Chương 17: The Devil in the Moonlight

The islands had a lovely rooftop I had spotted on my second day here. A flat section on top of the main administration building, accessible by a maintenance ladder on the east side, with a clear view of the ocean and the tower. No cameras, no foot traffic, and the Pacific wind carried salt and silence in equal measure. Perfect for what I had in mind. I set the worm cage down by the ladder and closed my eyes, and focused. From my soul chamber, I brought in a dozen rubies from the box.

Twelve rubies now sat in my hand, each the size of a marble, catching the last light of the fading sun. Right. Phase one, decoration. Phase two, logistics. I summoned a dozen tentacle worms. They appeared in flashes of dim light, all at once, each a single squirming tentacle between one and three feet long, with their usual random combination of eyes, spikes, and mouths. Three had mouths. Good. I needed something that could carry without stabbing.

"All right, team," I said, setting the rubies on the ground.

"Listen carefully. Each of you grabs a ruby. You carry them down the ladder and line them up along the path from the hub to this building, then up the ladder. Space them evenly. When you're done, unsummon yourselves." Twelve tentacle tips waved in agreement. One of the mouth-worms lunged at a ruby and swallowed it.

"Don't eat them." The worm spat it out, looking as guilty as something without a face could look. I divvied up the rubies. The mouth-worms held them between their teeth. The eye-worms had to wrap themselves around them, which looked as awkward as it sounds. One spike-worm tried to stab a ruby to carry it like a kebab, and I had to physically take it back and wedge it into the curl of its tail.

Watching twelve worms try to figure out how to climb down a ladder while carrying gemstones was exactly the kind of high-level tactical summoning that I lived for. Eventually, they got going. A chain of squirming tentacles descended the ladder, rubies glinting in the dusk. I grabbed the worm cage and climbed up to the roof. The flat section was better than I remembered. About thirty by forty feet, polished metal, with a low wall on three sides and nothing on the fourth except the ocean.

The tower rose to the east, a column of absolute black against the darkening sky. A few stars had already punched through on the western side. The moon wasn't out yet. I set the cage down. Inside, the white worm squirmed in its usual blind, leggy way. No mouth, no eyes, just a two-foot tube of pale flesh with tiny legs and an apparent enthusiasm for existing.

"You're about to become very famous," I told it.

"Try to look dignified." It squirmed harder. Fair enough. I sat on the low wall, letting my legs hang over the edge. The wind pulled at my jacket. The ocean stretched out below, black and endless. Somewhere behind me, the islands hummed with twenty thousand people doing twenty thousand things, none of which involved me. For the first time in days, it was quiet. I didn't love quiet. Quiet left too much room for thinking, and thinking had a way of circling back to the same questions. Like, why was I up here at all?

Like whether Astarielle was right, and this was going to end exactly the way it always ended. The girl in Spain was named Elena. We had two months together. Then she failed her finals, packed, and flew home. I didn't follow. Couldn't, really, not with the debt and the demons and the entire architecture of my life being built on summoning magic that only I could use. Before Elena, there was a stretch at Harvard where I tried dating apps. Three dates.

The first girl was nice, but kissing her felt like pressing my lips against a mannequin. The second was gorgeous, funny, smart, and I felt absolutely nothing when she touched me. The third, I didn't even finish dinner with. Four years of Astarielle, at least four times a day, did something to a man's brain. The thing about succubi was that the excitement wasn't just natural chemistry. On touch, they scraped mana from their partner, or life force if no mana was present, converting it into pure pleasure.

An intense week with a succubus made one numb to any other physical pleasure. And the withdrawal was real. The abstinence year was worse than anything the tower had thrown at me so far. But I recovered. Mostly. The issue wasn't desire. I had a desire. I looked at Cassandra, and my chest tightened, and my pulse spiked, and every instinct I had told me to get closer to the furnace. The issue was whether any of that was mine, or whether it was just an echo.

Residual wiring from years of supernatural stimulus, misfiring at the first thing that registered above baseline. I didn't know which was the case. But I was up here anyway. The moon cleared the horizon. It came up fat and golden over the Pacific, throwing a wide, shimmering road across the water. The tower's silhouette caught its edge, black against amber. Right. Showtime. I repositioned. Leaned against the low wall on the ocean side, one leg up, one hanging.

The worm cage sat beside me, catching moonlight on its metal bars. I angled myself so the moon sat directly behind me. Being raised by succubi taught a man how to pose. The wind tousled my hair just right. I waited. Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. The rubies should have been placed by now. If my worms followed orders, which, historically, they did about eighty percent of the time. The other twenty percent involved eating things they shouldn't have. A sound came from below. The faintest click of a heel on a metal rung.

