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PENN
My parents didn’t understand why I wanted to transfer to Creepin U when they opened their doors to humans. It wasn’t any closer to home than Temple University had been. It wasn’t better rated. In fact, it wasn’t rated in any of the human university guides at all. In addition to all of that, it was full of literal monsters.
Creelin University was the only school in America that would let me study side by side with them, and I’d been fascinated by monsters my entire life. Or at least as long as I’d known that the kid down the street with the blue tint to his skin wasn’t a normal person, but someone or something completely different. My parents had never liked my fascination with monsters, my desire to know more about them, but it wasn’t something I felt like they needed to understand.
They just had to support my desire to study among them.
They finally did. Eventually.
Which was a good thing, because my transfer application had been accepted and a few weeks ago, I’d moved to Creelin, Pennsylvania and started my second year studying with the monsters that had always fascinated me. I had a class taught by a ghost. I got served coffee by mummies and tried to make the zombie that roamed the library smile. (He never did. I wasn’t even sure if zombies were capable of smiling, but it was a fun game to play if nonetheless.)
I was a journalism major, and I’d earned one of the underclassmen spots on the Creelin Courier. I had a nice four person suite in Karloff Hall with three other humans. I wondered if any dorm rooms were mixed between monsters and humans, or if they were just as separated as boys and girls. I’d asked around at the welcome bonfire, but no one had any real answers for me. I had heard that in the traditional, two person dorms in Poe Hall, there were some mixed pairings.
Maybe I should have applied to live there instead, but Karloff came with my own sleeping area and didn’t have communal showers.
My life at Creelin University was everything I dreamed of it being.
Okay, that was a lie. It wasn’t everything that I imagined. There were flaws in the system, which I was reminded of when I stepped into the newspaper room.
The editor, an upperclassman named Ever who had small turquoise horns even in his human form, seemed to have an issue with humans being on his staff. We got assigned the most boring topics. I was assigned a story about parking . Who cared about parking on campus when there were so many other interesting stories that could be told?
Even Cam Wilde got a more interesting story than I did. He was in my year, and he was the most attractive person I’d ever seen in my life. He had creamy skin and bright, blue eyes that drew me in. He had dark hair that fell into his eyes and looked softer than any hair I’d ever seen. I wanted to run my fingers through it. His jawline was sharp enough to cut a steak. I’d found myself dreaming about him almost every night since I met him. (It made it hard to talk to him the first week of school, because I kept replaying those memories and he kept looking at me like he knew exactly what I was thinking.)
One of my roommates said that he’d heard he was an incubus. That would probably explain the magnetic pull I felt toward him.
Maybe it was because of how much time I spent looking at him that I could see how tired he looked. His usually flawless skin looked sallow. His usually vibrant blue eyes seemed dull with dark bags underneath them. His jaw line seemed less sharp and defined, though that could have been the result of the five o’clock shadow he had on his normally clean shaven face. He’d looked tired the day before, when assignments were handed out and he almost fell asleep on the table, but he’d still looked flawless. He looked less flawless today and even more tired than he had yesterday.
“Everything okay?” I asked him as he forced his head back off the table.
“Tired,” he grumbled.
“I can tell.”
He gave me a strange look, almost like he was looking through me. It was unsettling. “Most people can’t tell,” he muttered.
“Really?” I didn’t believe that for a second. “The bags under your eyes are bigger than the ones I brought when I moved in.”
“No, they aren’t.”
“Yeah, they are.”
He looked at me strangely and then, something weird happened. The air around him almost seemed to shimmer and the bags under his eyes were… smaller. Not quite gone but lighter than they’d been just moments before. Like he’d put on some magical concealer. Except even as I watched him, the bags seemed to be returning. Like a failing holographic image.
“What the fuck?” I muttered.
He looked confused again. “I’m tired,” he repeated. “I guess it’s not working as well as it usually does.”
“It?”
“Glamouring,” he answered in a matter of fact tone. “Incubi can change small details to look more appealing to our prey.” He paused. “Humans. To humans. Not our prey. That makes us sound like we’re going to crawl into your window at night and feast on your dreams.”
I blanched. Why did he put it that way? Did he actually know about my dreams, the dirty ones that he’d co-starred in after I’d first seen him? Had they been real? Had he been feeding on me in my sleep? God, I hoped not. That was not cool, and I mean would the school allow someone who was preying on humans to be around humans?
He caught my look and laughed. “Calm down. I can’t actually feast on your dreams.”
“Can you read minds?”
“No,” he answered bluntly. “I can’t read minds. I can, however, read people, and your thoughts are written all over your face. It makes it pretty easy to figure out what you’re thinking.”
He wasn’t the first person to say that. My parents used to say that I wore my heart on my sleeve. It had caused me a bit of trouble growing up. I’d never been able to keep anything from them, no matter what it was. They even knew that something was up when I was making my decision to transfer. Luckily, they didn’t know what it was until after I’d filled out the application, and it was too late for them to try and talk me out of the idea.
I just hated that he could read me as well my parents could. I would have preferred that he could read minds.
I looked down at the notes I’d gathered about parking and then back at Cam. He was staring at his notebook, but the page he was staring at was empty. “Are you sure you’re okay?” He sighed again, a heavier sigh than the first one had been. “I’m not trying to annoy you. You seem a little more than just tired.”
“I haven’t fed in a few days,” he finally said reluctantly.
“Don’t you have a meal plan?”
