As soon as Sam arrived at the house in Nashville, Susanna welcomed him at the door with arms open for a hug. She was as much of a vision as always, tall and crowned in long hair like yellow cornsilk, wearing a flower-sprigged dress. She was the same age as Sam, pulled into a creek in heavy rainfall at her Wisconsin homestead, all the way back in the spring of 1852. Now she and Isaac lived in a quiet neighborhood on a street with children’s bikes in the yards and cheerful garden flags that changed with the seasons. Isaac’s truck advertised that he was a plumber, but that wasn’t really what he did.
“So good to see you.” Her hug was sincere and tight around his shoulders. “I’ve felt so bad for you, Sam. We worry all the time.”
He stepped past the threshold and saw that she had laid out a table full of food—salads and cold cuts and bowls of chips, a tray stacked with corn on the cob—all the summer staples. He knew that Isaac rarely ate anything, and Susanna couldn’t, so this feast was purely for his benefit. The gesture touched him. It was good to have somebody taking care of him.
“That looks amazing,” he told her.
She smiled. “The guest bed’s set up for you upstairs. Go on up and settle in, and then we’ll eat outside.”
He hiked up the white-carpeted stairs and followed the hallway to the room he remembered. It was a pretty space, decorated in Susanna’s feminine style—a quilt with a double-ring design, white curtains trimmed in crocheted lace, a white dresser and matching night tables with little round feet. A wrought iron candleholder sat on one of them, and on the dresser were a bowl and pitcher. Susanna lived a perfectly modern life, but her sense of what made a house a home hadn’t budged an inch since the last day of her human existence.
Sam dropped his gym bag at the foot of the bed. But then, looking up at it—perhaps it was the design of the quilt, or the sight of the small dried-flower wreath that hung above the headboard—he suddenly remembered that the last time he had slept in this bed had been with Tabby, halfway through the cross-country journey that had yanked them out of Lowell and, eventually, deposited them in Portland. Tabitha had been so scared then. She had lived all her life in New England, and had left only under duress, because of a mistake Sam had made.
No. It hadn’t been a mistake. He had no regrets about what he had done: how he had slipped out after a visit with one of his longtime dreamers and come upon her little daughter struggling in the backyard pool, moments from drowning, and at great risk to himself had waded in to rescue her. In the chaos that followed, his dreamer caught sight of him, and—unsurprisingly—the description she gave to the police was uncannily good. He and Tabitha fled to avoid being accused of a much-dreaded Rule violation. Their path out of trouble landed them at Isaac’s, where they received all the documents they needed for a new, ostensibly legitimate life. In the end that effort had failed, but the friendship remained.
He ran his hand across the quilt, remembering. In this very place, beneath this very cover, he had made love to her. And he would get to sleep there again tonight. It was a comforting thought.
“Sam!” Susanna was calling him from downstairs. “Don’t fall asleep. There’s food.”
He smiled at her solicitous attention and headed down to the overflowing table.
Outside, Isaac had fired up the grill and was cooking up a pair of steaks. Sam discovered this when he came outside with his plate heaped with a sandwich and potato salad and everything else Susanna had laid out temptingly before him. “Man, there’s enough food inside for a block party,” Sam pointed out. “I don’t even know how I’m going to finish this, let alone eat a steak.”
“Oh, you can. I’ve seen you eat.” Isaac poked a fork into one of the steaks and flipped it. More quietly, he said, “Besides, it’s good for the neighbors to see us cooking. Makes us look normal.”
“Pretty sure you’ve achieved that already.”
His friend shook his head slightly. With his shaggy blond hair and piercing blue eyes, Isaac always looked a shade too boyish to really seem credible as a middle-class plumber with a wife and mortgage, but his neighbors appeared to buy it. “Me, maybe. Miss Wisconsin 1852, not so much. People keep asking her when we’re going to have kids. One of these days I’m going to open my mouth and tell them we’ve got about four thousand of ’em.”
“Don’t do that.”
“People are goddamn nosy. Why it’s any of their business whether we have kids, I can’t figure out. Maybe we have fertility problems, all right? Maybe we need to see a doctor.”
Sam couldn’t help but laugh. He popped a potato chip into his mouth. “You get right on that.”
“Yeah, we’ll leave it in the hands of God.” He pulled a steak off the grill and slipped it onto a plate. “I think I’m actually going to eat for once.”