Then another. The ladder creaked softly. A pale hand appeared over the roof's edge, followed by a cascade of blonde hair, then crimson eyes that caught the moonlight like lit coals. Cassandra pulled herself onto the roof with effortless grace. She wore the silver dress, as always, but tonight the moonlight made it look liquid. She straightened and looked at me. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. I held the pose.

Moon behind me, worm cage at my side, ocean below, wind in my hair. I knew I looked better than great. Her gaze traveled over the scene. The roof, the view, me, the cage. Her lips pressed together. Then they curved.

"This place sure has a nice view," she said, stepping toward me. I only returned the smile. Cassandra walked across the rooftop, heels clicking on metal, each step deliberate. She sat down next to me on the low wall, close enough that the heat hit me before the scent did. Burning iron and something sweet underneath it, like caramelized sugar left too long over a flame. The heat radiated from her in waves. She physically burned hotter than any normal human. Even more than the succubi. I hadn't the faintest idea why.

I motioned at the cage.

"Meet Slimy Jim. He's the first living organism ever brought from the tower to Earth." She glanced at the cage. Inside, the white worm twisted, its tiny legs scrambling against the bars. Her eyes widened.

"That's impossible… unless you summon your demons directly from Hell." I smirked. Most summoners had their summons ready in the soul chamber, or in some dimensional pocket or subdimension that they brought with them. I did not.

"Guilty as charged." She raised her hand. The cage floated from the ground by itself, drifting in front of her. It spun slowly, so she could observe the worm from every angle.

"It seems to be hungry. Have you fed it?"

"We haven't cleared his dietary needs yet."

"Starving poor Slimy Jim." She tutted, tilting her head at the worm with something that almost looked like sympathy. Then her gaze slid to me, the sympathy gone, replaced by a smirk playing on her lips.

"From what I've heard, you've been very naughty today." I leaned back.

"You might need to be more specific. I'm naughty every day, and in a lot of ways." The smirk broadened. She let the cage drift to her side, Jim still squirming inside, and folded her hands in her lap.

"The drone nearly started a war among the secret societies. They managed to arrange a research committee to oversee its study and technology." She picked at an invisible thread on her dress.

"The Golden Sands aren't terribly happy over it, though. As their member, you are supposed to bring treasures and secrets to them, and only them."

"So they wish." I stretched my arms behind me, palms flat on the wall.

"But I'm not here to serve them. Through me, they get a climber who will put their name high up on the climber ranks. That's more than enough." She inched closer, the motion so smooth it barely registered.

"What are you here for, then?"

"The glory." I looked up at the sky. The stars were thickening now, the Milky Way just barely visible through the Pacific haze.

"I've always known I was meant for something greater. Something beyond the lives of normal men. I just never had an opportunity, not until the tower showed up." She chuckled, eyes sparking in the moonlight.

"I see delusions of grandeur could never happen to you."

"Delusions require being wrong." I grinned.

"My mother is a former paladin of the Church. Best student of the year at one of the most prestigious magical academies in the world. Served her entire life. And I don't know exactly how much mana she has, but I know I have more than a thousand times more. At fourteen, I summoned my first succubus, who alone is comparable in strength to my mother." I tilted my head.

"I am more than just strong."

"Oh, are you?" She clicked her tongue, and something in her posture shifted. She leaned back on her palms, mirroring me, but the angle put her shoulder against mine. The heat flared at the contact.

"And yet you avoided the secret societies for your whole life. Racking up debt you cannot pay in the meantime." I shrugged, trying not to think about the heat.

"I'm not serving as a grunt to a corporation or a paramilitary organization."

"And yet here you are." She turned to face me fully, one knee drawing up onto the wall. The moonlight caught the sharp line of her jaw, the pale column of her throat.

"On a rooftop. With rubies on the stairs. Trying to romance me, specifically, instead of the succubus who's been sharing your bed for over a decade." A cargo ship crawled across the horizon behind her, its lights strung out like a slow constellation. I watched it for a moment.

"I've stayed clear of that for quite the while." Or, more precisely, I'd kept it at a level where it didn't cause addiction. Cassandra's gaze didn't waver. The wind caught her hair, pulling blonde strands across her face. She didn't fix them.

"Why don't you tell me about it? Not the sanitized version you've prepared. The real one." The wind shifted. I tasted salt. I looked out at the ocean instead of at her. It was easier to talk to the water.

"I summoned Astarielle when I was fourteen. But that wasn't the first summon. I figured out how to summon demons from Hell when I was eight. It just took a while to fish a succubus worthy of being my summon out of it." Mostly true. I simply left the Elsha part out. We weren't close enough for that.

