Isaac squinted into the camera mounted on a tripod in the kitchen and gestured for Sam to move to the left. “Get out of the shadow,” he said. “But, no, stay against the background.”
“You’re worse than the actual DMV.”
“Ah, shut up. Be grateful that my camera’s putting up with your face.”
He snapped a few shots, then slid a form over to Sam to fill out. “Whatever address you want,” he said. “And don’t lie about your height, shorty.”
Sam began to slowly fill out the form in block letters, as if it were from an official government agency. This was a process he had been through countless times over the many decades of his existence. Usually he and Tabitha collaborated on a surname, but it had certainly never been Sullivan. Amy had ended up knowing him by his birth name only because, at the time he met her, he had the bold indifference of someone who doesn’t care whether he lives or dies. And dying would certainly have been the result if he had played it loose long enough to attract the concern of the local succubi.
As Isaac went off to make him a stack of new documents, Susanna stepped into the kitchen and began taking leftovers out of the fridge. It was his second day in Tennessee and already lunchtime, though he had awoken barely an hour earlier. “Morning, sleepyhead,” Susanna greeted him. “Somebody was out late.”
“I’m on vacation.”
“Did you find a good dreamer?”
“Two, as a matter of fact.”
She grinned, setting another Tupperware on the counter. “Glad to hear you’re feeling like yourself again.”
He smiled back and lifted the corner of a container to tear off a piece of barbecued chicken. He had gone a bit overboard the night before, first with the dreamer he’d spotted at a club, then with a second woman at the same house who might have been the first one’s mother—risky as hell, because of the empty half of the bed, whose absent resident could have returned at any moment. But by then Sam had succumbed fully to the desire to binge, and for so long he had played it safe that the element of danger was hopelessly seductive. The only thing that stopped him from pursuing a third dreamer was the sight of the sunrise. He still felt the gloating satisfaction of it, just like sitting back after a holiday feast, secretly pleased at his overindulgence.
“Did Isaac tell you about the party tonight?” asked Susanna.
“He mentioned something about it. Not much.”
“We’re having a few people over. Nothing too loud. Can’t have the neighbors calling the police.”
He flipped back the plastic wrap on a bowl of chip dip and took a handful of chips from the bag next to it. “What kind of people?”
“Our kind of people.” She smiled over her shoulder at him, faux-seductively, and flicked on her demon eyes: a momentary switch of her pretty cornflower-blue eyes to marbles of pure black. It was a weird little quirk of Susanna’s, how she employed that for comic effect; most Mara only did it when they needed to scare the shit out of a human. He could count on his hands the number of times he’d seen Tabitha do it, and he found it creepy as hell every time; but Susanna seemed to use it like cute profanity.
“Sounds fun,” he said, though it was more polite than sincere. The Mara were normally wary of each other to a certain degree, which didn’t sound, to Sam, like much of a party; besides which, though he might pursue as many human women as the length of the night allowed him to, he wasn’t about to hook up with a succubus who wasn’t Tabitha. He would rather head back downtown for another go at the clubs.
Nevertheless, around nine PM Isaac cranked up some dance music in the basement, Susanna set out the food and a staggering amount of wine and liquor, and the guests began to arrive. Apparently, the Mara of Nashville were a tighter crowd than in the other places where Sam had lived. Within an hour, the party-lit basement was densely populated and pleasantly hot, the music was throbbing, and although the guests could not have actually been drunk, they were certainly acting like it. At any club Sam would have plunged right in, but these women gave him pause. There was a reason why, after his first heady encounter with a succubus following his rebirth, he hadn’t touched another one until he met Tabitha: because they could kill you, and often enough did. An angry or slighted succubus could easily drown her bedmate; Meridiana had done it to three of her partners, and God only knew how many more temporary lovers. He had no overwhelming desire to squeeze in among a dense group of them, and the whole scene made him nostalgic for his evenings in Portland: the warm lighting above the kitchen table; the friends gathered close around dishes of hot, delicious food; Amy’s hand, beneath the table, resting against the inside of his thigh. The board games afterward. The rising laughter.
“Hey, don’t you wanna dance?”
The woman smiling down at him had Viking-blond hair to her waist and gorgeous green eyes. She wore low-slung white jeans and a loose top that barely reached below her breasts—styled like a football jersey, but definitely not regulation. Most interesting of all, she had a pierced belly button, which was probably difficult as hell to maintain, unless she was fairly new and had it done before she died. Tabitha couldn’t even keep her ears pierced because they kept healing over.
