THE DEMON LOVER by JULIET DARK

·  “Gothic, atmospheric, beautiful, and romantic urban fantasy,” By Karissa Eckert “Devourer of all books fantasy”

·  “Strong urban romantic fantasy,” By Harriet Klausner

·  “An excellent guilty pleasure read!” By ChibiNeko “Sooo many books, so little time!

·  “So much more story than I expected,” By Mary Chrapliwy

·  “So much to sink your teeth into,” By Kelly (Fantasy Literature)

Since accepting a teaching position at remote Fairwick College in upstate New York, Callie McFay has experienced the same disturbingly erotic dream every night: A mist enters her bedroom, then takes the shape of a virile, seductive stranger who proceeds to ravish her in the most toe-curling, wholly satisfying ways possible. Perhaps these dreams are the result of her having written the bestselling book The Sex Lives of Demon Lovers. Callie’s lifelong passion is the intersection of lurid fairy tales and Gothic literature—which is why she’s found herself at Fairwick’s renowned folklore department, living in a oncestately Victorian house that, at first sight, seemed to call her name. But Callie soon realizes that her dreams are alarmingly real. She has a demon lover—an incubus—and he will seduce her, pleasure her, and eventually suck the very life from her. Then Callie makes another startling discovery: Her incubus is not the only mythical creature in Fairwick. As the tenured witches of the college and the resident fairies in the surrounding woods prepare to cast out the demon, Callie must accomplish something infinitely more difficult—banishing this supernatural lover from her heart.


Best keep your door locked, Miss. The housekeeper’s words came back to me as I readied myself for bed. It seemed a strange warning in a house as isolated as Lion’s Keep, where our only neighbors were sea and heath. Had there been trouble with one of the servants— perhaps with that impertinent groom with the roving eyes? Or could it be the Master that Mrs. Eaves was worried about? Haughty, remote William Dougall, who had looked down at me from his horse with such icy condescension— a cold look which had paradoxically lit a spit of fire from my toes to the roots of my hair. Surely not. The great William Dougall wouldn’t deign to bother a lowly governess such as myself. I locked the door all the same, but left the windows open as it was a warm night, and the breeze coming off the ocean felt deliciously cool as I slid between the crisp lavender-scented sheets. I blew out my candle . . . and immediately noticed something odd. There was a crack of light at the bottom of the door. Had Mrs. Eaves left a candle burning in the hallway for my benefit? If so, I ought to tell her it wasn’t necessary. I threw the sheets off and swung my legs over the side of the bed, preparing to go investigate, but froze before my toes touched the floor. The bar of light at the bottom of the door had been split in two by a shadow as if someone were standing there. 
As I stared at the door, seeking some other explanation, the brass knob silently began to turn. I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound came out. My throat was frozen with fear, as were my limbs, powerless to run from whoever was at the door. All I could do was watch as the knob turned . . . and stopped. The door didn’t open. It was locked. The knob paused there as if whoever was turning it was deciding what to do next. Would he break the door down? Would he force his way in and then . . . what then? But he must have decided that breaking down the door would make too much noise. The knob silently revolved back. The shadow disappeared from beneath the door and the light slowly faded. I let out a shaky breath, my limbs reduced to quivering jelly now that the moment of crisis was over. Should I go find Mrs. Eaves and tell her what had happened? But tell her what? That I had seen a light, a shadow, a turning knob? Already I mistrusted the evidence of my own senses and I had no wish to look an hysterical child on my first day of service. So I crept back into bed, pulling the sheets over me, but kept my eyes on the door. What if he had gone to retrieve a key? I lay like that, rigid beneath the crisp sheets, all my attention riveted to the door, for I don’t know how long. I was sure I would not sleep, but it had been a long day of weary travel and learning new faces and new duties, and the sound of the waves crashing on the shore below the cliff and the scent of saltwater mingled with honeysuckle from the garden were hypnotically soothing . . . 


