Choose Your Enchantment

There was a sharp rapping at my open door. I raised my eyebrow at Ms. Sultry where she stood, lounging against the door frame with a sheaf of papers in her raised hand. She always looked half asleep, languid, even when her lips were pressed together to show her frustration. She wore a sharp skirt suit that projected a businesslike confidence and poise in contradiction to the typical succubus who hunted prey over the tedium of hunting ancient choreography. As one of my favorite translators of ancient languages, she had the confidence to interrupt my own research when most others in my laboratory would hold back.

That was both a benefit and a frustration for me. If I read the small script on the papers in her hands correctly, and with my supernatural eyesight I could, she was still struggling to recapture a song and dance from ages ago. She’d already asked me five times about the proper sequence of turns and claps as if I’d been there or as if she’d seen me dance in all the years she’d known me. The only person in this world who could persuade me to take to the dance floor wouldn’t bother. No, Miss Morell, the librarian high above me, literally and metaphorically, wouldn’t ever deign to consort with a monster.

“Yes?” I finally said as I shifted, swiveling in my leather chair to face her. I’d smelled her hovering in my doorway before she knocked, the scent of her pheromones mingling with her jasmine soap, but I could block her out while I focused on my research until she lost her patience and knocked. Come to think of it, she had been standing there for over a quarter of an hour. Time flies when you’re having the opposite of fun. 

I dropped my papers on my desk, mixing that particular treatise on infernal fire written in Nordic runes with the other original texts I’d requested from my laboratory on the east coast, north of all human settlements. My research office was in a cozy corner of my infernal laboratory along with the other three translators who worked for me. It wasn’t so large that I lost things in a forgotten corner, which was probably the only benefit to working in such a confined space. My favorite thing about the small shelf-lined room was that it looked out on the night garden with its paths lined with eternally blooming and ripening orange trees, the fireflies and waterfall providing soothing background noise that covered the chaos from the streets of Song. My acute hearing could be inconvenient when I was trying to focus on the matters at hand.

She shifted slightly. “The chairman of the Library of Antiquities has requested your company as soon as you’re free.” She walked in the rest of the way and glanced at the papers that dominated every surface of my overflowing desk. “Also, I’m wondering about your opinion on the traditional moon dance, celebrating the goddess of night. You’ve had more time to think about it. In your professional opinion, does the text indicate a quarter turn to the left or right during the second chorus?”

I gave her a slight smile as I flowed smoothly to my feet. She’d asked a solid half dozen times about the same exact turn in the same exact chorus. Her persistence and tenacity were a wonder. Also rather amusing when my own topic of research was so horribly serious. “You are a reenactor, not a historian who seeks to catalogue rather than understand. I think perhaps you should move in whichever direction feels more true to the moment. You know that recordings fail to capture the spontaneity of an actual live performance, even if that live performance is similar in spirit to one many thousands of years past.”

Her brows furrowed. “But…”

I gestured her out of my office before I followed, closing the door firmly behind me. “I do not know the proper direction to turn in the Ancient Armenian moon dance. I do, however, know the proper turns to take me to the back staircase. I will see what dire straits Horace faces. He wouldn’t request my assistance if it weren’t an emergency.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “You’re researching the Square of Immolation again, the eternal fire that can’t be quenched. Aren’t you handling the topic at his request? I thought you had come to satisfactory conclusions about it.”

She’d noticed the papers on my desk, the topic that consumed me as endlessly as the eternal flames in the Square of Immolation. “Satisfactory? No. Accepting limitations isn’t particularly satisfying. Best of luck with the moon dance. I have complete faith in your reenactors to perform the spirit of that age, even if the insignificant details are slightly compromised.”

I strode out of the office faster than a demon. I didn’t want to talk about the Square of Immolation or the news I’d had of a certain sect of zealots who had been doing their own tests on the eternally burning flame that nothing could quench. If you could harness eternal fire and use it as a weapon, you’d be unstoppable. That’s why I was here in Singsong City, why I’d taken the lab, chasing all the unsavory, demonic, unhinged out of Song, spreading my influence through the undercity until it was practically stable. Understanding mysteries was my business. If the puzzle of eternal fire were to be unraveled I would be doing the unravelling. Not that I personally needed to be here. I had agents who could perform the work of overseeing the Square of Immolation, of safe-guarding secrets, but there were no agents I trusted enough to leave the other mystery I had no business investigating.

