Drained: The Lucid (23 page)

Everything about the situation felt wrong. She couldn’t count how many rules she was breaking. Ignoring her instincts, Riley opened her mouth. The dark smoke curled and twisted in front of her face. After another moment of hesitation, she drew the cool vapor in.

The room seemed to shift beneath her feet, and she grabbed at the bathroom sink to keep from falling over. She took in her reflection; her eyes were a solid black. Lifeless, dark eyes blinked back at her. It was energy, but the substance was more vile than euphoric for her palate. She could feel the life source course through her body as her senses flared from stimulation.

A small noise from the corner of the room caught Riley’s attention, as her new acquaintance tossed the empty vial into an open wastebasket. Generally, she could contain her primordial side after absorption, but whatever she had taken held its presence firmly. She turned back to the mirror and peeled her fingers from the sink when the lightheadedness passed. A quick flip of a handle and Riley washed her hands as though the cleansing act would absolve her of everything that had transpired. She pressed her damp palms to her face.

The woman turned the crank of the paper towel dispenser and handed her the material. After tossing away the used paper towel, Riley watched as the stranger took her time stuffing her belongings back into her oversized purse.

She retrieved a slim, rectangular silver case. Opening the narrow box, she produced an embossed business card and set it purposefully on the bathroom counter next to Riley. “In case you need another pick-me-up.”

Riley found herself unable to respond. Her tongue felt too large for her mouth.

“Have a good night, Riley,” the woman purred, leaving the scene of the crime.

Riley continued to regard her reflection in the bathroom mirror. “Pull yourself together,” she commanded. She focused on her eyes, vacant black pools that were a reminder of what she was. When they refused to turn back to their original color, Riley momentarily panicked. How could she have been so stupid and so desperate? Who knew what she had just willingly ingested, however reluctant she’d been. What if her eyes never changed back? How would she even begin to explain herself?

She tugged her sunglasses free from the confines of her jacket pocket and slid them onto her nose.

Subtle, Riley.

She snatched the shades from her face and held them in her hand. The bar was dark enough that her eyes could go unnoticed.

She pushed the women’s restroom doors and nearly crashed into someone standing on the other side.

“Oh! Excuse me.”

“Riley?”

Riley grimaced recognizing Darren Clay.
As if this night could get any worse.
She reflexively reached for her wrist where her watch should have been. In any other uncomfortable situation, she could have ducked back into the bathroom and used her watch to spell her into the dream realm for an escape. It was drastic but sometimes necessary.

“What are you doing here?” His eyes narrowed in confusion. “I didn’t know you came to these places.”

Riley snapped her gaze away from his. “There’s a beer on tap here I haven’t been able to find anywhere else.” She knew it was a weak excuse. “What are
you
doing here?” she deflected.

Darren flexed his hands and slid them into his pockets. “Liam’s still missing. I thought maybe an independent might have heard or seen something. You haven’t heard anything, have you?”

“No. I’m sorry.” Riley shook her head. “I wish I could be more helpful.”

“I just don’t know why he would be so reckless,” Darren openly lamented. “Why would he go off the grid like that? He knows how dangerous that is.” He paced the small area in which they stood. “I mean, what if a rogue venator found him …” His flustered movement halted. “Sorry. I … I didn’t mean to spring all this on you.”

“It’s okay. He’s like family. I get it. I’d be a wreck, too.”

“Can I buy you a drink?” Darren offered. “Maybe one of those magical beers you told me about?”

“I …” She flicked her eyes around the bar, refusing to settle directly on Darren’s face. She’d collected herself in the bathroom, but she was paranoid that Darren would be able to read her, to instinctively know what she had been up to that night. He hadn’t commented on her lack of eye contact, but she knew her simple presence at the indie bar was suspicious enough on its own. Maybe he could even smell the dirty energy on her breath. Riley rubbed her hands against her pants. The stranger from the bathroom’s business card felt like it was burning a hole in her back pocket. “I should really get going,” she excused herself. “Have work to do tonight.”

