Graham
The morning of election day should have been the biggest day of my life. Instead, as I drank my coffee and looked out over the sunrise from my modern apartment with huge windows, I felt more numb than anything.
The plan was for me to go to some local polling places and get myself out there one last time, shake some hands and kiss some babies, especially since I’d missed a few events recently. Sandra told me bluntly that I needed more selfies with my “horny female voters”. This only made me feel shittier. Especially when I had eighteen year old girls grabbing my ass for photos. (Who was the demon here anyway?)
I couldn’t even eat breakfast. Not an egg, not a green smoothie… “Why did I buy such fucking healthy food?” I asked the empty room. I thought this apartment was great when I bought it, but the high ceilings with efficient modernist ceiling fans, black leather couch, cream carpet and white marble gas fireplace looked a little sterile to me right now. I wished I had time for a pet. At least I wouldn’t be talking to myself like a crazy person. I’d be talking to a dog or cat like a crazy person.
You know what? I’m going for a trashy fast food chicken biscuit for breakfast. Helena would be proud.
I took the elevator down to my covered parking. I got in my BMW and pulled into a drive-through. I parked to eat in a lonely corner of the lot next to a dollar store that wasn’t open yet and unpeeled the wrapper, releasing the deliciously terrible sodium-laden scent of fast food breakfast.
A car pulled up behind me and a young man got out of the back seat dressed in a black suit. My danger radar pricked up immediately.
He flicked out a wand.
Then he rapped knuckles on my window. “Warlock council,” he said. “Get out of the car.”
“Why should I?”
“Because my magic works perfectly here in the Fixed Plane, but you’re an incubus and all you can do is seduce me. That won’t do you any good.”
“I’m part warlock too,” I said, although this was an absurd statement when I had no idea how to do any of the spells Helena could whip out.
Let’s face it, the entire moment seemed absurd.
“Okay. Well, give that a try. I’ll wait,” the guy said.
“Try? Try what? I’m eating breakfast. I don’t know who the hell you are.” We were speaking through the window. I held up my half-eaten sandwich. I leaned down so I could get a better look at the guy since he was standing right up against my car.
Blonde, pale, regal features, the face of a rich snot. “Are you Helena’s cousin?”
“Yes,” the guy said. “But that fact won’t save you.”
My mind seemed even more blank than before. I kept eating the sandwich. This seemed to piss him off.
“Get out of the car.”
I laughed gently. I almost felt some relief. I was in trouble with the wizard council. Shit was going to go down. So I would never make it to the polls. My career was over, wasn’t it? It was, in fact, going to go down in spectacular, scandalous flames. Everyone would wonder what in hell happened to rising star Graham Capello. Drugs? Sex scandal? Depression?
I’d already known that this humiliation and defeat in the human world would come. It was time to just admit it. I was never going to work in this town again.
But I was meant to be somewhere else.
At her side…
Piers tapped his wand to the handle of my car and the locks went up. He pulled the door open, seized my arm, and pointed the wand to my throat. “Come with me peacefully,” he said.
I never thought I would be facing a scenario in which I had to try not to get in the car with a kidnapper, but life is full of surprises. Piers was scrawny compared to me, so I didn’t give him a chance to do anything. I launched out of the car and caught him around the waist, knocking him down with all the strength and speed I could muster. He hit the pavement and I didn’t let up. I stomped on his wand arm and yanked it from his hand.
The driver of his car got out to join the fray. The chauffeur was more buff and mean looking than I was. More of a bodyguard than a mere driver. But I had a feeling it was still Piers I needed to keep my attention on.
I didn’t know what to do with the wand. Could I just point and shout things? Nah. I didn’t even want to waste time trying that. No way was it that easy. To me, the wand just felt like a stick.
I felt power stirring inside me, though. I understood this feeling by now, and where it came from. Every adoring person who had approached me these last few days of campaigning fed into it…but nothing fed me like that night making love to Helena. I was still carrying a little of that with me.
The driver rushed me and I took up a defensive stance as he came at me physically. He tried to punch me. I dodged, my eyes darting to Piers.
Piers said some spell word and I was hit with a wave of vertigo like nothing I’d ever felt. Suddenly down was up and up was down, but I tried to hang on to the world as it spun. I reached for the driver and shoved him against my car, then slammed my fist into his gut.
“Ungh!” I could tell I got him good.
“I don’t want to fucking hurt you…but back off,” I panted as the world spun around me.
“I don’t really want to hurt you either,” Piers said. “But you’re a demon. And you’re in the way. You have a human life, right? I came to demand an oath from you. Stay in your human life. Never see my cousin again. Say the words, and we don’t have any more trouble.”
“No,” I said.
“I’ve gone easy on you so far,” Piers said. “Trust me…your fists will be dust in the wind compared to the magic I can unleash on you. The pain I’ll cause you…and I don’t need a wand.”
“Helena doesn’t want anything to do with you,” I said. “I will not be cowed. Why are you such an ass, anyway? I know what you did to Jasper Sullivan.”
“I don’t really care if you think I’m a jerk. I took an oath to my people to maintain the safety and purity of Etherium. If doing so makes me a villain to you, I don’t care. You are a demon who feeds on human desire and loneliness. You have the power to take advantage of people and how many women have felt the sting of that power? The emptiness that follows?”
He might have shaken me, I’ll admit, if not for that conversation with Byron.
But in fact, an incubus doesn’t prey on the unwilling, but the willing. And when we’re not doing that, we can be quite productive members of society. Talin was always trying to change the world. You’re more like her than you were like your father. Be proud.
It was his words, but also his confidence. He seemed sure that none of us were evil. Not me, nor the grandmother I never had the privilege of knowing. We were complicated, I would admit that. I wasn’t proud of everything I’d ever done in my life. But I never wanted to hurt anyone. I had always wanted to change the world in some way.
“I stand by everything I’ve done,” I said. “I own my mistakes. But I’m also proud of the real work I’ve done in this town. I thought I was just a human. I thought this was the whole world, and I tried to make it better.”
“You should focus on that,” Piers said. “And stay out of magical business.”
“But I can’t. I know too much.”
“Alas.”
I saw the fire in his normally cold eyes and now I tried to retaliate again, to catch him off guard a second time, but he slapped his hands to my chest and said, in a whisper, “May your bones break.”
Pain shattered through me and I slumped against the car, managing to get into my seat as white hot pain devoured me. Stars danced in my vision. I heard him telling me to stay away from Helena and then everything went black.