"A fourteen-year-old boy summons an ancient succubus." Cassandra's voice had lost its edge. She drew her other leg up, sitting cross-legged now, her knee resting against my thigh.

"That must have been quite the evening."

"She's my age, actually. She was terrified of me, thinking I was some kind of elder demon testing her. Took me an hour to convince her I was just a kid, same as her." I exhaled. The worm cage rattled softly behind Cassandra as Jim threw himself against the bars.

"After that, she was the only person in my life who actually understood what I did. My mum would never understand the demon summoning thing. Once, she caught me in her own bed with Astarielle. She had the entire house warded against demons. Had me rinse with holy water twice a day."

"A rather understandable reaction to catching one's son shagging a succubus in his mother's bed." I laughed. She said it so dryly, like she was commenting on an unremarkable weather forecast.

"Yeah, it was. But ironically, mum was right about one thing. Do too much with demons, and you can't live a normal life. Astarielle and I had an intensely carnal relationship for about five years. Only at university did I realize how much it had isolated me from the life everyone else was living." Below us, the ocean sighed against the pylons. The worm had gone still in its cage, as if it were listening too.

"But like every problem I've ever faced, I overcame it," I said.

"It took a year of nothing, but I'm back to normal human functionality." Cassandra studied me. Her eyes ran over my face with something more than analytical precision. The blush of heat on her cheeks could have been natural warmth or something else entirely.

"Is that why we're here? So you can chase something human?"

"I'm not chasing anything. I'm free to live my life as I please, and my demons, Astarielle included, have the right to shut up and put up with it." I turned back to her.

"What about you? What haunts your nights?"

"Aside from working on the pods and handling the tower shop?"

"Yeah, aside from the boringly mundane. I've shared something I don't talk about. It's your turn to share something you don't talk about." She chuckled.

"And who decided that?"

"I did." Something flickered across her face. Not quite a blush, more like a flinch, she smoothed over before it could land. She looked away, out over the ocean, and for a moment, the playfulness dropped. Her fingers curled against the metal wall.

"My past is an ugly pile of violence and sadness. There's nothing fun to share from it. Only loneliness and misery." I waited. She didn't continue. The silence stretched between us, filled with wind and the distant hum of the islands. Whatever she was keeping back, it wasn't just pain. There was a weight to it. A practiced weight, the kind that came from carrying something specific for a long time. She turned back to me, and the mask slid back into place. Smooth, warm, just the right degree of provocative.

"Are you really over the succubus addiction? They're addictive on every level, physical, mental, and spiritual. I find it awfully difficult to believe you've simply gotten over all that." She tilted her head.

"Can you actually feel anything with someone who isn't a succubus?" I held her gaze.

"Kiss me and find out." Her eyes narrowed. The ocean roared softly against the pylons. A gust of wind hit us from the side, pressing her hair against her cheek. She didn't move.

"I really shouldn't." She leaned against me, tilting her face up toward mine. Her heat seeped into me, especially from the palm she placed on my crotch.

"But if you make me," she murmured, "then it can't be helped." What a fun way to frame this. I caught the side of her face, fingers threading into her hair, and pulled her in. I closed my eyes and kissed her. Her lips met mine, and the heat hit first. Intense, but human heat, the heat of a thousand lives compressed into one person. Her lips were softer than I expected, in spite of the temperature. And she kissed me back, hungry as she pressed against me.

My heart hammered like mad, and so did hers, beating in a strange super-fast rhythm that resonated from her chest into mine. Now, the part I'd left for her to figure out was that years of succubi company left lasting side effects. When one stared into the abyss, the abyss stared back. And I'd been binging the abyss since puberty. On a physical level, I subconsciously did all the things a succubus did, scraping her mana with every fractional touch, leaving nothing but pure pleasure behind.

Cassandra's hand trembled against me. A micro-tremor, barely perceptible, but there. Her composure cracked along a fault line I hadn't known existed. The kiss deepened for a fraction of a second, fingers digging into my leg. She pulled back. Her crimson eyes were wide. Her face was flushed deep red, her lips parted, chest rising fast. Excitement, surprise, and underneath both, something I hadn't expected, deep shame and embarrassment.

"I…" she stuttered.

"I need to go." She exploded into mist. Literally. Her body, and everything on her, turned into mist in the blink of an eye. What? I pushed power into my eyes. No residual magic. Just mist, still holding the vague shape of Cassandra for one more second before the wind tore it apart. The cage with Slimy Jim was gone too, absorbed into the vapor. I sat there, on the wall, the moon hanging fat and golden behind me, the pose officially wasted on empty air. How the fuck did she do that?