Chapter 40: A Fast Learner (Patreon)

The lift opened on a corridor colder than any of the others. By then I'd seen lockers stacked with binding kits, a lunar calendar with three dates ringed in red marker, and a break room where a vampire in a lanyard had lifted his mug to Lancelot over the kettle. This floor had the same drop ceiling and the same strip lights. One of them ticked off as we passed under it and came back on behind us.

"So what's this floor all about?"

"Ghosts, usually." Lancelot walked with his hands loose at his sides and his jacket buttoned. "Possessions. Apparitions. Anything without a body, or things that never had one to begin with."

A window ran along the left wall. Behind it, screens showed thin green lines climbing and dropping, and a woman in fingerless gloves sat with her chin in her hand, watching one of them. A mug steamed at her elbow. Nobody else was in the room.

Morgana had said nothing like me was on record. Somebody down here took spirits out of bodies for a living, though, and put them back when it went wrong.

I kept my hands loose at my sides and my eyes on the corridor ahead. "So basically Ghostbusters."

"Pretty much." He glanced down at me. "I'm surprised you know about them."

"Ghostbusters?"

"Do they have television in Hell?"

That got a laugh out of me, a real one, loud in the corridor. The woman behind the glass looked up and back down. "Not exactly. I think there's something like a theatre."

"Think?"

"Never went. I just heard about it."

"Hm." He slowed at a junction and took the right-hand branch without looking at the sign. "You're definitely unusual for a succubus."

"Unusual how?"

"For starters, you're more understanding. Less condescending." The light above us flickered twice, and he waited it out before going on. "Most demons, even the friendly ones, look at humans the way you'd look at livestock that learned to talk. Either you've learned to hide it well, or you really do see them as people."

I nodded at the floor tiles. "Not everyone's the same. Even demons."

"True. But most of them turn out a certain way." He lifted a shoulder. "Humans too, just a different way."

Aria had once told a shopkeeper that Bellas was hers, in the same voice she used for her boots. She'd never raised a hand to him. She'd brushed his hair out on a slow evening and hummed while she did it. She'd also never asked him what he wanted for dinner, because the question hadn't occurred to her.

"You might be right about that," I said. "I'll take it as a compliment, then."

"You should." He pushed open a fire door and held it with his forearm until I was through. "It isn't the only thing, though."

"Oh? What else?"

"You know a great deal about Earth. The culture, the small things." The door hissed shut on its closer behind us. "You knew which way the taps turned in the washroom upstairs. You didn't look at the lift buttons. You could have lived here for years. Most demons have the surface of it, or a version fifty years out of date."

I let a breath out through my nose. "I've spent a bit of time on Earth. And I'm a fast learner."

"There's a limit to fast. There should still be gaps."

"I'm a really fast learner."

He looked at me for a second longer, and that stillness came into his face, the one that had been there in the car. Then it went, and he nodded and said, "Second, then. You haven't got the look."

"What look?"

"Most succubi, when they're faced with a mortal." He tipped his head toward the monitoring room we'd left behind. "They size him up as a potential meal."

The word sat low in me. I hadn't fed since Thursday. I hadn't thought about it all day, not in the car, not through Morgana's questions, and now a slow pull sat under my navel. It widened while I stood there.

I looked at him. The collar of his shirt sat clean against his throat. His hands were broad across the back, and he stood with his weight even in a corridor he knew. He'd been warm when he took my hand upstairs. It wouldn't take much. A step closer, a hand on that lapel, my voice dropped half a register.

Lancelot laughed. He put both palms up. "All right, all right. Scratch that one." The laugh stayed in his voice. "I didn't mean anything by it."

I blinked, and the corridor came back: the strip light, the cold, the hum from somewhere behind the walls. The thought had come up smooth. No catch in it, nothing to push past. A month ago it would have stopped me on the stairs.

"What's left of the tour?"

"Not much." He let his hands drop. "There's the General Entities Office. Permits, registrations, a waiting room with a ticket machine. Mostly boring. I'll leave it up to you."

"I'll pass. Faith should be back soon, and I want to talk to her."

"Sure thing." He stopped by the lift doors and pressed the call panel with his thumb. Somewhere above us, cables started to move. "Will you find your way?"

"I'll be fine. You showed me round enough."

"I did, didn't I." He stepped back from the doors to give me the space in front of them, and inclined his head an inch. "Then I'll take my leave, Miss Nightstar."

He went back the way we'd come. The fire door swung shut behind him, and the light over the junction ticked off and stayed off.

*

I stayed in the corridor a while after the door stopped swinging. The cold came off the walls. Somewhere behind the ceiling tiles a fluorescent tube buzzed and steadied.

