SLEEPOVER

by Seanan McGuire

“Love is love. Species, gender, how long ago they may have died, none of that really matters. Love is love, and without it, we might as well be howling into the void. ”

—LAURA CAMPBELL

A nondescript warehouse in

Northeast Portland, Oregon

Now

It was the last exhibition match of the season, and the Slasher Chicks were attacking the track with such vicious precision that they looked almost choreographed. Their captain, Elmira Street, was organizing some of the most efficient blocking I had ever seen, while their jammer—my cousin Antimony, skating under the derby name Final Girl—was running rings around the opposing team. Literally. I watched her star-spangled helmet circle the track, and I tried to find it in my heart to cheer.

Annie had worked hard all season, and she deserved the support of her family. Since her parents didn’t give a crap about what she did in her spare time and her siblings were both out of the state, and my sibling refused to leave his basement fastness, that left her with a cheering section of one. Me, Elsinore Harrington, the girl with the broken heart.

The cause of that broken heart was behind Annie on the track, caught in the scrum with the rest of the Concussion Stand. Carlotta, better known as Pushy Galore when she was in the rink. Up until a week ago, the love of my summer, and now the latest in my long line of ex-girlfriends. Or, as my mother liked to call them, the “Gosh, Elsie, maybe if you knew how to commit to a relationship, I wouldn’t have to keep picking up the pieces when you broke another one” girls.

My mother is not the nurturing type.

Anyway, what with Carly dumping me like last week’s phone case—complete with “It’s not you, it’s me, I can’t handle dating someone who isn’t human, you understand, it’s not a racist thing, I’m just not comfortable with this anymore”—I would have been completely within my rights to avoid the rink for the foreseeable future. Better yet, forever, since I kept falling for derby girls, dating them until they got tired of me, breaking up with them, and then having to deal with seeing them every time Annie had a practice or a game. It got old.

But Annie needed me, and not just for rides to the track. So here I was yet again, wearing my Slasher Chicks T-shirt, with a purse full of cookies and bacon wrapped in foil, waiting for my cousin to skate her way to glory.

Glory or a split lip, depending on whether or not she flubbed her next jump. Split lips were bloodier. I was hoping for glory, or at least for a lack of stitches.

The buzzer rang to signal the end of the game, and the Slasher Chicks took the bout by a respectable sixty-three points. Annie kept skating, thrusting her hands up in the air as if she had just been elected Queen Bad-Ass of Ass Mountain. The rest of her team swarmed around her, all of them clapping and hugging each other like a big family.

I was the one who’d brought her here, encouraging her to try out after she graduated from high school and had to stop being a cheerleader. This was where I used to go to blow off steam and pick up girls, not necessarily in that order. So why did I suddenly feel like the one on the outside?

“Which one’s yours? ” The voice was unfamiliar. Low alto, with a little bit of a Northern buzz to it, like the owner had grown up somewhere in Nova Scotia.

“The brunette with the pigtail braids, ” I said. Annie was following her team into the victory lap, shaking hands with every member of the Concussion Stand. I paused, reviewing the voice and the question it had asked, before adding hastily, “She’s my cousin. I just come to support her. ”

“Oh, ” said the voice. “I see. ”

“I’m Elsie, ” I said, and finally turned to see whom I was talking to. I was promptly glad that I had gotten the pleasantries out of the way before I lost the capacity for rational speech. That, too, is me: Elsinore Harrington, the girl who sometimes gets slapped silent by beauty.

I am told that someday I will become smooth and easy with the ladies. I am pretty sure this is a lie.

The voice’s owner was sitting next to me on the bench, looking at me with amusement. She looked about my age, mid-twenties, with long, wavy hair that might have been blond once but was now all the colors of cotton candy—pink and blue and purple and white. It matched her makeup, which was overdone in that awesome “my makeup isn’t for you” way that always made me want to follow people back to their mirrors and learn all their secrets. She was wearing a Scream Queens league tank top and a black pleated skirt over striped tights, and as was all too often the case with me, I immediately wanted to know her better, even if that meant doing whatever she said.

“Hi, ” I said.