“Maybe another time then.”

Riley nodded curtly. “Another time.”

“Can I give you a ride home?” Darren offered. “I’m parked down the street,” he said with a jerk of his thumb.

Riley slipped her arms into her jacket. “No, I’m fine. My car’s not parked too far away. Thanks for the offer though.” Since the adrenaline had ebbed, Riley chanced her luck and looked up at Darren. Even if her eyes had not changed back, it was still a dark hallway.

He gave her a boyishly lopsided grin. “Anytime. We’ve got to look out for each other, you know?”

Riley’s returned smile was tight on her lips.

She escaped into the narrow alley that waited beyond the bar and pushed a ragged breath out of her lungs. Although the air was damp and heavy, she felt like she could truly catch her breath for the first time since entering the blue metal door. It felt good to be outside. The fresh air seemed to help clear her mind. There would be no work for the night. What she needed was to go home and to sleep off the last couple of hours.

To her relief, there were only a few staggered strangers in the alley. She made a plan to keep to the back streets and hail a cab. Her own car could wait until morning. It would probably be vandalized, but she was done taking chances for one night. The effects of the bottled vapor were under control for the time being, but she couldn’t risk a sudden onset of side effects.

Riley stalked deeper down the pathway in the direction of the main street where she hoped to find a cab. Wooden crates and large metal dumpsters lined the brick walls. Despite wanting to go undetected, she couldn’t help kicking at an empty beer bottle. The night was a disaster, and her irritation was building up more quickly than the mystery energy had coursed her body.

The bottle smacked against brick and shattered, spraying shards of glass on the pavement.
Good fucking job, Riles. Why not add “juvenile delinquent” to your list?
She scanned the surrounding area and nudged the broken pieces off to the side with her boot.
Cans. Kick cans.

Riley shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her jacket. She’d been reckless, stupid, and desperate all because of a promise to
some girl
in the realm. “Why am I doing all this?” she muttered quietly to herself.

Morgan was complicated. Heather had been right—what they did for a living was straightforward. Get in, perform, get out. There wasn’t supposed to be emotional baggage or lingering feelings.

Unlike the bottled adrenaline, the frustration hadn’t lessened and Riley swung her foot back to kick at a beer can. The aluminum container skidded across the black pavement and stopped with a muffled noise when it connected with a shadowed figure.

Riley squinted her eyes in the darkness. With her blown pupils, she was actually better acclimated to the dim lighting. “What the …”

A low, pained moan alerted her senses.

“Oh shit.” Riley jogged up to the fallen figure. “Hey, are you okay?”

When there was no response, she bent and touched her fingers to a wrist to feel for a pulse. It was there, but it was a murmur. She pulled her fingers away; they felt wet. She rubbed her thumb over the liquid. It felt thicker than water, and she blanched, realizing it was probably blood.

The figure groaned again, and Riley gingerly rolled the person onto his back. She gasped when she realized she knew who it was.

His eyes were swollen, and a layer of sweat and crusted blood was spattered across his face. “Fu-Fucking,” he gasped, struggling to find a voice. “Trusics bitches.”

Well, that’s uncalled for.
Riley frowned in annoyance of the insult.

His body shook in a violent cough that made his muscles clench. As the sequence of gut-wrenching hacks subsided, he slipped out of consciousness.

“Darren!” Riley yelled, hoping the rival incubus was still within earshot. “Darren! Over here! Hurry!” She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the familiar, yet bloodied face. The sound of feet pounding on blacktop came closer.

“Riley?” Darren’s alarmed voice rang out. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?” He found the succubus bent over the unmoving form of the bloodied and badly beaten figure. “Riley?”

Riley looked up. Her blackened eyes were filled with remorse. “I found Liam.”

Spoons clinked against the inside of coffee cups, and forks pushed food across ceramic plates. It was clear that the café waitstaff could sense something was off this morning. Cups of chilled coffee remained full, rather than being constantly refilled, and finished plates of half-eaten eggs and French toast remained unbussed, shoved to the center of the table.