Susanna came outside with a glass of wine, and together they sat around the patio table to enjoy a companionable meal. Susanna prodded him with questions about his life in Portland, and he answered carefully, emphasizing the improvements to his emotional health while leaving out certain details. Rose’s observations about his lack of backstory, for example, and the little things he said and did that weren’t quite right. If either Isaac or Susanna found out about that, they would have trapped him in a fireproof box and kept him there until Tabitha was finally paroled.
After dinner, he had barely lit a cigarette when the screen door pushed open at the back of the house, and through it stepped Meridiana. It had been quite a while since Sam had seen her, but there was no mistaking her: the wild headful of red curls, the intimidating hazel gaze, and the way her mouth managed to be sensuous and pinched slightly in judgment, both at once. She had been around for a long, long time.
“Oh, God,” he muttered. Behind him, Isaac snickered.
“Samuel,” she greeted him. She smiled, but he wasn’t buying it. Nevertheless, he got up and hugged her, and she openly squeezed his biceps and rubbed his waist in a way that was a little more than friendly. “Look at you. You’ve been hitting the gym.”
“Very funny.”
“I tell people, whenever I talk about you—here, let me have one of those.” She beckoned for a cigarette, and he passed her one and lit it with his Zippo rather than his palm. “Oh, what a classic gentleman you are. Anyway, I tell people, Sam is the perfect physical design for an incubus. The face, nothing, who cares, but a body that just will not quit. And very nicely endowed, or so goes the rumor. This is what any woman would want to see in her dreams. Do you ever get turned away?”
“All the time,” said Sam.
“Not really.”
“More often than I’d like. Maybe it’s the face.”
Meridiana brushed away this idea. “There’s no accounting for taste. But you do look well. I’m told you haven’t been feeling so well.”
“I’m trying to muscle past it. But yeah, of course I’ve been low. You know what happened. And it’s frankly bullshit.”
Meridiana’s eyes narrowed incrementally. “You don’t agree that Tabitha broke the Rule.”
He hadn’t spoken to Meridiana since it all went down, and he was certain that whatever she had heard, it was warped and biased. Sam leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and enlisted his hands for emphasis. “It’s like this. I leave my dreamer’s house at two or three in the morning, pass over the backyard, see her kid flailing around in the swimming pool, just her arms sticking out above the water. It was way too cold to be swimming, but they were probably getting it serviced and it was uncovered and so the kid got excited and snuck out. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. The kid’s drowning. So I do what anybody would do, and I climb in and pull her out.”
“Except that most people won’t be instantly destroyed if they swallow enough water to extinguish their delicate little ember of a soul,” Meridiana pointed out.
“Oh, don’t think I wasn’t aware of that. The whole thing was fucking terrifying, but what else was I supposed to do?” When Meridiana raised her eyebrows, he added, “Would you have left her in the pool? Honestly. Would you?”
Meridiana conceded with a shrug. “Probably not. But I would have washed my hands of it once I left, and my understanding is that you didn’t stop there, and that’s why Tabitha is in trouble.”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
“Yeah, well, it just wasn’t that simple. The mom—my dreamer—heard the commotion and came out and saw me resuscitating her kid—I’ve never been so sure I was about to die again, by the way—and freaked all the hell out, naturally. I knew I had to get out of there, but I was too wet to spark away, so I had to jump the fence and run. I know the situation looks bizarre, but the kid is safe, and that’s all that matters. But next thing I know, this police artist’s sketch of me is all over the news channels, and it’s really good. Like, crazy accurate. Which would have been hilarious, since the mom was describing the guy she’d been summoning into her dreams for years, except it was actually a real problem.”
“That’s for sure.”
Sam took a long drag from his cigarette and regathered his thoughts. “Our first impulse is, okay, get out of Massachusetts. Get as far away as possible. Figure out where we can live a quiet little normal life and park ourselves there. But before we can get out of town, the cops arrest some guy who lives a few streets away from the dreamer. Superficially looks kind of like me—Irish, black hair, dark eyes, lifts weights. Has a girlfriend and a little kid of his own. They charge him with leaving the scene of a crime, but they’re investigating to try to pin something way worse on him—kidnapping, attempted murder. I’m feeling like shit about that, and so is Tabby.”
