Her wings were folded against her back and they still took up most of the room.
She had angled them down, compressed against herself, the bone-white frame and deep red membrane held close to her shoulder blades. Even folded they were the largest thing in the bedroom that wasn't a wall or the bed. The bedroom was the long narrow side of my apartment with the window onto Berendo. The lamp on the nightstand was on, throwing yellow across the bed; the overhead was off. The window was open an inch at the bottom and the night air coming in was the specific kind of LA night air it is at two AM in August. Cool, dry, the city below still doing the long slow exhale it does between the bars closing and the early commuters starting. A motorcycle went down Vermont two blocks west, faded out, was replaced by the click and hum of the radiator catching itself.
She was watching me.
I'd given myself a moment. I'd looked at the ceiling crack. Then I'd looked back at her. The amber-gold eyes with no whites hadn't moved. She was in exactly the position she'd been in when everything changed. On the bed, her body in the form it had become, the heart-shaped bioluminescent mark on her lower abdomen producing a faint red light that did not match the lamp's yellow and made a soft circle of color on the sheet beside her hip.
I said, "First question. Am I in danger right now."
"No."
No softening on it, no wrapping. At the coffee shop she'd answered everything sideways, taken her time, made me work for the little she gave up. Tonight the question had one answer and she handed it straight over, like she didn't have the spare attention for anything else.
"Can you change back," I said. "Or is this it."
She shifted.
One moment she was what she was. The red skin, the white hair, the horns sweeping back from her temples, the wings, the eyes amber-gold all the way through. The next moment she was Amber. Not the word. Her. Platinum hair past her shoulders, near-white in the lamplight. Deep blue eyes. The proportions that had made me revise my estimate in the first five steps at PeakForm. The gym identity, visible and complete, as if she'd been wearing it all along and I hadn't seen it until now.
"Both are real," she said. "The red one isn't a costume and this one isn't a trick. They're both me. This one just gets fewer questions at the gym."
She sat down on the edge of the bed. I was sitting on the other end. She was in her human form and she was still the most unnerving person who'd ever been in my apartment. She had pulled the sheet up across her lap without looking at it, which she had not done at any point earlier when there had been the same amount of nothing on. The sheet was the gray one. I'd washed it that morning.
"What do I call what you are," I said.
She looked at me steadily. "Succubus."
The word sat in the room.
I turned it over. The word had a definition and the definition was wrong, or at least incomplete.
"I feed through sexual contact," she said. "I've been doing it for about nine hundred years."
Nine hundred years. I waited to feel something specific about it. The thing I felt was the radiator clicking on a second time and the small sound of a car door closing somewhere in the alley behind the building.
"That," I said, and gestured at the space above her shoulder where the wings had been. "Has that happened before."
"No." She was looking at her hands now. First time I'd seen her look at anything other than me since she'd walked through my door six hours ago. Her hands were folded in her lap on top of the gray sheet, the same long elegant hands she'd put on my lower back during the squat assessment that morning, no silver rings now. "Not once. Not in nine hundred years."
She went quiet. Whatever else she knew about tonight, she wasn't going to give it to me at two in the morning. There was more. I could read it in how she was holding herself still, the small bracing around her shoulders that hadn't been there in the gym. Something had shaken her and she was holding the edges of it.
"Does the gym know," I said.
Her mouth did something small. "My employment is fully legitimate. Social security number, direct deposit, CPR cert renewed last fall. The gym does not know."
"Are there more of you."
"Yes."
"In LA."
"Elsewhere. Some in LA."
I got up and went to the kitchen and got the glass of water she'd left on the counter earlier in the evening. The kitchen at two AM had the light from the streetlamp outside coming in flat through the window over the sink, the glass exactly where she'd set it down before she'd led me to the bedroom. Half full. I brought it back. I held it out to her.
She took it. She looked at it. She held it.
No sip.
I sat back down. We were three feet apart on opposite ends of my bed in my apartment in Koreatown at two-something in the morning. She was a nine-hundred-year-old succubus holding a glass of water she didn't need. I'd been her target. Something had happened tonight that had never happened before, and she wasn't telling me what.
I looked at her face.
The woman who'd watched me squat, come to the coffee shop, walked by the reservoir in the late afternoon. That woman was in this room now, holding a glass of water, and something had shaken her and it hadn't come back.
I said, "Are you okay."
She stared at me.
"You look like something surprised you," I said. "I'm asking if you're okay."
She was still looking at me. Whatever she'd had ready for every other question tonight, she didn't have this one.
No answer came.
She stood up.
"I should go."
She looked around the apartment the way she had when she'd first walked in, the framed print, the window, checking what was here, except this time without the air of someone confirming what they already knew. She had no bag, no jacket. She'd arrived with nothing and was leaving with nothing, which wasn't different from how she'd arrived. She pulled her clothes on with the brisk economy of someone who'd done it ten thousand times in apartments not their own. Jeans, the dark top, no underwear because she hadn't been wearing any to begin with.
At the door she stopped.
She turned around. She looked at me with the blue eyes that were blue again and the face that was Amber's face, which was also her face, and she said, "I didn't know it would end like that."
I didn't ask what she meant. I wasn't sure which part she meant.
She left.
The door clicked shut behind her. Her footsteps went down the stairwell at the careful pace of someone aware of the late hour and the thinness of the walls in a four-story walk-up. The street door at the bottom opened. Closed. She was gone.
The water glass was on my nightstand. She'd set it down when she stood. Some portion of the water was still in it. The bedroom had gone back to being a bedroom, no wings, the lamp doing what it had been doing all night, the heart-mark light gone. The window let in the same cool air and the same city sounds at two-something AM and nothing about any of it had changed in any noticeable way except that a creature that old had been on the bed I was now sitting on.
She'd fed on me. I didn't feel fed on. I felt like the best version of a Monday morning — rested, clear, something topped off instead of taken. A succubus had done whatever succubi do and I felt fine. I sat with that. It didn't get less strange.
I went out to the living room.
I sat down on the couch.
I looked at the ceiling crack.
I'd tell the building manager tomorrow.