“I was thinking about it,” he said. He was sitting on the stairs, drinking straight whiskey from a plastic cup.
“Well, come on.” She grabbed his hand and pulled him along, and he had no choice but to follow.
It was a good idea. Once he was up and dancing, the gloomy outsider feeling went away. Sam loved to dance, and he was good at it. As a kid he had climbed up to the roof of the tenement building on summer evenings and danced with his sister Anna to the sounds of the ceilidh musicians playing at the taverns several stories below. Later, with Tabitha, social dances had been one of their major sources of entertainment. He missed real, skilled dancing, but he didn’t exactly mind the overt grinding that had replaced it.
Especially not with this girl. She was masterful at holding him just slightly back from where he wanted to be, and it stirred up a tantalizing sort of frustration, building the desire to simply grab her and press her up against the wall and take control of the situation. When the third song ended, and he’d had all he could take without giving in to the force of his lust, he grinned at her and gave her hair an affectionate stroke. “You’re good,” he told her.
“Why, thank you.”
“I’m gonna step out for a minute.”
She trailed her hand along his arm as he squeezed past, but the next thing he knew she had grabbed his hand and, in two steps, backed him against the wall. She took his head in her hands and kissed him deeply, ending with a bite on his bottom lip that turned into a second kiss. He stopped himself and lifted his chin to break it.
“There’s a guest room upstairs,” she said, pulling at his belt.
“I know. I’m staying in it.”
She smiled. “How convenient.”
He laughed and shook his head. Her behavior, he knew, wasn’t unusual for a succubus—even Tabitha would have rolled her eyes at it and expected him to fend her off, without any excess drama—but it would have sent Amy into a rage. Not that this girl would have accepted a human girlfriend as any good reason to leave him alone.
“I’m partnered,” he said apologetically.
Her smile widened. “No, you’re not. Not right now.”
“That’s news to me.”
She made a face of pretty disdain, smacked him hard in the stomach, and moved on.
He exhaled a messy sigh and shouldered through the crowd to reach the stairs. Susanna had instructed the guests to smoke in the kitchen rather than outside so the neighbors wouldn’t be disturbed by talking and laughter, but he needed to get a new pack from his gym bag. When he reached the guest room, however, it was clear that some other couple had gotten the same idea as his dance partner downstairs. The door was shut, and judging by the noise behind it, they wouldn’t appreciate him barging in.
He frowned, then stepped into Isaac’s office across the hall. The closet was like a miniature warehouse store: wire shelves holding reams of paper and printer ink, boxes of pens, laminating film, and cleaning products. Cases of bottled spring water were stacked on the floor beside a large plastic storage container. Surely there were cigarettes around here somewhere. He shifted things around on the shelf, found nothing, and popped open the lid on the storage box.
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Guns. At least two dozen handguns, some obviously very old, others far more modern, were piled into the box. It was nowhere near full, but it held more guns than Sam had ever seen in the same place in his life.
He pushed the lid back down and carefully shifted the box back into place.
Then he jogged quickly back down the stairs.
By now, Isaac was sitting at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, smoking. He smiled subtly when Sam appeared. “Came up to escape Cara, huh?”
“Is that her name?”
Isaac nodded and slid his box of cigarettes across the counter to Sam. “Recently single. She was asking me about you, but let the record show, I merely explained why your partner isn’t here with you. I didn’t encourage her.”
Sam lit up. “Amy would have killed her if she’d seen that go down.”
Isaac smirked. “Yeah, let’s see her try. By ‘partner’ I meant Tabitha, you know.”
“I know that.” He sank down onto a barstool across from Isaac and put his head down, resting it against his arm.
“Your life is too complicated, man. All the sneaking around you gotta be doing. What do you do, tell her you work a night job?”
“Kind of.”
“That sounds exhausting. We ought to take a long weekend someplace, you and me. Vegas, maybe. That’d be fun, right? Stuff like that to look forward to, you can survive this however long it takes.”