Faith might be back already. I wanted to get to her before anyone else did, and before I went down into Hell again. A proper conversation was owed, and I was not waiting another week for it.

I pressed the call panel. The lift came down without hurry. I stepped in and the doors closed on the corridor.

The floor indicator ticked upward and stopped. The doors opened onto the VCD floor.

Heads turned as I walked out. Two men at a filing cabinet stopped talking. A woman with a mug in her hand watched me go by and then leaned toward her neighbour. I caught "level two" and "succubus" before the carpet tiles carried me past. Word had beaten me up the building.

Lancelot had pointed out Galahad's office on the way through, so I went there. Better a door I knew than a floor of people to wander past while they whispered.

I knocked.

"Enter."

Galahad sat behind the desk with a file open and a pen in his hand. His hair was tied back. The long coat hung on a hook by the window, and I could see where the cuff had been mended.

"Good afternoon," I said.

"And to you." He capped the pen. "I take it you have finished with my father."

"He's gone to do whatever he does."

"That is generally the answer." He folded his hands on the file. "What can I do for you?"

"Is Faith back?"

"She is. At her desk, most likely, writing the report. She will not thank anyone for interrupting it."

"She'll live." I half turned to the door. "Thank you."

"Do you require an escort?"

"No. I'll find it. Lancelot showed me round."

"Then I shall tell Agent Clarke you are coming." He said it evenly, and he was already reaching for the pen again.

My hand was on the door handle when he spoke.

"Miss Nightstar."

I looked back.

"I would be obliged if you did not feed on any of my men. I need them fully operational."

I rolled my eyes. "I wasn't going to do anything."

"Of course not. I say it merely in case." He turned a page. "And, in case, I will mention that HSU would gladly assist with your special… needs."

"Right," I said, and went out.

I shut the door behind me and stood there with the handle still in my grip.

Assist how? Did HSU keep a room full of people on standby for succubi? A rota? I pictured a clipboard and a sign-in sheet, and decided I did not want to know.

The woman with the mug was still watching. I walked past her toward Faith's desk.

*

Faith's desk sat at the end of a row of four, against a pillar. Her jacket hung on the back of the chair. The screen showed a form half filled, the cursor blinking in a box marked Narrative. She had a pen behind her ear and another in her hand, and she was not writing with either.

She looked up before I reached her.

"Got a moment?" I asked.

"Of course." She saved the document and locked the screen. "Come with me."

She took her jacket off the chair and didn't put it on. I followed her past the pillar, past a man eating crisps over a keyboard, past a door with a laminated sign that said PRINTER JAMMED, DO NOT FORCE, beneath which someone had added in biro, it knows.

"Where are we going?"

"Somewhere we can talk privately." She glanced back over her shoulder. "Isn't that what you wanted?"

"Yeah." I kept pace with her. "I just didn't expect you to drop everything. I thought you were in the middle of a report."

"I was." She swiped a card at a plain grey door. "This one's waited long enough."

The room behind it was narrow, with dark panelling on three walls and a table between two hard chairs. A brass lamp stood on the table, and beside it a desk microphone on a short stand. A lattice screen of wood worked into diamonds was bolted to the wall behind the far chair, with nothing on the other side but more panelling. The room smelled of furniture polish.

"Charming place."

"Nobody comes in here." Faith dropped her jacket over the back of the far chair and picked up a black remote from the table. She pressed a button. In the two top corners, the cameras swung down on their brackets until their lenses faced the floor, and the red lights beneath them went out. She pulled the microphone's lead out of the socket in the table and laid the cable flat beside the lamp.

I sat. The chair was lower than it looked, and my knees came up against the table edge.

"I don't even know where to start," I said.

Faith sat opposite me. She put the remote down and turned it so it lay square with the table. "Neither do I, to be honest."

The lamp hummed. Through the wall a phone rang twice and stopped.

"I want to sort this out," I said. "Whatever we've got between us. Before it gets any worse."

She nodded. Her hands were together on the table, thumbs pressed against each other.

"You know, I'd have understood," I said. "If you'd told me the truth. Instead of just going."

"I know." She said it to the table first, and then lifted her eyes to me. "I know you would. But I couldn't say anything. We're not allowed to talk about the work with civilians. Not friends. Not family. Not anyone."

"You could have said something. A lie that made sense."

"I tried to." Her thumbs came apart. "There was a group we'd been tracking for months. They found out who I was outside of here. My name, my flat. Where I went on Sundays." Her jaw set and then let go. "Where you lived. I thought I was protecting you. I thought someone was going to turn up at your door, and I'd hear about it from a report like the one on my desk."

