Six years later
Samira flew above the earth, its landscape a shifting panorama of blacks and grays, formed by the minds of dreaming mortal men. Villages, forests, and mountains rippled and changed like a world fluttering beneath the waves of the sea, occasionally glowing with a pale wash of color as someone dreamt a particularly vivid scene about that spot. Beneath her, a pack of wolves loped across an open hillside toward a flock of sheep, then disappeared into nothingness as a dreamer banished them. A farmhouse changed shape and grew extra rooms; a river turned shallow and changed course. The tableaux faded as quickly as they appeared, sometimes lasting no longer than a moment.
Samira paid them scant heed, her senses searching out something else. It wasn't long before she found it: the trail of a man with unfulfilled desires. Finding such a trail was like stepping into a flowing creek of lust, or hearing a distant sound of entrancing, erotic music; it was a thrum, a vibration in the night that belonged to a single sleeping man, and that she as a succubus could not help but follow to its source. Her body hummed in response, a faint tingling pleasure vibrating through her, luring her toward this drowsing male who needed release in the form of a sex dream. This was the main work of a succubus: giving sexual release to sleeping men through their dreams.
She had no existence apart from this work; no solid body on the plane of mortals, no lover in the Night World. She had no home or close family, no talents or skills beyond weaving dreams. Up until six years ago, that had suited her perfectly.
Lately, though, a bleak and depressive mood would sometimes steal over her. She would wonder—absurdly!—whether she was nothing more than a shadow of the mortals she visited; a poor imitation, making up stories for their entertainment, and pretending to herself that those stories were real. As if, somehow, telling stories could be the equivalent of living a true and mortal life.
As if a mortal life was something worth living! She was not like Theron, who wanted such a thing. Humans lived but a fleeting moment, the space between their birth and death no more than the duration of a sigh, and that sigh filled with mud, cold, fleas, disease, and great puddles of bodily fluids that Samira shuddered even to think about. Humans were cruel and greedy and violent, and not half so beautiful as the creatures of Night. What did a mortal life hold that could compare to existence in the Night World? It was foolish of her to feel even a moment of envy for mortal creatures. And she didn't. Not for a moment!
She pushed such wonderings aside, and set herself in the invisible current of male lust, pursuing it through the shadows of the Night World toward its source.
Who would it be this time? she wondered, trying to distract herself from her own pointless thoughts. An adolescent boy, with far more sexual energy than opportunity to release it? Maybe a long-married man with a brood of children and an exhausted wife. Or perhaps it was a shepherd alone in the hills, far from his maiden fair.
Making up stories about sleeping men was about the only thing that still kept her interested in her work. Ever since that night she'd given the nightmare to Dragosh, nothing had been the same for her. She was no longer a virtuoso of vengeance. She'd lost her taste for the delivery of nightmares.
She pushed this thought aside as well, trying as she always did to ignore it. What could she do about the past, anyway? Nothing. And what could she do about who she was now? She was a succubus. She could be nothing else. There was no escape from the Night World, for either her or for Theron.
Better to chase intriguing rivers of male lust through the night than to wish for the impossible. She didn't even know exactly what impossible thing it was that she wished for, other than that it be different from what she was now.
Change. A different life. A different world. A different
her
.
You're just bored
, she told herself.
You'll snap out of it in a couple hundred years
.
A sense of something strange, something amiss, interrupted her thoughts,
making her slow in her absentminded pursuit of the sexual thrum. She hovered
where she was for a long moment, the forest of dream trees beneath her shifting from full leaf to winter bare to autumn yellows and oranges as dreamers dreamt scenes within it. The sky above filled with dark gray clouds, as thick as wool, and then parted again to let through streamers of moonlight and a twinkle of distant stars.
A frown between her reddish brows, Samira tried to figure out what was wrong, what had caught her attention. There was a flavor to this sexual thrum she pursued, almost a scent, which was out of the ordinary. Unique.
She bit her lip.
Unique
could mean dangerous.
But
unique
also meant it was different, and therefore it piqued her curiosity.
After three millennia of exploring the minds of men, all their sexual thoughts, their fantasies, she had seen it all. She hadn't come across anything truly new for at least five hundred years. The hopes were always the same, year after year, culture after culture:
Making love to a wife's best friend or her sister, or to the big-breasted woman who once passed in the street. Being ravished by an eager young wench, who could only be satisfied by
his
impressive manroot. Two women at once, pleasuring each other and the man with equal passion. Thrashing bare bottoms with a switch. Being thrashed in return, while wearing the wife's favorite chemise.
Well, that last one wasn't so common, but more so than most mortal women probably knew.
She was overdue for finding something new. Samira's own dream creativity had been suffering these past few years, and she needed inspiration. She was repeating herself too much, often being so lazy as to simply give a man satisfaction with nothing more than a dream handjob.
She was becoming a disgrace to her kind.
The only time she felt her old enthusiasm rising up was when she came across a sleeping man who was deeply in love, and who needed nothing more than a dream of holding his beloved close in his arms and making love to her tenderly. For that, she still took time and care, and would feel within her a shimmering of emotion that she could not name.
Was it envy? A longing for something similar? She was not supposed to have a heart of her own, or human desires for things like love. In truth, she didn't understand love, except when it came as an intense sexual yearning.
That
she understood and could feel as she reflected it back to a man. Something inside her whispered that love might be more than that, though. It might hold treasures of which she was utterly unaware, and which she could never know.
It made her want to weep, if only she was capable of it. Succubi had no tears, though, nor a heart to break.
But maybe, after so many centuries of playing in the minds of mortals, she had become infected by their emotions. Maybe part of her was turning slightly human. Humanity might be contagious, like the plague.
