as if she were admitting something difficult. She gave Caleb an almost beatific smile of affection, and I nearly choked on my burger. Partly I reacted from shock, but partly from sheer joy at seeing her eyes glow—if dimly—in that telltale succubus way. I’d wondered if Iris’s eyes would ever glow again, after what she’d experienced.
Caleb and Iris? I thought, surprised despite my happiness for her. The satyr was so solid and Iris had always been a fairly typical succubus: flighty and a bit fluffy. The idea of serious, calm Caleb with frivolous, excitable Iris was interesting, to say the least.
“Really?” I said, around a mouthful of food. I really needed to stop talking with my mouth full.
“Yes. I know it probably seems strange. But he came down with Ryu after you were attacked. And he ended up staying.” Because of me was her unstated message.
“Wow,” I said, swallowing hastily.
Ryu was here? I thought. But I didn’t say anything. This was Iris’s time to talk.
“What about, er, the mojo?” I asked hesitantly. The thing was, succubi harvested essence from bodily fluids the same as baobhan sith, like Ryu, harvested essence from blood. Only difference was that any bodily fluid would do for succubi and incubi, but they could feed only off lust—even if it was the sort of twisted, pain-filled pleasure preferred by Graeme, Phaedra’s incubus minion. This reliance on essence meant that succubi, incubi, and baobhan sith couldn’t be monogamous, long term, with another supernatural creature. Not if they wanted to keep their power. Instead, they needed to charge up with either humans or special halflings, like me, who created the right magical essence in their bodily fluids.
So what I was really asking Iris was “Who are you boffing on the side?” After all, I could feel her using a small amount of glamour to keep the humans from noticing how unhealthy she still looked, and her usual succubus juju was beating, if very faintly, against my shields. If she could use magic, she was feeding from somebody.
The succubus’s eyes glowed a bit brighter as she gave me a secret, sly smile, making Iris look like herself again.
“That’s not a problem. Caleb’s a terrible voyeur,” Iris said, pronouncing terrible in a way that let me know she found it anything but.
I blinked at her, sneaking a look at the satyr. His handsome, craggy face was as kind and as placid as ever. He looked like a sexy college professor in a movie, although the sandy blond hair falling down into his eyes gave him a little-boy-lost appearance that was adorably innocent. Granted, he also had goat haunches and was naked as a jaybird, but I needed to stop seeing him through my human eyes, with their human values.
Finally turning back to Iris, I tried to reconcile my established image of Caleb as utterly respectable with my new image of Caleb peeping out of a closet at a couple screwing on the bed. I would have wagered Caleb had sex while wearing an ascot, not him being a certifiable kinkster. But you know what they say about judging a book by its cover…
And yet, considering the fact that Caleb’s impressive man-janglies were one of the more startlingly prominent features of his cover, I guess I should have totally gone ahead and judged.
For a second, the human part of me worried about Iris. She seemed so smitten with Caleb, yet their relationship was hardly going to be the subject of a Hallmark made-for-TV movie.
But maybe it should be, my brain kicked in. After all, look at her: He’s made her comfortable enough to have the sex she needs to get strong. That couldn’t have been easy after the abuse she endured. And the way they look at each other shows how much they care.
Plus he’s hung like a yak! chimed in my libido, which my brain ignored.
Instead, it touched on a subject I’d been confronted with innumerable times since joining my mother’s world.
Hallmark movies deal with human lives and human relationships: short-lived love triangles, messy divorces, joyful reunions. All of which are played out in the course of a human life span. They don’t deal with near-immortals. Or near-immortality.
And I finally admitted to myself what I’d begun to think about while dating Ryu, but had managed, mostly, to sublimate.
You only have human experience of relationships. And those last, what… fifty, sixty years at most? You have no idea what it would take to make a relationship last for generations of human