by Karen Chance
The fact that incubi gain power and influence through sex, and that this plan had therefore involved whoring his son out to the highest bidders, wasn’t thought of as a problem. Or probably thought of at all, since incubi have to feed to live anyway. So obliging other demons merely meant a two-way power exchange for them, with a little added influence for the pimp-in-chief.
At least, it did unless you were Pritkin. Who, as half human, could live off pizza like the rest of us. And who’d had this weird idea that there might be more to life. Long story short, he’d ended up being allowed to stay on earth, but only for as long as he could handle complete abstinence—something that, for most incubi, was considered the same as constant torture. Rosier assumed he’d have his son back inside a month.
He was still waiting.
As a result, when I met the stubborn cuss known as John Pritkin, he’d been that strangest of strange creatures: a celibate incubus. So it was more than a little odd to watch him flirting with a buxom blonde who was trying her best to fall out of a low-cut blouse. It looked like barmaids dressing for tips wasn’t a new concept, I thought, scowling.
And then a mug was shoved in my face. “Here,” Rosier told me abruptly. “I need a refill.”
“So? What do you expect me to do about it?”
“Get me another!”
“With what? You were mugged, remember?” He’d charmed the first round out of the other barmaid somehow, but that sort of thing wasn’t in my repertoire. Besides, I still had beer.
“Do you usually pay for your own drinks?”
“No, but that’s in—what are you doing?” I demanded, as he started unbuttoning the top of my prim little shirtwaist.
“Advertising.”
I slapped his hand away. “Advertise yourself!”
“I’m not his type.”
“His—” I stopped, staring at Rosier.
“We need to get him alone,” the demon said impatiently. “And distracted. Can you think of a better way?”
“I can’t think of too many worse ones,” I said, clutching my top to stop Rosier from looking down my shirt. “And anyway, that sort of thing doesn’t work on Pritkin.”
“Doesn’t work on your version,” he corrected, wiping something off my cheek. “But this isn’t the man you know, and this one didn’t come in here for a drink. He came in for a meal.”
“But this place doesn’t serve—” I broke off at the look Rosier was sending me. “Oh.”
That type of meal.
“Hurry,” Rosier said, stealing my beer. “It looks like he’s already found the first course.”
I looked back at the bar to see that, sure enough, Pritkin was being led off somewhere by the blonde. I felt my face flush. I thought he’d have better taste.
And then Rosier gave me what could only be called a shove, sending me stumbling into the middle of the room.
I might have returned the favor, but he was right, damn him. We couldn’t just de-hex Pritkin from across the bar, however nice that sounded. That’s what had tripped us up in London.
I’d left the poor, unprotected demon lord at the mercy of the city’s murderous brutes in order to play damsel in distress. Or at least damsel in need of some directions. Pritkin had gone sauntering by the alley where we’d popped in, and I’d run after him to lure him back so Rosier could zap him, although not with the counterspell.
We’d planned to knock him out and wait—until his eyes glowed neon green with a double dose of soul energy behind them. We’d showed up in London to get ahead of the hexed spirit, because hitting him with the counterspell before it arrived wouldn’t help. And, knowing Pritkin, would probably get us hit back. So unconscious it had had to be.
Or distracted, although that sort of thing was more daunting for me than for a horny demon lord.
I looked back to see Rosier shooing at me, with an expression of utter disgust on his face. Whatever. I started winding my way through the low, bench-like tables, nervousness gnawing at my gut.
Sure, Rosier wouldn’t have a problem seducing somebody into doing what he wanted. It was practically his job description. But it wasn’t mine, and the whole thing was uncomfortable in ways I didn’t want to think about right now.
Like some of the things Pritkin had said recently, after he’d had his father’s prohibition lifted, but before he’d gotten zapped with the curse. Things I had probably misinterpreted. Things that, even if I hadn’t misinterpreted, weren’t going anywhere, because my personal life was even more complicated than my job.
And wasn’t that saying something?
I stopped in front of a tattered curtain leading to what I guessed was the back of the bar. And then just stayed there, chewing my lip and trying to come up with a better plan. Because this one wasn’t going to work.
I wasn’t one of Rosier’s succubi, some experienced femme fatale. Hell, I wasn’t even a femme slightly nauseous. I was a time-traveling, ghost-whispering, somewhat clumsy clairvoyant, with an upturned nose, too many freckles and cheeks nobody would call defined even without Rosier’s idea of a disguise. I wouldn’t have been competition for Dolly Parton in there on my best day.
But I had to come up with something. Enough to keep Pritkin in sight, at least. Otherwise, if his soul came and went while he was in the back, we might never know it. And that would be a problem, since we were fast running out of time before—
And then I was out.
The curtain was abruptly thrown back and the blonde emerged with a giggle and a wink, tucking something down the front of her front. Wow, I thought, faintly disappointed. That hadn’t taken long.
And then I was being jerked through the door by a furious war mage. “You!”
“What?” I asked stupidly.
