If I Die

“Kaylee, you didn’t do anything wrong. Sabine knows it. I know it. Nash’ll know it, once he’s thinking straight.” His hand tightened around mine. “You have no reason to be embarrassed.”

“What did he do?” Em repeated, losing patience now.

“If I were stronger, I could have resisted. Sabine can resist him.”

“Sabine can just unleash his own fear on him and make him back down. You can’t.”

“What the hell did Nash do?” Em demanded, standing to get our attention.

“He tried to use his Influence to make her go somewhere private with him. Alone. So he could Influence her into taking him back.”

“That son of a bitch!” Em looked like she wanted to punch him, too, only maybe lower than Sabine had aimed.

“It’s more complicated than that. He was hurting. And anyway, it was the frost,” I insisted. No matter how mad he got at me and Tod, he wouldn’t have done something like that if he’d been clean. I was absolutely certain of that.

Tod was unconvinced. “It was him on frost.”

“Is he okay?” Em asked, settling into her chair again.

“Sabine and my mom seem to have it under control, at least for the moment,” Tod said. “But I don’t think we should count on either of them for backup tonight.”

“So, what, it’s just the three of us?” Em asked, and I was relieved to hear a tremor of fear in her voice. The real trouble would come later, when Beck unleashed his charm on her again, and she forgot to be afraid.

“What, you don’t think I can protect you?” I said, only half kidding as I ducked into the living room to grab my laptop from my backpack.

“I don’t doubt your bean sidhe skills, Kaylee.” Emma leaned back in her chair to see me around the kitchen doorway. “I just don’t see how they’re going to be any good against an incubus. I mean, we don’t even know how to fight him, short of a good hard kick to the groin.”

“You can’t go wrong with that,” Tod mumbled, looking distinctly uncomfortable at the thought.

“Except that by the time it’s time to kick him, that’s the last thing you’re going to want to do. Which is where this comes in.” I set my laptop on the kitchen peninsula and turned it on. “So far, we haven’t had much luck fighting Netherworld evil with tips from the internet, but Alec says that because they need humans to breed with, as well as to feed from, incubi have a long, and presumably well-documented history in our world.” And I was hoping that at least some of that history had made its way to the web.

“Ooh, I have mine, too, so I can double our efforts.” Emma claimed the second bar stool and plugged her laptop in next to mine. While we searched with Google like madwomen, Tod stood behind us where he could see both screens, reading and pointing out anything he thought might be useful.

“Is this chick for real?” Emma asked, about ten minutes into the research, and I leaned over to glance at her screen. “She claims she’s been communicating with demons that appear and disappear at night in her room since she was a kid, but now she’s tired of them and wants to know how to get rid of them.”

“Antipsychotic medication,” Tod suggested, scowling at the screen. “The internet is full of crackpots claiming to have personal contact with ‘demons’ who bear no resemblance to any Netherworld creature I’ve ever heard of, except for hellions. And if hellions could cross the barrier into your bedroom, we’d have bigger things to worry about than one horny incubus.”

“I wish you wouldn’t throw that word around like it’s harmless,” I said, elbowing him in the ribs.

“Horny?” Tod grinned.

Emma laughed. “She means crackpot.”

“Just because someone talks to things other people can’t see or hear doesn’t mean those things aren’t there, and it doesn’t necessarily mean she’s crazy,” I insisted. “She could just be having a series of bad dreams.”

The reaper’s brows rose in amusement over my automatic defense of the mentally unstable. “Or, she could have an over-active imagination and a pathological need to be the center of attention. With all due respect to those who’ve unjustly served time in mental institutions, people who are really hearing and seeing things they shouldn’t either go crazy—in which case a coherent internet plea for help would be improbable—or they keep quiet about their so-called delusions to avoid looking crazy.”

Tod spun my stool so that I faced him, then looked straight into my eyes, so I could see sincerity swirling in his. “You are none of the above, Kaylee, so you can quit worrying about that. But just because you’re not crazy or looking for attention doesn’t mean that—” he glanced at Emma’s screen, then back at me “—DemonQueen87 is in possession of all her marbles.”

“Okay, valid point,” I said, when I couldn’t find fault with his logic. “So, did DemonQueen get any advice we could use?” Just because her problem was probably bogus didn’t mean all the answers would be.

“Yeah, I don’t think so.” Em scrolled slowly, reading aloud as her finger slid down the mouse pad. “‘Banishing incantations…’”

“Bullshit,” Tod declared, rolling bright blue eyes. “Even if that wasn’t a bunch of mumbo jumbo nonsense, incantations wouldn’t work against something with a physical presence. You can’t fight evil by chanting a few magic words.”

“‘Religious rituals…’” Em continued, without even looking up for his rant. “‘Ceremony conducted by the high priest of a Wiccan church or a…Magickian’?” She looked up from the screen, frowning. “Is that even a real word?”

“Dunno.” I shrugged. “Do Wiccans have high priests?”

“I have no idea.” Emma leaned over to glance at my screen. “You having any better luck?”

“Not unless you believe that sleeping with scissors under your pillow will prevent midnight ninja incubus attacks.”

“That’s superstitious nonsense.” Tod sank into one of the kitchen chairs, looking more frustrated than I’d ever seen him. “A long time ago, people used to blame fictional incarnations of incubi to cover up an affair or pregnancy out of wedlock. It was this whole, ‘I was raped by a demon’ defense that absolved the ‘victim’ of guilt and gave everyone something intangible to blame. That created this whole legend of ethereal demons that could seduce people in their sleep, like some version of a mara who would molest you instead of scaring you, thus tempting you to damn your own soul by committing sinful acts of sex. Unfortunately, that means that all the methods of fighting these ‘demons’ that come out of that era assume that the incubus has no true physical form.”

“Which means they’re useless to us, since we know incubi are actually thoroughly physical psychic parasites,” I concluded, and Tod nodded.

“That kick to the groin method isn’t looking so bad now, is it?” Emma said.

“Neither are the scissors.”

“We’ll call that plan B,” Tod said, pulling open the fridge in search of another can of soda.

Two hours later, I was starving, and we’d still had no word from my dad or uncle about the family dinner, which I’d invited both Tod and Em to stay for. Nor were we any closer to a decent plan A. Evidently no one in the history of the internet had ever successfully annihilated a real live incubus.

“I think we’re going to have to call it quits on the ambush,” Emma said, closing her laptop with a soft click. “At least for tonight.”

“No!” I refreshed my browser and typed in another variant of the same “banish kill incubus” keyword search I’d been scouring the internet with. “I’m not going to have another night!” And I didn’t want to die without knowing Beck would be no threat to my best friend. “Besides, if we’re not there when he shows up tonight, he’s going to know something’s up, and we’ll have lost the element of surprise. And we—or you guys, since I’ll be dead—won’t get another shot at him if he knows you know what he is.”

Emma shrugged, meeting my gaze reluctantly. “Maybe that’s for the best, Kay. If he figures out what he’s up against, maybe he’ll just…move on.”

“But that’s just passing our problem on to someone else. Someone who won’t know how to fight him.”

“We don’t know how to fight him,” she pointed out, with infuriatingly sound logic. “The lack of information to the contrary suggests that incubi are probably immortal and practically invincible. So what choice do we have, Kaylee? You may be immune to the evil hotness, but I’m not, and I don’t want to walk away from this pregnant with a demon fetus. Or dead because I knew too much.”