Page 2 of Hungry Like the Wolf

Eugene nodded his head so vigorously that it was a wonder his neck hadn’t popped.

“Good,” she said. “And, uh, cover that up. Right now.”

He raced around the easel and started painting over her sigil with rushed strokes. When the whole canvas was that lurid, blood red, he turned to face her, his eyes wide with the question.

“Perfect,” she said. “Thank you.”

“No sweat,” he said, which was ironic as he was sweating profusely.

There. That had been easy enough. No harm, no foul. Except that now she had to figure out how to get home. She’d never travelled across the planes alone and had no idea where to even begin.

She turned, knocking over another easel with her wings, and winced. She carefully turned back to him.

“How do I get out of here?”

Eugene’s eye went comically wide. “Like that?” He gestured at her, head to toe.

“Shit,” she said under her breath.

“There’s a janitor’s closet in the corner. They don’t clean on the weekend so nobody will go in there the rest of the day. You could hide in there until tonight and then… sneak out?”

“You won’t try to lock me in?”

“I won’t. Cross my heart,” Eugene said, drawing a cross over his sternum.

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

He swallowed and stood up taller. “How do I know you are?”

She canted her head from side to side. “Fair point. Okay. Well—” She looked and saw the door in the corner. “Good luck, Eugene. See you around.”

“No offense,” he said shakily, “but I hope I never see you again.”

She smiled, in spite of herself and the situation. “Same.”

Nadja closed the closet door behind her, sitting carefully on an old stool in the corner. The room smelled awful, but it was dark and quiet and would give her space to think. She thought about Eugene’s innocent doodling of her own sigil and got an idea. She knew what Halphas’s sigil looked like. She could draw it on something in here and summon him. Then he could bring her home.

The wall beside her was laddered with floor-to-ceiling shelves containing everything from cleaning supplies to paint. She didn’t want to paint his sigil, though. It felt too permanent, which was dangerous for him. She rummaged through boxes hissing when something sharp poked her. She pulled the box farther off the shelf and saw, in the midst of a box of assorted nuts and bolts, a shiny brass tack.

Nadja took the tack and went to the darkest corner of the closet, beside the mop buckets. Next to the baseboard, as small as she could possibly make it, she carved his sigil into the flaking paint. It wouldn’t be noticeable but it would do the trick. She nicked her finger with the tack and pressed it to the sigil, just to make it work faster.

Her ears popped as the pressure in the closet changed and Halphas appeared before her, eight feet tall and deep red, like the underside of a ripe plum. His shoulders were so thick that he nearly spanned the width of the small closet. His tall horns spirals over his head; horns that he used for more than decoration, the tips kept dangerously sharp.

He thundered. “Who dares to summon the Earl of—Nadja?” His voice was instantly quieter, normal. “Nadja, what the hell are you doing here? And why did you?—?”

She threw herself against him. Halphas wrapped his arms and wings around her, and she pressed her face against his chest. The weight of all of the things that could have happened to her was so very frightening all of a sudden and she felt hot tears gathering in her eyes.

“A human summoned me, and I didn’t know how to get home. So I summoned you.”

Halphas stroked a hand over her hair. “Have I really never taught you that?”

“No, because I don’t come here. I?—”

“Right,” he said. “I know.”

He did know. In fact, nobody knew better than Halphas just how bad a succubus she was. He had shown her how to access the dream network, giving her a way to feed herself that wasn’t completely unpalatable. And because she didn’t visit Earth to feed, she’d never had to learn how to get back.

“You did the right thing. You’re safe now, and I’ll take you home. We just have to—oh fuck,” he said. Nadja tensed in alarm.