because nature abhors a covered succubus.
Her name was Rowena, and I’m not calling her names; she actually was a succubus.
I slid out of the bed and padded over to the pitcher of water on a nearby table. After my third or fourth encounter with Rowena, I learned that keeping drinking water available was a good idea. I had tried wine first. That didn’t work out so well.
“Do you want some water?” I offered.
“No,” she said. “I want you to come back to bed.”
I smiled to myself and drank. We were in a private country house in Northern England that I happened to own, in the middle of the day and the middle of the week. I had nowhere to go and nobody to see, and I expected those facts to remain unchanged for quite a long time. So there was no hurry. Despite this, my heart skipped and I fought the urge to race back to the bed, because she asked for me.
This is how things work with succubi. The whole business about them being demons is a bit of nonsense, but it contains a grain of truth. A succubus will enjoy sex a lot—nearly as much as whomever they happen to be with— but what she really appreciates is the obsession. Thus, men (and women, more often than you’d think) might find themselves doing things that turn out to be a touch self-destructive in hindsight. It’s not exactly the same as enslaving a man and sucking his soul out of him and causing premature aging and whatever else people are saying nowadays about her species. But when a man throws away his family, career and inheritance just to spend all the uninterrupted time he can with one, it’s nearly the same thing.
Not that it always ends up that way. I personally love finding a willing and able succubus whenever I can, because aside from their obviously wonderful physical attributes, the average succubus looks roughly twenty-two human years old for approximately fifty actual years, and that is a fantastic thing for a guy who’s been alive as long as I have. Despite that, even if I completely lost control with one, unlike an ordinary human, I could outlive her.
That’s my solution. I don’t know how mortals do it, though.
Rowena was not a long-term companion for me in that sense. She spent most of her time enthralling high- ranking members of the Anglican Church, including at least one Cardinal I knew of. That was no less scandalous then—this was 1862—than it is now.
I was her vacation.
“Why do you want to know about the gods?” I asked, returning to the bed. She sat up and let the sheet fall away, revealing a deeply tanned body and two perfect, pert breasts, and for a moment I forgot what we were talking about. I slipped under the sheet beside her. “And which gods do you mean?”
“I’m curious,” she said, curling under my arm. Her hand slid down my chest and to my crotch. “And we have a few minutes, it seems.”
I brushed the red hair from her eyes and lifted her chin so I could see her properly. “This isn’t a casual bedside inquiry, Rowena. Why don’t you ask what you want to ask instead of hoping I stumble upon it?”
She grinned and I fell in love, for just a half second. “Plato,” she said.
“Plato?”
“You’ve read him?”
“I knew him.”
She pushed away and tucked her knees in until she was sitting up and opposite me and my heart broke, for just a half second. Although she was still entirely naked, and fully apparent as such, and that eased the pain.
“Did he believe in the gods of the Greeks?” she asked. The switch from coy flirtation to intellectual curiosity was mildly jarring, but I didn’t mind all that much. The truth was, there were few beings on Earth with greater native intelligence, on average, than succubi. It was the sort of thing one was better off knowing in advance.
“He didn’t,” I said, “but many still did in his day, as did most of their ancestors.”
“And Aristotle? Or Socrates? Or, I don’t know, Parmenides, Eratosthenes, Pythagoras, Heraclitus…”
“You’ve been bedding a scholar, haven’t you?” I asked. It had been a very long time since anyone had rattled off such a long list of Greeks to me.
“I’ve been reading,” she said a touch sternly. She slipped off her knees and lay back on the blankets, looking up at the ceiling.
“I can tell. No, most of the great thinkers did not believe in the old gods. They preferred to set up their own private cults instead, since the body politic at large did still believe. Pythagoras’s cult was particularly notorious, but he was also a lunatic.”
“I thought he was interesting,” she said. She reached over her head with one arm and found my leg, which she rubbed gently the way one might tickle a pet. It was as if she was daring me to form complete sentences.
“Interesting yes, sane no,” I said. “The Pythagoreans worshipped numbers instead of gods.”
“That doesn’t sound so crazy to me. Not in comparison.”
“Except they had a tendency to draw their swords on non-initiates. They were particularly protective of the dodecahedron.”
Rowena laughed. She had a rich, velvety laugh that caused men to run toward the sound, even if they couldn’t walk unaided prior to hearing it.
“All right,” she said, “I accept your opinion on Pythagoras. But… what I don’t understand is how anyone could in seriousness think the Pantheon was a reasonable thing.”
Her other hand had managed to discover her cleavage, her fingers teasing along the breastbone, the thumb tracing the outside of her left breast. It was possible she wasn’t even aware she was doing it, but it was all I was aware of. Consequently, my response was nothing more than, “The Pantheon.” Because when you cannot think of what to say, repeating back what you had just heard was nearly always a safe option.
“Zeus,” she offered. “Hermes, Poseidon, Hera, Athena…”
“Yes, I know who you mean, I just don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh, milord. Petulant, irrational, cruel beings living on top of a mountain lusting after mortals and giving them silly quests or hurling thunderbolts at them or turning them into pigs or cows or trees. It’s the sort of thing you tell a child you want to frighten into obedience.”
I leaned forward until I was next to her, looking down at her lovely body. “Maybe that’s how they saw the world,” I suggested. My right hand, on its own initiative, traced its way along her flat stomach and to her hipbone as my lips contemplated giving some serious attention to her nipples. Her skin felt like satin and smelled like cinnamon.
She lifted my hand up to her face. Smiling, she pulled a finger into her mouth and sucked on it for a moment, and then pulled it out and kissed the palm. “You were there,” she pointed out. “Don’t tell me maybe.”
Rolling out from below me, she reached the end of the bed and got to her feet. My heart broke again, along with a few other organs.
I sighed grandly as I watched her walk away. She stopped at the pitcher and slowly poured herself the glass of water she’d turned down so recently. “All right,” I said. “The behavior of the gods was their way of explaining the apparent random cruelty of day-to-day life. Will that do?”
“No.” She leaned back against the wall, sipping from her glass, smiling. I sat up and swung my feet around, meaning to walk to her. “And you have to stay on the bed,” she added.
“Why is that?”
“Because you’re not taking my questions seriously, so you will stay there until I’m satisfied.”
“It seems to me you’ve been fairly well satisfied so far,” I suggested.
“Oh, indeed, milord. But in that regard I can also satisfy myself right here, without additional assistance.”
To punctuate this point, she dipped two fingers into the water and began drawing a line down her belly, stopping just shy of very interesting. I think I may have moaned audibly.
“Ask me again,” I said.
“I want you to explain to me how a civilization that gave birth to the greatest thinkers in history, could possibly subscribe to such a juvenile religious faith.”
“That will take a while,” I confessed, without exaggeration.
“I have nowhere to be.”
Nor did I, but this was not how I expected to be spending all the free time I had set aside. “All right. But this will come at a price.”
