it snap behind her, nearly hitting me in the face. Normally she was the most charming and sophisticated of women, so I had the feeling that the subject was a sensitive one for her. I’d learned this past year that Soheila had become part human when a mortal man fell in love with her, but he had died because her succubus nature had drained the life out of him. Since then she’d scrupulously avoided any physical contact with mortal men, even though I suspected she had a crush on our American studies professor, Frank Delmarco. A suspicion confirmed by how melancholy she’d been since Frank had gone away a few weeks ago to a conference on “The Discourses of Witchcraft” in Salem, Massachusetts.

  “Anyway,” Diana continued in the strained cheerful voice of a grade school teacher trying to keep her class on subject, “the eggs hatch into fingerlings that stay in the headwaters until they’re mature—we think it takes close to
a hundred years—then when they’ve matured into smolts, they begin the downstream journey to the sea.”

  “The sea?” I asked. “But we’re hundreds of miles from the sea.”

  “Not the Atlantic,” Liz said. “The Faerie Sea. The upper branch of the Undine flows through an underground passage into Faerie before it joins the lower branch.”

  “I thought the door in the honeysuckle thicket was the only way into Faerie. You told me it was the last door.”

  “It is the last door,” Liz said, “but there’s also an underwater passage to Faerie in these woods … or at least there used to be. It’s been growing narrower over the years, just as all the other passages to Faerie did until they closed. This passage was only big enough for a juvenile undine to slip through the last time they migrated a hundred years ago. We think, though, that it’s almost completely closed now. If they don’t get through to Faerie they’ll die. We thought with your talent as a doorkeeper you might be able to open the passage just wide enough for them to get through.”

  “But I have no idea how to open an underwater passage,” I said. This was true—I wasn’t even sure I knew how I’d opened the aboveground door when I’d done it—but I was also thinking of the dream I’d had last night. The dream had started seductively enough but had ended with my demon lover trying to drown me. He had been angry with me for trapping him in a watery sort of hell. If that were true, I didn’t much like the idea of taking a dip into any body of water that might be connected to Faerie.

  “Would I have to get in the water?” I asked.

  “We don’t think so, dear.… Wait.… Do you hear that?”

  Liz tilted her head and held up a manicured finger. At first all I heard was the buzzing of mosquitoes and flies in the heavy humid air. Even the birds were too tired to sing in the midday heat. I wiped a trickle of sweat away from my eyes and was about to tell Liz I didn’t hear anything when I became aware of a soft burbling beneath the drone of insects. A breeze stirred the heavy underbrush, bringing with it the delicious chill of running water.