Demon Mine

by Marina Simcoe

  Andras closed his eyes. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to recall an image in his mind or was searching for words to describe what he saw.

  “There is this small, soft, very delicate glow that appears inside of her whenever she realizes that I am near… it’s like a tiny orange light with brighter streaks of white and pink… It’s warm and nurturing…”

  “It could be a good start… Does she know who you are? Have you ever told her?”

  “No. I cannot.” He shook his head resolutely.

  “Andras, a lie is a very wrong base for any relationship.”

  “What if she runs? What if she never wants to see me again? I cannot lose her. I need to see her at least a little, at least some of the time.”

  “But what if she doesn’t run? What if she wanted to stay with you no matter who or what you are? What if she wanted to get to know you better, to spend more time with you?” I felt that I didn’t need to spin any further the possibilities of what Natasha’s acceptance would bring him. Andras had a sharp mind and could work it out on his own. In fact, I could see it in his eyes that his imagination was already offering him some of the most tantalizing scenarios.

  He growled clenching his fists, faced with the new dilemma that I put in front of him.

  I gave him a placating smile.

  “Well, all I’m saying is that you should think about it instead of continuing to sneak around and secretly skim emotions of the poor unsuspecting woman. There may be a chance that she would give them to you willingly if you just ask…”

  Chapter Thirty Six. Demons Feeding.

  “They are leaving, Sytrius!” I heard the loud sound of the front door closing downstairs and forced myself to pull away from him. “We need to go!”

  “They’ll wait…” he murmured into the side of my neck where he was leaving a trail of hot kisses and only pulled me closer.

  Tonight, Sytrius and I were joining Andras and his housemates on their walk among humans for the nightly feeding.

  It had a dual purpose for me. First of all, I wanted to see with my own eyes any alternative ways of feeding. I needed to make sure that humans were not harmed physically or emotionally in any way. Second, I wanted to see some of the nightlife of Munich, to see a little more of the city than what I had glanced through the window of the cab on the way from the airport.

  I had dinner, showered, dried my hair and was already fully dressed in jeans and the dressiest t-shirt I could find from the ones I brought from Canada when Sytrius finally returned from his appointments that took him all of the afternoon and most of the evening. I was so enormously happy to see him again, but now we were in a real danger of missing the nightly feeding, once again.

  “We need to go, Sytrius…” I repeated, even as I was melting into his kisses and tangling my fingers into the soft, thick hair on the back of his head. “We can’t spend all this time in bed again…”

  “Why not?” His hands slid under my t-shirt, and he walked me backwards a couple of steps, towards the bed. “Sounds like an excellent idea…”

  “Because it’s not normal.” I finally found enough willpower to tear myself away from him and twisted out of his grip. I grabbed my spring jacket off the bed and ran to the trap door, dodging his hands that tried to catch me on the way.

  “Nothing about you and me is normal, Alyssa,” he stated, catching up with me by the door. I squealed when he lifted me by my waist and tossed me over his shoulder before going down the ladder.

  “Indeed, Sytrius, nothing is!” I laughed, hanging upside down and gripping the belt loops of his pants for balance.

  “Fine.” He reached the bottom end of the ladder and put me down. “We will go out with them for a couple of hours, but then you are mine for the rest of the night!”

  I smiled because this deal made no sense. I was already his for the rest of my life. I decided not to bring his attention to it right now, though, and just said, putting my jacket on, “Think about it: the sooner we leave, the sooner we can come back.”

  “Well, let’s hurry then!” He lifted me again, this time with his hand under my bottom and pressed me to his side as I wrapped my arms around his neck and my legs around his waist. With his free hand, Sytrius opened the door of the studio apartment and jogged down the numerous flights of stairs with me clinging to him like a monkey to a tree trunk.

  The four men waited for us outside the front door when Sytrius exited from the house carrying me. I unwrapped my legs from around him and lowered my feet to the ground before greeting everyone.

  All four were dressed in more modern clothes tonight. Even Andras had abandoned his fraying robe in favour of a pair of jeans and an asphalt-grey hoodie. I saw that Lucius was still sitting in a wheelchair and asked him how he was feeling. He didn’t reply right away, avoiding my eyes.

  “He is fine,” answered Zander for him. He was standing behind Lucius’s wheelchair with his hands on the handles, ready to push. “You helped him yesterday. He can walk now. It’s embarrassing to admit, but we decided to keep the wheelchair for a while. Just because of the amount of human sympathy he got last night while sitting in it.”

  Lucius lifted his gaze to mine finally.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” he said with a small apologetic smile and added. “Thank you again for waking me up, Alyssa. And sorry for what happened…”

  “No harm done!” I accepted his apology brightly.

  We took the S-Bahn train from Obermenzig station and got off somewhere that looked much more like a large city than the quiet small street where Andras’s house stood, mostly due to the number of bright street signs and busy traffic with loud groups of people passing us by.

  Other than the noise of traffic and the bright city lights, it looked and felt very different from Toronto downtown. For once, there were no skyscrapers. Most buildings that I could see were only a few stories high, opening up the sky and making the street look even wider than it was. The street signs were much more subdued in size and number too.

