“I never knew my mother,” Laura laughed, the edges of her buzz thickening to the point of blustery inebriation. “Although, I am fairly certain she was a succubus.”
“A succubus? Isn’t that some sort of demon?” Charles looked uncomfortable across the table, he kept alternating between adjusting the cuffs of his sport coat and pushing his glasses up his nose.
“Something like that,” Laura shrugged a single shoulder. “I learned a long time ago that true evil, and vice versa, true good, are rare things.”
Charles picked up his wine glass by the stem, swirling it around carefully in the muted light of Laura’s dining space. She couldn’t call it a dining room for the same reason that you cannot call a tugboat with a handgun duct taped to it a battleship. Laura’s place was small, but it was hers, and that is all that mattered. She had bought her combo office/flat from her Aunt Missy, when her aunt had decided it was time to retire from embroidery and turn snow-birding in Florida a full time gig. Laura ran her finger tip around the edge of her wine glass, making it hum a brief note in the lull of conversation.
“How is my lasagna?” Laura followed.
“I am glad you asked. This is the best lasagna I have ever had,” Charles smiled carefully around his mouthful of cheesy goodness.
“Ever?” Laura grinned.
“Ever.”
“Just so you know going into this, I am not going to sleep with you.”
“Huh?” Charles looked confused.
“I’m swinging for my own team,” Laura laughed brightly, pouring more wine into her glass.
Charles visibly relaxed. “Oh thank god.”
Laura grimaced playfully. “Oh thank god? I know I am hot, Chuck. It is ok to be disappointed.”
“I guess.”
“You guess?” In her fogginess of wine, she felt a small glimmer of actual insult. She flipped her blonde ponytail with one hand absentmindedly.
“Well, you know, it’s our professional relationship. It works for me. I… uh… felt a little uncomfortable coming tonight, to be honest.” Charles shifted in his seat, and took a quick bite of lasagna. “This is great lasagna though. Damn.”
“You can take the pan, my friend. It’s a thank you lasagna after all.”
“For what?”
“For the information you shuffle over to me. It’s been crucial this year. I know its been hard since your partner died… I know how we met was not under the best of circumstances, but, even after all that, thanks for reaching out here and there.”
“Of course, Laura. I have found your unique approach valuable, to say the least.” Charles grinned, and put a hand through his thinning hair. He was an attractive man, even with the hard miles of being a detective in a big city. He even managed to lose all the weight, but that was probably more because of his partner’s death than any fear of obesity. “But back to my question. You were saying something about good and evil?”
Laura took a sip of her wine and leaned back in her seat, kicking a barefoot heel onto the edge of her seat. “I was just saying good and evil is a range, right? A spectrum. There are very few things that are truly evil and the same can be said for the good side too.”
Charles frowned thoughtfully. “I guess I can understand the evil piece, but it is harder for me to accept the good. Being a cop first and all.”
“It typically is. It is easy to look for the best in everyone, and assume the best. It is harder to see the evil where you are not looking for it,” Laura shrugged again. “I know you are still working to understand my world, but I will tell you that I know vampires that are better people than half of the people I met at a typical church swap meet.”
Charles raised his eyebrow. “Swap meet?”
“Oh yeah. Big yard sale with a potluck. Surprisingly, you find some really good stuff.” Laura shook her head. “You key on the swap meet? But not the vampires.”
“After the Maeven, a vampire is easy.” Charles chuckled. “At this point, I assume that everything is true, and wait for you tell me if it is bullshit or not.”
“Good call.”
“Unicorns?” Charles raised a finger and put it against his forehead in crude mimicry.
“Yes. But not what you think they are.”
“Trolls?”
“Nope. That one is fake news. What people call Trolls are fairy folk of a different sort. Its mislabeled racism, and most folks don’t even know it.”
“Brownies?”
“Oh yeah, little fuckers.” Laura spat.
“Here is a hard one,” Chuck grinned around another bite of lasagna. “Zombies.”
“Yes and no?” Laura tried.