Few events could prevent the group from gathering for breakfast and companionship. And when an attack on one of their own occurred, even if Liam wasn’t a Trusics employee, it still hit close to home. It took no longer than the following morning for the news of Liam Dunbar’s condition to spread across the cubare community, but how the word got out was a mystery to Riley. No one in the group had expected to hear that the local playboy had been attacked. There were talks of occasional fights, but in general the community was more than happy to live independent, conflict-free lives.

Riley tilted her coffee cup on its edge and stared into its brown, murky depths. She took a small sip of the nearly inconsumable liquid and made a face at the coffee grounds that remained on her tongue. When the texts, calls, and alerts had begun early that morning, first breaking the news of Liam’s attack and then subsequent updates about his health status, she’d waited with clammy palms for the notification that named her as the succubus who’d discovered Liam’s body. But they never came.

It was Madison, never comfortable with silence, who first broke the unsettling quiet that had engulfed the group. “Do they know who might have done it?”

There were no leads. Liam was still unconscious. He’d been placed in a coma to prevent the swelling in his brain from doing any permanent damage. Even Trusics had been conspicuously silent in the wake of the attack. Riley had expected at least a mass e-mail with reminders about safety, but that message also never came.

“Does anyone find the timing too suspicious to be a coincidence? That Sean’s return coincides with this attack?” Seven quietly proposed.

There was an uncomfortable collective twitch around the table at the mention of the incubus’s name.

“Sean had his problems, but I don’t think he would do something like this,” Riley defended. She recalled Liam’s face, broken and battered almost to being unrecognizable, and she shuddered.

“Are you still defending him?” James said, with an incredulous shake of his head. “Your loyalty really has no limits, Riley.”

Riley stared down at her untouched breakfast plate. She thought back to her relationship—if she could even call it that—after joining the cubare world. Riley had ended things after a few dates; their short time as a couple was awkward at best. They’d parted amicably and had remained friends in the decades that followed. Both had worked for Trusics in the early years, and Sean, like Riley, had quickly become a rising star in the corporation. It had been less than a decade ago, however, that Riley had been witness to his change. Sean had once sat at their brunch table, an important part of their close-knit group, but he’d become irritable, moody, volatile, and defensive. Not soon after that, he’d left and gone off the grid, only to resurface now. Even Riley had to admit the timing was suspect, but she had a difficult time believing that the brutality that Liam had endured had been the work of Sean.

James’s phone buzzed with an incoming text.

Madison clapped her hand on his forearm. “Is it about Liam? Is he dead?”

He looked over the brief message. “No. It’s from my sister,” he said, reading. “She wanted to make sure that we were all okay.”

Seven frowned. “It’s too bad Liam’s not conscious; he’d love all this attention.”

“Play nice, Sev,” Heather cautioned. “I know you don’t like the guy, but that’s no reason to be catty right now. It’s easy to get comfortable and think something like this could never happen to one of us, but we should all be a little more careful,” she spoke to everyone at the table. “Immortality can only keep you alive for so long.”

For some reason, Riley thought Heather’s gaze lingered on her a little longer than the others.

“I wonder if we’ll get another mandatory seminar,” Madison whispered at her plate. “I don’t like those.”

James and Seven could only offer a shrug in response. None of them knew what their employer would do.

• • •

Riley reshelved the book on energy extraction that Josh had procured for her. After brunch with her friends, she’d reread the text, hopeful to discover something, anything, that she might have skipped over the first time through. Self-preservation refused to allow her to return to the Red Sea Tavern or to call the number on the business card the woman with the Southern drawl had given her. But there had to be a way to extend her time in the realm. She just didn’t know what it was yet.

Besides the problem of energy, there was something else pressing on her mind. She grabbed her phone and pulled up the contact information. Unlike the cell number of most of her cubare friends, she didn’t have this number memorized.

“Wyatt?”

“Speaking,” the excubitor responded, formal as always.

“It’s Riley. Is this a good time?”

“Hey, to what do I owe the pleasure?”