“Oui, I know. That’s why you hired me.” Her chest puffed with pride before she sobered. “We should put something on that. I have first aid.”
Circling to the passenger side of the Lincoln, Colette opened the glove box and pulled a small metal tin from inside. After locating the essentials, she urged me to sit while she crouched beside the car.
She unwrapped an alcohol wipe and set to work scrubbing dried blood from the lines of my fingers. I tensed as she neared the puncture wounds around my knuckle, waiting for the impending sting.
“So, I’m no expert,” she mused, “but this looks like a bite. Do they have animals in there, or…”
“No animals,” I replied. “Just a very hungry incubus.”
Colette’s ponytail bounced as her head snapped up, and she grinned. “The new kid!”
I sighed. “One and the same.”
She daubed a bit more before palming the stained wipe. “So, you and he…” Her grin turned wily as she stabbed her index fingers together, tip to tip.
“What’s that supposed to be?” I asked.
“Making the dicks kiss.” She gave one more press to emphasize her point. “Très romantique.”
I scoffed as she opened a cloth bandage and measured it against my wound.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “Livingston left, you stayed, and the incubus bit you… why?”
“He was hungry.”
The image of Cherry clinging to my coat hem in the executive suite, looking at me with round, anguished eyes, remained poignant. He’d given me the full Oliver Twist, “Please, sir, I want some more” act, and I’d believed him. His pale skin was almost sallow, and the stage makeup didn’t quite mask the gaunt shadows on his face.
I wasn’t sure if energy starvation took the same toll as physical deprivation, but there were symptoms. The incubus had a problem I’d taken it upon myself to solve.
No, it wasn’t nearly that altruistic.
Luxe called me chivalrous; maybe I’d let the compliment go to my head.
Colette finished wrapping my knuckle, then stood and stepped back. “I thought they fed on vibes, not flesh.”
She waved for me to watch my legs as she swung the passenger door shut. Walking around the hood, she climbedinto the driver’s seat and donned the black cap and gloves she’d left on the dash. As she adjusted her hat in the rearview mirror, I offered a belated reply.
“I think he’s new.”
“Bien sûr.”
The keys hung from the ignition, adorned with a brass bullet casing salvaged from her revolver. Colette started the engine, and the Lincoln rocked into drive, rolling toward the stream of cars patrolling the Strip.
“No, I meannew, new,” I clarified. “He’s young. Fresh.”
“And sexy?” Colette eyed me.
I tested my bandaged finger, mentally recounting the evening from the moment I saw the incubus swathed in silks to the way he looked on his back, his face lit by the glow pouring through that barred window.
“Beautiful,” I murmured, mostly to myself, but of course, Colette missed nothing.
“You didn’t kiss him, did you?”
Glancing over, I found her wearing an apprehensive frown.
There were myriad reasons I didn’t make a habit of affiliating with incubi or succubi. Their entire existence was based on predatory instincts, and they had supernatural gifts to further the cause of securing and subduing prey. I wasn’t as vulnerable to those charms as a human, but I wasn’t completely immune.
And I refused to be fucking prey.
