After work, Sam swung by the bakery with the three bars of Guittard chocolate that Lola had requested. It was just past closing, but Kevin let him in and waved him back to the kitchen, where Lola was sitting at the stainless-steel table with a notepad and pencil, surrounded by the rest of the staff on random chairs and stools.

“Three to five items that really represent Portland,” she was saying. “Or at least the Pacific Northwest. We can’t just offer a pan of brownies and some chocolate chip cookies and call it a day. This a region-specific food tour, and they want hyper-local stuff only.”

“They’re kickass chocolate chip cookies,” Sam offered, taking a few from the remaining batch on the tray.

“Be that as it may,” Lola continued, “we need to brainstorm, and give this some deep thought. Because this is one opportunity we don’t want to screw up.”

Amy raised her eyebrows. “We need at least one vegan item. That’s something that says ‘Portland’ for sure. I think we should go with the almond milk salted caramel bar.”

Sam grimaced, but paused as he passed behind her to lean down and kiss her on the neck. “God, get a room, you two,” said Lola. She pointed at Sam accusingly with her pencil. “How does he eat like that and stay in that kind of shape? I never even see him exercise.”

“He doesn’t,” said Amy. “It’s weird.”

“I work it off in the sack,” said Sam.

Laughter rose up from around the table, and Sam polished off his second cookie. But Lola had turned to him with a serious gaze, which was a little intimidating. Like Amy she was covered in tattoos, and the pink hair and sparkling studs that climbed her ears gave her a pixieish, ethereal beauty, but the tight pull of those little buns made her thin face more severe. She asked, “Seriously, how do you do it?”

He shrugged. “Fast metabolism.”

“A good metabolism won’t make you that muscular if you don’t exercise.”

“I lift fifty-pound bags of flour all day. Believe me, it’s a workout.”

With a slight frown and a lift of her eyebrows, she conceded the argument. “What about some sort of wild mushroom tart? Should we include a savory item?”

An energetic debate arose, and Sam palmed his buzzing phone from his pocket. Two missed calls and a text from Susanna. Call me, you moron, it read.

Sam slipped out the back door and made the call. The sweet tone of Susanna’s feminine voice belied her recent text. “I’m a little confused,” she said. “Isaac was telling me your living situation has changed.”

“All I did was ask him for a driver’s license. I appreciate the concern and all, but really.” Sam’s laugh was short. “Nobody ought to be judging me. I’m being discreet and I’m putting one foot in front of the other. That’s all anyone can ask of me.”

“Nobody’s judging you. I think our concern—Isaac’s and mine—is that right now, Tabitha’s the one who got in trouble, and it’s because of her that you’re on a temporary ban from each other—”

“Seventy-five years,” Sam interjected. “That’s a pretty broad definition of ‘temporary.’”

“But it’s still not permanent.” Susanna’s voice stressed each syllable. “Yet if you do something stupid, where you draw attention to yourself, and people start watching you closely and figuring you out—then you’ll get in trouble, and it will be permanent. So you have to keep your eye on the prize, like they say in sports. This won’t last forever.”

“Just seventy-four more years.”

“Well ... yes, but you’ve lived more than twice that long already.”

Sam laughed ruefully. “I can’t make it. You can’t imagine—I mean, we hit the one-year mark the other day, and I went down to the lake where they took her. It’s absolute torture to stand there, knowing she’s down there, and not be able to see her. And at the same time, I can’t leave her. Portland is practically the worst place in America for somebody like me—I mean, the rain alone ... but I can’t leave knowing she’s here.”

“Sam—” Susanna sounded almost apologetic. “She’s not in that lake. Why do you think she’s there?”

The words seized his heart. “What are you talking about?”

“I mean, yes, the Searcher made her come to that lake to deal with the ... issue, but they only held her there for six months or something. She’s moving around freely. But she’s definitely not in Oregon.”

The thought that he had been wrong all this time—so wrong, and for so long— made Sam instantly frantic. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know. You can’t talk to her anyway. You can’t, Sam. But it isn’t right for you to go on thinking this is like her grave right down the street from you. I mean, no.”

“You know where she is,” said Sam. “Just tell me. I know the ban means I can’t talk to her or see her. I just want to know.”

