INTERLUDE
On Gods and Succubi
“Tell me about the gods,” she purred. She was curled up next to me wrapped loosely in a cotton sheet with a pillow under the crook of her arm. The light breeze from my open bay window threatened to lift the sheet off of her, 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 22 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,” I said.
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 is, there are few beings on Earth with greater native intelligence, on average, than succubi. It’s the sort of thing one is better off knowing in advance.
“He didn’t,” I said, “but many still did in his day, as did most of their ancestors.”
