Page 23 of Changeling (The Incubus Saga #2)

The woman appeared in a doorway off the living room with a bemused expression and a hand on her hip.

She was beautiful, much more so than any photograph could capture.

The red hair falling in waves past her shoulders, the bright blue eyes, the quirk of a loving smile.

She didn’t wear makeup; she didn’t need to.

She was dressed in jeans and an oversized violet sweatshirt that hung low off one of her pale shoulders.

“Deklin,” she said again, calling to her husband as she approached him, “you’re supposed to put the baby to sleep, not the other way around.” The smile on her lips shifted into a smirk. She stopped just in front of the couch, barely a foot from where an adult Sasha was still crouched.

Deklin stirred, lifting his head with tired eyes and a small smile of his own.

He looked down at what was so obviously his son , a wide awake little bundle of a boy who was happily squirming in Daddy’s arms. “Well, that was the original idea. You’re making me look bad, buddy,” he whispered to the tiny redhead.

A smile broke onto the real Sasha’s face, but it was a sad smile. His eyes were turned down at their edges and already shimmering wet.

“He’s like a little space heater,” Deklin said, resituating himself but not getting up from the couch. “Puts me out every time. I can’t help it.”

Sasha's mother, Solaris—for there was no denying who she was—looked thoroughly amused by the situation. She leaned toward Deklin and kissed his forehead, smoothing back his longer dark hair with her hand. Deklin had that familiar black Irish look to him—black hair, blue eyes, fairer skin, though not as fair as his wife’s.

His hair was layered and wavy to his shoulders.

He looked twenty-five, of course, but what surprised Nathan was the sight of rugged stubble.

Sasha didn’t even have a shaving kit. Nathan had certainly never seen the guy shave and assumed that, as an incubus, he didn’t need to. It made Nathan wonder if the rules were different for the initiated, since Deklin hadn't been born an incubus.

“Maybe it wouldn’t be so easy to put you to sleep if you weren’t staying up so late with all that research,” Solaris said chidingly.

“The bad guys don’t take days off, Sol, so neither should I,” Deklin replied. He looked down at baby Sasha again and smiled. “Besides, if I’m already up then I can take first shift with this guy. Male bonding time is very important for us, ya know.”

A melodic giggle left the succubus. “I’m not saying I don’t enjoy the benefits, just don’t wear yourself out. You can still get fatigued as an incubus. You’re not invulnerable. You’re a seal, a husband, and a father. Some might consider that too much for one man.”

Deklin just grinned. “I thought that’s what all the sex was for,” he said through a laugh.

“Very funny,” Solaris droned, bending down again to kiss him full on the lips. It was a slow, easy kiss.

Nathan liked to think his parents had been like that too.

Solaris pulled away. Deklin was smiling wide as ever, and that’s what finally made Nathan realize something that should have been obvious.

Sasha looked just like his father. Pictures couldn’t really capture the resemblance well enough, but it was clear now.

Sasha had his mother’s eyes, but the rest of his face, especially the smile, was all Deklin.

Maybe Nathan was thinking or feeling too loudly because that was the moment when Sasha turned and saw them. Nathan and Jim both shrank back but Sasha wasn’t upset. He just smiled wide with an expression so like his father.

A buzzer went off in the kitchen, startling the couple and bringing Nathan back to reality, too.

He was about to tell Sasha that they really needed to move on.

They shouldn’t have let themselves get so wrapped up in their pasts to begin with, but then maybe they were right in assuming that taking the tour was the best way to figure things out.

“We have to go…right?” Sasha asked, turning back to the door with tears in his eyes.

Next to Nathan, Jim smiled, all reassuring with his ‘I’m here for you’ look that Nathan was so grateful for at moments like this. “Yeah, we really should,” Jim said. “None of us can move past this room anyway.”

Nathan wanted to grab Sasha by the back of the neck and kiss him until the incubus stopped looking so shattered. He couldn’t yet, though. They didn’t have time. And time seemed to be the key with this place.

Casting Sasha one long look of affection as the incubus moved toward them out of the room, Nathan received an answering smile but still wished he could do more.