Meridiana shook her head slowly. “You can’t meddle in human affairs, Sam. It’s one thing not to be a monster out there in the world, turning a blind eye to some drowning child, and quite another to get all wrapped up in the details. That way lies madness.”
“Do you want the story, or do you want to just sit there and tell me I’m crazy? Because I feel like that has already been proven many times over.”
She smirked. “Apologies. Go on.”
“So we’re leaving town, but Tabitha wants to try one thing. The kid’s parents are separated. The mom is my dreamer, but the dad has also been one of Tabitha’s dreamers for years and years. One of her favorites. Cameron. She started visiting him when he was in college over in Boston. At some point he got a serious girlfriend and they moved in together, and Tabitha didn’t want to give him up. So if she wanted to keep seeing him, you know—”
“You’d have to do the tag-team thing,” Meridiana filled in, looking amused. She flicked ash into the astray Susanna had quietly set down in the center of the table. “Make sure both halves of the couple are distracted so neither one wakes up. Such a kinky little pleasure, when you have a partner.”
“Yeah.” Sam gave a short laugh. “But even after they split up, I didn’t have a reason to stop. I liked her. Anyway, Tabby decides she’s going to pay the guy one last visit and suggest to him in his dream that the cops picked up the wrong guy, there’s been a terrible mistake, and he should talk to his ex-wife and get her to retract the identification, or whatever you call it.”
Meridiana’s eyebrows had been climbing higher and higher as Sam spoke. As soon as he stopped, she said, “Well, I can’t think of anything sexier than bringing up your dreamer’s daughter’s recent brush with death. Was it as arousing as it sounds?”
Sam gave her a look. “She wasn’t going to have sex with him. She just needed him to summon her so she could make the suggestion. It’s not against the rules,” he added quickly, seeing that she was about to protest. “We’re allowed to inspire, within reason. You know how many times I’ve suggested to women that they get the fuck out of obviously bad situations? Hundreds at this point, no doubt.”
“That’s different. Giving a human a little nudge that could plausibly come from their own dreaming mind still respects the illusion. It isn’t knowledge from beyond.” She pointed at him with the hand in which the cigarette smoldered. “To use the technical term. You can’t go around dropping in new knowledge the dreamer couldn’t possibly have had.”
“This wasn’t knowledge from beyond. It was just inspiring doubt where doubt deserved to exist, because the guy they arrested didn’t do it. I did. But it didn’t matter, because the dreamer woke up, and he didn’t dismiss her, and she didn’t leave. She told him the problem, and they talked about it, and then she left. Two days later, they dropped the charges against the guy. The kid fully recovers. Everybody lives happily ever after. Except for me and Tabby.”
Meridiana looked at him silently for a moment. Then she asked, “How is that not a Rule violation? How does that in any way respect the illusion that a dream is just a dream?”
“Because the dreamer wasn’t under any illusion. He woke up but didn’t dismiss her. He spoke to her directly. She’s been visiting him for going on twenty years. At some point, it seems, he either suspected or understood that he was getting visited by a succubus. Like your priests.” Sam held Meridiana’s gaze, and she responded with a look that betrayed only mild surprise at being called out. “They know what you are. They know they’re not just having sinful dreams about their platonic dinner companion. Sure, you maintain the illusion, but let’s be real. Everybody knows what’s up.”
Susanna, who had been hovering on the perimeter of the conversation slowly washing dishes in the kitchen sink, looked over her shoulder at Meridiana. “He has a point. I mean, I do think Tabitha technically broke the Rule, but only technically. And I think it’s pretty clear that her instincts were right about this dreamer. The Leaders never would have even known about it if they hadn’t sent their spy network after her ahead of time.”
Meridiana frowned. “What do you mean?”
Sam leaned back in his chair, making broad gestures with both arms. “That’s just it. They were pissed about what I did, getting caught by a dreamer and getting publicity, but since they don’t have any power over me, they had to get to me through her. So they sent a Searcher to tail her, waiting for her to do something wrong so they could separate us. And then that Searcher followed her into the dreamer’s apartment and listened in. Completely against the rules.”
Meridiana, drawing delicately on her cigarette, looked at him appraisingly. After a moment, she asked, “How is it against the rules for a Searcher to go into the dreamer’s apartment? It’s not unusual for the Leaders to put people under surveillance. If you’re under surveillance and you get caught violating a rule, that’s on you.”
