How to Kill an Incubus: A Rae Erickson Story (10 page)

He pulled the covers down and arranged me under them. I resisted the urge to ask him to stay—he never did—and shut my eyes instead. Then his lips brushed against mine.

When I opened my eyes again, he was gone and my bedroom had been plunged into total darkness.

JP Fontaine was angry. This was obvious because he’d just punched a guy in the face and, from my vantage point in my rental car across the street, I could see that his intent had been to squash the guy’s eye into its socket.

JP had an anger problem.

Over the past four days, I watched him slap, punch, kick, and throw things like a spoilt child. I was never close enough to hear much of anything but I was sure he punctuated these attacks by shouting French obscenities. These disagreements mostly occurred outside Club Nicolette—which, coincidentally, turned out to be Ivanov’s club, and happened in broad daylight. Yet no one so much as batted an eyelid at a guy hurling a liquor bottle at another guy.

“The perks of being a tool,” I said aloud, taking a big bite out of my club sandwich before I snapped a shot of the dark-haired man with my camera.

Looking in from the outside wasn’t going to help. If I wanted to find out what JP was involved in, I needed to get into the club. Andrei’s livid voice reverberated in my head, telling me not to have anything to do with Ivanov. I shook it away. Even if I didn’t want to do this, Ana Fontaine had wired me a ridiculous sum of money—so ridiculous I almost rang her up to ask if she’d meant to add the two zeros, which made me irreversibly bound to this assignment.

Clubbing
time
, I thought resignedly, starting the car up again and pressing the button that rolled the window down.

Andrei wasn’t going to be pleased. But then again, he could go right back to hell, for all I cared.

Chapter 7

I sensed him before I saw him, except that “him” turned out to be a “her”.

This radar thing should come with a gender-identification thingy
, I thought, annoyed.

“You’ve been fucking Andrei,” her heavily-accented husky voice rang from behind me.

Despite the loud dance music the Nicolette’s resident DJ seemed to favor, I heard the succubus loud and clear. Since she was so close, I also felt the strong pull of sexual energy she radiated and it was all directed at me. I could feel it around me, like a helicopter hovering above my head, but it wasn’t tugging at me.

So I guess this immunity thing has its perks.

Refusing to relinquish the barstool I’d fought tooth and nail for, I turned at the waist, still holding my half-empty glass of Coke. “Who are you and what do you want?”

She licked her lips, her voice loud and clear as she replied, “Selene. And all I want to know is how you… came to belong to my lord.”

Selene was a tall, curvy knockout dressed in a ridiculously tiny strapless red dress. Her honey-colored hair fell in a stylish bob that framed her heart-shaped face. Her blue eyes were rimmed with kohl and her full lips painted blood-red. And those lips curved into a sly smile as she returned my once-over with one of her own.

“Belong to him?” I spluttered, despite my previous stance of not communicating with supernatural creatures. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“You shouldn’t be here,
ma petite
. I sniffed you out the second you walked in. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one.”

I hopped off the barstool, annoyed to see that she dwarfed me by a few inches, even in my pumps. “I can handle myself.”

She cocked her head, the crafty smile still pasted on her face. “I can see why he’d like you. You are… feisty. However, there are some out here who would love nothing more than to challenge Andrei and what better way than to take away his… plaything?”

I glared at her, ignoring the spike of fear in my gut. “I’m not his plaything. He has no claim on me, nor I on him. This conversation is over.” I tried to move past her but she reached out and grabbed my arm, her inhuman strength keeping me there.

“Get your sticky hands off me, you little bitch!”

“Because you are his, I will watch over you,” Selene murmured into my ear, her lips slightly brushing my lobe. “And you are very wrong. You are his now and, as such, are bonded to him because you have exchanged more than essence. Be careful tonight,
chérie
.”

“Fuck off,” I retorted, and she released me, allowing me to dive right into the sea of bodies, sweat beginning to trickle down my back. “Bonded” to Andrei. “Belonging” to him. How ludicrous was that?! I had never heard anything more stupid or more insulting.

It was painfully obvious that dousing myself in Jennifer Lopez’s Blue Glow did zilch to disguise the fact that I’d been having repeated sex with the king of the incubi. Just how long would his… “smell” last on me? Days? Weeks? Months? Years?!

“Deep breaths, Rae,” I told myself, bumping into a grinding twosome and receiving heavy-lidded glares in return.

I had to find JP quickly. The fact that I’d scoped the club out the last time I’d been here following Karr was of little help. There were far too many people in my way, making it extremely difficult to locate my left hand, let alone the one person I was looking for.

After being bumped, grabbed and shoved, I finally gave up and returned to the bar to order a Pellegrino. My throat was dry and I was revoltingly sweaty. There was nothing worse than being sober and icky at the same time.

“Baby Phat! Fancy seeing you here.”

