filled the room. “I killed him with my touch…”
Ariadne and Dr. Perugini exchanged a look. “If you say so,” Dr. Perugini said with an air of patronization. She reached for me again, Ariadne a step behind her. “I need you to sit down and relax…”
Old Man Winter took two long strides from where he stood at the side of Wolfe’s body and landed a long arm on the shoulders of Dr. Perugini and Ariadne. “Don’t…” he mumbled in quiet warning, “…touch her.”
They both looked at him in surprise, but Perugini’s turned to annoyance. “She’s injured. I need to get her back to the Directorate and treat her wounds.”
Old Man Winter did not budge. “She’ll be fine. Do not touch her without heavy gloves.” His gaze fell over me again, and he turned back to where the agents stood around the body of Wolfe.
“Or what?” Perugini spat at him. “She’s hurt, she’s delusional, Erich! She’s just been through a ridiculous level of trauma – you can’t possibly think she killed this maniac by touching him.” She looked after him, and he hesitated, and the chill of the cold air from the window filled the room, swirling around him as though it were embracing a very old friend. “Erich?” she asked again, note of disbelief filling her voice. “You don’t actually believe her?”
He stared down at Wolfe for a long moment before he answered. “Certainly I believe her,” he replied. His cold blue eyes swept back to Dr. Perugini, then to Ariadne, finally coming to rest on me. “It is as she said. She touched him, and he likely screamed and begged for his life, and she killed him with her hands. With her touch.”
I felt a chill unrelated to the broken window as my eyes followed Old Man Winter’s down to the corpse of Wolfe, the scariest maniac I’d ever heard of, dead, helpless, on the floor – the way I’d made him. I looked back up and the biting fear ate at me, doubts, horror, still swirling in my brain, which was rocketing at a mile a second. “What…am…I?” I croaked out at him.
“What am I?” I asked again, stronger this time. He did not answer me, instead turning away after gesturing at Wolfe’s body as he swept up the stairs. Dr. Perugini reached for my elbow and I brushed her off, knocking her aside.
“WHAT AM I?” I howled at him as he retreated.
A voice, deathly familiar, prickled at the back of my mind, instilling a sense of calm that came from deep inside, an answer to a question that was asked and answered somewhere in the depths of me.
Soul eater, it said in a raspy, whispering voice.
Succubus.
Twenty-five
“You’re what would be known in mythology as a succubus,” Dr. Sessions said in a voice pitched with excitement. We were back at the Directorate hours later. I had let Ariadne and Dr. Perugini coax me upstairs and into a waiting car after my question was answered from within. Although I was familiar with the myth of succubi, I knew that the answer hadn’t come from me. And that left another question that I was sure I could answer, but didn’t want to.
After a visit to the medical unit to make sure I was all right, Ariadne had asked me to see Dr. Sessions. I’d agreed. So there I sat, clad once more in a long sleeved turtleneck, jeans, and with a pair of heavy mittens they’d rummaged for me, on his examination table, him keeping an arm’s length away while he talked.
“I thought that succubi…uh…” I blushed as I thought about having to ask the doctor the question that was on my mind. Ariadne and Dr. Perugini were both in the lab as well, hovering in the background. Perugini, in particular, looked as though she was ready to level Dr. Sessions, staring at him from across the room through half-slitted eyes. “…slept with men in order to steal their souls.”
Dr. Sessions smiled, which at the present moment didn’t creep me out as much as it might have a week ago. “No. Well,” he rescinded, “you could, I suppose, but all that’s necessary is the touch of your skin. You touch someone with your bare hands, or your face – anything involving flesh to flesh contact, and they’ll start to feel the effects of your power.”
“Mom knew,” I said in a low whisper. “That’s why she had rule #4.”
“Excuse me?” Sessions looked at me.
“My mom,” I explained. “She had a rule that I