I must have drifted off because when I came to, the room was bright with light. I startled awake, thinking the light in the crack below the door had seeped into the room, but then I saw that the light came not from the door, but from the open window. Moonlight spilled in, white as cream, soaking the sheets and my nightgown—I was wet, too, from the heat—drenching the whole room except for a pillar of shadow that stood at the window . . 
A pillar shaped like a man. For the second time that night I opened my mouth to scream, but my throat was as frozen as if the moonlight was a carapace of ice. I could not see the man’s features, but I knew it must be William Dougall. I recognized that arrogant bearing, those broad shoulders, the slim agility of his hips as he moved forward . . . He was moving forward, slowly, gliding across the floor so as not to make a sound. He must think I was still asleep. I must let him go on thinking I was asleep. If he knew I was awake he might become violent. 


The Master has his moods, Mrs. Eaves had said. Best not to get on the wrong side o’ them. I clenched my eyes shut. Perhaps he had only come to look at me, as he had stared down at me from his mount earlier today. Perhaps I could bear it if he’d only come to look . . . I felt a tug on the sheet that lay over me, a minute movement as if the breeze had lifted it, but then it began to slide down, dragging across my breasts, tugging the placket of my nightgown, which I’d left unbuttoned because of the warmth of the night. The cool air tickled my bare skin and to my acute embarrassment I felt my nipples harden beneath the thin cloth. I could feel his eyes on me, a prickling sensation that made the hairs on my legs stand up . . . my bare legs! My nightgown had ridden up around my hips in my sleep. Cool air licked at my thighs, my calves, and finally, as the sheet slipped away in a soft swoosh that sounded like running water, my toes. I lay still, barely daring to breathe, alert for the slightest sound or movement. If he touched me I would scream. I’d have to. But nothing happened. The breeze played across my skin, teasing the bare places—my breasts, the crook of my arm, the inside of my thigh. At last I couldn’t bear it—I risked a peek through slitted eyes . . . and saw nothing. The room was empty. Had I imagined the shadow at the window? Perhaps I’d tossed the sheet off myself . . . but then I felt something touch the sole of my foot. A breeze warmer than the outside air, warm and moist as breath. The shadow was still there, at the foot of the bed, crouched by my feet, but whether man or dream I could no longer say. The pull it had on me seemed otherworldly. Why else would I lie silent as it breathed on my calf, its breath hot and wet? Why else would I stir only to widen my legs as its breath traveled up my leg? Why else would I close my eyes and give myself over to its rough warmth lapping inch by inch up my thigh? Like a wave lapping at the shore, leaving wet sand as it retreats, and traveling a little farther each time it returns. Insinuating itself into the cracks and crevices, wearing away the stony shore. I felt my own stoniness wear away as the warm tongue found its way into my very center and then licked deeper into the depths I didn’t know I had . . . deep underwater caverns where the surf rushed and boiled, retreated, lapped again, and filled me.
 Retreated, lapped again, filled me. I was riding the waves now, borne higher and higher. The room was filled with the smell of salt and the roar of the ocean . . . and then the wave dashed me down to the strand. I opened my eyes and watched the shadow slip away like a retreating tide, leaving me wet and spent as a woman drowned. I knew at last what had happened to me. I’d been visited not by William Dougall—or any other mortal man—but by an incubus. The demon lover of myth.


“So, Dr. McFay, can you tell me how you first became interested in the sex lives of demon lovers?” The question was a bit jarring, coming as it did from a silver-chignoned matron in pearls and a pink tweed Chanel suit. But I’d gotten used to questions like these. Since I’d written the bestselling book Sex Lives of the Demon Lovers (the title adapted from my thesis, The Demon Lover in Gothic Literature: Vampires, Beasts, and Incubi), I’d been on a round of readings, lectures, and, now, job interviews that focused on the sex in the title. I had a feeling, though, that Elizabeth Book, as dean of a college with a prominent folklore department, might genuinely be more interested in the demon lovers of the title. It was the folklore department that had brought me to the interview. It certainly wasn’t the college—second-tier Fairwick College, enrollment 1,600 students, 120 full-time faculty, 30 part-time (“We pride ourselves on our excellent teacher to student ratio,” Dr. Book had gushed earlier). Or the town: Fairwick, New York, population 4,203, a faded Catskill village shadowed by mountains and bordered by a thousand acres of virgin forest. 


