The Demon Lover Read online

  The Demon Lover is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Ballantine Books eBook Edition

  Copyright © 2011 by Carol Goodman

  Excerpt from The Water Witch by Juliet Dark copyright © 2011 by Carol Goodman

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book The Water Witch by Juliet Dark. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dark, Juliet.

  The demon lover : a novel / Juliet Dark.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-52627-4

  1. Incubi—Fiction. 2. Demonology—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3607.O566D46 2012

  813′.6—dc23 2011039996

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Title-page image: Jared Swafford

  Cover design : Eileen Carey

  Cover images : © Marie Killen (woman), © Thom Lang/Corbis (background)

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The Dark Stranger

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Excerpt from The Water Witch

  THE DARK STRANGER

  —Dahlia LaMotte, unpublished ms.

  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.

  ONE

  “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 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 …”