“Seriously? I get a maybe on Zombies!?”
Laura rolled her eyes. “Well they are reanimated deceased, but its not like they will bite you and you get the ‘zombie virus’ or anything. And they definitely don’t eat just brains.”
“Well that is good.”
“I said, just brains. I mean they eat all of you. They are not picky eaters.” Laura commented offhand.
“Gross.”
“Can be. They are typically pretty fastidious eaters. Nice and clean.”
“Double gross,” Charles stuck out his tongue and made a gagging face. “Let’s just get back to the first question I asked. Soooooo, your mom was a succubus?”
“That’s my theory. My dad told me a lot of stories about how they met.”
Charles pulled out his smart phone, and flicked his finger across the screen. “Huh. I was going to Google ‘succubus’, but it looks like I don’t have a signal. Not even one bar.”
“That’s just me. Complex electronics don’t like magic, remember? But I can tell you all about them,” Laura took another sip of her wine, her buzz was going the other direction as she tried to pull everything from the mental collage of her mother. It was a story cobbled together from hundreds of sources and little snippets of information, like a shredded photograph being held together by only scotch tape. “A succubus is a half breed. It’s half human, half demon. They feed off of sexual life force, draining their host’s life by seducing them. Sometimes over and over and over until their victim ages prematurely and dies.”
“That would make porn way more interesting. It could be a survival sport,” Charles teased.
Laura raised her eyebrow at the jest. “Actually, that would be the perfect cover. You could feed for a long time without anyone noticing.”
“Man you know how to pick the dinner topics over a thank you lasagna, Laura.”
“Quirky. That’s me.” Laura pulled her sweater sleeve up and smiled across the table.
“But your dad didn’t die. You told me that you visit him up in the mountains often?”
“Oh yes, he very much is alive. And that is part of the mystery. According to legend, Succubi and Incubi can’t breed. I think that is the secret they like to keep away from the rest of the world. They can breed. But for them, it is always a choice. Pregnancy never is an accident.”
“Hell, if all of us could be so lucky.”
“Try being homosexual. Works the same,” Laura said deadpan.
“Ha, I suppose it does.”
“And that is why my dad didn’t feel the effects. Taking life force is a choice. Somehow, somewhere, my mother decided she loved my dad. She loved him enough, that for her it wasn’t feeding, it was connection. She pushed that potential energy into making a baby.”
“But, wait, she still had to feed…”
Laura smirked. “You get it.”
“Give me a break, I am a detective. Remember?”
“She had to leave. If she stayed, she would have slowly killed him. Or she would have had to go elsewhere, and that would have been worse. My dad would not have understood.”
“He doesn’t know?”
“No, he doesn’t know. It is only a theory after all. Maybe she was a perfectly normal human woman that was hurting emotionally or mentally unstable. Those exist too. Don’t need a supernatural explanation for people that are just a mess.”
“Does he know about you?”
“Chuck, I could only come out to my daddy about one thing. I chose my sexual orientation. What I do for living is private investigation. He doesn’t need to know how and for what I go investigating. That would just upset him. He is a good man. Having a witch for a daughter would be unnecessarily upsetting for a man that prays on his knees every night.”
“So your theory is that your mom, being a succubus literally able to suck the life out of your dad’s dick, loved him too much and decided to ditch him with a fresh baby in order to save you both? That is fucked up. Ok, you win the messed up family award. I can’t even compete.”
“Yeah, enough about me. What about your parents?” Laura asked, changing the topic. She didn’t want to explain all the other reasons she thought her mother was a succubus. You know, besides, the huge obvious fact that she had proof from the damn woman’s mouth herself. But that was her little secret… and one of the reasons she had become a PI in the first place. Finding her mom was her first case. It wasn’t Laura’s first solved case, but it was her first opened one.
“Punxsutawney. Retired. My father is remarried to my stepmother for the second time, and still kissing her every night before bed,” Charles nodded, tilting his head to the side looking around Laura’s flat again. “Who taught you this business?”