A great place if your hobbies were snowshoeing and ice fishing, but not if your tastes ran, as mine did, to catching the O’Keeffe show at the Whitney, shopping at Barneys, and dining out at the new Bobby Flay restaurant. And it wasn’t that I hadn’t had plenty of other interviews. While most new Ph.D.s had to fight for job offers, because of the publicity surrounding Sex Lives I had already had two offers (from tiny colleges in the Midwest that I’d turned down) and serious interest from New York University, my undergraduate alma mater and first choice since I was determined to stay in New York City. Nor was I as financially desperate as many of my friends who had student loans to pay back. A small trust fund left by my parents had paid for college and grad school and I still had a little left over to supplement my teaching income. Still, I wasn’t sure about NYU yet, and Fairwick was worth considering if only for its folklore department. Few colleges had one and I’d been intrigued by the approach the college took, combining anthropology, English, and history into one interdisciplinary department. It jibed well with my interests—fairy tales and Gothic fiction—and it had been refreshing to be interviewed by a committee of cross-discipline professors who were interested in something other than the class I taught on vampires. Not that all of them were fans. 


An American history professor named Frank Delmarco—a burly guy in a proletarian denim shirt rolled up to show off his muscular, hirsute forearms—had asked me if I didn’t think I was catering to the “lowest common denominator” by appealing to the popular craze for trashy vampire books. “I teach Byron, Coleridge, and the Brontës in my classes,” I’d replied, returning his condescending smile. “I’d hardly call their work trash.” I hadn’t mentioned that my classes also watched episodes of Dark Shadows and read Anne Rice. Or that my own interest in demon lovers wasn’t only scholarly. I was used to academic snobs turning up their noses at my subject area. So I phrased my answer to Elizabeth Book’s question carefully now that we were alone in her office. “I grew up listening to my mother and father telling Scottish fairytales . . .” I began, but Dean Book interrupted me. “Is that where you got your unusual name, Cailleach?” She pronounced it correctly—Kay-lex—for a change. “My father was Scottish,” I explained. “My mother just loved the stories and culture so much that she went to St. Andrew’s, where she met my father. They were archaeologists interested in ancient Celtic customs—that’s how I got the name. But my friends call me Callie.” What I didn’t add was that my parents had died in a plane crash when I was twelve and that I’d gone to live with my grandmother on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Or that I remembered very little of my parents besides the fairy tales they told me. Or that the fairy tales had come to seem so real that one of the figures from those stories had haunted my dreams throughout my teens. 


Instead I launched into the spiel I’d delivered a dozen times before—for my college essay, grad school interviews, the pitch for my book. How listening to my parents telling those old stories had fostered a love of folklore and fairy tales that had, in turn, inspired me to study the appearance of fairies, demons, and vampires in Romantic and Gothic literature. I had told the story so many times that it had begun to sound false to my ears. But I knew it was all true—or at least it had been when I first started telling it. I had felt a passion for the subject when I first realized that the stories my parents had told me when I was little existed in the outside world—or at least pieces of them did. I’d find traces of their stories in fairy tale collections and Gothic novels—from The Secret Garden and The Princess and the Goblin to Jane Eyre and Dracula. Perhaps I’d felt that if I could trace these stories down to their origins I would reclaim the childhood I’d lost when they died and I moved in with my conscientious, but decidedly chilly and austere, grandmother. Perhaps, too, I could find a clue to why I had such strange dreams after their deaths, dreams in which a handsome but shadowy young man, who I thought of as my fairytale prince, appeared in my room and told me fairy tales just as my parents had. But instead of becoming clearer, the stories my parents had told me had grown fainter . . . as if I’d worn them out with use. I’d become a very competent researcher, earned a doctorate, received awards for my thesis, and published a such
a successful book. 


The dreams had ended, too, as if I’d exorcised them with all that scholarly research and analysis, which had sort of been the point. Hadn’t it? Only with the disappearance of the dreams—and my fairytale prince—the initial spark that had spurred my work had also gone out and I was struggling with ideas for my next book. I sometimes wondered if the storytellers I documented—the shamans sitting around a campfire, the old women spinning wool as they unfurled their tales—ever grew bored with the stories they told and retold. But the story still worked. “You’re just what we’re looking for,” Elizabeth Book said when I’d finished. Was she actually offering me the job here and now? The other universities where I’d interviewed had waited a seemly ten days to get back to me—and although I’d had two interviews and taught a sample class for NYU, I still wasn’t sure if they were going to hire me. If Dean Book was actually offering me a job, her approach was really refreshing—or a little desperate. “That’s very flattering,” I began. Dean Book leaned forward, her long double rope of pearls clicking together, and clasped her hands. “Of course you’ll have had other offers with the popularity of your subject. Vampires are all the rage now, aren’t they? And I imagine Fairwick College must look rather humble after NYU and Columbia, but I urge you to consider us. 


