The Demon Lover (40 page)

THIRTY-EIGHT

I
took the box inside and put it on the kitchen table. Then, after a moment’s thought, I stuck it in the pantry on a shelf with the cleaning supplies and the mousetraps I’d bought and never had the heart to use. Great, I thought, I couldn’t use a mousetrap. What were the chances I was going to use an incubus trap on the man I …

Loved?

Did I love Liam? I’d never said it to him. I’d told him that I wanted him, but I’d never said
I love you
.

Did I?

I opened the pantry again and took out a bucket, rubber gloves, and a bottle of ammonia. I filled the bucket with hot soapy water and went out onto the porch. It was a measure of how much I didn’t want to think that cleaning up vomit seemed a preferable activity.

I scrubbed until the paint started coming off the porch boards and I’d mixed a pint of my tears in with the dirty water. Then I brought the bucket and sponge back into the kitchen, washed them out in the kitchen sink, and put them back into the pantry. I took the box Brock had given me out, put it on the kitchen table, and opened it. I squeezed the two iron bracelets into the two front pockets of my jeans and slipped the chain with the key over my head, sliding the key under my shirt where it lay against my breastbone, cold and heavy as my heart. Then I sat down on the couch in the living room—not in the library where Liam and I had watched movies and made love—and waited for Liam to come home.

The minute I wasn’t moving, my mind became active again. What if it was all a mistake? a desperate voice whined inside my head. Even if there was an incubus on the loose there was no conclusive proof that it was Liam. It could be some other size-thirteen-shoe, J.-Peterman-shirt-wearing old movie buff,
not
my Liam.

I heard the key click in the lock.
There!
It was an iron lock and an iron key. If Liam was an incubus he couldn’t use it, could he? I was so excited by the discovery that I leapt to my feet and ran to meet him at the door. He was in the foyer, his head bowed, a lock of dark hair falling over his eyes as he closed the door behind him. He slid the key back into his wallet—a leather wallet with Eddie Bauer stamped on the outside flap—and he took off his leather cashmere-lined (Lands’ End) gloves, folded them carefully and put them in his (L.L.Bean) coat pocket. His fingers never touched the iron key or the doorknob.

He looked up. The lock of hair still lay over his eyes, like the wing of a black bird shadowing them. The late afternoon sunlight streaming through the stained-glass fanlight above the door threw a streak of red across his cheek, like a smear of blood. As if he’d been devouring something bloody and wiped the blood from his mouth.

“Callie! I didn’t see you there. What’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

He took a step forward and I stepped back. “Hey,” he said, his voice husky. “Are you upset I’m late? Didn’t you get my text?”

“Yes,” I answered, sliding my hands in my pockets. “What did the dean want?”

“Damned if I know. Honestly, I think she might be going senile … or she’s not entirely over her illness. First she wanted to talk to me about starting a poetry reading series. She had a list of poets and she wanted to see what I thought of their work and their ‘characters.’ I explained I didn’t know a lot of American poets personally. Then she got a call and kept me waiting while she took it and then she wanted me to call some of these poets with her. It was strange … but not as strange as how you’re looking at me right now.” He took another step forward—into a swath of blue light from the fanlight that cast a deathly pall over his features—and reached for me. I knew that if I let him touch me it would be all over. Already I could feel myself melting in his eyes. I’d let him kiss me and make love to me right there on the foyer floor. So what if he was an incubus? He was
my
incubus.

I pulled my hands out of my pockets and, as he reached for me, desire and concern mixed in his eyes, I clamped the iron bracelets around his wrists.

The effect was instantaneous. He fell to his knees like a puppet whose strings had been cut, his iron-bound wrists clanking loudly on the wooden floor. My name in his throat came out a scream of agony.

“Good,” I said, making my voice cold. “You can still talk. I wasn’t sure if you’d be able to, and I think you owe me an explanation.”

He lifted his head—slowly, painfully—and looked at me out of the hollow shadowy pits that his eyes had become. His skin, always pale, had gone nearly translucent. The only color in his face came from the play of light from the fanlight, which spread itself on the floor around him like stage lights.

“You know … what I am … What more … do you want to know?” he gasped through gritted teeth.

I knelt down so I could look straight into his eyes. “I want to know why you picked me and what you intended to do with me. When you drained me dry would you have gone on to another victim?”

He shook his head slowly, like an injured animal. “I didn’t … pick you. You … picked me. You wanted … me.” He took a long shuddering breath and then his words seemed to come easier. “You wanted me enough to give me flesh … Even as you were telling me to leave, I felt your pity for what had happened to me. And I heard you answering my question …”

“What question?”

“I asked you what more you wanted and you told me … in between the words of the banishment … you told me you wanted decency and caring and a man who really bothered to see who he was trying to seduce.” He looked up at me. “Haven’t I given you those things, Callie? I care about you. I tried to be all those things you asked for.”

I shook my head. “I didn’t ask for lies. All the facts of your life that you told me were lies. The whole story about Jeannie and Moira … it was all a lie!”

“I had to pretend to be someone else to get the chance to know you better. As for the story about Jeannie … that was what happened to me, with only the details changed to modern times. I did love a girl from my village who had a touch of the fey about her and could open the door to Faerie, but I was seduced away by a fairy temptress. You’ve met her. You’ve seen how powerful she is.”

“Fiona? The Fairy Queen?”

“Yesss.” He hissed the word. “She stole me away from my village. I was her captive. She kept me in Faerie so long I lost my humanity … I faded into a shadow … Only a human’s desire can give me flesh, and only a human’s love can give me a soul. But still I broke away … When the fairies were exiled from the old country, when we were on the march to the door, I broke away and came for
you
, lass.”