  “We are on Sonnenstrasse.” Sytrius said close to my ear. “It’s part of a large party area here in Munich now.”

  “Have you been here before?” I asked, taking in the wide street with the green-treed boulevard in the middle that contained streetcar tracks.

  “Yes, last time it was on my way to Belarus in the 1960s,” he replied and added with a sunny smile, “It looked slightly different back then.”

  “I bet it did, old man!” I poked his side playfully, only to make him smile wider in response. “Well, it looks like there are plenty of happy people around here. Must be enough positive emotions floating around for your friends’ dinner?”

  “As long as the humans are not too drunk yet.”

  “Drunk? What difference does it make? If anything wouldn’t drunk people have more positive emotions?”

  “Emotions of drunk people would make incubi drunk too. Demons are just like people in this respect: they lose control more easily when they are inebriated.”

  “I thought that alcohol doesn’t affect you.”

  “Drinking alcohol does not affect me. Absorbing emotions laced with alcohol will eventually make me feel almost as drunk as the source.”

  “Sooo,” I said slowly, “does it mean that if I have a beer now, you can get a buzz too if you skim my emotions right after?”

  “Oh, Alyssa!” He gave me a heated look. “Don’t you know by now that everything about you is intoxicating to me, just the way you are?” He nuzzled the hair on the top of my head. “No alcohol necessary.”

  “Still,” I teased. “I shall get you drunk one day, just to see what kind of a drunk you are.”

  “You would be playing with fire, my dear.”

  We followed Andras and the other incubi as they turned into a side street and then walked between two buildings, one of which had a short line of people in front of the entrance to the basement. Pulsating blasts of techno music ripped through the door every time it was opened to let someone in or out
.

  “Are they going in?” I asked Sytrius, tipping my chin in the direction of the door to the basement.

  “No,” Zander replied before Sytrius had a chance to answer. “We can’t go in; it’s too dangerous.”

  “For you?” I couldn’t believe my ears. What did they have to be afraid of?

  “For the humans inside,” answered Andras. “It’s hard for us to keep control in an enclosed space of a dance club filled with humans.”

  Still in disbelief, I looked over the four men in front of me. They all had long pants on and hooded sweatshirts with the hoods pulled over their heads, keeping their faces in the shadows. All four had their gloves on too. The only exposed areas of their bodies were their faces inside the hoods. It looked like they had taken every precaution to stay covered and to avoid any skin-to-skin contact with anyone.

  Actually, of all the men out with me tonight, Sytrius was the one with most skin exposed. His short jacket had no hood and his black t-shirt exposed his neck down to the collarbone. He was also the only one without gloves on. He had a pair of leather gloves in the back pocket of his pants, but I knew that he never put them on since we left the house, because the fingers of his bare hand were laced with mine all this time.

  True to my innate desire to keep peace and avoid confrontations, I didn’t say anything out loud, but I thought that the incubi were overreacting in this case. It looked fairly easy to me to avoid any contact with human skin when almost all of their own skin was covered. Until a loud group of giggling young women spotted us hiding in the shadows and proved me wrong.

  There were about five or six girls. All were dressed too light even for the warm spring evening, just like I used to dress during my previous life that seemed so far away now.

  One of them, a curvy brunette in a sparkly mini dress, saw Lucius and walked over to him, saying something in German. She bent over in front of his wheelchair surrounded by her chatting friends and patted his knees through his jeans.

  “Do you speak German by any chance?” I asked Sytrius quietly, not expecting an affirmative answer.

  “Yes,” he answered just as quietly.

  “Really? When did you learn? On your last trip here?” With so much going on, I never thought about asking him that before.

  “Never. I didn’t have to learn. I speak any human language. I am a demon, remember? It makes it easier to seduce a woman if you speak her language. Wouldn’t you agree?” He grinned at me.

  Right, he was a demon. It was just somehow getting easier for me to keep forgetting about it.

  “Okay, so what are they saying?” I motioned discretely towards the girls, who were now all gesturing towards the entrance to the club in the basement. I could have guessed that they wanted us, or at least Lucius and the guys, to go to the club with them. I also noticed something that escaped the attention of the girls, simply because the demons were trying very hard to hide it from them. Every few seconds, the eyes of the guys would sparkle white and blue from the shadows of their hoods. Demons were feeding.

  “They want all of us to go to the club with them,” Sytrius translated, confirming what I had already figured out from their body language. “The one with gold in her hair likes Lucius. She says that there is a freight elevator around the corner and that they can help us get his wheelchair inside.”

  Gold in her hair? I swept the perfectly styled hair of the girls in front of me with my eyes, looking for any kind of gold hair accessories, and found none. I was about to ask Sytrius about it before I looked closely and realized what he meant. The bright light of the street lights behind us cast a soft glow onto the dark auburn hair of the brunette who was leaning into Lucius, making the top strands of her hair look like if they were, indeed, made of spun gold.

  Interesting. Her sparkly dress was the main thing I noticed about her, and most likely it would have remained the only thing that I would have remembered about her after we parted. Since the dress wasn’t a part of her, I would not have remembered anything at all about her as a person the moment she walked out of my sight.