Laura looked up at the ceiling, remembering her teacher with a grin. “An old bitch.”
“Damnnnn…” Charles exclaimed. “Old wound?”
“Not at all. Love her to death. Not my fault she likes to stay in the form of a dog.”
Chuck shook his head, amazed once again that such a strange life could be lead in a world where everyone thought this stuff was make believe, and surprise, surprise, he had found out that it wasn’t.
Laura continued. “She found me. Our kind are drawn to one another, like moths to a flame. That is why the stereotypical convents happen. Witches like to spend time with other witches. Until they don’t.”
“Huh, why?” Charles played a dumb card.
“Imagine a bunch of women all being catty bitches to one another… now imagine them all having new and creative ways to be catty.”
“Like magic spells.”
“Two for two, Detective. Help me clean up… you can take the pan, just return it to me after you wash it, ok?”
“10-4, Laura.” Charles pushed his chair back, and the legs caught the rug. It tipped backwards and fell with a clatter. “Sorry about that.”
“You probably just woke up someone in my work room,” Laura laughed.
“And who would that be?”
“Steve. He is an asshole. But he is my asshole, so I have to love him.”
“You have a cat too, huh?” Charles tried.
“Not quite. STEVE, GET YOUR DRUNK ASS OUT HERE AND MEET MY GUEST!”
Charles took his hands away from his ears realizing two things in the same moment. He was capable of clapping his hands over his ears at an extremely fast speed, and Laura could probably drown out a landing 747 with her voice alone.
“My fooking gawd, Laura.” A greasy growling voice wound its way into the kitchen and dining area from the hallway. A small winged demon, exactly what the polar opposite of cupid would look like, hovered into the small diffused pool of light. His skin was a brownish green, with leathery flaps somehow keeping his rotund body afloat in the air, and his head was cloven in two by a wide mouth that would look at home on a pit bull.
“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, you asswipe,” Laura said dryly. “This is Charles. Charles, Steve.”
Charles’s mouth was agape, watching the small goblin-like cupid antithesis float over to the table and grab a breadstick. Steve unceremoniously ripped in in two with a single bite.
“I am out of beer, Laura. So I can curse any thing, any where, any time I want,” Steve grumbled. “Nice to meet you, Chuckyduck. You can close your mouth now though.”
Charles clamped his mouth shut and stammered. “S..sorry. First time I have met a demon.”
“Really? You know Laura.” Steve commented with a straight face before breaking into peals of dry huffing laughter.
“And this is why I leave Steve in the other room. I conjured him years ago when I was trying to capture a werewolf, he helped me find the fix, and he hasn’t left since. Ironically, I thought I sent him back to where he came from, but somehow, he either is stronger than he lets on or I boned the spell. So now he is my fat little hairless cat. With wings! And a drinking problem. He flits around, drinks my beer, and defecates in a box.”
“So the worst cat ever, yeah, yeah, yeah,” Steve grumbled. “I need to pop out for more beer. And by the way, I defecate ash, so me finding any firepit is literally the same as you finding a toilet. Can I get your explicit and full permission to fetch some beer?”
“No need. I hid a case of the belgian white in the back of the the hall closet for just this moment. Help yourself,” Laura grinned. “Chuck, let’s clean up and get you on your way with your lasagna.”
“Ooooh, you made Apology Lasagna?” Steve crooned. “Can I have some?”
“No and no, this is Thank You Lasagna,” Laura corrected.
Steve scoffed. Chuck looked between the two of them confusedly, like he was watching an old couple argue.
Laura shrugged as she walked into the galley kitchen. “It’s versatile recipe, I suppose.”
Steve turned and flew back towards the hall, lifting a knobby hand over his shoulder. “See you around, Chuckyduck.”
Charles stood by himself for a moment, looking down the dark hallway and then to the lit kitchen, where the sound of a dishwasher filled with clinking and clattering filtered out, and he shook his head in amazement at the strange world he found himself dipping a toe into once again.
“Apology Lasagna is probably just as delicious,” Charles said to no one in particular.