“I don’t know, okay? I only heard that she left Oregon. That’s it.”

“Who told you that?”

“Meridiana.”

Meridiana was Tabitha’s oldest friend. Of course she knew. And Sam had asked her that exact question directly, twice in the past six months, and she had claimed to have no idea. He didn’t believe Susanna, either, in her dubious claim to know where Tabby wasn’t but not where she was. He closed his eyes and wished with all his soul that it were possible to strangle a succubus.

“This is good news for you,” Susanna said—persuading, soothing. “See, you don’t have to take some crazy step of living with this Amy person just so you can stick around for Tabitha. Travel the country. Come visit me and Isaac. Live it up like you’re still single. The time will pass like it’s nothing. And before you know it, Tabitha will be off punishment and you can go back to being the sweet, adorable couple you’ve always been.”

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

That gave him a pang. He leaned back against the wall and rubbed his face wearily. “I’ll figure it out.”

“Our offer will still stand, anytime you need a place to crash. But text first, because we’ll probably move in a couple years. Last week one of my neighbors asked me my secret to looking so young, and I said ‘Neutrogena.’ Isaac had to stop me from packing my bags that very night.”

Sam laughed, already feeling a bit more relaxed. It was good to have options—but now, faced with the truth, he wasn’t sure whether it eased things or complicated them. All this time, it had crushed him to imagine Tabitha in a place where he couldn’t reach her, couldn’t touch her. If none of that was true, he had no idea how he would handle the temptation just to see her face or hear her voice. If there was one thing this life had taught him, it was that avoiding temptation was not his strong suit. That was, after all, how he had ended up here in the first place.

~ * ~

Owing to their early shifts at the bakery, Sam’s housemates retired very early—at eight o’clock, most nights, so they could rise at three. It was Kevin’s business, in the legal sense, but Lola and Amy and Remy had all been with it from the beginning, and it was easy to see why. Kevin was a generous benefactor. He paid the lion’s share of rent on the house, plus most of the utilities, and threw around money here and there when somebody needed a car repair or dental work or any of the surprise expenses that came with being a regular human living an ordinary life.

A few days after Sam’s talk with Susanna, his mind was still in a fog over how to handle the new information, and thus nothing had changed. He fell asleep beside Amy as he always did, curled up against her, knowing that before the night was over he would be awoken by the dependable alarm clock of his own desire. Prepared for this inevitability, he had mentioned to her in passing that he was on the schedule to unload a late-night shipment at Brunson’s and would be gone when she awoke. She was used to this; as far as she knew, Brunson’s took such deliveries two or three times a week, which was the most he had dared to use this excuse since he began sleeping there regularly. It was fortunate that bakery workers had no blessed idea of how their suppliers operated.

When he awoke, he slipped out of bed carefully so as not to disturb her, pulling on the boxers he had dropped on the floor a few hours earlier. The rest of his clothes lay in a heap beside the dresser—it was a good thing she was nearly as messy as he—and he quietly carried them downstairs to dress. But when he reached the landing, he spotted a small light glowing in the kitchen. It was the one above the stove, illuminating one corner of the room with a moonlike glow while leaving the rest shrouded in darkness.

Turning the corner, he saw Rose sitting at the table with a mug of tea before her, rubbing her forehead with her free hand. Rose was Kevin’s longtime girlfriend, and the one resident besides himself who didn’t work at the bakery; she was a first-year teacher at a nearby elementary school, and to Sam, she looked the part. She had a round face with the faint beginning of a double chin, and a body that seemed to call out for children to sit on her lap—soft hips, soft breasts, but a nipped little waist. Her long brown hair was usually gathered up in a careless bun, which drew attention, at least for Sam, to her large, vulnerable brown eyes, which Sam suspected were part of the source of her day-to-day tribulations in her classroom. He had been a schoolboy once, and for all her apparent sweetness, she was not a teacher he would have taken seriously.

“Oh, hey,” he said. “Sorry, I didn’t realize anybody was up.”

She dismissed his intrusion with a wave of her hand. “It’s fine.”