Folklore has been taught at Fairwick since its inception and the department has been nurtured by such prominent folklorists as Matthew Briggs and Angus Fraser. We take the study of legend and myth very seriously . . .” She paused, as if too overcome by emotion to go on. Her eyes drifted toward a framed photograph on her desk and for a moment I thought she might cry. But then she squeezed her hands together, turning her knuckles white, and firmed her mouth. “And I think you would find it an inspiration for your work.”
She gave me such a meaningful smile that I felt sure she must know how much trouble I was having with my second book. How for the first time in my life the folklore and fairy tales that had seemed so alive to me felt dull and flat as pasteboard. But of course she couldn’t know that, and she had already moved on to more practical issues. “The committee does have to meet this afternoon. You’re the last applicant we’re interviewing. And just between you and me and the doorpost, by far the best. You should hear from us by tomorrow morning. You’re staying at the Hart Brake Inn, correct?” “Yes,” I said, trying not to cringe at the twee name of the B&B. “The owner has been very nice . . .” “Diana Hart is a dear friend,” the dean said. “One of the lovely things about teaching here at Fairwick is the good relationship between town and gown. The townspeople are truly good neighbors.” “That’s nice . . .” I was unsure of what else to say. None of the other colleges—and certainly not NYU, which had all Manhattan to boast of—had bothered to talk about the amenities of the town. “I certainly appreciate you taking the time to consider my application. It’s a fine college. Anyone would be proud to teach here.” Dean Book tilted her head and regarded me thoughtfully. Had I sounded too condescending? But then she smiled and stood, holding her hand out. When I placed mine in hers I was surprised at how forcefully she squeezed it. Beneath her pink suit I suspected there beat the heart of a steely-willed administrator. “I look forward to hearing from you,” I told her. 
Walking through the campus, past the ivy-covered Gothic library, under ancient leafy trees, I wondered if I could stand to live here. While the campus was pretty, the town was scruffy and down at the heels. The heights of its culinary pretensions were a handful of pizzerias, a Chinese takeout, and a Greek diner. The shopping choices were a couple of vintagey-studenty boutiques on Main Street and a mall on the highway. I paused at the edge of the campus to gaze out at the view. From up here the town didn’t look too bad, and beyond were forest-covered mountains that would look beautiful in the fall—but by November they would be bare and then snow-covered. I had to admit I had my heart set on New York City, as did Paul, my boyfriend of eight years. We’d met our sophomore year at NYU. Although he was from Connecticut he was passionate about New York City and we agreed that someday we would live there together. Even when he didn’t get into graduate school in the city he had insisted I go to Columbia while he went to UCLA. Our plan was for him to apply to New York City schools when he finished rewriting his doctoral thesis in economics and got his degree next year. Surely he would tell me to hold out for the NYU offer rather than leave the city now. But could I really say no to Fairwick if I hadn’t gotten a definite yes from NYU? It would be better if I could find a way to put off my answer to Dean Book. I had until tomorrow morning to think of a delaying tactic. I continued walking past the high iron gates of the college onto the town road that led to Hart Brake Inn. I could see the blue Victorian house, with its decorative flags and overspilling flowerboxes, from here. The opposite side of the road was bordered by massive pine trees, the beginning of a huge tract of protected state forest. I paused for a moment at the edge of a narrow trail, peering into the shadows. Even though the day was bright the woods were dark. Vines looped from tree to tree, filling every crevice and twisting into curious shapes. This is where all the stories start, I thought, on the edge of a dark wood. Was this why the dean thought that living here would be an inspiration to me? Because the woods were the natural habitat of fairies and demons? I tried to laugh off the idea . . . but couldn’t quite. 