“Hello, ” she said, and smiled. “I’m Morgan. So, Final Girl’s your cousin, huh? How does that feel? ”

“Like I should buy stock in Band-Aids, ” I said. She laughed. It was a low, husky sound, sweet as the candy her hair resembled. I wanted to make her laugh again. I hadn’t known her five minutes before, and now making her laugh felt like the most important thing I could possibly be doing with my time. “No, it’s good. She really enjoys derby, and I enjoy watching my cousin kick the crap out of people twice her size. ”

“But you don’t skate. ”

“I don’t skate, ” I said, with a small shake of my head. “I’m a wuss. ” Well, that, and my blood was a natural narcotic that very few humans had any resistance to. Roller derby was a mostly safe place for me: more women than men, and little in the way of things that could stress me out and make me start sweating through my monster-strength antiperspirant. But being half succubus means never being able to say “oops” when you get a bloody nose. I’d be way too busy saying “No, no, please don’t grab me, ow, that hurts, you don’t really want to do that, ” and that was no fun for anybody.

Morgan rolled her eyes. It was a deeply sarcastic gesture, and it just made me appreciate her laughter even more. “Oh, please. They’ve been feeding you that party line about how ‘pain is growth, ’ haven’t they? Give me a nice, cushy seat in the stands and a box of popcorn any day. ”

“Besides, the view’s good. ” I tried to make the statement sound casual, even as I was watching Morgan for her reaction. Most of the people who come to roller derby are laid-back enough not to respond to a gentle expression of interest with flung objects and pejoratives, but I’ve learned to be careful, especially when my heart has been recently broken.

Morgan responded by looking me slowly up and down, eyes lingering on the pink tips of my hair and the matching laces in my shoes. She smiled. It was the languid smile of a cat that had been locked in at the dairy and now had access to all the cream. “I think the view’s just fine here in the stands. ”

My cheeks burned red. Well, that answered the question of whether or not she’d be okay with me flirting with her. “I, uh, like the view okay too. ”

“Looks like they’re finishing up down there, ” said Morgan, with a nod toward the track. The Concussion Stand was taking their final trip around. They’d be loose in a few seconds, and I’d have to start playing everybody’s least-favorite game, Will I See My Ex? No matter who won, I was going to lose. “Does your cousin need you, or can you run across to the food trucks with me? Maybe get something to drink, find another view to admire? ”

She was going pretty fast, considering that we’d met only five minutes ago. But she was hot and I was lonely, and my head was still filled with all the hormones and heartbreak of my split with Carly. I looked at the track one more time.

Annie could get a ride home from Fern. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d left in the middle of a bout, when I found something more interesting and less sweaty to do.

“Sure, ” I said, and slid off the bleachers and followed her to the door.

Let me just preface this by saying that I’m not a total pushover. I’ve taken self-defense classes with the best (in other words, my cousins), and I know how to handle myself in a crisis. Also, I always carry pepper spray in my vast monstrosity of a purse. Also-also, I am a strong, competent succubus in the modern age, and I don’t need people to take care of me. I can take care of myself.

Also, she was really cute, and I think I should get some slack for that.

The evening air was cool and moist and tasted like roses—perfect Portland weather, in other words. The empty lot across from the warehouse had been converted into a temporary wonderland of assorted cuisines by the food trucks, which flocked all over the city during daylight hours and sought out events like roller derbies in the evening. Watch a couple girls eat track, and then stroll across the street for a grilled cheese sandwich made from all-local, all-organic ingredients. Or a hamburger made from ground-up pigeons and sold to you by a man named Doug. Whatever you wanted. We didn’t judge.

Well, a lot of people would judge. Portland was full of people who liked to judge. But I wouldn’t judge, and I was the one who mattered.

Morgan paced me step for step as we walked, slanting little smiles in my direction, toying with her hair, and asking all those meaningless, flirty questions that sounded sort of like an Internet quiz gone weird. What sort of desserts did I like? Did I have any pets? Was the blond part of my hair natural, or did I get it done when I had my tips dyed?

I answered her questions as honestly as I could, only dodging the ones that touched on my family. Mom and Dad were okay with me dating. They actually liked it when I got out of the house, since they thought that my social life might somehow inspire Artie to get one of his own. (As if. My baby brother got stronger pheromones from Dad than I did, and didn’t get half the control. If he so much as sneezed in the presence of people he wasn’t related to, he was going to be in a world of trouble. ) But that didn’t mean I was allowed to blow our cover, or to ever reveal more information than I absolutely had to.

“So, how did you find out about roller derby? ” asked Morgan. She kept walking, passing a food truck that made excellent grilled-cheese sandwiches. My stomach grumbled.