  Sytrius saw things differently. The first thing he noticed was something personal and truly beautiful about her in that particular moment - the gold colour brought out of her auburn strands by the light illuminating them. Within seconds of meeting her, he noticed something that she might not even be aware of herself.

  I saw Lucius shake his head and heard him say something to the brunette softly.

  “Awww!” she sang, looking impressed by whatever Lucius had just said. She tilted her head at Lucius and lifted her hand off his knee, reaching into his hood to touch his cheek. Gently but firmly he intercepted her hand lacing his gloved fingers with hers and kept talking to her in a soothing persistent voice.

  I looked up at Sytrius again, waiting for him to translate to me what was going on, but he just shrugged his shoulders. “Lucius is a smooth talker,” was the only explanation he offered to me, seemingly losing interest in their conversation.

  Meanwhile Andras, Alfarr and Zander had moved forward from the opposite sides, flanking the girls and maneuvering the whole group towards the club entrance in the process. Almost everyone was talking at this point with the conversation remaining light and friendly. I continued to notice frequent white-blue flashes of light from inside the hoods, yet it was obvious at least to me, if not to the girls, that the incubi were ready to part with them now. The main reason for the separation, I guessed, was the preservation of the fragile self-control of the demons.

  I noticed the naked feminine arms linking with the burly male ones. The exposed delicate shoulders brushed against the bulky biceps. The slender girly hands were patting the wide shoulders of the demons, stroking their hard chests, brushing against their gloved hands. I saw the open smiling faces of the girls reaching inside the darkness of the hoods, attempting friendly good-bye kisses…

  Yes, Andras was right, I could see how difficult it would be to control any type of touch in a crowd inside a club when any one of these girls here could make the control of a demon snap with one simple touch. The young women had no idea what kind of danger they were playing with here.

  But then again, I also didn’t have a complete understanding of it myself when I challenged Sytrius by demanding a kiss in that motel room. Yet, I felt confident taking that risk that I would not be harmed, just as I was confident now that neither of the demons in front of me would drain and kill a human on purpose. Despite the incident with waking up Lucius, I believed that incubi could learn to control their ravenous appetites for human energy. With some practice, involving probably the help of a human, any of the demons who were here with me tonight could gain control over their cravings, at least long enough to sustain a friendly human touch.

  The girls were disappearing one by one through the door into the club when a movement in my peripheral vision caught my attention. Turning my head in the direction of the movement, I saw that it was a young couple inside a side door recess further along the wall of one of the buildings.

  The girl was leaning against the wall with her back, and her male companion was in front of her, covering her body with his. His face was buried in her hair somewhere below her ear as he either kissed her neck or whispered something into her ear, or both. She giggled, and I saw her leg travel up the side of his all the way to his hip.

  I averted my eyes from the couple, giving them privacy even through they didn’t seem to seek any. An idea came to me that I wanted to run by an incubus right away. I was still holding Sytrius’s hand, but he was turned slightly away from me at the moment, telling something to Andras, so I turned to Alfarr instead, who was standing on my other side.

  “Can I ask you a question, Alfarr? I apologize in advance, it may be slightly inappropriate…”

  He turned to me and nodded. I noticed that he must have been looking at the couple himself.

  “Why don’t you move closer to those two over there?” I asked him. “I’m sure there is all kinds of energy flying aroun
d them for grabs. Why don’t you take it?”

  “Skimming sexual energy is still strictly forbidden… by both Councils,” he answered. His speech was still halting, as if he had to stop and search for words, but he didn’t look as listless and indifferent as I remembered seeing him earlier. “We are breaking some rules here already, just by skimming any available positive emotions we can find. We don’t want to push our limited freedoms… lest, they would be taken away too.” He paused and looked at me coyly, adding suddenly, “Besides, how do I avoid looking like a total pervert when lurking around people who make out?”

  The brilliant incubi smile appeared completely unexpectedly on his tired, ashen face.

  “Well, beggars can’t be choosers.” I returned his smile, repeating the words Lucius said to me earlier. “Anyway, they look too into each other to even notice your lurking around.”

  “In their case it wouldn’t be worth it at all.” He shook his head. The bright smile slipped off his face, as if he had run out of energy to keep it on any longer. “When two people make love… their sexual energy is shared between them. It is created for each other and is absorbed by each other… stoking the arousal of both people. Their joined energy… it is like a tight vortex around the two of them with maybe a few stray tendrils here and there. I would have to literally crawl in between them to be able to skim any significant amount for myself.” He smiled again, but it didn’t reach his eyes this time. “I don’t think they would appreciate my intruding on them like that.”

  “No. I don’t think so either.” I laughed and shook my head. “So it has to be a single individual, horny for no apparent reason, in order for you to be able to skim any sexual energy off him or her?”

  “Well, I would prefer it was me who made that individual horny in the first place.” He wiggled his eyebrows at me, making me laugh before adding in a more somber tone that betrayed a deep longing in his voice, “Ideally, the individual would also care about me, and I would stop at nothing to make them happy.” His longing was more than the simple cravings of hunger. It sounded very much like yearnings of the heart.