Demon Lover Read online

  Thanksgiving came and went, and Autumn had been invited to Liz’s family’s celebration. It was a pity invite for sure. After breaking up with Dylan, she had nobody to spend the holidays with. She had no extended family, her father was dead, and her mother lived in Florida. Autumn accepted the invitation. Thanksgiving Dinner at the Cruz household was more of a late-lunch affair, and Autumn managed to slip out before sundown, returning to her apartment just before Irdu appeared.

  She’d come to value her time with him so greatly that she was starting to worry herself. She couldn’t seem to dampen her excitement for him. Even though all they really did was chat and watch TV, she had more fun with Irdu than she had with anybody else. As they got closer and closer to winter, the days grew shorter, and the nights longer, which meant even more time spent with him.

  After a while, Autumn managed to bring him around on her love of hate-watching bad shows. To her delight, he offered blisteringly sarcastic criticisms that had her laughing so much her abs ached the next day. He’d confessed to a fascination with people—probably spurred by his inability to interact with them—so Autumn had started queueing up shows that featured large ensemble casts. One such show followed the rise of an anti-hero who started with nothing, but through grift and cunning, accumulated an empire of wealth and power. Irdu had been disgusted with the character and the show.

  “Just another tower builder,” he’d complained. It was the first time he’d asked her to stop playing a show.

  The epithet replayed over and over in Autumn’s mind. Tower builder. She began to understand that his disgust with “tower builders” permeated beyond entertainment. She saw it in the way his lip curled when she told him how wealthy her ex-boyfriend was, and that she’d walked away from their relationship with nothing but her clothes. She heard it in the frustrated noise he made when they watched a news segment about a law that criminalized homelessness. She felt it in the way his body tensed when she was leaning against him and explained how her workplace employed the owner’s family members in all the highest-paying positions, even though they did little to no work.

  His sensitivity to those things made her wonder more and more about his past, but she didn’t want to pry too much. When she asked questions he didn’t want to answer, he clammed up, and the evening turned stilted and awkward. But for the most part, things were easy and comfortable between them. Maybe too comfortable.

  Irdu didn’t just give her the best orgasms of her life and make her laugh until her sides hurt. He was also openly fascinated by her art. She had to remind herself over and over that their arrangement was temporary and would end any day, without any notice. She tried not to let herself get too attached. But when he stood in front of her in-progress painting, considering it with all the intensity of an art student in the Louvre, Autumn could feel her heart doing weird things inside her chest.

  “This reminds me very much of the Russian Madonnas,” Irdu said one evening.

  Autumn nearly bounced off the floor in excitement. “That’s exactly what I was going for!”

  He was examining a portrait she’d nearly finished of her friend Liz, in which Liz held her baby Athena on one arm and a cup of coffee in the other hand. She had her cellphone pressed between her ear and her shoulder and a frayed afghan blanket was draped over her head and shoulders like a mantle. Like the Russian icons, there was a great deal of gold and filigree, but in Autumn’s painting, the filigree formed a pattern of computer circuits, and instead of a halo behind Liz’s head, there was an ominous golden clock face. Liz hated it, but she had said so in an admiring kind of way.

  Irdu stared at it for a long time. “She’s your friend?”

  “Yeah, that’s Liz. She and her husband Marcus are pretty much my only friends.” Embarrassed by the admission, she tried to tack on a dismissive laugh, but it was too late. Irdu looked over at her, sympathy in his eyes.

  “Do I count as a friend?” he asked.

  Her heart thumped. “Yes. Of course you do.”

  He turned back to the painting. “Do you do often paint portraits?”

  “Sort of. I like to paint human figures, but the subjects are often conceptual.”

  Irdu tilted his head as he stared at the portrait of Liz. “You are very talented.”

  Her heart thumped again.

  As the nights progressed, he took to examining her works-in-progress. He liked to watch her paint, and their evening routine shifted from watching television together, to Autumn painting while Irdu watched and asked questions.