He couldn't help looking at Walter, still visible nearby in the hallway, as they began to move for the next room, and again he thought that maybe he was beginning to understand what Walter must feel like, capable of watching and speaking and offering small bits of advice, but of so little else.

It was a helpless feeling, not being able to do all that you wanted, or all that you thought the ones you loved needed.

But as Nathan met Walter's warm brown eyes, he didn't see sadness or regret. Instead there was something like relief. Walter looked ahead at Sasha and Jim, then back to Nathan, and he smiled as if to say 'they have you', before he faded away.

The next fifteen rooms went by quickly, leading all the way up to room #100 in jumps of five years. All of the rooms remained plain white with no change when they entered. After all, neither Nathan nor the others had existed 30 years ago

“Okay, so let me make sure I got this,” Nathan said after they had finished with the last room.

“This place was originally a family house built way back when, which is why it was declared a historical building. The dead curator turned the place into a museum like sixty years ago when he was still a young guy. So...when did the incidents of people turning up like vegetables first start?”

“Right when it first started giving private tours,” Sasha said, leaning back against one of the plain white walls of the last room. “The curator, a guy named Hollander, never allowed the Historical Society to lay claim to the house. It was a private museum.”

“For what?”

Sasha gaped at Nathan. “For…the tours,” he said lamely. “I guess it’s never been stated to the public what the museum was for. People just assumed—”

“And that was their first mistake,” Nathan cut in.

“Okay, so tours. They were pretty consistent over the years but only resulted in vegetables once in a while, meaning some people managed to get through this place fine. That we already know. But why didn’t the police ever tie the incidents to the Animus House in the first place? ”

“That’s the best part,” Jim said. “When Hollander was still running the place, the people who came out changed were always found in their hotels or homes or somewhere else, not here.

There was no way to trace what happened to them to this house.

Not enough hard evidence anyway. The recent squatters were the first positive link. "

“Okay,” Nathan nodded, “let’s assume everyone on the tour always makes it through these rooms, looking in on their pasts until they get to the point where they can’t go back any further. Last step’s the third floor.”

Nodding to each other, the three of them headed out of the last room, back onto the landing, and climbed the final set of stairs.

There was no accompanying message scrawled at the top of the stairs this time, but when they got to the third floor they came to a much smaller landing as if they had reached an attic.

Before them were two close-set doors. Here there was a long message up high and then separate words directly above each door.

Jim used his flashlight again, since it was darker up here without any windows, and started reading. “Look to the past and you move forward. Stay in the past and you stand still. Seek the future…and you shall fall behind?”

“Great,” Nathan said. "Poetic and all, but what’s it mean?”

“Well,” Sasha supplied with a shrug, “I’d say it means…you should learn from your past without dwelling on it, and if you think too much about the future, you forget to live today. It’s actually a pretty good lesson.”

“With a nasty consequence,” Nathan grumbled.

Jim was still pouring over the Gaelic. “This one could mean 'the present' or 'now',” he said, reading the lone word above the door on the left, “and this one,” he said about the door on the right, “could mean 'future'. So it’s like a riddle. And the answer is either Present or Future. Right. At what point does David Bowie declare his love for us again?”

Nathan snorted. Jim wasn’t completely useless in the pop culture side of things. “At least the riddles in Labyrinth actually get ya thinking,” Nathan said. “This one’s easy. I’ll take door #1, Wink,” he said, smacking Jim on the back.

“Yeah…” Jim said, but he wasn’t looking at door #1.

“Hey,” Nathan insisted, pushing Jim a little harder this time, “eyes on the prize. I’m sure after seeing the past, a lot of people thought that glimpsing their future sounded like a fair deal.

But we’re not stupid, remember? It’s pretty damn obvious that going through the Future door, whether you get to see what it suggests or not, dumps you out on the other side a vegetable.

I don’t know what the Present door does, but if you ask me, I say we make things simple. ”

Sasha and Jim turned to look at Nathan expectantly.

With a grin, Nathan took a small bottle of lighter fluid from his coat pocket.

They wouldn’t need much to get a place like this going, old as it was and all wood.

“We neutralize both doors and burn the place to the ground.