Pretty girl, more important than food. “One of my ex-girlfriends was a skater. She used to encourage me to come and cheer for the team, and sometimes convinced me that I should work the merch table for her during halftime. She was pretty persuasive. ” And she’d kissed like it was her own invention, which helped a lot.

“Lost the girlfriend, kept the derby? ”

“Something like that. ”

Morgan stopped in front of a food truck I’d never seen before. It was selling cupcakes. That wasn’t unusual. You can’t throw a rock in Portland without hitting half a dozen cupcake stands. “Just to be clear, you’re Elsinore Harrington, age twenty-six, daughter of Theodore Harrington? Currently unemployed, no significant other? ”

I gaped at her. “W-what? ” I managed after a moment, recovering my senses enough to realize that something was extremely wrong.

“Good enough for me, ” said Morgan, and snapped her fingers.

The needle bit into the meaty part of my shoulder, deep enough that it felt almost like I was being stabbed. I jerked forward, trying to get it out of me before it could inject whatever payload it was carrying, and started to spin around to see my attacker. Only started: I might have unseated the needle, but I couldn’t stop the injection, and as soon as it hit my bloodstream, everything began to spin without any help from me. My turn became a fumble, and then a collapse as my knees refused to support my weight any longer. I could still see, but I couldn’t process what I was seeing. It was like my brain and my vision had become disconnected, turning everything into a soup of colors and shapes and jagged lines.

“I told you I could get her for you, ” said Morgan, her voice distant and distorted. “Now pay up. ”

“As agreed, ” said a male voice. I heard papers rustle, and then my face hit the food-court pavement and I stopped listening. It didn’t seem important anymore.

Unlike my cousins, who seem to think that no day is complete unless they’ve knocked themselves unconscious on some obstacle or other, I have tried to maintain a life devoid of blackouts, concussions, and other forms of trauma. Maybe they’re better at pulling themselves back out of oblivion than I am. I crawled back to myself one inch at a time, becoming slowly aware of the world around me, even though I couldn’t force myself to move. It was like sleep paralysis, except for the part where I hadn’t gone to sleep. Going to sleep would have been too easy.

The inside of my mouth tasted like a dentist’s office crossed with a perfume counter. It was obvious what had happened. Dad’s an incubus, which makes me a succubus. Half succubus, if you’re splitting hairs. I got some of his powers—not all—and I got all of his weaknesses, which is entirely unfair if you ask me. Couldn’t I have inherited some extra telepathy and skipped out on the violent allergy to aconite? The stuff’s poisonous to humans, deadly to werewolves, and acts on Lilu as a combination sedative and mind-control drug. It’s awesome.

(Incubi and succubi are both Lilu—just the male and female of the species. Ours is a complicated and inconvenient nomenclature. )

Whoever had grabbed me had shot me full of aconite, probably mixed with some more mundane sedative—or, hell, maybe it had just been mixed with saline. The end result would have been the same: one knocked-out succubus, no waiting, and no opportunity for me to get the hell out of Dodge.

This is why you don’t follow pretty girls you’ve just met without telling someone where you’re going, I thought sternly, and I accepted the chastisement as my due. This was all my own damn fault. I was the only one who was going to get me out of it.

Concentrating hard, I twitched my big toe. It moved sluggishly at first, and then more easily, like it was remembering what it meant to be connected to a body. I did it again and again, until it was moving as readily as it ever had. Good. My sleep paralysis was broken, and it was time to figure out what the hell was going on.

I opened my eyes.

I was sitting up: that much was evident from my perspective on the room, which was small and boxy and looked for all the world like it had started out as somebody’s garage. My brother lives in a converted basement. Once you learn the tricks of repurposed architecture, they’re difficult to overlook.

“She’s awake, ” said a voice. I froze. It wasn’t familiar, per se: I was pretty sure I’d never heard this specific voice before. But I knew it all the same. It was a male voice, late teens or early twenties, the sort of voice that I had heard in too many teen comedies and over too many live video game chat channels. I was a succubus tied to a chair, with a kid in the Revenge of the Nerds/Weird Science age bracket somewhere nearby.

This was not going to end well.

“She doesn’t look like a demon, ” said another voice, slightly higher but otherwise interchangeable with the first.