Miss Morell, the respectable librarian who despised monsters, drew the infernal to her like moths to a flame. I understood the allure of the seemingly insignificant creature down to my impermeable bones, but why a monster needed nothing more than a hint of her scent to become obsessed, I didn’t understand. It was so extreme that I’d had to take precautions to keep her protected from the monsters in my lab and to keep them out of her domain, the library above. She needed a mate, someone who could mark her as theirs, so the scent of her availability would cease taunting every monster with a shred of darkness in his soul.

Yes. She should find an angel to carry her away from Singsong and its constant struggle between darkness and light before one of the demons gave in to her allure and swallowed her whole.

I adjusted my cuffs, trying to remind myself that I was wearing a suit and wasn’t one of those dark creatures she needed to fear. I’d go into her domain without seeing her. I’d smell her, because her scent was impressed on every pillar, every book that she’d touched, but I wouldn’t be faced with the irresistible pull she seemed not to notice exerting on me every time she walked past me, focused on the stack of books in her hands.

The few times I’d directly interacted with her, I found myself awkward and uncertain, particularly when her lovely eyes got larger and larger in time to her racing heart. Panic. I filled her with undeniable panic. She was aware of the danger that I posed to her health and happiness, which was understandable and appropriate, but at the same time I wasn’t one of the unstable monsters who couldn’t control their instincts and appetites. She couldn’t know that, so I’d never know what she was working on during long nights in the library when everyone else had gone home.

I climbed through the darkness of the back staircase until I reached the heavy door that was runed to keep the infernal things from venturing out. I pressed my palm to the smooth black surface until I felt the rune release and then opened the door. The scent of the librarian rushed over me, old paper, ancient ink, and something else, something that coated the back of my throat with unmistakable craving. She was temptation that transcended desire. And she’d been there recently.

I stepped into the path of the whirlwind of librarian and my mind shut off while my body reacted. She’d been flipping? Why was she flipping? She hit me hard enough to send me sliding along the floor. I was not a soft creature. Had I hurt her? I’d stepped right into her path like I wasn’t aware of her, instead of being so hyperaware of her but desperately trying to ignore the temptation that I’d never get to taste.

There she was, pressed against me, gripping my lapels, her warmth spreading through me in a rush of agonizing deliciousness as I held her waist, securing her to me. She was so soft, delicate, impossibly breakable. If I breathed on her wrong, she would shatter. How could I release her when I knew how tempting she was to those who wouldn’t mind crushing a perfect blossom? That’s what she was, orange blossoms bearing fruit in the darkness, like the trees lining the walk outside my office window, heady aroma completely beguiling, like her eyes when she raised her head, fixing those sparkling sapphire orbs on my soulless pits of agony.

Even the memory of pain evaporated as she grasped my lapels, her heat coursing through me more deliciously than any blood I’d ever tasted.

At this distance, I could clearly smell her blood. Angelic blood, poison to my kind was the headiest elixir in her veins. Beneath that was another flavor, a hint of burning in the opposite direction. She was heavenly more than touched with the infernal. She was my perfect poison.

For a split second, I smelled something else on her skin, something that reached down my spine and ripped it out along with any resistance I had to her allure. Desire. She was aware of me and that scent tangled with her own sweet flavor until I was dizzy with wanting, helpless in her hands.

Did I say something? My lips moved, but meaning was lost beneath the rush of the touch and feel of her. Heaven. And hell. She was the flames of eternal fire burning in my arms.

She pushed away from me, and somehow, I let her slip through my fingers although every one of my senses was focused acutely on the creature that owned me heart and soul.

Her lips parted. “I beg your pardon. This hall isn’t used very often. If you will excuse me, I need to get snacks.” She sounded amazing, a voice that belonged in the heavenly choir, touched with the unmistakable allure of the infernal depths.

She was running before I came up with something conversational to say in regards to her need for snacks. What kind of snacks did she have in mind? An image of her throat at my lips had me holding very still so I didn’t run after her and…

I stood and watched her hurry away, her hips swaying like a mesmerizing pendulum until a high voice distracted me.

“Is that a vampire?” an elven boy whispered to an elven girl, staring at me with contempt on his cherubic face rather than the caution one should portray in the presence of one’s untimely end.

I gave them a closed-mouth smile and moved to the hallway opposite the stairs where Horace waited in his office. I’m sure it was an emergency. I hoped it was something that could distract me from the warmth and softness that had imprinted in my body. It was impossible. There would never be anything that touched me so deeply as my librarian.