And then three things happened at once. The outer room went suddenly silent, a knife blade bit into the skin of my throat, and the barmaid came back through the curtain, smirking at me. And then continued doing so as she toppled over, stiff as a blond-haired mannequin. And hit the floor, bouncing on her considerable padding off to the side.
Pritkin and I stared down at her for a moment, at her glassy eyes and messy hair and still-leering face. Which was more than a little creepy, since she was now leering at my left boot. And then we looked at each other.
“What did you do?” we demanded, at the same time.
“What?” we said again.
And then “Stop that!”
And Pritkin did. But only so he could grab me and snarl: “It’s here, isn’t it?”
“Wh-what’s here?” I asked, as he backed me into a wall with no effort at all. Because I’ve always found a knife over my jugular to be really persuasive.
“Don’t play games,” he hissed.
I started to swallow and then stopped, afraid I’d push the blade in more. Of course, that might not matter. Since one glance at the frozen girl told me I had bigger problems than a pissed-off war mage.
There are spells that can render a person unconscious just that fast, but they wouldn’t leave her with one hand raised, adjusting a bit of material over the assets between her assets. Or cause her skirts to be stuck in a swirl, like around moving legs. Or make stray bits of her hair stay suspended in air that was no longer flowing.
She looked like someone had called her name right after she’d come out of the back, and she’d turned toward them, professional grin already in place. Only to freeze halfway through the motion and come tumbling back in here. She looked like a frame cut out of a movie, which would have been weird if I hadn’t seen that sort of thing before.
“You know,” I told him nervously, “I’ve never felt less like a game in my—”
“What you stole from me!” he yelled, making me flinch. And freak out, since I wasn’t sure I hadn’t just slit my own throat.
And then a voice came from the outer room. “In back!
Check it out.”
Pritkin and I froze, stiff as the girl on the floor. I don’t know what his reasoning was, but mine ran something like: crap. That command had been in English, which was weird enough considering where we were. But not as much as hearing it in imperious female tones, in a place where women were tolerated only if they were with a man or serving drinks.
It can’t be, I told myself sternly. You’re just being paranoid. Even your luck isn’t that—
And then the curtain was flung back and Pritkin let go of me to face off with . . . two little girls?
That’s what they looked like at first glance, two teenagers wearing long, white gowns, their red and brown curls held back with ribbons from their innocent faces. But I knew the drill, I knew the goddamned uniform, and innocent they weren’t.
“Oh, shit,” I said, causing the brunette’s head to jerk up.
Her hand followed the motion a second later, but I’d expected that and already thrown myself at the floor, jerking Pritkin down with me. As a result, the time wave she threw rippled overhead, missing us by inches. And hit something to our rear that collapsed in a cacophony of rusty metal and shattering glass that I didn’t see because I was busy.
Freezing two Pythian acolytes in place before they could do the same to me.
It was lucky I was already on my hands and knees, because the power drain of stopping time was immediate and terrible, especially after flipping through the damn stuff all day. If “day” even meant anything anymore, which I wasn’t sure it did, I was just sure I was going to throw up. And then Pritkin grabbed me again.
“Where is it?”
Dear God, he was single-minded, I thought, trying to crawl off. I’d forgotten that, somehow. Although I was remembering as he dragged me back to my feet and shook me.
I caught sight of myself—red face, tumbled blond curls, startled blue eyes—in some brass platters hanging on the wall. And damn Rosier! He must have taken off the unflattering glamourie when he sent me after his son, and hadn’t bothered to mention it.
Well, that explained my reception, anyway.
My Pritkin might not be here yet, but this one . . . well, we’d met before. To be precise, we’d met in 1793 on one of my previous time jaunts, which had been barely a year ago from his perspective. It was why I’d needed the glamourie.
Okay, and because the last time we’d met, I’d made like one of Rosier’s street toughs and mugged him.
It hadn’t been intentional—all right, it had been, but it was for his own good. He’d been looking for something he absolutely couldn’t be allowed to find, and he’d had a map on him to its location, and, well, I’d had no choice but to take it.
And strip him and steal his clothes.
And get him beaten up by a vampire.
And then there was the small matter of burning the only map that led to the location of his most prized possession, so, yeah, I probably wasn’t his favorite person just now. But I had one big advantage. “I’m n-not t-trying to k-kill you,” I told him, pointing at the girls. “They are!”
It wasn’t a lie.
Because the frozen barmaid, and the time wave, and the girls’ prim little outfits all added up to one thing. One very, very bad thing. And if there was about to be a time battle in here, I didn’t want him anywhere near it.
“You have to go,” I told him frantically, when he finally stopped shaking me.
But Pritkin didn’t go. He just stood there, looking bemused, as I tried my best to push him out the back door. “Why?”
“Because . . . there are some . . . people . . . after me and . . . goddamnit!” The guy weighed a freaking ton.
Green eyes narrowed. “Perhaps we could work out an arrangement—”
“No! No, we can’t!”
“Give me what I want, and I will help—”
“You can’t help me with this. It’s . . . new magic,” I said, thinking fast. “Really new. Like super new.”