  She’d begun working in secret on a smaller portrait that she hid away in the closet at night. It took her several weekends during the daylight hours to complete it. By the time she finished, Christmas was nearing. She thought about waiting until Christmas day to give it to him, but then she rationalized that a demon whose existence predated the Old Testament probably wasn’t likely to put a lot of stock in the holiday. Besides, she didn’t want to wait any longer to give it to him.

  When he finally appeared, she practically threw it at him, she was so nervous for his reaction.

  “I have a gift for you,” she said, gesturing awkwardly to the painting, displayed on her easel.

  It was done in an impressionistic style, because she hadn’t been able to work off a reference photo or drawings. With bold, sketchy brushstrokes, she’d rendered a portrait of Irdu as a sensuous ingenue. He was seated on a throne made of twining rose vines. His vibrant blue eyes smoldered as he leaned forward, staring into the eyes of the viewer. The blue shades of his body contrasted beautifully against the dusky pink roses. What the portrait lacked in precision, it made up for in energy. Irdu’s likeness radiated an alluring combination of emotional warmth and masculine potency.

  Irdu stood in front of the painting and stared at it silently. His face was completely blank. After a long stretch of silence, Autumn began to get anxious. He hated it. He was angry. He was insulted. He was trying to figure out how to tell her—

  “I love it.”

  Autumn’s head snapped up. “What?”

  “Nobody has ever done something like this for me.” He continued to stare at it. “When I was human, only the most elite had their likeness recorded. Kings. Gods.” He shook his head. “I don’t deserve this.”

  “Yes you do. It’s my gift to you.”

  His grip tightened on the edges of the canvas. “I have no way of giving you anything in return.”

  “That’s not how gifts work. Besides, you give me things I can never repay either.”

  Irdu regarded her skeptically.

  “Comfort. Companionship. Happiness. Peace.”

  His skepticism faltered. “You don’t think of me as…”

  “As what?”

  He sighed. “As a parasite?”

  Her brows shot up. “Is that how you think of yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  Autumn didn’t know how to comfort him. “You’re not a parasite,” she said angrily. “You’re kind and funny and wonderful. I look forward to seeing you all day.”

  Irdu’s gaze lifted to hers. Something intense burned in his eyes, but neither of them was ready to acknowledge it. Whatever it was, it was too big, too terrifying. As if they could run away from it, they both surged into motion. They caught each other up in a feral embrace and tumbled wildly onto the bed where their bodies worked through the truths their minds weren’t ready to consider.

  5

  Weeks passed in that happy, but fraught stagnancy. The idea of changing anything between them was terrifying—changing could very well mean losing Irdu. But at the same time, Autumn was beginning to feel caged by the limitations of their relationship. She sensed it in Irdu, too.

  Every night she fell asleep in his arms, and wished she could wake in them as well. In the mornings, she instinctively reached for Irdu. When she felt only an empty bed, she remembered that he was gone and some of her golden glow dimmed a little. But he’d be back at night, she told herself every morning.

  Mid-
December, she found herself staring down yet another Sunday full of daylight. She had nothing to do and nobody to do it with. She tried to distract herself by cleaning her apartment, but the distraction didn’t last long. Within a few hours, she had the floor swept and vacuumed, the bathroom scrubbed, the kitchen wiped down, dishes put away, and the laundry done.

  As she put clean sheets on her bed, she couldn’t help but think of Irdu. She checked the time, sighed, and looked out her window where the stupid sun was still high in the sky.

  She knew Sunday was a more relaxed day for Liz and Marcus, so she texted Liz to see if she was free. Liz texted back almost immediately:

  Sorry, can’t. I’m sitting in the airport right now. I’m flying out to D.C. this afternoon.

  What? Why?

  I’m spending a few days doing research in the National Archives for my book.

  In addition to her regular journalistic endeavors with the Chicago Times Herald, Liz was writing a biography on Jane Addams.