He set down the bundle of clothes on the floor and quickly pulled on his pants—black jeans, well-worn—to at least be decent in front of her. As he buckled his belt and glanced at her, he realized her face was wet with tears. He asked, “What’s wrong?”

“Just work.”

“Something happen?”

She replied with a jerky shrug, but then began crying in earnest. He hastily finished pulling on his black t-shirt and stepped over to her. Crouching beside her chair, he rested his hands against her arm and knee. “Hey. Don’t be upset, okay? Tell me about it.”

“It’s the same thing as always. My boss, the kids—they all hate me. Well, the kids don’t hate me. They terrorize me, and then when I try to crack down on them, their parents hate me.” She roughly brushed away her tears. “And then they email my boss. It’s an endless cycle. And I know they’re not bad kids—”

“Sure they are,” said Sam. “They’re demonic little bastards.”

She burst out with a laugh, made uneven by her crying. “No, I know they aren’t,” she said dutifully.

“I bet some of them are. Every asshole adult starts somewhere. You should have seen the kind of stuff I did when I was a kid. I once cut open my teacher’s blouse with a pair of scissors when she was helping the kid next to me because I wanted to see her, uh—her bra.”

Rose laughed again, and Sam privately congratulated himself for dodging the word “corset.” Rose said, “But you didn’t grow up to be an asshole.”

“Depends on who you ask.”

“You’re not. You’re nice.” She took a shuddering breath and wiped away her remaining tears. “Kevin says I should just quit. He’s tired of hearing about it. All he ever says is that this is why a person should own their own business and not have to deal with BS from administrators and the state.”

“That’s one way to do it. Not sure running a bakery gets you out of BS from the state, though. Between inspections and licensing and taxes and everything else.”

She jutted out a hand in agreement. “Right? Ugh. I don’t mean to complain about him. I just had a bad day. I know you have to get to work.”

He rose up from his crouch and held out his arms to offer her a hug. She stood and accepted it, wrapping her arms around his neck. The gesture began to make her cry anew, a single shuddering sob, but then she stopped herself. He held her tight for a few moments, and then she pushed back. She said, “That’s one heck of a cologne you’re wearing.”

He felt momentarily embarrassed. Eau de Sam, Tabitha used to call it—the cocktail of pheromones his body produced to make him appealing to human women, which in quantity was practically an enchantment in itself. His prowling clothes, in which he had just dressed, were saturated in it. He let her go.

“How are you doing?” she asked, to his surprise.

He cocked his head. “What do you mean?”

“Just—” Her shoulders lifted and fell, as if the words to explain it eluded her. “You always look so sad.”

In the awkwardness of her observing this, he laughed. “Just getting past a rough year.”

“Well, if you ever want to talk about it—I’m glad to listen, all right? And I can keep a confidence.”

He smiled tightly. Not about this stuff, you can’t, he thought. He could just imagine how she would react if he sat down beside her and spelled it out. It’s like this, see, he would begin. I’m one of the Mara—the people of nightmares. It’s an old Norse name, because we’ve been around for a long, long time. We bring you your filthy dreams, and make you think it really was just a dream, and not us physically in your bed, having you.

Those big brown eyes. How they would grow.

But then, she would surely think it was just another of his jokes. He could probably keep going and tell her anything—about his partnership with Tabitha, and their role in the creation of the half-magical children called cambions, and the one inviolable rule never to interfere with the illusion that such a dream was merely a dream. He could tell her how Tabitha had broken that rule, but that it had been his fault, too. And then he would nosedive into genuine despair, and Rose would decide he was insane.

Unlike Tabitha, he couldn’t be punished. As an incubus, the leaders who ruled over the succubi held no power over him, in the technical sense; they couldn’t punish him directly. They could only label him an Obstructor and make it a crime to partner with him, once and for all. That was what Susanna kept trying to remind him about, and she was right. If it ever came to that, he would throw up his hands and call it a day. He wasn’t immortal, just hard to kill. There were still plenty of ways he could snuff himself out.

“Thanks,” he said. Right now his existential crisis was off less importance than his immediate need, which was to get the hell out of this house and find himself a dreamer. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

He kissed her on the top of her head, spontaneously, and headed out into the chilly spring darkness.