“Succubi look like normal girls, only prettier, ” said a third. “Didn’t you read my notes? ”

“Her hair’s pink, ” said a fourth voice. “I didn’t expect a demon with pink hair. ”

It figures. My first kidnapping, and I get amateur hour. I yawned, trying to look as unconcerned by my situation as possible, before saying, “Anybody can have pink hair, if they understand the secret ways of Hot Topic and the local salon. Not that I use Manic Panic. You get what you pay for, right? Kool-Aid is cheaper and lasts about as long. Now, does this meeting of the Young Cryptologists Society want to come to order and untie me before I get mad? ”

“You’re trapped, ” said the first voice. He sounded like he was projecting bravado as hard as he could. “You have to do what we tell you to do. ”

“I’m not trapped, I’m tied up, ” I said. “There’s a difference. It’s a small one, granted, but it’s big enough to matter. Now untie me, and I won’t tell my parents about you. ” Dad would be annoyed. Mom would be pissed, and while she often tries to forget that she comes from a violent family full of violent people who solve their problems with, yes, violence, threatening her kids had always been an excellent way to jog her memory.

“The ropes are a precaution, not a prison, ” said the first voice. He seemed to be their spokesman. He was probably the one who had managed to track me down. I thought fondly of putting his head through the wall.

Property damage never makes friends. I looked down at the floor, finally realizing what they were implying. Sure enough, I was sitting smack in the middle of a Seal of Solomon. It had been painted on the concrete with the sort of precision that implied protractors and drafting tools had been involved, and I would have been very impressed if I hadn’t been tied to a chair. That was taking up most of my capacity to care.

“Seriously? ” I looked up again, scanning the walls for anything reflective that might show me my captors. They were somewhere behind me, probably out of a misguided belief that succubi shared certain attributes with gorgons. If looks could kill, I would have had a very different high school experience. “A Seal of Solomon? Where did you get your information—the D& D Monster Manual? ”

Silence. Which was really an answer in and of itself.

“I am not bothered by the Seal of Solomon, because I am not A, a demon, or B, deceased, ” I said, speaking slowly and clearly. “I would have to be one of those two things before this would become a problem for me. Seriously, don’t you know anything? You really shouldn’t kidnap people if you don’t know how to safely contain them. Actually, scratch that. You shouldn’t kidnap people, period. Now come untie me, before I get pissed. ”

“You’re right: she can’t escape, ” said one of the boys. He sounded utterly amazed, like this was the culmination of all his birthday wishes. There was a rustling sound, and then he was stepping into view, staring at me in awe. That just made me more uncomfortable. It wasn’t the sort of look you give another person. It was the sort of look you give a delicious cake, right after you’ve realized that it’s all for you. “She’s trapped. ”

My guess about their age was supported by his appearance. He was thin, in that not-finished-yet way that some people don’t lose until they hit their thirties, with a scrubby brown mustache on his upper lip and hair that didn’t appear to have encountered a brush in quite some time. He was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a giant robot on it. Artie had the same one. In fact, just based on age and general scruffiness, this kid could have been my little brother, except for the part where my brother would never tie me to a chair, drop me in the middle of a Seal of Solomon, and invite all his friends over for a look.

Also, my brother didn’t have that many friends.

“What are you, twelve? ” I demanded. “This isn’t how you meet girls. This is even worse than listening to pickup artists. ”

The kid blinked. “What? ”

“Seriously, no woman is going to love you because you tell her she’d look good if she lost a few pounds. She’s just going to punch you through the nearest salad bar. And no succubus is going to play the Jeannie to your Master just because you tie her to a chair. ”

He blinked at me again before turning an impressively bright shade of red. “That’s not— I mean, we didn’t— I mean, we would never do that. That’s not okay. ”

I blinked. Apparently, I had been misreading the situation. That, or a hundred erotic fanfics had gotten it all wrong. “Then why am I here? ”

“Because you’re a demon, ” said a second boy, walking into my field of vision. He had short, curly black hair, dark skin, and a solemn expression. “We needed a demon, and when we asked around, you were the safest one we could find. ”

I wanted to tell him—again—that I wasn’t a demon, but since it hadn’t gotten through the first time, I wasn’t sure what good it would do me. I settled for frowning at him sternly and asking, “Why did you need a demon? Demons don’t grant wishes, you know. Mostly they play piñ ata with the people who mess with them. You’re not full of candy. The average demon thinks entrails are just as nice. ”

“We needed a demon because a demon took my baby sister and I have to get her back, ” he said, and everything changed.

“Oh, ” I said softly.

Shit.

