15
1080 Words
Ruby gulped, and her face flushed. He took a step closer to her, his hand going to her lower back. “s**t, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t want to upset you. I didn’t think.”
She waved him off. “No, no, you’re fine. It’s not like you know.”
“Know what?”
“I just found out some stuff about the succubus life.” She gave him the information that had basically ruined her holiday.
“That is …” he shook his head, “so unfair. Why don’t you talk to Lucifer about it?”
She snorted. “You’re joking! You think I wanna ask the devil to let me have kids that won’t be a benefit to Hell? He’d laugh me right out of Hell and probably strip me of all my powers. If he did, I would die. He might go right for my immortality!”
“And that’s bad?”
She frowned. “Well, yeah.”
“I don’t know. I think the whole point of life is that it eventually ends.”
“Aren’t you basically immortal?”
“No, I’m basically not vulnerable. I heal fast from pretty much anything given the right amount of time in between injuries. But my life expectancy is pretty close to a human.”
“And you don’t mind that?”
He considered her question for a moment as they made their way to the long and narrow dock extended from the shores of the beach. Big wooden pillars supported the dock to the depths of the water for a boat to dock.
The boat in question was a black and red catamaran. The pitch-black sails had the Hellscape Holiday Resort emblazoned in red, and they snapped in the fragrant breeze.
“Not exactly subtle, though, is it,” Ethan said.
“Lucifer isn’t known to be subtle.” Ruby laughed. “But don’t worry. I’m pretty sure that the entire beach here is not actually a real beach. It’s magic. You can feel it, right?”
“I can feel it everywhere and in everything in this place. It’s hard to differentiate what is in the architecture and what is your succ …” He cleared his throat.
The poor man was so uncomfortable that he didn’t know what to do with himself. Sensing he needed an out, she gave him one. “You know, you never told me what kind of curse Jazmin the witch put on your pack.”
“Gus can’t shift anymore. He won’t be able to unless we can reverse the curse. He’s likely to go a little insane if we can’t reverse the spell.”
“Holy s**t! Can you shift?”
“Honestly, it was the first thing I tried to do when Gus told me what happened. But yes, I can still shift. All of us can. It’s our pack that she has cursed. She’s basically made it so that all of our businesses are starting to fail. Our forest is dying, our lake is poisoned, and we can’t even keep gardens. Everything dies.”
“Huh. Sounds nasty. He really hurt her, by the sounds of it.”
“Isn’t there always a risk in love?” Ethan asked.
“There is, yeah. I wouldn’t really know. I never took that kind of risk.”
“Are you saying you’ve never been in love?”
Ruby nodded. “Never. Not once. It doesn’t exactly come with the territory. If I fall in love with a mark, then I can’t get his soul. It also gets more complicated if I stop collecting souls. I guess succubi who fall in love better have a man who doesn’t mind her work.”
“If you were mine, I’d march right into Hell and demand that Lucifer let you live your life. Want kids? Go right ahead. Don’t want them to be in the family business? Fine. Wanna fall in love and be a one-person kinda woman? Have at it.”
Ruby’s throat was dry. She wasn’t even sure how her legs were still working. “You really would do that?”
He stopped walking to turn and face her. There was a beautiful intensity in his blue eyes. “Of course, I would do that for the woman I love.”
If they hadn’t been about to climb onto the boat, she would have fanned herself or kissed him, or maybe jumped into the water to cool down her skin.
Who was this man, and just what in Hell was he doing to her?
ETHAN
Ethan would never have thought it before, but Hell … or a magical simulation of it, anyway … was pretty. Not beautiful.
Nope.
He reserved that word for the woman beside him.
Ruby wore a tight white dress under which he could see the outline of a white bikini. Her long red hair was loose, but she had pinned half of it to the back of her head. It put her heart-shaped face on full display, and he could see it every time she blushed. She blushed surprisingly often for a succubus, but he had to wonder if it was more a condition of her red hair than any sort of impact he could have on her.
They settled on one side of the boat as Portia walked around, chatting with every couple to see if things were going well. Ethan noticed that a few of the pairs were different today than they were yesterday. He wanted to point it out, but he figured Ruby would only say that was pretty damn normal in such a place.
“You gotta hand it to Lucifer. He doesn’t do things by half measures. This is actually amazing. I’ve been in many resorts over the years, and I can safely say that this is the most beautiful one.”
“It’s powered by magic, right?” Ethan asked. “Is that why it just always seems perfect?”
“Probably,” Ruby replied.
His heart sank a bit, but only because he wanted her to reply something super cheesy like it’s you that makes all the difference.
She gripped his arm and straightened her back. “You see that woman there? She’s a witch.”
“I knew that,” he grumbled, his mood sour because they had lost the flirty tones completely.
“We should try to approach her,” Ruby suggested.
- Writer