That should nullify the spells and keep anyone new from wandering in.

And I'd be willing to bet it'll bring out the dark fae behind this place, too.”

“But Nathan,” Jim objected, “we don’t even know what the spells are. The power of this place may rest in memories, but...” Jim paused a moment, his brow crinkling like he was the biggest idiot in the world. “ Animus House. Animus can mean 'memory'. That…really should have dawned on me before now.”

Nathan snorted again. “Who cares. Memory House is going down. Neutralizing and burning the place should work.”

“But…” Jim looked at the future door again. “Think about this, Nathan. Think what we might see. If we could harness this power instead of just destroying it—”

“Hey,” Nathan said sharply, grabbing the collar of Jim’s coat. “You know better than to mess with this shit. It's a trap.”

“Maybe if we only looked inside,” Sasha suggested meekly.

“ No . Will you two listen to yourselves? You’re not taking that kind of risk just to see if there’s some secret way to save me from my mark in there.

” Nathan wasn’t stupid; he knew what they were looking to the future for, and that’s what would get them in trouble.

In any other situation neither of them would be so foolhardy.

Nathan was tempted too, not only for himself, but to see what the future might hold for all of them, especially for Jim and what his growing powers might lead to, but he wasn't about to fall for some dark fae trap.

Jim and Sasha both had downcast eyes because, of course, they knew how foolish even thinking about doing what they were suggesting actually was.

Nathan walked up to Sasha, opening the incubus’ dark leather jacket, and plucked one of the black markers they had brought along out of his pocket.

“Even I know the right runes for neutralizing a spell.

Once we've done that, burning the place should be enough.

We're here for whoever's responsible for all this, remember? We need to draw them out.”

Reluctantly the others nodded, giving in to Nathan’s authority over the situation—which actually amazed him for a moment, considering Jim was the smart one and Sasha was the seal, but he’d take what he could get as long as they listened to him.

At first, everything seemed to go fine. Nathan scrawled neutralizing runes over the first door, while Jim took one of their other markers for the second one, and Sasha started spraying the part of the upper landing closest to both doors with lighter fluid.

The first words of a neutralizing incantation were barely out of Sasha's mouth before the house started shaking. Nathan stared hard at Sasha, and the incubus kept on speaking. They would light the place up and run for it as soon as he finished.

They were all crouched low to avoid toppling over as the shaking of the house intensified. The more Sasha spoke, the more the place shook. The magic put into this place was strong, and it did not want to give up its dominance over the house.

Nathan pulled out his lighter. He didn’t smoke, but having a lighter around came in handy in many situations. Matches were too unpredictable.

There wasn’t much left of the incantation, but Sasha was starting to lose his footing. Jim moved carefully over to him and grabbed onto Sasha's shoulders from behind to steady him. They were closer to door #2 while Nathan was standing by door #1 with his lighter out, waiting.

Sasha was only a few words from the end of the spell when everything went sour.

The house shook more violently than ever, as if an earthquake was cracking the foundation.

Then, as the house gave a great shudder, an impossible wind rose up out of nowhere, and suddenly Nathan went down, landing hard on his side.

He had never cursed himself so much for being overly prepared; he had already readied the lighter.

When he fell, the flame hit the floor and a blaze erupted.

Jim was still hanging onto Sasha's shoulders. Nathan tried to yell to them over the roar of the shaking house, but he couldn’t even hear his own voice when it left him.

With a BANG both doors flew open outward so that the doors themselves slammed into the wall.

All Nathan could see was bright light emanating from both of them.

He shielded his eyes and looked to Jim and Sasha, trying to yell louder, because he couldn’t move and the fire was already lapping toward him and climbing up the walls.

Jim and Sasha stared into room #2, barely noticing the fire. Their eyes went wide at whatever they saw inside, and then the wind spun into a vortex, lifting Jim and Sasha into the air and sucking them right into room #2 without ceremony.

Nathan screamed but no sound came. He tried to move, tried to crawl, but the vortex spun toward him next, unseen but definitely felt , and lifted him into the air towards door #1.

White light may have been emanating from it before, but when Nathan went through the door marked ‘Present’ everything went painfully black.