One thing Julian will always be sure to serve me, it seems, is a platter full of humiliation. It was bad enough to not be good enough to fuck, but to be deemed unworthy of setting foot on any of his properties is a new low.
“Don’t bother. I’ll see myself out.” I shove my arms back through my coat and storm past her.
Ritika follows me all the way down. Her heels clack smartly behind me down the three flights of stairs, across the lobby where Matt sheepishly avoids my gaze, and even beyond the swinging glass doors and down the sidewalk to the street.
Annoyed, I spin to face her.
“You planning to escort me to my car?” I snarl.
Something shifts on Ritika’s face: a clenching of her teeth, a furrowing of her brow. Determination. She peers left, right, behind her, and just as I’m about to ask her if she’s good, wraps her arms around me in ahug.
“W-What—” I stammer. My arms are suspended in the air, but she squeezes me closer.
“From Rose,” she whispers.
I’m too petrified to process what she’s said, let alone respond, when she relinquishes me. She steps back, then lifts her chin haughtily as if I’m the one who just ambushed her with an embrace.
“Have a good day, Dr. Sullivan,” she says.
Then she turns on her heel and marches briskly back into the gallery, leaving me there at the side of the road to make sense of what just happened.
Something falls from my pocket onto the ground, glossy and the size of a postcard. I bend to pick it up, then suck in a breath.
Ritika has given me a clue.
Twenty-Four
I sit in my car in the parking lot, shell-shocked, as I stare down at the weighty, lacquered card in my hand, decorated with an embossed image of a single metallic red rose.
Around it, in stylish, curling letters, it reads:
Transmogrification
by Rose Callahan
February 2, 7PM
Ulrich Art Corridor
Dress Code: Black Tie Formal
Use this invitation for entry.
That’s tomorrow night, I realize. There’s a note on the back, handwritten in hasty black ballpoint ink.
He loves you. Come to him.
The knot in my throat pulls tight, and I squeeze my eyes shut, because the weight of my discoveries is all at once crushing. My ex-boyfriend is (probably) an incubus. His best friend, who is married to my best friend’s ex, is likely his female counterpart. Judging by the fact that they keep appearing in paintings and photographs across centuries, they have been alive a very long time, hiding in plain sight, planting evidence of their existence like serial killers leaving calling cards for paying patrons to see.
And most importantly, they’re draining the life out of us.
“Jesus,” I murmur, reading over the card again.
Rose was the fourth figure in the painting by Julian’s artist, the mysterious artist whose identity he’d refused to reveal. I can only assume she’s a succubus herself, and her decision to lure me to her both exhilarates and frightens me. Clearly she and Julian have discussed me, or she wouldn’t have included that personalized note, the implications of which I am too frazzled to contemplate right now. Did they decide that I knew too much, and are planning to finish me off? Where does Ritika fit into all this? She seems so distinctly human—
My phone buzzes, and I jolt as I fish it out of my pocket.
Bizarrely, it’s a text fromBrandon.