  Ugh, fine. Have fun, you nerd.

  I’m the kettle, you’re the pot.

  I’m not a nerd.

  You once told me that you have a favorite French court painter. That is a level of nerdery that I will never surpass.

  Hey! Jacques-Louis David managed to keep his head attached to his neck through three drastically different regimes. Can you imagine being such a good artist that Robespierre decides to spare you, even though you used to paint for Louis XVI?

  Point proven. You are a nerd.

  They texted back and forth until Liz had to board her plane. And then Autumn was left alone with her thoughts—which mainly circled around Irdu. Autumn didn’t think she was the sort of woman who lost all sense of self in favor of a man. When she’d been with Dylan, his biggest complaint had been that she was argumentative and didn’t care about any of his interests. On the flip side of the coin, they’d always gotten a certain amount of enjoyment from arguing with each other—things never turned nasty or personal. And as far as interests went, he’d never wanted to try hers either.

  But with Irdu, she found herself unable to think of anything else. It was only to be expected, she reasoned. Irdu wasn’t exactly an ordinary kind of guy. She wasn’t turning into some man-obsessed drip. She was just—very reasonably—fascinated by her new supernatural sex buddy.

  But that flippant description of Irdu felt somehow unkind. Disloyal, almost. Lover, she amended. Fascinating, sweet, demon lover.

  Eventually, she gave in to the fact that she couldn’t think about anything other than Irdu. So far, she’d resisted the urge to Google the things he’d told her about his human life. He was evasive about some topics, and so she tried to respect that he wasn’t ready to share them with her. But with the whole of a lonely Sunday stretching out ahead of her, her will-power snapped. She opened her laptop and put her cursor in the search bar.

  Tower of Babel, she typed. She had to try six different spellings of Eurmeiminanki before she finally got any hits. She fell down a rabbit hole of research—reading about everything from the Akkadian king Sargon, Mesopotamian cosmology, and Babylonian architecture, to early-Judaic monolatrism, the Hebrew Bible, and the linguistic diversity of ancient Mesopotamia. There were a surprising number of myths surrounding the destruction of a tower meant to reach the heavens, and a corresponding relationship to changes in language. She clicked between tabs, reading and re-reading them, considering the overlaps and divergences between them. None of the stories included anything about slaves rebelling.

  Several sources connected the biblical Nimrod, architect of the Tower of Babel with Sargon of Akkad. And when Nebuchadnezzar was trying to rebuild the tower of Babel, he referred to a predecessor who’d built the original long before him—who could have potentially been Sargon. If Sargon was the king who’d constructed the original tower, then that would mean Irdu had been around since at least 2334 B.C. She clicked on a thumbnail image of an old Babylonian tablet describing Sargon’s reign, and gasped out loud. The cuneiform writing looked exactly like Irdu’s tattoos.

  After scrolling through article after article about cuneiform, she returned her attention to Sargon—trying to find a connection to a possible slave rebellion. Trying to find anything about prisoners of war and slave labor, she clicked back to an academic paper about the ziggurat in Borsippa. If completed, it would have been the tallest structure in the entire Akkadian empire. It was likely originally constructed for the local god, Nabu—the patron deity of literacy and scribes.

  Languages. Writing. Irdu’s tattoos.

  Autumn directed her research towards that—falling down another rabbit hole about cuneiform, its evolution over the rise and fall of various Mesopotamian kingdoms and empires. As a single writing system, it was used across multiple languages. Even when the old languages died and new ones took their place, cuneiform persisted.

  A single writing system used to communicate across multiple languages… the collapse of a ziggurat dedicated to a god of writing… a slave rebellion… and Irdu’s tattoos.

  Autumn sensed a tenuous connection between those things. She poked and prodded and twisted and rearranged them in her mind, but try as she might, she couldn’t bring them together into a clear answer.

  Irdu clearly hadn’t wanted to discuss it any further last night. Would he be annoyed if she brought it up again? Would he be willing to explain the meaning of his tattoos?