A wind came up and blew out of the woods toward me, carrying with it the chill scent of pine needles, damp earth, and something sweet. Honeysuckle? Peering closer, I saw that the shadowy woods were indeed starred with white and yellow flowers. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. The breeze curled around me, tickling the damp at the back of my neck and lifting the ends of my long hair like a hand caressing me. The sensation reminded me of the dreams I’d had as a teenager. A shadowy man would appear at the foot of my bed. The room would fill with the scent of honeysuckle and salt. I’d hear the ocean and be filled with an inchoate longing that I somehow knew was what he was feeling. That he was trapped in the shadows and only I could release him. The psychiatrist my grandmother had sent me to said the dreams were an expression of grief for my parents, but I’d always found that hard to believe. The feelings I’d had for the shadow man were not at all filial. Now the invisible hand tugged at me and I stepped forward, off the pavement and onto the dirt path. The heels of my boots sank into the soft, loamy soil. I opened my eyes, stumbling, as if waking from a dream, and started to turn away . . . 
That’s when I saw the house. It was hidden from the road by a dense, overgrown hedge. Even without the hedge the house would have been hard to see because it blended in so well with its surroundings. It was a Queen Anne Victorian, its clapboard painted a pale yellow that was peeling in so many places it resembled a cleverly camouflaged butterfly. The roof was slate and furred with moss, the decorative cornices, pointed eaves, and turret were painted a deep pine green. The honeysuckle from the forest had encroached over the porch railings—or, more likely, the honeysuckle from the house’s garden had spread into the woods. The vines and shrubs circling the porch were so thick it looked as though the house were sitting in a nest. I stepped a few feet closer and a breeze stirred a loose vine over the door. It waved to me as though it were beckoning me to come closer. I looked around to see if there were any signs of habitation, but the driveway was empty, the windows were shuttered, and a green dust, undisturbed by footprints, lay over the porch steps. Such a pretty house to be deserted, I thought. The breeze sighed through the woods as if agreeing. As I got closer I saw that the vergeboard trim along the pointed eaves was beautifully carved with vines and trumpet-shaped flowers. 


Above the doorway in the pediment was a wood carving of a man’s face, a pagan god of the forest, I thought, from the pinecone wreath resting on his abundant flowing hair. I’d seen a face like it somewhere before . . . perhaps in a book on forest deities . . . The same face appeared in the stained-glass fanlight above the front door. Startled, I realized I’d come all the way up the steps and was standing at the front door, my hand resting on the bronze door knocker, which was carved in the shape of an antlered buck. What was I thinking? Even if no one lived here it was still private property. I turned to leave. The wind picked up, lifting the green pollen from the porch floor and blowing it into little funnels around my feet as I hurried down the steps, which groaned under my boot heels. The vines that were twisted around the porch columns creaked and strained. A loose trailer snapped against my arm as I reached the ground, startling me so much that I stumbled. I caught my balance, though, and hurried down the front path, slowing only because I saw how slippery it was from the moss growing between the stones. When I reached the hedge I turned around to look back at the house. It gave one more sigh as the wind stopped, its clapboard walls moaning as if sorry to see me go, and then it settled on its foundation and sat back, staring at me.