“Her name is Angie, ” he said. They still hadn’t untied me, but all four of them were in front of me now. I was trying to see that as an improvement and not as a sign that they were planning to sacrifice me to something. “She’s seven. She’s the smartest kid you’ve ever met, but she’s sort of dumb sometimes too, you know? Little kids don’t always know that they shouldn’t trust everyone they meet. ”

“Are you the one who hired Morgan to get me out of the derby game? ” I asked. He looked away. “Thought so. Just as an FYI, sometimes adults don’t recognize danger either. Everybody messes up sometimes. ”

“She followed this gray-skinned thing into the sewers, ” he shot back. “How is that messing up? ”

A gray-skinned thing in the sewers was a lot more likely to be a bogeyman than it was to be a demon. I shook my head. “I still don’t know what you want me to do. I’m a succubus. If you wanted someone persuaded to make out with you, I’d be your girl, except for the part where I don’t do that sort of thing. It’s shitty and date rape-y, and I refuse. But I can’t find missing kids, and I can’t reverse time to prevent bad decisions. ”

“You’re a demon, ” said the kid with the scraggly mustache resolutely. Of the four, he was the least willing to budge from that point. “The person we hired to get you for us injected you with enough aconite to kill an elephant, and you’re still alive. That means you can’t be human, and you have to do what we say. ”

Anger suddenly swelled in my chest, hot and tight and unforgiving. “Wait, you mean you weren’t sure? ” I demanded. “You thought there was a chance I was human, and you had them pump me full of aconite anyway? Kid, you missed a murder charge by one mistaken identity. You get that, right? If your little honey trap had landed anyone else in that warehouse, you would have had a body on your hands. ”

“It didn’t happen that way, ” said the first kid. “We hired professionals. ”

“Professional what? ”

“Bigfoot hunters, ” said one of the other kids—one who hadn’t been speaking much up to this point, apparently happy to let his friends dig their own graves while he stared, awestruck, at my breasts. “They came very highly recommended. And they had a money-back guarantee. ”

“Oh, that makes it all better, ” I said bitterly. There are two kinds of Bigfoot hunters in the world: the gently deluded ones who just want to meet something mysterious and who never manage to actually encounter a real Bigfoot, and the mercenary bastards who believe that everything in this world exists to be broken down for parts and sold on the alchemical, scientific, and pharmaceutical black markets. There are people who swear that powdered Bigfoot bones cure erectile dysfunction, or that the hair of a dragon princess will bring wealth. Bigfeet have been hunted to the verge of extinction by assholes looking to make a quick buck, which has forced their hunters to step up their game.

Catching me had probably netted them a few thousand bucks, enough to buy some better tracking gear and a bunch more guns. I supposed I should count myself lucky that there’s not much of a market for succubus bits—we’re not sex magnets like our male counterparts—but I couldn’t help but feel like I had just dodged a bullet that should never have been pointed in my direction to begin with.

“It’s not like you’re a person, ” said the first kid, pulling my attention back to him. He quailed a bit under my glare, but rallied quickly. “Anyway, we didn’t hurt you. We just needed you to listen. You have to get Angie back. ”

“Why would I do you any favors? ” I asked.

“Because either you’re a demon, and the Seal of Solomon means you have to do what we say, or you’re a person who’s also a succubus, and you can go where we can’t. You can get Angie back. ”

His logic was sound, once you got past the part where it had started with a kidnapping. I looked at him flatly. “You’re going to need to make me a promise and answer a question before I agree to help you. If you don’t promise or you don’t answer, then we’re finished here. You can keep me tied up forever if you like. It won’t get your sister back. ”

“But if we promise and answer, you’ll do it? ” he asked. The desperation in his voice was too raw to have been anything but real. He was at the end of his rope, and while I felt bad about that, I wasn’t ready to forgive him for what he’d done to me.

“I’ll consider it, ” I said.

“Anything, ” he said.

“First off, you have to promise me that you’ll never do anything like this again, ever. No matter how important you think it is, no matter how much you want to go ‘Well, it worked last time, we got a succubus and she fixed things for us, ’ you need to leave your friendly neighborhood inhumans alone. Got me? I am a person, I have a life, I do not need to get kidnapped by the Hardy Boys every time one of you has a hangnail. If I hear so much as a whisper of you doing this to somebody else, I will rain down fire and brimstone on your heads, and I will not be sorry. Got it? ”

“Got it, ” said the boy with the missing sister. None of them had given me their names. It made sense. If they still thought I was a demon, they wouldn’t want me to have that sort of power over them. “We promise. ”

“Good. ” I still didn’t know whether it was safe to believe them, of course, but that would come later, after I had gotten out of this garage and told my family about the teenage demon stealers. These kids would learn the hard way not to mess with people if they ever tried anything like this again. “Now here’s the question: How did you find out about me? ”

One of the other kids, the one with the black hair and the uneasy eyes, told me.