I didn't say anything.

"I'd rather have you hate me," she said, "than spend every day wondering if something had happened to you and I didn't know."

I breathed out. "Doesn't matter now. What happened, happened."

She waited.

"I'd be lying," I said, "if I told you I didn't feel anything for you any more."

"But." She didn't make it a question.

"But things have changed. I've changed." I put my hands flat on the table, nails short and pale against the wood. "I'm still me. I'm not the man you broke up with, though."

"You're not a man at all," she said, and she almost smiled.

"That's the least of it." I looked at the lattice screen behind her rather than at her face. "I've done things I wouldn't have thought of doing before."

Faith's hand went to her collar and stayed there. "You mean you've..."

"Yes. With a lot of people. Men. Women." I kept my voice level. "And there are thoughts that come in, things I'd never have felt before, and they don't feel strange. They feel normal."

"That isn't your fault." She leaned forward. "That's what the body does to you. You didn't choose it."

"Didn't I?" I turned one hand over on the table. "At the start, maybe. At the start I did it because I had to. Now I don't do it to survive. I like it. I go looking for it. I was in an orgy, Faith. A proper, actual fucking orgy, in a club, and I lost count of how many people I'd been with before the night was over." The words kept coming and I let them. "And that's only the sex part. I own a man, Faith. A slave. And I'm not horrified by it anymore. Most days it feels right. Like that's how it should be."

She had gone still. Her hand was still at her collar.

"So what does that make me?" I continued. "Am I still the person you knew? Or just a succubus doing an impression of him?"

"Don't say that." It came out sharp. She took her hand off her collar and put it on the table, close to mine but not touching. "You're still Liam. You've adapted, that's what humans do. You've done what you had to do to get through it."

"For how long?" I asked. "A year? Two? How long does that hold?"

"We'll find your body before then."

"And if we don't?" I pulled my hand back into my lap. "There's no trail. What if this is it? What if I'm like this for good?"

Her mouth opened. Nothing came out of it. She looked down at the unplugged cable lying by the lamp, and her shoulders came up under her blouse.

Then she stood. Her chair scraped back on the floor. She came round the end of the table, and before I'd got my feet under me she had her arms around my shoulders, her cheek against the side of my head, her chin above where my horns sat under the glamour.

"I don't care," she said into my hair. "I've got you back. I'm not doing that again. I'm not walking away from you twice." Her arms tightened. "You're still Liam. I'm not letting you go."

She smelled of the same shampoo. My hands came up off my lap. They got as far as her waist, and stopped there, an inch from the cloth.

I put them on her arms instead and eased her back. She let me.

"Thank you." It came out rough, so I said it again. "Thank you. Maybe you're right."

She stayed crouched beside my chair, one hand on its back.

"But I'm sorry." I said. "We can't go back to being together. Not like this."

She looked at me. She didn't get up.

"I'd love to," I said. "Pretend none of it happened. Pick up where we left off. But I can't do that in this body. It isn't possible."

"No," she said quietly.

"So for now, friends. Properly friends. And when I'm back in my own skin, we work out the rest then."

She pushed herself up with the hand on the chair and stood with her arms folded. "I understand."

"You of all people know that getting involved with a demon doesn't end well. And I'm not just any demon now. I'm a princess of Hell, apparently." I tipped my head at her. "Besides. You're not exactly into women."

The laugh came out of her through her nose, short, and her eyes were wet when it finished. She wiped one with the side of her thumb.

"You might be right." She unfolded her arms and took her jacket off the back of the far chair. "Slowly, then. We take it slowly."

"Good." I stood. The chair scraped. "Want to get a coffee? Talk about something boring for a bit?"

She nodded and put the remote in her jacket pocket. "Vending machine's round the corner."

*

The paper cup was empty by the time the lift doors opened on minus eight. I'd carried it down from the VCD floor because there was no bin by the vending machine, and Faith had keyed the panel for me before she went back to her desk. The carpet took my footsteps. Two of the strip lights along the corridor were off, and nobody passed me between the lift and the unmarked door.

I stood there with the cup in one hand and knocked with the other. Better she heard it from me now than found three succubi in her lobby next weekend.

"Come in."

The door was heavier than it looked. Morgana sat behind the desk with the laptop open this time, its light on her chin, and a lever-arch file lay spread beside it with a pen in the fold. She didn't close either.

"Miss Morningstar." She took the pen out of the file and set it across the pages. "Have you spoken with Ms Clarke yet?"

"I have." I dropped the cup into the bin by the door. "Went smoother than I expected, to be honest."

"Good." She looked up. "I'm glad the two of you have worked something out. A distracted agent costs me more than a dead one." She leaned back. "So what brings you down here again?"