“Who owns the house across the street?” I asked later, while having afternoon tea with Diana Hart on the porch. Diana, a slim, copiously freckled woman in her fifties, shifted in her wicker rocker. “What house?” she asked, her large brown eyes widening. She wore her chestnut brown hair so closely cropped that it accentuated the size of her eyes. I pointed across the street even though the house wasn’t visible. “The one behind the overgrown hedge. A pretty yellow Queen Anne with green trim. It has a very unusual stained-glass fanlight over the front door.” “You went up to the door?” Diana asked, setting down her delicate china cup in its matching saucer. Milky tea sloshed over the brim. “The house looked empty . . .” I started to explain. “Oh yes, no one’s lived there for more than twenty years. Not since Dahlia LaMotte’s cousin died.” “Dahlia LaMotte, the novelist?” I asked. “Oh, you’ve heard of her?” Diana had her head down while she added more sugar to her tea. I could have sworn she’d already put in two teaspoons, but then she had quite the sweet tooth, as evidenced by the pink frosted Victoria sponge cake and chocolate-chip scones spread out over the wicker table in front of us. “I thought her books had gone out of fashion long ago.” Diana was right about that. Dahlia LaMotte had written a half dozen bodice-ripper romances at the turn of the twentieth century—the kind of books in which a young girl loses her parents and then finds herself at the mercy of an overbearing Byronic hero who locks her up in a Gothic tower and makes threats against her virginity until he is reformed by her love and proposes honorable marriage. Obviously influenced by Ann Radcliffe and the Brontës, her books were avidly read in the beginning of the twentieth century, but then fell out of favor. They’d been reprinted in the sixties when authors like Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt made Gothic romance popular again. You could still find copies of those reprints—tattered paperbacks featuring nightgown-clad heroines fleeing a looming castle on their covers—on the Internet, but I hadn’t had to buy them there. I’d found them hidden behind the “good books” on my grandmother’s bookshelves, a dozen books all with the name Emmeline Stoddard written on their flyleaves, and devoured them the summer I was twelve—which was another theory of where the shadow man of my dreams had come from: reading all those steamy Dahlia LaMotte books! “I’m interested in the intersection of fairy tales and the Gothic imagination,” I said primly—a primness ruined by the blood that rose to my cheeks at the memory of a particularly salacious scene in my favorite Dahlia LaMotte book, The Dark Stranger. “I knew she lived in upstate New York, but I didn’t know she lived here.” “Oh yes, we’ve had quite a number of famous authors in Fairwick. 


Dahlia was the daughter of Silas LaMotte, who made his fortune in shipping tea from the Far East. He built Honeysuckle House in 1893 for his wife and daughter. He planted Japanese honeysuckle all around it because his wife, Eugenia, loved the smell of it. Sadly, Eugenia died a few months after they moved into the house and Silas died soon after that. Dahlia lived all alone in Honeysuckle House, writing her novels, until her death in 1934. She left it to a younger cousin, Matilda Lindquist, who lived there alone until her death in 1990.”
“Matilda never married?” “Oh no!” Diana widened her eyes and then looked down, noticed the spilled tea in her saucer, and blotted it with a cloth napkin embroidered with hearts and flowers. “Matilda was a sweet, but rather childlike woman of very little imagination. Really the perfect one to live in Honeysuckle House.” “Why’s that?” I asked. “Just that living alone on the edge of the woods might scare some people if they had active imaginations,” she said, pouring herself another cup of tea. She held the pot over my cup and raised a tawny eyebrow. I indicated I’d take another cup, even though I’m more a coffee person than a tea person. “But Dahlia LaMotte lived there alone,” I pointed out. “And she certainly had an imagination.” “Yes,” Diana conceded, “but Dahlia liked to scare herself. That’s how she got the ideas for her books.” “Hm, that’s an interesting notion,” I said. “I’d love to see the house. Do you know who owns it now?” “Some LaMotte relation in Rochester. Dory Browne of Browne Realty holds the key, sees to repairs, and shows it to the occasional house hunter. A lovely gay couple from the city looked at it last year and almost bought it. They would have been perfect for it, but they changed their minds.” “So Dory Browne could show it to me if I wanted to see it?” Diana looked up from her tea and blinked her long dark lashes. “Are you thinking of buying it?” I began to protest, but I stopped. Really I only wanted to see the house out of literary curiosity, but if I told Diana that she might not be able to convince Dory Browne to show it to me. “Well, if I get an offer to teach here I’d have to find someplace to live. And I’m tired of living in a cramped little apartment.” That part was at least true. My studio apartment in Inwood was the size of a closet. Diana was studying me carefully. 
For a moment I was afraid she’d caught me in a lie. But it turned out that wasn’t it at all. “I’ll call Dory and ask her to come by tomorrow morning to show you the house. I’m not sure if the Honeysuckle House would be right for you,” she said. “But I think you might be perfect for it.”