Sam sat up and nodded, but for a few moments they sat in silence as Sam debated whether to ask the question. He couldn’t make sense of the stash in the supply closet. He knew Isaac’s background only broadly—Civil War, tent fire, had never left Georgia prior to his rebirth—and he knew Isaac was Susanna’s third partner, but not what had happened to her first two. In former times it hadn’t been all that uncommon for a husband to unexpectedly arrive home, find a shadowy figure in bed with his wife, and shoot to kill. The incubus was instantly immolated, body and soul, and ceased to exist—leaving only the wife, either shot dead by the same bullet or else awakening from her miasma haze to find an infuriated, bewildered husband and no evidence of the scene he claimed to have stumbled upon. It had happened to Alexander, Tabitha’s first partner; she had gleaned from a newspaper article why he had never come home. As a rule, incubi didn’t kill each other; they left any necessary justice to the women, who didn’t need weapons beyond their own elemental power.
“All right, I’m going to ask,” he said. “Why do you have a giant box full of guns upstairs?”
Isaac laughed. “Oh, you found that, huh? They’re just from people passing through. Mostly from succubi, believe it or not. They’ve found a lot of ’em in lakes. Other times, they’re walking home from a bar and some guy comes out of the shadows, thinking he’s found an easy target, and they think it’s funny to take his gun when they loot the body. Word gets out that you used to be a soldier, and then everybody thinks, ‘I bet Isaac’ll think this is cool.’” He grinned at Sam. “And you know what? I usually do. Not like I can walk into a store and buy one.”
“Tabitha would freak the fuck out if I had even one gun on the house. She doesn’t even like seeing them in movies. She’s always afraid I’ll get killed the way her first partner did.” This was normally the moment in a conversation where he liked to delve into his best and most entertaining near-miss stories, but he abruptly realized he just wasn’t in the mood. In the uneasy silence that followed, the other obvious thing felt glaring to him: he’d lapsed into talking about Tabitha again, and it was probably annoying the hell out of his friends how constantly he did that.
“You okay, man?” Isaac asked, and his bright blue eyes reflected genuine concern. “For somebody who says he’s getting through the day all right, you sure don’t look all right to me.”
Sam flicked his cigarette at the ashtray before it burned Susanna’s immaculate counter. “I just need for shit not to go wrong for a little while.”
Isaac uttered a dark laugh. “That’s one kind of magic we don’t have, my friend.”
~ * ~
In the end, the trip to Nashville was more restorative than Sam had expected. It had escaped his notice just how wearying it was to be around humans all the time, in a constant state of pretending to be something he was not, and how lonely to never talk to anyone like himself. As he stepped off the plane, stretching his long-confined limbs and breathing in the wet, cool air in the gangway, he reflected that even a few days with his fellow Mara had been a therapy he sorely needed.
His housemates arrived home happy and tired, and they all went to bed early. In the morning, mindful of Rose’s unnerving observations of him, Sam redoubled his efforts to appear unimpeachably human. With Amy still drowsing in bed, he padded off to the bathroom, simulated emptying his bladder, and brushed his teeth. He decided to shave, and as he finished up, Amy slipped into the bathroom and ran her hands across his abs. “It’s been way too long,” she said.
They returned to the bed for a little while, and then Amy proposed going out for breakfast. That was a tricky one for Sam because one couldn’t order alcohol for breakfast at IHOP. But he ordered orange juice and, while she was in the bathroom, took the flask from his pocket and drained it into his glass. Now it was perfectly potable.
“So what did you do in Nashville?” she asked. The waitress had just set down their orders—blueberry pancakes for Amy and a plate of practically everything for Sam, because the skepticism about his metabolism was one thing he could abide.
“Just hung out, mostly. Got a visit from another friend, had a cookout. They threw a party one night.”
“A party?” She looked vaguely nervous. “Meet anybody fun?”
He laughed. “Not particularly. Their friends are pretty boring.”
“Do your friends know about me?”
He cut into his eggs. “Sure they do. They know all about you.”
She reached for the syrup and gave him a smirk that looked somehow uncertain. “And do they approve?”
He had taken a bite of ham and eggs and potatoes, but he nodded reassuringly. He swallowed, then said, “Of course. What’s not to approve of?”
She drizzled syrup over her pancakes, but instead of eating, she folded her hands on the table in front of her. “So, I need to tell you . . . while I was in Los Angeles—which was great, by the way—I got a little freaked out, so in the middle of the night—I mean, literally at like two in the morning—I made Lola drive me to CVS to get a pregnancy test.” She laughed nervously and looked away. “She must have thought I was crazy. It was so random.”
“And?”
She cautiously met his eyes again, and smiled, brightly but uneasily. “I’m pregnant.”
