Succubus Shadows Page 0,66

interest in her" had caught his notice. He stayed silent, however, and waited for Jerome's next profound statement. Which wasn't that profound.

"Time to go," said the demon, probably so Roman could grab hold again.

Jerome teleported, off to wherever it was he had to go.

And me? I returned to my prison.

Chapter 15

It was 1942, and I was in France.

I didn't want to be in France. I hadn't wanted to be there for the last fifty years, yet somehow, Bastien kept talking me into staying. There was also the small fact that our supervising archdemon didn't want us to go. He liked the way we worked together. Incubus-succubus teams were hit or miss sometimes, but we were exceptional, and our superiors had taken note. It was good for our hellish careers but not for my morale.

Bastien didn't see what my problem was. "Hell doesn't even need us here," he told me one day, after I'd complained for like the thousandth time. "Think of it as a vacation. Hordes of souls are being damned here every day."

I walked over to the window of our shop and peered out onto the busy road, pressing my hands against the glass. Bicyclists and pedestrians moved past, everyone needing to get somewhere and get there fast. It could have been any ordinary weekday in Paris, but this was no ordinary day. Nothing had been ordinary since the Germans had occupied France, and the scattered soldiers in the street stood out to me like candles in the night.

Bad simile, I thought. Candles implied some kind of hope or light. And while Paris had fared better than most people realized under Nazi rule, something in the city had changed. The energy, the spirit...whatever you wanted to call it, it had a taint to me. Bastien said I was crazy. Most people were still living their daily lives. The food shortages weren't as bad here as in other places. And after shape-shifting into Aryan nation poster children with blond hair and blue eyes, we were more or less left alone.

Bastien was still going on about my glum mood while he moved about and straightened hat displays in my periphery. He'd chosen millinery as his profession for this identity, one that worked well for meeting well-to-do Parisian women. I played the role of his sister - as I so often did in other scenarios - helping with the store and keeping house for him. It was better than dance halls or brothels, which had been our previous occupations in France.

"What about your friend?" Bastien asked me slyly. "Young Monsieur Luc?"

At the mention of Luc, I paused in my dejected assessment of the world outside the hat shop. If I was going to talk about candles in the night, then Luc was mine. A real one. He was a human I'd met recently, working with his father - a violin maker. Their trade had suffered even more than ours, as the market for luxury items shriveled in these lean times.

But Luc never seemed to let their financial woes affect him. Whenever I saw him, he was always cheerful, always full of hope. The weight of so many centuries of sin and darkness were starting to take their toll on me, and being in Paris only made it worse. Yet, Luc was a wonder to me. Being able to look at the world with such optimism, with such conviction that good would prevail...well, it was a foreign concept. One I was intrigued by. I couldn't stay away from it.

"Luc's different," I admitted, finally turning from the window. "He's not part of this."

Bastien snorted and leaned against the wall. "They're all part of this, Fleur." Fleur was his long-time nickname for me over the years, no matter what identity I assumed. "I don't suppose you've slept with him yet?"

My answer was to turn away again and remain silent. No, I hadn't slept with Luc. I wanted to, though. I wanted to with the instincts of a woman who had fallen for a man, as well as the craving of a succubus to consume the energy and taste the soul of someone so good. I had never hesitated before. This was the kind of thing I'd always sought out. It was even my job. But something inside of me was changing. Maybe it was these bleak times, but whenever I looked at Luc and saw that purity radiating from him - and his growing love and trust in me - I just couldn't do