Page 42 of Hungry Like the Wolf

“I can’t stand to see her like that, JJ. It’s like she’s dying or something.”

JJ stood in front of him, his arms crossed over his chest, looking as if he were wrestling with something in his mind.

“What?” Robbie asked.

“How much has Nadja told you about herself?”

Robbie thought about that. The truth was, she hadn’t told him much at all. He knew that she’d gotten her master’s degree in social work somewhere out east. Virginia? He couldn’t remember. But he didn’t know what her childhood had been like. He didn’t know about her current friends. He didn’t know her favorite color or whether she liked salty or sweet. He didn’t know her favorite flower or season or when her birthday was.

It struck Robbie as funny in that moment that he felt like he knew her on a soul-deep level, that he would recognize her anywhere in any timeline, that he could find her blindfolded in a dark room by his senses alone, that he missed her when he wasn’t sitting next to her, but didn’t know how she took her coffee.

“Next to nothing,” he answered honestly, his cheeks heating with emotion that straddled somewhere between embarrassment and hurt.

“Fucking hell,” JJ said under his breath before walking away. He didn’t get far before wheeling on his heel and stalking back toward Robbie, muttering quietly. He did that a few more times, pacing, working through something in his mind. Robbie leaned against a tree and waited, the rough bark scratchy on his bare skin. After six or seven laps, JJ stopped in front of Robbie.

“I shouldn’t do this. She’ll kill me when she finds out.”

Robbie’s stomach lurched as if he’d been thrown off a cliff. “What is it?”

“She’ll never tell you herself. Stubborn-ass woman,” JJ said, scrubbing his hands over his face roughly. “And I shouldn’t. But goddamnit, someone needs to step in and save her from herself and her goddamn principles.”

Robbie forced his voice not to shake. “What the fuck are you talking about, JJ?”

“She’s starving to death.”

“That’s impossible,” Robbie protested. “I bring her food back from the mess hall. It’s always gone later. I’ve seen her eat. She’s?—”

“A succubus,” JJ interrupted.

Robbie tripped sideways, landing hard on his ass on a boulder beside the trail.

“A what?”

“A succubus. A demon that feeds on sexual energy. Without it…” JJ let the sentence drop.

“Explain it to me like I’m five. People are fucking all over this commune. I hear it.”

“Right. But she won’t let herself feed without permission.”

“What?”

“Nadja has ethics,” JJ said, sitting next to Robbie, their shoulders touching, hot and damp from sweat.

“An ethical demon,” Robbie said, and JJ snorted a humorless laugh. “So she’s starving because…”

“She won’t feed from anyone she doesn’t have permission from. She can’t get permission without telling them what she is, which would go about as well as you might think.”

“But she’s alive now.”

“Right. She’s been feeding herself the past few years as a cam girl. Before that it was Chatroulette. Phone sex lines before that.”

Realization dawned. “Because people log on soliciting her.”

“Yeah. Their very presence in the situation feels like consent, or enough like it. And she doesn’t actually have to touch anyone. She doesn’t enjoy sex without a personal connection. But there’s not enough internet up here for streaming. She asked me if I could help her out, like I used to, but I had to turn her down.”

The hot rush of jealousy surprised Robbie. She’d asked JJ to help her? When Robbie was in the bed right next to her, smelling her hair and feeling like a creep for it? When he was so attracted to her that he’d had to stop reading to go rub one out in the bathroom like a teenager?”

“It was a long time ago,” JJ said, reaching across his body to squeeze Robbie’s arm tightly. “Years. I was passing through, and we became friends. I told her about my shifting, and she told me about her predicament. It was sex. I needed comfort, and she needed food. It was never anything more than that.”