  She checked the time on her phone and nearly jumped out of her chair with excitement. Her research had eaten up several hours. Her east-facing window was dark. Sunset was only half an hour away. Soon, not only would she get to see Irdu, but she’d have some answers.

  Maybe.

  While she waited for the sun to go the hell away, she read more about the symbiotic interplay between the Sumerian language and Akkadian. She was trying to figure out, based on her estimate of Irdu’s age, whether he would’ve spoke Sumerian, or Akkadian, or both.

  She was looking at Borsippa on a map of the ancient Akkadian Empire when she sensed a change in the air. She looked up and found Irdu standing in the center of her room, watching her with a cautious expression.

  “Irdu!” She slammed her computer shut and launched herself at him. He caught her in his arms, his expression transforming to something both incredulous and joyful as she wrapped her arms around his neck and laid a happy kiss on his cheek.

  “Hello,” he said, sounding a little dazed. His embrace was almost painfully tight, and he gazed down at her with an expression of such earnest happiness that Autumn felt her heart expanding inside her chest.

  “I missed you,” she told him. “I missed you all day.” She sounded like a child, but she couldn’t hold back the tide of feeling.

  “I missed you too,” he told her. He leaned down and gave her another one of those sweet, heatless kisses. A gentle touch of undemanding affection. Autumn’s heart swelled again. She pulled him towards the bed and propped up pillows so they could sit comfortably.

  “What do you do when you’re not with me?” she asked. “When you’re in the Underworld?”

  Irdu’s expression shuttered and all the joy in him blinked out in an instant. “You don’t want to hear about that.”

  “Sorry,” Autumn said quickly, nearly choking on her regret. “I didn’t want to upset you. I just want to know about you.”

  Irdu regarded her silently from that bleak, empty mask. “Know, then, that I live only when I am with you. When I am not with you… I am not myself. If others of my kind knew the joy you brought to me, they would find a way to destroy it.”

  “Why?’” Autumn asked, unable to stop herself.

  The bleakness in his eyes was heartbreaking. “Because you are everything that is wonderful and good about the living world—things that are forbidden to my kind. When I am with you, I can steal a little bit of that for myself.” He looked away from her. “For as long as I exist, my time with you, however fleeting, will be burned into my soul. And when you no longer need me, and I am summone
d to another, I will comfort myself with the memories of the time I had with you.”

  Autumn’s eyes burned with tears. “I don’t want to let you go. I don’t want anybody else to summon you from me.”

  He turned back to her, a sad smile pulling at his lips. He stroked his thumb gently beneath her eye, catching a tear before it streaked down her cheek. “I am yours as long as you want me.”

  Forever! Autumn stopped herself from blurting it out, staring at him in fraught silence instead. Someday, she would have to let him go. Whether it was because she’d resolved whatever need had summoned him, or because… she died. Someday she would have no choice but to leave him.

  “You have to tell me about yourself,” she said suddenly, urgently. “If we’re going to be separated eventually, I need every piece of you that I can hold onto.”

  Irdu considered that for a moment. “I don’t want to drive a wedge between us,” he said. “My past is ugly.”

  “Just tell me this—were you human at Borsippa?”

  Irdu met her gaze. “Yes.”

  “Were you—” her throat caught. “Were you one of the slaves?”

  “Yes.” He held her gaze, the blue of his irises intensifying. “I am the lowest of low, Autumn. I am a failed warrior, captured alive. I am a slave. I am a defeated rebel. And now I am a demon. A slave once again, and a parasite, whose very existence is dependent—”

  She cupped his face with both hands, her gaze boring into his. “You’re Irdu,” she said, her voice wavering with emotion. “You are kind and generous. You take care of people who need it. You make me—them—feel safe and valued. Your history makes you fascinating, not pathetic. You have always fought your circumstances, no matter how desperate. That’s admirable. That’s… it’s heroic.”