After consuming Diana’s ample tea, I decided that although I was too full for a run, I’d better take a long walk to burn off the scones and clotted cream. I walked down toward Main Street, past Victorian houses, some lovingly restored like the Hart Brake Inn and others in various stages of disintegration or restoration. As I neared Main Street the houses grew larger, but also shabbier. Clearly the town of Fairwick had enjoyed a time of prosperity at the end of the nineteenth century. Faded signs on brick walls advertised long gone businesses: LaMotte Tea Company, Miss Fisk’s Haberdashery, and, in giant letters across a huge brick building, the Ulster & Clare Railroad. I vaguely recalled that the town had been an important railroad hub in the late nineteenth century, but then the Ulster & Clare had failed, the trains had stopped coming to Fairwick, and the town began its long slow decline into shabbiness and poverty. It still had elegant bones, though. A Greek Revival library stood in a green park that had once been prettily landscaped. Now the rose bushes were leggy and a strange-looking bush with feathery gray blooms—like a giant dust mop—had taken over the paths and flowerbeds. The yards of once stately Victorians were overgrown and crowded with garden statuary. 


The residents of Fairwick were apparently partial to red-capped gnomes, plastic deer statues, and metal cutouts of winged fairies. No Madonnas, no baby Jesuses, but maybe those came out at Christmas. Main Street itself was sad and dreary. Half the storefronts were abandoned. The businesses that looked to be flourishing were the tattoo parlor (ubiquitous in college towns, I’d noticed from my recent lecture tours), an old Airstream diner, a head shop, and a coffee place called Fair Grounds. At least the latter smelled like it brewed a decent cup of coffee. I bought a soy latte and a New York Times and a sandwich in case I got hungry later, although I suspected that Diana’s tea would hold me till bedtime. Walking back uphill to the inn, I passed Browne Realty. Looking at the listings pasted onto the window I saw that the houses in town were going for even less than I’d imagined. For the price of a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan I could get a five-bedroom Victorian here. I wondered what Honeysuckle House would sell for. It started to drizzle then, so I walked faster up the hill. It wasn’t raining hard when I reached the inn, so I stopped on the other side of the road and peered through the hedge at Honeysuckle House. The face on the pediment seemed to look back at me. The raindrops streaming down its cheeks looked unnervingly like tears. 


Suddenly the rain began to fall harder. I crossed the street and sprinted up the steps to the porch, stopping to shake the rain out of my hair and off my jacket so I wouldn’t shed water all over Diana’s hooked rugs and chintzupholstered furniture. A thump on the wooden steps behind me made me turn around, sure that someone had followed me up the steps, but no one was there. Nothing was there but the rain, falling so hard now that it looked like a gray moiré curtain that billowed and swelled in the wind. For a moment I saw a shape in the falling water—a face, as if just behind the watery veil, a face I knew, but from where? Before I could place it, the face was gone, blown away in a gust of wind. Only then did I recall where I’d seen that face. It was carved into the pediment of Honeysuckle House.


It was an afterimage, I told myself later when I was lying in the too-soft four-poster bed, listening to the rain that hadn’t let up all evening. I’d stared at the face on the pediment long enough that I’d fashioned it out of the falling rain. A face, after all, was the easiest pattern to find in random shapes. And that face—the wide-set dark eyes, the broad brow, the high cheekbones, aquiline nose, and full lips—was particularly striking. So striking that I’d even imagined for a moment that it was the face of the fairytale prince from my adolescent dreams, but that was impossible because I’d never seen his face. He’d always stood on the edge of the darkness, inches from the moonlight that would have revealed his face. I could almost see him now, taking shape behind the veil of my eyelids instead of the scrim of rainwater. I forced my eyes back open. I was tired, but I’d told Paul I would call him at nine California time so I was struggling to stay awake until midnight. At a quarter to, I called him, hoping he was back from his evening seminar early. He was. “Hey you,” he said. “How was the interview?” “Good, I guess. I think they’re going to offer me the job.” “Really? So soon? That’s unusual.” I thought I detected a faint note of jealousy—the same edge I’d heard in his voice when I got into Columbia and he didn’t and when I’d gotten a publishing contract for my thesis just after his thesis had been turned down by his reading committee. “What are you going to say if they do?” “I don’t know. I can’t imagine living here and it seems ridiculous to leave the city when you’ll be applying for jobs there next year. I suppose I could just turn it down . . .” “Hm . . . better to try to put them off until you have a firm offer from NYU. How far did you say it was from the city? A couple of hours? I could visit weekends.” “It’s three hours over mountainous roads,” I told him. “It’s really the back of beyond. The place where I’m staying is called the Hart Brake Inn.” I spelled it for him and he laughed. “And there’s a place across the way called Honeysuckle House . . .” “Let me guess, there are plastic cows everywhere and the town bar’s called the Dew Drop Inn.”