“Oh, ” I said.

There was a momentary silence.

“Untie me, ” I said. “I need to go get your sister. ”

Bogeymen have always been nocturnal. Long before humans were building cities with functional sewer systems, their close cousins were figuring out ways to get around without being seen, and coming up with excuses for why they never came out during the day. Lots of bogeymen got in trouble for being vampires during the Victorian era, or corpse eaters, or grave-robbers, even though they weren’t any of those things. They were just polite, reclusive neighbors whose place on the hominid family tree wasn’t quite so well lit.

Portland’s bogeymen had a lot of light pollution and a high population of hipsters, Goths, and punks to contend with—all barriers to a comfortable nocturnal community. So they had done what any species that wanted to coexist with humans without actually talking to them would do: They had installed a bunch of lovely “sewer drains” that fed into a system of tunnels not found on any municipal map, connecting to basements all over the metro area. They could move from place to place without ever seeing the light of day, and they had entrances near several local grocery and big-box stores. Supplies weren’t the problem.

Children, on the other hand. . . Children were always an issue. Because kids didn’t understand why they couldn’t make friends with the little boy down the block who just happened to have weirdly pink skin and fingers that were missing a joint or two. Kids wanted to play tag, and didn’t understand fear of the unknown—not the way adults did. Everything was unknown to a child, and so they accepted what they didn’t understand much more quickly, and embraced with much less restraint.

It didn’t help that most bogeyman households had cable. Bogeyman children learned to see human children as friends they just hadn’t met yet, which sometimes led to situations like this one.

I slid on the sides of my feet down the short embankment leading to the storm drain, all too aware of the four teenage boys who were on the sidewalk behind me, watching me go. I didn’t look back. When I reached the flat ground at the bottom of the embankment, I stood up a little straighter and walked forward, into the open mouth of the tunnel.

The light cut off almost immediately. It was the middle of the night, after all, and the streetlights weren’t designed to shine into the bowels of the Earth. Not for the first time, I wished my kidnappers had been willing to return my cell phone. Antimony had to be frantic by now. . . assuming she’d even noticed that I was gone. Her team had won, and I didn’t always stick around for the after party, especially when I’d just gone through a painful breakup. She might think I was just fine.

“I need better cousins, ” I muttered, and walked onward into the dark.

Bogeymen like to live underground when they can. It affords them a lot of advantages. Humans tend toward claustrophobia, which makes them reluctant to follow shadowy figures into dark tunnels. Bogeymen, on the other hand, tend toward agoraphobia, and sometimes freak out if forced to stand in the middle of a grassy field. It’s a perfect balance. But living underground doesn’t mean living in squalor. Anyone with a nose would have known that this wasn’t really a storm drain. It smelled of damp metal and clean dirt and nothing worse—no mold or decay or waste products. The local human homeless probably slept down here occasionally and found themselves gently encouraged to seek shelter elsewhere, before the signs of their presence were scrubbed away.

I walked deeper, and smiled as the urge to turn back began to bubble in the recesses of my mind. This was careful, meticulous work, doing its best to convince me that this whole enterprise had been a terrible mistake. Succubus work, in other words, probably performed in concert with one of the local hidebehinds. Nobody binds a simple illusion or telepathic command to a static charm like a hidebehind. Which would be a terrible slogan for a business, all things considered.

The feeling that I wasn’t supposed to be here just kept getting stronger as I kept pushing onward, until I reached a dead end, my fingers brushing against hard-packed earth in front of me. “Nice, ” I murmured, and closed my eyes and walked into the wall—

—only to slam face-first into the same thing my hand had encountered. The dead end was not an illusion. I stepped backward, rubbing my nose, and tripped over a bump in the tunnel floor. I spun to my right, reaching out to catch myself—

—and fell as the tunnel wall proved to be an illusion. “Oh, come on! ” I protested. I had been dumped into a second, wider tunnel, lit by dimly glowing bulbs that hung like party lights from hooks on the ceiling. It was a little bit like stepping onto a circus midway after the show had closed, all soft illumination and the faint, sweet smell of sawdust.