Sam shook his head adamantly. “Thresholds have rules for us. We’re demons, aren’t we? What’s the definition of a demon?”
Meridiana was looking at him with an evaluating gaze. “An unclean spirit that can be summoned.”
“Right. You have to engage with the person whose house it is, or whose dream it is, and establish that, first thing. With a dreamer, you show up, you do a little sweet-talking with the miasma, and you’re either summoned or dismissed. If you’re dismissed, you leave. You don’t hang around and make a snack or run their pockets for petty cash. You leave. You haven’t been summoned.”
“I think I see where you’re going with this.”
“Right. So this Searcher shows up—a succubus just like any other one, except she’s old and tired and loves to snitch—and hides in the apartment, but never gives the dreamer the opportunity to summon her. So why is she there?”
Meridiana smiled without humor. “Well, to rat on Tabitha.”
“Yeah. And it’s bullshit. You can’t set aside higher law—law that rules all demons, even the really powerful ones—so you can enforce your little local ordinance about not communicating with humans who wake up. The order of things is, humans don’t have to deal with demons lurking around their houses secretly. You announce your presence, and you’re bound by their answer.”
She turned her head and exhaled a thin stream of smoke. “I do see your point. I don’t know who you’d appeal to, though. Has Tabitha heard this rationale of yours?”
“No, because I can’t talk to her. Back when she first got called to the lake, I knew she was in trouble over the whole situation, but I didn’t find out the part about the Searcher spying on her until after the judgment had been rendered. And then it hit me while I was fuming about it that this never should have happened in the first place.”
Meridiana nodded. She looked thoughtful for a few moments, and then said, “Well, the reason I’m here is that I wanted to be sure you know that Tabitha is actively working on a solution. Right as we speak, she’s trying to come up with a way to get a reprieve from your seventy-five-year ban. So try not to be too discouraged, Sam. Who knows, maybe she’ll be successful.”
Sam tried not to let his skepticism show on his face. It stood to reason that if Tabitha was indeed out there, she would be trying to find a way to shorten the punishment. But it also stood to reason that Meridiana would tell him that, whether or not she had active knowledge of what Tabitha was up to. Isaac and Susanna had called her here. Isaac and Susanna wanted him to leave Amy. They were not above telling him whatever they thought he wanted to hear, if it served a higher purpose.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“You know I can’t tell you that.”
“Do you know?”
She looked at Sam without answering, but her expression said yes.
“Can you get a message to her, if I give you one?”
“Of course not. A partnership ban means she isn’t supposed to communicate with you in any way, and that includes through us. But you have to trust that she’s working to resolve this.” Meridiana leaned in toward him and made meaningful eye contact. “Don’t get yourself tangled up in any relationships that are going to be difficult to leave. Not while she’s trying so hard.”
“Ah.” So here they were, no longer beating around the bush. He sat up straighter. “Right, this is the part about how I should ditch Amy while I sit by the phone, waiting for it to ring.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Isaac already gave me this lecture. I’m not going to break off a perfectly good relationship in the slim chance the punishment gets changed. If a miracle occurs, yeah, of course I’d leave Amy. But barring that—no dice. Next subject.”
Meridiana straightened up too, folding one arm across her waist and holding her smoking hand away from herself. “I’m trying to understand why this relationship—which is very dangerous, as you know—even appeals to you.”
“Because she’s fun.”
That made Meridiana smile. “Fun.”
“Yeah, she’s a lot of fun. I like having her around. I know you guys are worried about these people finding out what I am and spreading information about it or whatever, and then me being labeled an Obstructor. The bigger risk, if you ask me, is that when I’m by myself, I don’t actually want to stay alive. All I think about is how bad I miss Tabby and how I’m not going to make it to the end of her sentence anyway, so there’s no point in drawing out the misery. I still feel that with Amy, but it’s manageable. Somebody’s expecting me to come home at the end of the day. Somebody puts her arms around me when I’m making love to her, and it actually means something. It gets me through the day.”
Whatever it was about how he explained it, it seemed to have an impact. Meridiana smiled sympathetically and nodded. “I get it. It’s just—human relationships come with human problems, Sam.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m prepared for those.”
Isaac got up and began scraping the grill. Meridiana sighed and stood, straightening her skirt. She rested a hand on Sam’s head and ruffled his hair as a mother would. “Take courage, my friend,” she said. “We’ll get you through this.”