Chapter Seven
The house that Oz brought Isabel to looked – at first – like a standard mini-mansion, with a landscaped yard, and a modestly sizeable home on it behind wrought iron fencing. But as Oz pulled up onto the circular driveway, Isabel realized that it was something like an illusion; the house was grander, larger, more ornate than she had thought from the street. “How did you pull that off?”
“A little this, a little that,” Oz said, matter-of-factly. “There’s some illusion magic along the perimeter of the grounds to keep people who haven’t been brought here directly from even knowing it’s here.”
“Magic is real?” Oz smiled.
“Magic is real, vampires are real, angels are real,” he said. “There’s a whole wide supernatural world out there, Isabel.”
“And now I’m a member of it,” she said wryly.
“Yes, you are,” Oz told her. He parked the car and shut the engine off, and Isabel thought that if she had to be on veritable house arrest for the foreseeable future, she at least had a big, expansive house to be confined to.
She climbed out of the car and followed Oz towards the front door. It was painted red, a deep, bold shade that seemed almost to glow, and the frame was coated in something that Isabel couldn’t quite identify, that gave it a slightly shiny finish. The front yard, hemmed in by the wrought-iron fence, was perfectly manicured, with lushly growing garden beds.
Oz unlocked and opened the door as Isabel followed him into the house, blinking in amazement. She had been torn between belief and disbelief when Oz had told her that he was a billionaire; but the marble floors, vaulted ceilings, and the subtle gleam of gold leaf along the molding above set her firmly in the “belief” camp. “Come on, Isabel, let me show you your room,” he said.
The whole situation was bizarre; Isabel looked around as she followed Oz through the house, thinking to herself that if anyone ever told her that it had happened to them, she would think they were not just lying, but insane. I’m a succubus, she thought. I’m going to have to make sure I have sex with someone every night or I’ll ‘starve’…. no matter how much food I eat. Vampires exist…. Angels exist, but they’re not like angels from the bible. Her mind spun in circles, trying to make sense of the situation.
“Here,” Oz said. He opened a door to a room that was almost half the size of Isabel’s entire home. Looking in, she could see doorways leading into a bathroom and presumably a closet, along with a big, wide bed that dominated the room, a dresser and a vanity with a low bench in front of it. She spotted a flat screen TV, and some kind of terminal – it was turned off at the moment – that had the Wi-Fi symbol on it.
“Not a bad prison, all things considered,” Isabel said, stepping through the door. Oz had given her enough time to grab a small suitcase of clothes, and when she had started to pack makeup in her luggage, he’d snorted and pointed out that as a succubus, there would be no —need for makeup ever again.
“It’s not a prison,” Oz said, his voice firm. “I don’t think you understand the urgency in this, Isabel.”
“I would be able to understand the urgency in this if I could believe half of what happened,” Isabel said. “I’m still trying to figure out how to make sense of becoming a succubus, and you being a literal, real angel, and the fact that I apparently had sex with a vampire. Oh, and that’s just the beginning of the bombs you dropped on me today.”
“If nothing else,” Oz said, starting to lighten a bit, “you know that while you’re here, you’ll be able to keep yourself from starving.”
“I guess,” Isabel said. “I’m assuming this isn’t just going to be a few days.”
“Until further notice,” Oz told her. Isabel sat down on the edge of the bed and looked around her room.
“You do realize that I have friends and people in my life, right?” she said as she met Oz’s gaze. “People who will miss me if I just disappear.”
“I would recommend that if you’re going to meet with any of your friends and family, you keep it to the women,” Oz told her. “I can’t guarantee if you meet with any males who know you – even if they’re family – that they won’t be sexually interested in you.” Isabel stared at Oz.
“If I meet with my Dad …?”
“He will react the same way your boss did, in all likelihood.” Isabel shuddered, involuntarily imagining it. It’s not fair! What did I do to deserve this? She took a slow, deep breath.
“So only women,” she said.
“Until you’re better able to control your output, yes,” Oz said, nodding. “Once you’re fully adapted to being a succubus, you might be able to go around male friends and family without having to beat them off of you with a baseball bat.”
“But if I have control over their minds, I can just tell them to stop it.” Oz smiled.
“Just trust me on this one,” he said. “Men will continue to have a difficult time controlling their impulse to hit on you. All men.”
“Can you do me a favor?” Isabel looked at Oz.
“Depends on the favor,” he said.
“I’d really like some space,” Isabel told him. “I need to kind of ... figure things out.”
“Of course,” Oz said. He smiled slightly. “If you get lonely, or hungry …” his smile deepened, and Isabel looked away, feeling embarrassed at the knowing look in his eyes.
He left the room, and Isabel let herself fall back onto the bed, staring up at the ceiling. Nothing at all in my entire life is normal anymore, she thought bitterly. Her body was changing; she had caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror on the way to the bedroom she would be staying in at Oz’s house, and could have sworn that she was slimmer, more svelte. Even though she didn’t have the burning, stomach-churning need for sex that she had felt earlier, she could still sense the pulse of her new appetite deep down in her brain.
Oz had said that because he was part of what had turned her into a succubus, he was able to command her. But the vampire and Isabel’s brain balked at the idea that had also taken part in her strange conversion: would he have the same ability? With any luck, I’ll never know. Isabel shuddered, thinking of what Oz had told her about how the vampires treated the succubi; they wanted to recruit.
“I wanted to change my life but this is ridiculous,” Isabel said, shaking her head against the mattress. She had wanted to get a different job, or find someone she could maybe consider dating in the long term – not to turn into a supernatural creature that fed off of sexual energy, never slept, and had to be careful around the men in her life she wasn’t interested in sexually.
“It’s not fair,” she murmured, turning over onto her side and curling up into a G shape, her knees almost to her stomach, her flatter stomach. The fact that she was losing weight without doing anything different in her life, so much so that her clothes were starting to not fit in a matter of only two days since she’d had her one-night stand with Oz, truly unsettled her.
She didn’t feel physically tired, but as Isabel kept her eyes closed, trying to think, to wrap her mind around everything that had happened to her in such a short time she found herself drifting off. Absently, she thought she might as well appreciate the ability to sleep while she still had it, just before her thinking slowed with her breaths, and she slipped into a deeper doze.