Succubus Shadows Page 0,44

hypocrisy. It was all too surreal.

"Who are you?" I demanded. "What am I doing here?" I saw no point in wasting time.

The duo didn't answer right away. Their eyes were cold and unreadable, but I saw a bit of smugness in their lips.

"Our succubus," one said. His - my brain decided to assign them a gender - voice was low and raspy, with a lisp that reminded me of a snake. "Our succubus at last."

"Harder to catch than we thought," added the other, voice identical. "We thought you would have succumbed long ago."

"Who are you?" I repeated, anger kindling. I squirmed in a futile attempt at escape. My confines were so tight that I didn't even have the space to beat my fists against the nonexistent walls.

"Mother will be pleased," the first one said.

"Very pleased," confirmed the other.

The way they alternated phrases reminded me of how Grace - Jerome's former lieutenant demoness - and Mei used to interact. That had had a charming, moderately creepy The Shining feel to it. This...this was something else. Something terrible and icy, burning my senses like nails on a chalkboard.

"Mother will reward us," the first said. I decided to call them One and Two for the ease of mental processing. "She will reward us when she is free, when she escapes the angels."

"Who's your mother?" I asked. A troubling suspicion was beginning to form.

"We will avenge her until she can do it herself," said Two. "You will suffer for betraying her."

"Nyx," I murmured. "Nyx is your mother. And you're...you're Oneroi."

They said nothing, which I took as affirmation. My head reeled. Oneroi? How had this happened? Oneroi were a type of dream demon - but not demons like the ones I interacted with. Heaven and Hell were forces in the universe, but there were others, others that mingled with and often ran parallel to the system I existed in. Nyx was one such force, an entity of chaos from the beginning of time, when the world had been created from disorder.

And the Oneroi were her children.

I knew a few things about them but had never seen them - or ever expected to. They visited dreams, feeding on them. Nyx had done this too, but the manner had been a little different. She had manipulated people into seeing the future in their dreams - a twisted version that didn't unfold the way the dreamer expected. It had led to crazy actions that spawned chaos in the world, allowing her to grow stronger. She'd also fed on my energy directly, taking it in its purest form and distracting me with dreams of my own.

But Oneroi fed on the dreams themselves, deriving their power from the emotions and realities fueled by the dreamer. My understanding was that they also had the power to manipulate dreams but rarely had reason to. Humans provided plenty of hopes, dreams, and fears on their own. They needed no outside help.

That was the extent of my Oneroi knowledge, but it was enough. Feeling even a little informed about the situation empowered me. "That's what this is about? You took me because of Nyx? I wasn't the one who caught her. The angels did."

"You helped them," said One. "Led them to her."

"And then refused to save her," added Two.

With a pang, I remembered that horrible night, when Carter and his cronies had recaptured Nyx after her devastating free-for-all in Seattle. An angel had died that night. Another had fallen. And Nyx had promised to show me a future and family with a man I could love, if only I would give her the rest of my energy and let her break free.

"She was lying," I said. "She was trying to make a deal when she had nothing to offer."

"Mother always shows the truth," said One. "Dreams can be lies, but truth is truth."

I decided pointing out the redundancy of that statement was useless. "Well, I'm sure she'll appreciate the Mother's Day gift, but you're wasting your time. Jerome will come for me. My archdemon. He won't let me stay here."

"He won't find you," said Two. This time, I could definitely see smugness. "He can't find you. You no longer exist for him."

"You're wrong," I replied, with a bit of my own smugness. "There's no place in this world you can take me where he can't find me." That was, of course, assuming they hadn't managed to hide my immortal aura. To my knowledge, only greater immortals could do that. I wasn't sure where Oneroi