If anyone heard my exclamation, they didn’t come to see what I was doing there. I picked myself up, dusted the tunnel dirt and sawdust off my knees, and started walking away from the false wall.

Little by little, the sounds of life drifted out to meet me. Voices raised in greeting or argument; laughter; a brief, sharp burst of an argument. By the time the voices began to form actual words, I was moving with quick assurance.

That assurance died when I came around a corner and found myself facing what looked like an underground parking garage crossed with a flea market, and packed with bogeymen, almost all of whom had turned to wait for my arrival. They were tall, oddly jointed people with grayish skin and pale eyes. That was where their uniformity ended. Some were fat and some were thin; most had dark hair, but a few were blond, and one had shockingly red curls that held their color even in the dim light that the community favored. Most were wearing human-style clothing. Add a hoodie, and they could pass unnoticed among the population of Portland. That was the point.

“Uh, hi, ” I said. I knew bogeymen in passing, but I didn’t know any well enough that I could really call them my friends. More like “acquaintances in shared persecution. ” I cleared my throat and continued anyway. “My name’s Elsie Harrington? I’m Ted Harrington’s daughter? I was wondering if I could speak to somebody in charge? ”

“If you’re Ted’s daughter, that means you’re also Jane Price’s daughter, ” called a voice from the back of the crowd. “How do we know this isn’t a trap? ”

“Um, well, I’m not armed, for a start, which is basically proof that I’m not here as a Price, ” I said. “Also, I’m alone. Also, I’m a succubus, so if the Prices had gone back to being killers instead of conservationists, I’d be seeking sanctuary right about now. I’m here because Angie’s brother is worried about her. He asked me to come find her. ” The part about him kidnapping me seemed like it was better left unsaid, at least for right now. I had already come into these people’s home without permission. I didn’t need to kick the beehive.

“Angie? ” One of the bogeymen stepped forward. She was wearing a red dress in a traditional bogeyman cut, tight around the collarbone and flowing otherwise, allowing her hyperflexible limbs the space to move. Her hair, the color of dust over granite, was looped into an ornate braid atop her head. She must have been one of their leaders. Only the people in charge of a community held to the old fashions, because only the people in charge were never required to go among humans and try to pass. “There’s no one here by that name, Lilu. You have come to the wrong place. ”

“Maybe there’s no one who’s supposed to be here, but she’s here, ” I said, trying not to flinch at her use of the proper name for my species. Male Lilu are incubi and female Lilu are succubi, and it’s an insult to call any individual by the singular species name. I don’t know why. It’s just the way things have always been. “Her brother saw her go into the storm drain with one of your children, and he sent me to get her back. He’s worried about her. ”

The bogeyman leader bristled. “Are you calling us child thieves? ” she demanded.

“No, I’m saying that one of yours decided to invite a friend over for dinner but forgot to get permission from her parents first, ” I said. “Look. Right now, it’s one teenage boy who saw his sister go underground with a stranger, and one succubus in your living room asking for that sister back. If I don’t succeed, who knows what that kid is going to send down here next? ” Belatedly, it occurred to me that if the boys had known how to find monster hunters, they could have cut out the middleman and sent them down here directly, instead of messing around with me. I wondered whether it was the teenage tendency toward baroque planning, or whether they had understood that sending a bunch of professional killers into a bogeyman community would have been like killing a spider with a machine gun: unfair in the extreme.

The bogeyman leader narrowed her eyes. “You’re threatening us? ”

“Uh, not so much, if you actually listen to the words I’m saying and not to the script you think I should be following. I am saying that I am the easy option. Give me the little girl, and I’ll walk away from here, and you can have a nice, long chat about stranger danger and why we don’t invite humans over for slumber parties, okay? ” I held out my hands, showing that they were empty. “It’s after midnight. Humans aren’t nocturnal. Come on, just give the kid back, and we’ll call it good. ”

“I didn’t mean to. ” This voice was soft, and sweet, and distinctly prepubescent. The adult bogeymen shuffled to the sides, turning toward the speaker: a little bogeyman girl, her curly black hair in pigtails, her grayish skin made up with human cosmetics in that garish way that only appeals to little girls playing dress-up. She looked miserable. “Angie and me were playing, is all. And then her parents said it was time for her to go to bed, but they hadn’t seen me, and I said that it wasn’t bedtime where I lived, and she said, ‘Okay, let’s go, ’ and I’m sorry, I didn’t think anybody would notice that she wasn’t there anymore. . . . ”

Fat tears were starting to slide down the little girl’s cheeks, cutting paths through the dime-store blush she had slathered on. It made me want to hug her and teach her about doing her colors, all at the same time. I cleared my throat, forcing both urges down.