He set down his fork.
She raised both hands barely off the table, holding them up in a steadying way. “I know. I’m also pretty surprised.”
“You’re on the pill.”
“The shot, not the pill—it’s every three months—and it worked great, you know, plus I got them to prescribe me the kind I could pick up at the pharmacy and do at home, so I didn’t even have to go to the clinic like I used to. But then I spaced on picking it up, just by, like, two weeks at the most, but I didn’t think it was a big deal. And the shot made it so I didn’t get periods anymore anyway, so I didn’t even notice . . .”
As she was talking, explaining—all of which Sam only half-heard, because human medicine was all an irrelevant fog to him and he cared only about what this meant—he felt the terrible revelation of this like a truck screeching its brakes directly in his path. She’d been fucking somebody else. God only knew how long she’d been doing it. And he had two guesses about who it might be.
“Oh, stop looking at me like that,” she said, tipping her head beseechingly. “Are you mad? I was hoping you’d be happy. Like, it’s not true that you can’t have kids, like you thought. You seemed sad about that when we talked. So this could be cool, right? I think you’d make a great dad.”
His brain struggled to catch up with the puzzle of this, its implications. Anger was the first thing that smacked him—for her duplicity, her dishonesty, and how much he had trusted her. But then, hadn’t he been doing the same? Could he really condemn her for going to bed with someone behind his back when he went to such lengths to hide that he did the same several times a week?
It’s different, he thought—his mind flatly rejecting the effort to forgive and excuse. His elemental self had no role in this relationship. In this body, he was faithful to her. And yet, even as these thoughts fed his anger, he processed the fact that, despite their conversation in the park, she seemed to believe it was reasonable to assume he was the father. Something had happened, something she didn’t want to own up to, and that now she had to hide.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m trying to wrap my head around this.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was late with the shot. I really just didn’t think it mattered.”
“No, don’t—don’t apologize.” He rested his elbows on the table and let his forehead drop to his hands. He was picturing Remy, cheerful swinger that he was, but Remy’s behavior toward Amy had never raised any flags with Sam. His mind switched to Kevin, and suddenly the image appeared of Kevin and Amy sitting on the floor by the basement television, smoking weed together. Kevin in the backyard, asking him if the two of them were exclusive at this point. Sam looked up at Amy, who was still looking across the table at him, over her cooling pancakes, with hopeful eyes. How could you do this, he thought.
“I need a minute,” he said.
She called his name as he got up abruptly and headed out the door. Outside, he immediately lit a cigarette to calm his nerves, ignoring the disapproving glares of the patrons waiting near the door. This wasn’t like his prowling; it was nothing like his prowling. That was about the core of his nature; this was about trust. The morality of sex could be slippery among both humans and once-humans, but there was no circumstance in which it was okay to sleep with a mutual friend and conceal that fact. That was a good part of why he didn’t simplify his life, and gratify his curiosity, by visiting Rose at night when Kevin was out of town. He had no doubt she would summon him instantly if he visited her in her sleep; she was practically doing it while awake.
Rose. Her face suddenly appeared in his mind, and the weight of the most awful realization yet came upon him. Rose was already pregnant with Kevin’s child. If Sam didn’t play along with this fiction that he had fathered Amy’s baby, it would quickly come out that Kevin had been a little too busy within the household. He couldn’t even imagine how crushing that blow would be to Rose.
He curled his hand around the metal railing and drew hard on his cigarette, making the ember glow cherry-red. The only option, at least for now, was to go along with it.
Human relationships come with human problems, Sam.
He exhaled through his nostrils and threw the smoldering end into the parking lot.
Back inside, Amy sat at the table with her head in her hands, looking thoroughly beside herself. When he reappeared, she took one look at him and let out a sob. “Sam—”
“Amy. It’s okay.”
She looked so fragile, as if she might crack like an eggshell. Her face was entirely wet with tears. Her eyes begged him to reassure her further.
He leaned toward her and picked up his fork again. “A kid deserves better than to be introduced to the world by his mother crying into her pancakes. Eat. We’ll figure out the details. It’s all going to work out.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m a hundred percent positive.”
She cracked a smile. Her smile was so endearing that he spontaneously remembered that, indeed, he loved her. Under the anger and betrayal and the fear that he couldn’t possibly pull this off, there was his love for her that had grown all on its own. It might be enough to get by.