She wasn't sure if that was an encouraging thought or a repulsive one.
What she did know for sure was that something interesting, like this tantalizing, unique thrum of male desire she was following, should not be passed by for so paltry a reason as fear. She would follow it and see where it led. How dangerous could it really be?
The thrum of desire from the unknown man was beginning to attract other succubi, who approached like wolves to a fresh kill. One, a blonde, approached too close to the stream of desire, and Samira bared her teeth, hissing, asserting her ownership. The blonde bared her teeth back, hissing in return, but then gave way, flapping off into the darkness, tossing her hair back over her shoulder with a pout and a glare.
Samira made a face at her, feeling disappointed. The coward. A territorial bat fight would have been fun.
She turned her attention back to the thrum. The scent was growing stronger now. She must be nearing its source.
The warning sounded yet again in Samira's mind, chasing a shiver down her spine. Something truly wasn't right about this thrum. Something wasn't natural. Three millennia of experience were telling her to slow down, to be cautious.
Curiosity and the deliciously strong desire of the sleeping man lured her forward, regardless. Common sense fled, and she happily waved it good-bye. Boring old common sense. What use had she for it?
She slipped out of the charcoal landscape of the Night World and emerged into the nighttime landscape of mortal men—the plane of the Waking World, they of the night called it. The hills and forest beneath her were the same as a moment before, only now they did not waver or shift, and their washed-out colors were from true night, not the influence of dreams. Everything was
real
, everything was solid, and now she herself was the one who was not, and she could not be seen by waking eyes.
The land flattened out beneath her, and the trees gave way to fields and pastures. Samira flew low over the roofs of a village, and then over the low, swampy, reed-clogged bank at the edge of a lake.
A fragile wooden walkway led from the bank out across the dark water to an island. She flew over the narrow walkway toward the island, noting the missing boards and places where the rail had fallen into the black water.
As she approached the island, she made out the thick walls of a ruined fortified monastery, originally built for protection from invading Tartars and Turks. What was left of the brutal low outer walls was punctuated by two remaining stubby towers, guarded by a single dozing sentry.
Inside the crumbling fortress knelt a half-fallen stone church, its surviving walls blackened by long-extinguished flames. A massive square spire rose from one end, miraculously still standing, tall and strong. The spire dwarfed the outer protecting walls, thrusting upward like a spear, its roof a tall, tapering pyramid covered in red tile, the peak stabbing the night sky like a bloody blade that had pierced the belly of the moon.
A flickering yellow light glowed from the narrow windows in a room at the top of the high tower. It was from those windows that the river of desire flowed. A shiver of anticipation ran through Samira, the last vestiges of rational thought flickering and dying under the pull of the unknown man's desire.
Samira flew up toward the windows, and then alit on a sill, her hands clinging to the stonework. She crouched for a moment in the embrasure, peering inside at the square, dimly lit chamber, and at the man who slept therein.
When nothing threatening appeared, she folded back her wings and inched through the opening, scrabbling along like the demon she was. She dropped to the floor, landing soundlessly and with only the faintest sense of the rough-hewn wood floor beneath her bare feet. She could have passed straight through the wall itself if she had so desired, but such passages through solid matter were painful and tiring for succubi.
Red coals burned in a large iron brazier set on a tripod, the only source of heat in the room. Red velvet draperies half-concealed a wood-framed bed in one corner, its linens and furs disarranged and tumbled to the floor. Above her, beams held iron brackets where once had hung the bells of the tower.
A massive table dominated the room, covered in sheets of parchment and leather-bound books, some open, some shut, all of them cracked and stained with age. A candle guttered in its wax-coated holder, casting flickering light onto the books and the bare stone walls, and onto the single occupant of the room.
The dark-haired man slept with his arm sprawled across one of the open books on the table, his face resting on his white sleeve, his black hair concealing all but a pale triangle of forehead from her view. His other arm was drawn up close to his body, resting atop his thighs under the table.
It was from him that the river of latent desire was coming. This close, the desire was so strong that Samira could feel it entering her as if through the pores of her skin, setting every inch of her alive with tingling, unquenched lust. She stood still, soaking it in, helpless for a moment to do otherwise. She'd never felt anything like this, the man's unsatisfied desires coursing through her body with the sweetness of honey, pooling in her loins with a hungry anticipation of things to come.
For the first time in all her thousands of years, she was vaguely aware of the danger of falling captive to the lust of a man. It had always been easy for her to weave her dreams and fly away, never losing control, never being tempted to stay.
Such thoughts of control were far from her now. Almost any thought at all was beyond her.
She trod silently across the room, sidestepping piles of books and small tables loaded with vials, bowls, and jars of colored powders. Her gaze flicked over them, almost wondering what this man had been doing; but her mind was drifting in and out of a welter of caution and sexual excitement, and she could make no sense of the things.
She came around behind the sleeping man, noting the strong line of his back beneath his simple white tunic and the broad line of his shoulders. His long legs, clad in heavy black hose, were sprawled beneath the table. He was seated on a bench, his body canted to the side in slumber.
Samira stepped lightly up onto the bench and squatted on her haunches next to him. His latent desire was coming off his body in waves, pulsing through her, her entire frame vibrating in echoing response. It was so strong, she almost imagined that her flesh rippled with its pulse.
She reached out her hand toward him. It was shaking, and the sight startled her out of her passion for a moment, making her laugh nervously.
Midnight sun! You'd think I'd never done this before
, she thought to herself.
It's only a man. A sleeping man
.
She shifted from foot to foot, her bare breasts pressed against her thighs as she squatted beside him. She fluttered her wings once, nervous, making a rustling leathery sound. She wanted to touch him so badly, the desire was making her weak and uncoordinated.
She reached out again.