“Plastic deer,” I said, yawning, “and it’s the Tumble Inn.” “Yeah, well, it does sound pretty unbearable. I bet it’s freezing in the winter, too. Still, better not burn your bridges until you’ve got a firm offer in the city. I’m sure you’ll think of a way to keep your options open.” We talked a little more and then said good night. When I turned off my phone a wave of dejection swept over me as random as the gusts of damp air that were coming through the open bedroom window. I supposed it was just the strain of maintaining a long-distance relationship—the uncertainly of not knowing when we’d ever manage to be together for longer than the summer or winter vacation. But we’d known what we were getting into when we agreed, during our senior year of college, that neither of us would compromise our careers for “the relationship.” We’d done better than most of our friends, and we had a good chance of ending up on the same side of the country next year. Really, it made sense for me to hold out for the job at NYU. If Dean Book offered me the job I’d find some way to hold her off, and then I’d call NYU and tell them I had another offer. Maybe that would propel them into giving me the job. The decision made, I felt a weight lift off me, a lessening of tension that made a space for sleep to enter. As I began to drift off my last thought was that I should get up and close the window to keep the rain from coming in . . . but I was already too far gone to move.
I couldn’t move. I should get up and close the window but I couldn’t move an inch. There was a weight settled on my chest, pinning me to the bed, pushing me deep into the soft mattress, which surrounded me in an enveloping embrace. I couldn’t move a muscle or draw in a breath. Even my eyelids were pasted shut. I struggled to open them against the light. Light?


The rain had stopped. Instead of wet gusts of air, moonlight streamed through the windows. It was the moonlight that had pinned me to the bed. I could see it spilling across the wide pine planks, a white shaft carrying on its back the shadows of tree branches that quivered in the breeze, trembling to reach me. I recalled the tangled trees and shrubs surrounding Honeysuckle House and had the confused impression that the moonlight was coming from there. There was something wrong with that idea, but I was too tired to figure it out and the moonlight was so bright I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. They fluttered shut and I saw him. The fairytale prince from my teenaged dreams. With him came the scent of honeysuckle and salt air I remembered from those dreams and the longing I’d always felt. He stood on the threshold between shadow and moonlight, where he always hesitated . . . He stepped forward into the moonlight. It was him, the man from the house across the way. I forced my eyes open and he was still there, hovering above me, looking down at me, his face thrown into shadow by the moonlight cascading over his back like a silver cape. I could only see the places the moonlight touched: the plane of one cheekbone as his head tilted sideways, a lock of his hair falling over his brow, the blade of his shoulder. Each piece of him took shape and weight as the moonlight touched it. It was as if he were made of shadow and the moonlight was the knife sculpting him into being, each stroke of the knife giving him form . . . and weight. The moonlight sculpted a rib and I felt his chest press down onto mine, it rounded a hip and it settled onto my pelvis, it carved the length of a muscular leg and it pressed against the length of my legs. I gasped . . . or tried to. My mouth opened, but I couldn’t draw breath because of the weight on my chest. His lips, pearly wet, parted and he blew into my mouth. My lungs expanded beneath his weight. When I exhaled he sucked in my breath and his weight turned from cold marble into warm living flesh.


Moving flesh. I felt his chest rise and lower against mine, felt his hips grind into mine, his strong legs part mine . . . He inhaled a long draft of my breath and I felt him harden against me. He rocked against me, pushing his breath into my lungs just as he pushed himself between my legs and then inside of me. He felt like a wave crashing over me, a moonlit wave that sucked me down below the surf and pulled me out to sea, onto a crest, and then back under again . . . and again and again and again. We rocked to the rhythm of the ocean until I lost all sense of what was me and what was him, until we were the wave cresting, then crashing onto the flat hard sand. Then I lay panting like a drowning person, slicked in sweat, alone on the bed in a pool of liquid moonlight.

You can learn more about the author and the book here:
http://www.randomhouse.com/book/69284/the-demon-lover-by-juliet-dark