Songs of Love & Death

Briefly I described the dead street people while Bethany filled her electric kettle. It’s one of the British types that serious tea drinkers use because it heats water to boiling in seconds. After pushing the on button, she stood on tiptoe for the tin of my favorite Darjeeling tea. I reached over her head to take it from the shelf.

She isn’t a lady in the sense of an English title, but she was named for an ancestor called Lady Bethany Fox, so my brother, Charlie, and I like to call her Lady Beth. Not only was she English born, but the title suited her classy nature.

She warmed the teapot, then added tea leaves and poured boiling water on them. “I suspect our worries are related, David. Early this morning I sensed a strange, menacing energy sweeping into the city, and it’s getting stronger. Something is very wrong.”

“And I have the corpses to prove it. Any idea what the cause might be?”

She set out two teacups and produced a cookie jar filled with her rich, crumbly scones. As she set them on a dainty china plate, she said, “I think a demon has come to New York.”

I experienced a moment of severe cognitive dissonance at the contrast between the sweet silver-haired widow and the words she’d just said. But though Bethany Sterling was indeed sweet, she was a Guardian hunter like me, with special abilities to track the ungodly and enforce justice.

I glanced across the kitchen at the old photo that hung over the neat computer table. It showed a young Bethany dressed in parachute gear early in World War II. She’d trained as a secret agent and parachuted behind Nazi lines in France, single-handedly freed a jail full of Maquis, and done a lot of other heroic things.

But she hadn’t managed the rescue that mattered most—her equally young husband had been a Guardian healer, like my brother, Charlie, and he died in a prisoner-of-war camp, treating fellow prisoners right up to the end.

So Bethany Malmain Sterling was one formidable woman even at her present advanced age, though she refused to divulge the actual number of her years. She’d also, in her youth, been one very hot babe, with cool blond hair and dangerous blue eyes. I wish I’d known her then. But I’m damned lucky to know her now.

“A demon,” I repeated. “This is new? The city has plenty of them, starting on Wall Street.”

“This isn’t a joke, David,” she said with mild reproof. “The—entity—is no metaphor, but a malicious noncorporeal being. A demon that feeds on human energy. Have all the victims been male?” When I nodded, she said, “So it’s a succubus.”

“A succubus,” I repeated. “Ooooo-kay. At least that would explain why the men were smiling.”

She judged that the tea had steeped long enough and poured the steaming liquid into the mugs. Then, knowing me, she added a dollop of rare and expensive Highland single malt to my tea. “There are worse ways to die, but I imagine that most of the creature’s victims would prefer to live.”

I took a long, appreciative swig of tea and whiskey. “Is there any way to get rid of this demon, or will it keep feeding indefinitely?”

“I don’t know. I was about to do a search on magematrix.net when you thundered in here.”

“Good idea.” I took my mug and the plate of scones and followed her to her desk.

She opened her laptop and used her fingerprint ID to enter magematrix.net. The site is a very, very private database and social network for Guardians, who are spread all over the world these days. I don’t think there is a better source of information on magic and impossible events anywhere—though I’m not sure. Any equivalent stash of knowledge would be just as secret.

Lady Beth typed “succubus” into the search engine, then scrolled through the results. “Not a very large entry,” she murmured. “Some of this data goes back centuries.”

I peered over her shoulder to read. The oldest entries had been translated into modern English, with links to the original text if someone wanted to consult that. “So these demons steal human life force through dream sex until they become powerful enough to acquire physical bodies.”

She clicked through to a section of original text. “This seventeenth-century report claims that sex demons are escapees from hell. They long to acquire human bodies because that makes the pleasure of their wickedness so much more powerful.”

“How do we get rid of this one?”

“A sufficiently powerful mage might be able to dismiss a sex demon from the body it’s taken over, but there are no details.” Bethany started clicking links at the bottom of the page to see if they led anywhere interesting.

“So maybe we could do an exorcism, if we knew how. This is beginning to sound like a low-rent horror film.”

“Truth is stranger than fiction,” she murmured. “The earliest account says that when the demon is dismissed from the body it inhabits, it’s sucked down to hell forever.”

“No way of checking that part, of course.”