“So, see, she is here, ” I said. “Where’s Angie, honey? ”

The little girl sniffled and said, “She fell asleep. I guess maybe it was her bedtime after all. ”

I looked at the bogeyman who seemed to be in charge, raising an eyebrow and waiting for her to say something. She looked at me, and her face was a sea of rage, sorrow, and simple, mundane regret. She didn’t like that this had happened on her watch; she liked even less that I was right.

“I’ll bring you the girl, ” she said finally. “I’m going to tell your father you came down here. ”

“To retrieve a human child who had been kidnapped, even if it was by accident, so that you wouldn’t get into trouble with your neighbors? Yeah, he’ll be real pissed at me. Be sure to tell him how you called me ‘Lilu, ’ okay? Because, hell, maybe he’ll buy me a new car. ” I folded my arms. “The girl? ”

“Wait here, ” said the bogeyman leader. She turned away, and the little girl in the wrong shade of blush followed her.

I felt no triumph, no rush of victory.

There was no victory here.

Angie’s brother and his friends had been waiting for me when I emerged from the storm drain, a sleeping little girl in a sundress and a feather boa cradled in my arms. The relief on their faces had been palpable—as had the calculation.

“No, ” I had said, holding Angie close, refusing to give her up until they understood. “You made me a promise, remember? You’re going to keep it. ”

“Or what? ” asked one of them.

“You don’t want to know, ” I’d replied. “Now somebody get my purse from wherever you stashed it. I need to call a cab. ”

The last I’d seen of them, they had been retreating into the house, a sleepy Angie walking between them. I felt a little bad for her. She had made a friend, and she was never going to see that friend again. The bogeymen were already sealing off the entrance I’d used to get to them; they wouldn’t move their community, but they’d make damn sure they stayed secret.

But that was for later, when there was time to regret. I had taken the cab back to the warehouse, where my car was still parked at the back of the lot. A half dozen messages from Antimony blinked on my cell phone, waiting to be answered or acknowledged. It was late enough that the after parties had all broken up or moved on, and I hadn’t seen a single living soul as I drove the familiar route across town.

Raising my hand, I hammered on the closed apartment door until my knuckles ached, and then I hammered some more, just to get my point across. Someone shouted from inside. I knocked harder.

The door was wrenched open, and there was Carlotta—lovely Carlotta, with the lips I had kissed so many times—snarling, “It’s three in the fucking morning, you—”

She stopped herself when she saw me, going pale. I looked at her wearily.

“You dumped me because I’m not human, ” I said, no preamble, no softening the blow. “Did you really have to tell your sister about me? You promised me you wouldn’t. ”

“Elsie. . . ” she began, and stopped, clearly unsure how to continue.

“She told her kid, Carly. She told her kid, and he told his friends, and they hired some mercenary assholes to shoot me full of aconite because they needed a demon. I know we’re not dating anymore, but damn. ”

“I didn’t think she’d talk about it, ” said Carlotta weakly. “This is a lot to put on my shoulders, Elsie. ”

“You mean my survival? Yeah, it is. ” I stepped closer, seeing the way she flinched when I entered her personal space and hating it. Still, I forced my voice to stay level and cold as I said, “My life is more important than your bigotry, Carlotta. You want to talk about what a shit girlfriend I was? Fine. But you gave me your word you’d keep our secrets, and you’re going to do it. If you don’t, I am not going to make any promises about your safety. Do you understand? ”

To my surprise, she laughed. “This is why we had to break up, ” she said bitterly. “Because my safety matters more to me than your secrets. ”

“Keep my secrets, and you’ll have nothing to worry about, ” I shot back. “You get one shitty ex moment. This was yours. Now prove that I was right to love you. ” I turned on my heel and stalked away before she could say anything else.

I made it back to my car before I started to cry. I buckled myself in and kept crying, until the tears ran out. And then I checked my mascara—waterproof for the win—started the engine, and drove myself home. I would answer Antimony’s texts later. Right now, I wanted a gallon of ice cream, my own bed, and late-night cartoons on Adult Swim.

Sometimes all we can do is have a sleepover with ourselves.

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