"I'm going back to Hell."

She didn't answer straight away. Her fingers rested on the edge of the laptop lid, and she tilted it a few degrees forward, then left it there.

"You're sure?"

"I can't stay longer." I stayed by the chairs and didn't sit. "People will notice I'm gone. And I don't think anyone in this building would enjoy the people who'd come looking for me."

"No." She said it flatly. "You're right about that." She drew the file towards her and closed it over the pen. "Do you need anything from us?"

"Just giving you a heads up. Next week I might come back with company."

"What kind of company?" One eyebrow lifted. "The two you came through with last time?"

I nodded.

Morgana let a breath out through her nose and sat back against the leather. The chair creaked under her.

"Fine. But they are your responsibility. If they do something, it lands on you, not on my staff."

"Don't worry about it." I put a hand on the back of the nearer chair. "I'll make sure they don't blow anything up."

"That is a lower bar than I'd hoped for."

"It's the realistic one." I ran my thumb along the chair's wooden rail. "I went past the APD floor earlier. Would they have anything on what happened to me?"

Her mouth moved at one corner. "So Lancelot really did walk you round."

"You sound surprised."

"He works when he wants to." She turned the closed file a quarter turn on the desk so its spine faced her. "Most days he doesn't want to. If he gave you the tour, he's taken an interest in you."

I thought of the lift, and Lancelot standing with his hands loose at his sides while the floors counted down, and kept my face where it was.

"I've already sent word to Bors," she said.

"Bors?"

"Head of APD."

"Did you tell him?" My grip tightened on the rail. "About me?"

"Not yet." She held my look until I let go of the chair. "He knows there's a case and that it involves a soul in the wrong body. He's going through the archives. There may be something similar on record, even if it isn't the same."

"Better than nothing."

"Considerably better than nothing. Bors keeps good archives."

I stepped back from the chair and tugged the hem of my blouse straight where it had ridden up over my jeans. "I'll head out, then."

"Wait."

I turned round with my hand already on the door.

She had opened the top drawer of the desk. Something came out of it and across the room in a flat arc, and I caught it against my chest without thinking. A black lanyard with a clip and a plastic card on the end, still warm from the drawer.

The card had the Agency's logo in one corner, a level printed in plain grey numerals, and my face. It was the glamour face, the human one, three-quarters on, hair behind one shoulder. I was looking at something off the edge of the frame, and I had no idea when anyone had taken it.

"This is for you," she said. "Wear it on the branch floors and nobody will ask you to explain yourself."

"How did you get my photograph?"

"There were plenty of occasions." She opened the file again and picked the pen back up. "You don't look at cameras much. You should."

I turned the card over. The back was blank except for a magnetic strip. I turned it face up again, then looped the lanyard once around my fingers.

"Thanks. I guess."

She was already writing. I let myself out, and the door closed on its own weight behind me.

*

I took the lift up and walked out through the lobby, past the desk and the pot plants and a man at a monitor who looked through me. The lanyard went into my ring. Outside, the air smelled of wet tarmac and exhaust, and the light was going.

I took the phone out of my pocket and thumbed it awake. Daniel first.

Things are fine on my end. Are you home?

I walked to the corner while I waited. A bus went by with its windows fogged. The phone buzzed before it had finished passing.

Home. You coming?

Yes. I'll take a cab.

The screen stayed dark through a red light. Then: Want anything to eat? I was going to order.

Chinese is fine.

I sent it and kept walking. My stomach wanted nothing. The rest of me did. The pull was low and even, and the last real feed was three days behind me. Daniel's flat would be quiet. I had no intention of looking at him that way, and I had no intention of testing how long that held.

I scrolled the contacts with my thumb. Aria. Charles. Faith. Daniel. Felix.

My thumb went past him, stopped, and came back.

Screw it.

I pressed call and put the phone to my ear. It rang three times.

"Hartley."

"Felix." I let the name come out slow. "It's Vera."

An engine idled on his end. "Vera. Blimey." His voice dropped and warmed. "Thought you'd forgotten me."

"I missed you."

"Yeah?" He laughed, short and pleased. "I'd say I missed you more, but I'd sound desperate."

"You'd sound honest." I stopped under a shop awning, out of the drip. "Would you be so kind as to give me a ride?"

"For you? Where are you?"

I read him the name of the street two blocks over, and the number of the building on the corner, a dry cleaner with a green sign.

"Twelve minutes," he said. "Maybe ten, if the lights are kind."

"I'll be waiting."

I ended the call and put the phone away. Then I walked to the dry cleaner's and stood under its green sign with my hands in my pockets, and watched the road.