Pritkin frowned, but he didn’t call me on the lie, maybe because he couldn’t. This Pritkin wasn’t the spell master of my day, when there were few enchantments he didn’t know or hadn’t invented. This one was just back from an extended jaunt in hell, and was therefore out of the loop as far as magical theory went.
Way out. It was why he’d lost the property he was trying to recover from me to a couple of low-end scam artists who didn’t have as much magic in their whole bodies as he did in his little finger. But knowledge is power, and they’d known stuff he didn’t.
I could almost see the thoughts running through his head, but he still wasn’t moving. And that was a problem since he was half again as heavy as me and most of that was muscle. But I was determined, because we didn’t have a lot of time.
And then we had less, when he glanced at the curtain and then at me, and I suddenly found myself up against the wall again.
But this time, the knife was nowhere in sight.
“No, see—” I managed to say, right before a hard mouth came down on mine.
Chapter Two
“This . . . is no time . . . for a snack!” I gasped furiously when Pritkin let me up for air. Only to have him scowl in a very disturbing impression of his father.
All the more so because the next thing I knew, a knee was spreading my thighs, hard hands were gripping my hips, and he was nuzzling my neck with little growling sounds that sent shivers all the way to my belly.
And put a crease in my forehead, because this was so typical.
Not the sexy stuff, although there’d been a few moments. . . . But moments were all they’d been, because of the whole no-sex rule and because, well, it was complicated. But the stubbornness. The arrogance. The absolute certainty that he knew better than me about every damned thing, yeah, that was familiar.
The last time I’d seen him, other than for that glimpse in London, had been the moment he was cursed. And just after, when I was sure I’d lost him for good. It had felt like a punch to the gut. It had felt like the end of the world. I’d thought, if only we had one more minute . . .
And now that we did, all I wanted was to give him a swift kick.
But instead, my hands were finding their way under his shirt, my fingers were ghosting over his ribs and nipples, and my palms were enjoying the feel of springy chest hair under my hands.
And then he pushed me against the wall and kissed me again.
And damn it, I knew what he was doing, I thought, returning the kiss furiously. He was trying to use incubus abilities on me, and it wasn’t going to work. Because he could feed anytime—I broke off to bite on a luscious lower lip—when we weren’t—and to suck on his chin—in the middle—and along his jaw—of a damned crisis! I bit an earlobe and heard him inhale sharply. Served him right, I thought, worrying it, and wondering how I was supposed to face a Pythia at full power when I was barely able to stand up on my own.
And then suddenly I wasn’t.
A single hand curved under my butt, lifting me, another captured my hands, shoving them over my head, and a body pressed against mine, holding me helplessly against the wall. I couldn’t touch him, I couldn’t move, except to wind my legs around his waist, skirts and all, and try to hold on. But he could, and he took full advantage, with little vibrations of his hips against mine that quickly had me gasping and groaning and staring at some cobwebs on the ceiling like I had no idea what they were.
And then he was groaning, too, and talking into my neck.
I couldn’t understand a word because it wasn’t English, at least I didn’t think so. But it was hard to tell with all the white noise suddenly roaring in my ears. Along with the ebb and flow of labored breathing, which might have been mine but I wasn’t sure because he was kissing me again, hot and hard and hungry, almost desperate. And his hips were moving more, pounding me into the wall until he forgot to hold my hands and they found his shoulders and I
just hung on. And every time he did that grind again, the white noise ramped up and my heart sped up and my breathing became sobs became groans became cries until I was just screaming and thrashing and—
And . . . and . . . oh.
I held on as wave after wave of sensation crashed through me, like a hurricane slamming into a beach. Hurricane Pritkin, I thought deliriously, as the vibrations hammered at me, wild and tumultuous and demanding. And then softer, gentler, sweeter, but no less strong for all that. I finally surfaced to find his body still pressed against mine, his breathing uneven and his fingers trembling on my jaw. A piece of my hair was stuck to his cheek. I brushed it off, panting slightly, feeling drugged and delirious and golden warm wherever our skin touched.
And then someone cleared a throat.
It wasn’t Pritkin.
I looked up, blinking. And saw a short, stout, middle-aged woman in a frilly Victorian frock framed in the doorway. She had a head full of improbable violet sausage curls and was carrying a cherry-covered parasol. The frock had cherries on it, too, big red ones on a white background, and small, round, purple glasses were perched on the end of her nose.
She looked totally nuts.
She also looked confused, although not half as much as I was.
“Are you finished?” she finally asked, politely.
I just looked at her.
“Yes, I remember,” she said, a little nostalgically. “Take a moment, girl.”
I took a moment.
And then I took another one.
“Who the hell are you?” I finally asked.
“My very question.”
I opened my mouth, and then closed it again. Then I looked at the two girls in white, who were still imitating statues on either side of the door. “Yours?” I asked carefully.
“Quite.”
I slumped back against the wall in sheer relief. “Oh, thank God.”
