Page 14 of Incubus with Benefits
“It’s Prax’s friend. I’m still not quite sure what happened. Either someone spiked her drink, or cast a spell. We’re leaning toward spell. But she passed out in the booth yesterday at Delerium.”
“Oh shit, let me guess. She is also a witch. Just like the ones who recently went missing.”
“You got it. So I offered to watch her until she woke.”
“Good call. We don’t need another visit from the cops. I have to actually be there to charm them, and the pair last time had some kind of counter spell.” She paused, noticing my look. “Aw, crap. They came by again, didn’t they?”
I sighed and told her what happened.
“And yes, they still had that counterspell, but Lily managed to sneak in a bit of magical influence, and some well-planned words, and they left. But that’s not all. The only reason she was still there was that I had driven her back home, and her place was trashed. They not only got through but broke all of her magical wards too.”
“Oh shit! Do you think she’s the next target?” Gina had caught on.
“Yeah, I’m almost sure of it.” I leaned forward, voice low. “I want to know what happened last night. They fucked with my camera. And I’m pretty sure someone cast a spell on her. In my fucking establishment. Offensive spells should be immediately detected and countered,”—unless it was self defense, such as in the case of Lily protecting herself from grabby hands— “I didn’t get so much as a peep. I need you to do what you do best and look into this. And don’t say anything to anyone else in the operation.”
“You think someone on the inside is in on it?”
I shrugged. “I hope not. But we can’t be too sure.”
Gina swirled her drink, watching the amber liquid catch the light shining in from the colorful stained-glass windows. “Rune’slate,” she muttered, side-eyeing her cell phone, which sat under a pile of knickknacks on her coffee table.
“Rune’s a DJ,” I said, dragging myself out of the armchair that had molded itself to my ass. I couldn’t get too comfortable because I had more errands to run before I could return to a sexy little witch waiting for me at home. “He operates in his own time zone. But he always pulls through.”
“You know he prefers to be called a sound mage.” Gina wrinkled her nose.
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah. Sure. Just because his turntables are enchanted doesn’t make him a mage. I’ll give him ‘bard with bass drops’ at most.”
Rune wasn’t Delerium’s regular DJ, but we had him in every few months or so when he was in town to visit family. Ever since he got booked for some big music festivals around the world after the fall of The Wall, he’d been strutting around like he was hot stuff. Sound mage my ass.
“He’ll call,” I added.
Gina sighed. “Things were so much simpler back in the day.”
“Simpler, but not easier.” I reached over, stole her drink, and took a giant sip. She didn’t even slap my hand away or complain, which meant she was in full nostalgia mode.
“That I must agree with. The past was… It was something.”
The silence stretched, heavy with old memories.
Then Gina’s gaze brightened. “You remember Prague?”
“Which time?”
“The time with the cabaret. The one with the cursed piano and the bartender who kept hiding from his crazy wife.”
Ah. That Prague.
“We were pretending to be a young newlywed couple from Paris traveling the world after our wedding,” I said, the memory clicking into place.
It was good for those like us who lived a very long time to remember the past once in a while, lest we forgot everything we ever knew. It was so easy for the memories to slip away and be lost forever. Or at least until someone recalled them.
“I was Julien and you were Genevieve,” I added, pronouncing our names in an exaggerated French accent.
“I remember. It was the easiest way to blend in. I got to say, it’s much easier now to be female than it was before. But technology has made things both easier and more difficult.”
That it had. We no longer had the ability to pay with fake coins made from our soulstuff, taking it back secretly once pocketed. Not to mention, all the cameras and phones everywhere made hiding magic so much more difficult. Some even believed it was why The Wall, the magical barrier hiding magic and monsters in plain sight, had fallen. Society had progressed past its scope of action.
As the years passed, it had become harder and harder to hide the fact that we didn’t really age, though we did a good job pretending to. But aging meant it was more difficult to find new conquests, either alone or together, forcing us to move. So we moved. City to city. Town to town. Always chasing the next safe haven.