Lass? He’d called me that once before when I first tried to banish him and he’d been betrayed into his true voice. The sound of it summoned the dream for me again.

The dream again rose up inside me: the long march, my comrades fading around me, the dark figure on the white horse coming toward me, his hands reaching for me … I looked up at Liam. The dark eyes were the same, the hands reaching for me were the same. I felt the iron key, hot now, burning against my bare skin.
Turn right to send him to the Borderlands, left to free him
.

“So you’re saying that I’m … what? The reincarnation of the girl you loved centuries ago? Is that why you want me? Because I remind you of her?”

He shook his head. “Her spirit lives inside you … and yes, at first, that’s why I was drawn to you, but then I got to know
you
 
… who you are now … Callie McFay. You’ve got a piece of the ancient Cailleach inside you, but you’re
more
. I’ve watched you since you were a young girl. I came to you when you were grieving and lonely and told you stories to ease your pain. All I’ve ever done is try to be what you wanted me to be so that you would love me and I could be mortal again.”

“Then I must not love you,” I said, pointing at his iron-cuffed hands. “Or those wouldn’t be bothering you.”

A look of anger passed over his eyes, ripping away the façade of humanity. Beneath there raged the incarnate force that had first come to me as a creature of moonlight and shadow. “No. You don’t love me … yet … but you are close to loving me. I can feel it.” He lifted one hand. It was a struggle, I could see, but still he lifted it and brought his hand to my face.

He won’t be able to move
, Brock had said. So if he was moving it meant the iron only had some effect on him … and maybe that was because I
almost
loved him. How hard would it be to
really
love him? And then he would become fully human and we could be together.

He pulled me toward him, his hand shaking with the effort. His lips when they touched mine were on fire. They seared my skin like a hot brand, but I didn’t care. I opened my lips for him and felt the heat of him flooding me. He was peeling me open, the way a boy peels back the petals on a honeysuckle blossom and sucks the nectar off the stamen. He was sucking the life force out of me …

I pushed him back. “No!” I cried. “You lied to me.” I could hear the indecision in my voice, feel my resolve wavering. “How can I trust anything you say?”

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

I smiled sadly and touched his hand. I saw where the iron had burned through his skin. There was no bone there, only darkness—the shadow he came out of and would return to if I didn’t do something soon. I pulled the key out from under my shirt. If I released him we could still be together and when I loved him he’d become mortal. We could be together without him draining me dry …

I had already fitted the key into the keyhole of the left bracelet, but I stopped and looked into the shadowy pits that had been his eyes. “The students,” I said. “And Liz. You were feeding on them.”

He flinched. “No!” he cried. “I would never …”

“Then why have they been getting sick? Flonia, who you see every day? Nicky, who you went to visit? Even poor Scott Wilder …” I froze, recalling that day I sat in the infirmary. “
All
the students who were sick were in
your
class. You had private conferences with them. You were feeding on them.” My stomach clenched, nausea rising in me again. I tried to find something in his eyes to convince me that I was wrong, but there was nothing in his eyes but darkness and his voice when he tried to protest was the merest creaking of dry branches in the wind.

“I didn’t, Callie, I swear. I didn’t feed on my students.”

But how could I trust him? He’d lied about too much already.

I turned the key right. He screamed. The sound tore through me, but I made myself move the key to the bracelet on his right hand. Before I reached it, though, he grabbed my hand and wrapped his fingers around my wrist. I felt them digging into my skin with the same cold bite as when the shadow-crab had attacked me. They were made of the same thing, weren’t they? I looked up into his face and saw that the shadows were spreading out from his eyes, eating into his flesh. He was dissolving right in front of me, turning back into the darkness he was made of. How could I love that darkness?

But I knew even as I saw him dissolving in front of me that it was the darkness in him that called to me, that I desired even more than the civilized creature he had made himself into to gain my love. I had rebuked him for lying to me, but I suddenly knew that I had lied to him, too. All those things I told him I wanted were lies. I wanted him as he was
now
—a creature of darkness. So what did that make me if not a creature of darkness myself? I looked down at my hand, where his fingers gripped my wrist. My own skin was dissolving under his touch, merging with him. I felt the pull of him, like an undertow dragging me out to sea. I might not have been able to love the man he had made himself into, but maybe I could love the creature he really was. That might not be enough for us to stay together in the light, but maybe it was enough for us to stay together in the dark.

And all I had to do was … nothing. As long as I didn’t turn the key in the second lock I would dissolve with him.

I lowered my hand … and waited, my eyes locked on his. He saw what decision I’d made. In what was left of his eyes I saw surprise, and I heard a gasp from what was left of his mouth. I felt his grip loosen on my wrist. He held out his arms to me. I closed my eyes and dropped the key to hold him … As we embraced I felt the darkness rush around me with a sound like wings. I opened my eyes and saw a wasteland of shadows—no color, no light, no heat. Ghostlike shapes flitted around me like bats but each one had a human—or nearly human—face. I recognized them as my comrades from the long march. This is where they had faded before reaching the door to Faerie. They had counted on me, their doorkeeper, to let them into Faerie, but I had failed them. Instead of going with them I had gone into the woods with my demon lover. Now I had come back to join them. It seemed only right.

A tug brought me back into the real world, into the foyer of Honeysuckle House crouched beside Liam, who had all but dissolved into the shadows. He was holding the key to the lock on the right-hand bracelet. He inserted the key in the lock … and turned it to the right.

“Why?” I screamed.

“I couldn’t let you destroy yourself for me.”

They were the last words that he spoke before his lips dissolved. I reached for him, but he was already gone—a shadow that melted into the colored light pooling on the floor beneath me.