He gave me a look like I was an idiot. “Do you pay attention in your Intro to Monsterkind class?”
“We haven’t studied incubi yet.” I did not like him acting like I was stupid. I wasn’t stupid. I just asked stupid questions, apparently. “I’m guessing you’re not talking about food you can get in the cafeteria?”
“No, they don’t serve what incubi and succubi feed on in the cafeteria. There are probably laws against them serving it, actually,” he answered with a shake of his head. “I mean, we eat regular food too. We need that to survive just like you do, but we also need energy. A special kind of energy.”
I thought through my limited knowledge on incubi and succubi. It mainly came from human media, but the way he worded it, I thought that maybe the human media had some truth to it. “Sexual energy?” I asked, my voice low. Just in case he didn’t want the rest of the newspaper staff to know he hadn’t gotten laid in a few days.
“Yeah,” he answered. “I have a regular feeder and—”
“A regular hookup?”
“You’re blunt.”
I chuckled. “Yeah, a little bit. Especially when I want to know something. My parents always said that I was the kind of person that left no stone unturned when I got curious.”
“A good trait for a journalist,” Cam observed before continuing. “I have a regular feeder. I just haven’t met up with him in a bit.”
“Oh.” I thought for a moment before asking a question that was probably inappropriate. “Is that the only way you can feed? On the one feeder?”
“I mean, I could feed on any willing human, but Ryder and I have had our arrangement for awhile. It’s a good arrangement, so I don’t bother with other feeders.” He stopped for a moment, like he was waiting for me to interject. Or maybe he was stopping himself from saying more. After a few beats of silence, he continued. “I can also siphon little bits of energy from people on campus, but it’s not the same. It’s like if you were eating potato chips. Yeah, it might fill you up and give you a little energy, but it wouldn’t be the same as a real meal.”
I nodded. That made a lot of sense. “So when are you feeding again? Because you look like you could use a good meal. Or a good…” I couldn’t bring myself to say he looked like he could use a good fuck. Even if it was technically true. “It just looks like you could use a bit of whatever it is.”
“I’m meeting with Ryder tonight.”
“So you should feel better tomorrow?”
“I should be feeling a lot better tomorrow. No worries.”
I nodded. “Good.”
“Good?”
“Yeah. Looking this tired doesn’t suit you. I mean you’re still really hot, but you look hotter when you don’t look dead on your feet.” I felt my cheeks burn. I couldn’t believe I’d just said that.
Thank God for Ever and his sudden call for attention. I could put my focus there and not think about the fact that I’d just made a complete ass of myself with the hottest man I’d ever seen in person. Or anywhere, really.
I had another class after newspaper. It was a history of journalism course taught by a witch who had some really interesting takes. It wasn’t like any of the history classes I’d ever had. It wasn’t monster based, but maybe her experiences colored the way she taught it. Whatever it was, it was impossible not to pay attention to her class.
After class, I went to the cafeteria for a quick bite dinner and headed back to my dorm room. Two of my suite mates were in the common area, heads together over a textbook. They were political science majors. I wondered how that differed from how it was taught at a human university. I was tempted to go over and ask them. They’d both transferred in from human colleges too, so they’d have a point of comparison.
I took a few steps towards them, but Ethan, a dark skinned boy who played on the basketball team, lifted a finger to me. Telling me to wait before speaking. Clearly he and Ryan were in the depths of whatever they were studying, and I didn’t want to interrupt. I started to my room without a word.
On the way, I passed our third suite mate’s room. Coop’s door was open and he laid on the bed, video chatting with his girlfriend. She went to a school in New York, where he was originally from. Judging by the conversation, she still wasn’t happy that he was attending Creelin. I heard a few key words and decided that I probably shouldn’t be listening in. I went into my room, closed the door, turned on Spookify, and started on my homework.
I couldn’t focus.
I was thinking about the stuff Cam had told me about incubi. I was thinking about how he fed. Was he feeding right now? How did it work? What were the ethics behind it? How did it work when he was younger?
I closed my textbook and opened my laptop. I pulled up Witchipedia and began searching for incubi. There were two entries: one about incubi, one about succubi.
Most of what it said matched what Cam had told me. There were some human myths about them, about demons who came in while humans slept and fed off of them. About how feeding an incubi could lead to madness, illness, even death. Some of the human myths described the incubi as demonic looking.
I only had to think about Cam to know that human mythology had it all kinds of fucked up. He was hot as hell, sure, but he didn’t look like he came from it.
I shouldn’t be reading human myths about incubi anyway. I should be looking at the true parts, the parts that had sources from studies taken over the past twenty years since the Halloween Wave turned some humans into monsters.
There wasn’t a lot. The article talked about how most incubi had more than one human feeder and how they could shift parts of their physical appearance to best suit whoever was looking at them. It made me wonder how much of his physical appearance was real. Was his jawline as sharp as I thought it was? Were his eyes as blue or his hair as soft? What did he look like when the glamour wasn’t in place?
Did he look like he did in newspaper that day? Sallow with bags under dull, waxy blue eyes, and a jaw that was somewhat softer than I’d always seen when I looked at him. Did he look like something completely different? Did he shift like some of the students on campus? Professor Fan had talked about it briefly the first day of Introduction to Monsterkind, warning us that we might see some interesting things on the full moon. Other times, too, since not everyone had control over their shifts.
My mind was still racing as I fell asleep, curiosity unsated.