I groaned, rethinking my decision to remain teetotal. “Don’t talk to me,” I muttered, positive he could hear me over the thumping sound of Sia trying to compete with a she-wolf. “Don’t even fucking look at me.”

“Come on, Baby Phat,” Temp said loudly, sounding miffed. “We’re kin!”

I turned to glare at him and did a double-take. Dressed in a teal golf shirt and dark jeans, he looked ridiculously good-looking. If I hadn’t recognized his annoyingly sarcastic voice, I wouldn’t have known he was the same guy I met two months ago.

“What did you do to your hair?” I choked out as I saw the bartender set a bottle of sparkling water in front of me out of my periphery.

“You like?” Temp grinned, running a hand through his thick jet-black curls.

It was completely ridiculous to think that someone’s hair color could make you see that person in a totally different light but I was completely taken aback by how it transformed him into someone who looked… well, related to me. We’d both inherited Lauren’s high cheekbones, her ever-so-slightly pointed ears that I’d always despised, and the curves of her pouty lips. I could see it all now. It was made clear by the shade of his hair, which was as inky as mine. Seeing him in this new light made it too real for me.

“You dyed your hair?”

“I don’t have to dye anything,” he stated mildly. “I visualized it, it happened.”

“Visualized it?” I was having trouble visualizing
that
. I was still stuck on our stark resemblance to each other.

Temp’s chocolate brown eyes danced. “Don’t tell me? You had no idea I could do that, did you?”

“I… Well, yes, I did. It’s just… you look… like me.”

“Hey, Vince! We look alike?” Temp called to the bartender.

Vince raised a puzzled eyebrow before his attention was captured by a woman raising an empty glass in his direction. Temp returned his gaze to me.

I glared at him. “Very mature of you.” I jabbed a finger in his chest, hitting a wall of muscle. “So are you following me? Did she send you here? Does she want us to… to bond?”

He grabbed my hand. “If by ‘she’, you mean our mother, no. She did not send me to Paris to fuck, get shitfaced, and fuck some more. What is your problem?”

Good question. I was probably PMS-ing or some bullshit because even to my own ears, I sounded like an irrational nutjob.

I wrenched my hand away from his and threaded my fingers in my hair, which was getting messier by the second anyway. “My problem is that I thought I was rid of you both!”

“Rae…” His voice trailed off and he was giving me a look that clearly said he wished he were anywhere but here.

“What?”

“You’re… sort of crying.” And he looked away, embarrassed.

“What?” I repeated, angrily scraping the pads of my fingers across one cheek. Sure enough, they came back black with running mascara. “Shit. What is wrong with me?! I can’t be drunk, can I?”

“I swear, Rae, this…” he said as he gestured around him, “… is purely coincidental. I’ve been coming here for years. Got a friend who moonlights as a DJ, so… I’m not stalking you.”

“I know. Forget about it. This is stupid. I have allergies. It’s probably all the noxious fumes in the air that pass for perfume.”

Temp gave out a weak laugh. “You probably want to, you know, fix your make-up. Know where the restroom is?”

“Oh, wow! Are you going to take me? Maybe change our tampons in one cubicle?”

Temp arched a brow. “You know, they say sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.”

I wiped at my cheeks, irritated. “Thank you for that. Now, buzz off.”

“What a bitch,” he said, a reluctant smile tugging at his lips as he shook his head. He grabbed Vince’s proffered bottle of beer and turned on his heel to leave, weaving his way straight to a guy I immediately recognized as JP Fontaine. He was standing against one wall on the emptier side of the club and looked like he’d been there for a while.

He’d been a hair’s breadth away from me the whole time! I felt like an idiot. Plus, judging by the way he and Temp were already laughing about something, it was obvious that they were good buds. It was time to befriend Temp.

But I needed something stronger than bottled water.

“Vince,” I called, keeping my eye on the two chatting men. “A dirty martini,
s’il
vous
plaît
.”

“You’re coming home with me,” I said, dragging Temp away from the aroused-looking redhead whose mouth he was getting pretty familiar with only a second ago outside the club.

He made a low sound in his throat. “What the fuck, Baby Phat?”

“We need to talk about something,” I told him, willing Red to disappear. Really, I was doing her a favor—maybe even saving her life—by tugging Temp away from her, yet she was looking at me like I’d pissed on her suede pumps.

“What now, Rae?” Temp snapped at me, his eyes blazing. “You want to tell me to stop listening to Incubus because you have all their albums, too?”

I sighed. “Maybe I was… illogical about your little… makeover.”

“Gee,” was Temp’s sarcastic retort, “you think?”

“It’s just that… Well, this whole ‘being related’ thing? I can’t wrap my head around it. I’m sorry. Seeing you makes me want to rip you apart and feed your carcass to a pack of coyotes.”

“You think this is easy for me?” Temp muttered. “I practically tried to rape you the first time we met because my…
our
mother didn’t tell me about you! There’s no support group for sick shit like that.”