Phil awoke to the smell of lavender and spring. Verdé's soft lips were pressed against his in a kiss. She exhaled and warm, fragrant air flowed back into him like a fresh spring breeze. He felt the embers of his spirit rekindle and spark back into life. Verdé looked down at him with her bright green eyes and smiled. Her long silky green hair flowed down over her shoulders.
"I don't think it's going to hold, Verdé."
Rosa leant against a wall, a frown on her cheerleader-cute face. Phil knew this room. He recognised the velvet canopy above him. The two succubi had taken him back to his room in the castle. Pink-tinged light poured in through the narrow window and the air was filled with fragrant perfumes and other musky scents.
"I think he's broken," Rosa continued. "It's only your energy keeping him going. His is all gone."
With a sinking feeling, Phil realised Rosa was right. The spark was already fading. The warmth from Verdé's kiss was leaking out of him, leaving behind cold grey ash.
"I can keep him alive until Cέrμləa brings Nurse Honey here," Verdé said.
"What can she do though?" Rosa said. "The warlock has reached his limit. Mamǝḵā Bēyˁṯān's rules are inviolable."
Phil heard clicking sounds, like iron spikes striking hard stone. They drew closer until the door was pushed open and Nÿte walked into the room. She was dressed in her usual dominatrix-wear—the tight black leather contrasting with her pale, almost white, skin. Her face was colder than Phil had ever seen it. Expressionless. A mask, perfect in its beauty, carved from ivory.
She looked at Phil, then from Verdé to Rosa. "Who did this?"
Phil detected no emotion in her voice, it was as flat and as expressionless as the mask of her face, and yet her words felt like ice condensing on the inside of his ears.
"An arachne, we think," Verdé said. "We found him hanging in a web cocoon in the showers of that silly school."
"Someone sent an arachne to kill a novice?"
Nÿte looked at Verdé then Rosa. Her face remained a perfect mask. No emotion escaped its finally drawn lines.
Apart from her eyes. They blazed like black holes.
"Yeah, that's what I thought too," Rosa said. "Not very fair or sporting, is it."
"No, it isn't."
Phil ached all over. His hands and feet felt like they'd been welded to weights and he felt as cold as if he'd spent the night lying naked on frozen tundra. That was nothing compared to the coldness he saw in Nÿte's black eyes right then. It was the coldness of deep space, of universes collapsing into entropy, of lightless places that had never once felt a sun's caress.
Nÿte turned around and walked out of the room. Her heels clicked on the stone floor like coffin nails being driven into fresh wood.
"Hmm, I was going to have some fun with her later in the Nightshade suite," Verdé said. "I think I'll pass today."
"Sensible," Rosa agreed.
Verdé placed her soft lips against Phil's and blew more warm air into him. The warmth brought succour to his aching limbs, but he knew it was only a temporary relief. He felt like a sack of cold ash.
"I found her!" A high-pitched girlish voice came from the doorway as Cέrμləa, in her usual form of a young girl in a cornflower-blue dress, rushed in.
She took one look at Phil and her eyes widened and she put a hand to her mouth.
If a daemon is shocked at how you look then that must mean you're really fucked up, Phil thought. He tried to speak and failed. His tongue felt like a piece of dried-up meat.
"Poor warlock," she said.
Nurse Honey walked in behind her, calm and collected in her latex fetish nurse's outfit.
"Tsk," she said on seeing Phil's emaciated form.
"Is there anything you can do?" Verdé asked.
Nurse Honey walked to the side of the bed. She placed one white-gloved hand on his chin and the other around his temples. She turned his head and peered intently into each eye. The bottom hand moved down and lightly stroked Phil's flaccid penis. There was no response. Not even a twitch. A gorgeous blonde was leaning over him, her large round breasts straining beneath tight white rubber, and he felt no arousal at all. He must be dead.
Nurse Honey tsked again. She leant over and wrapped her mouth over Phil's in a kiss. Unlike Verdé, she inhaled and for a brief moment Phil felt like every particle of his being was caught in the grip of some kind of irresistible attraction. Then she released him and he sank back on the bed.
Nurse Honey frowned. "The daemon has left him alive but beyond the reach of most restorative arts. It has been carried out with such precision it must have been a condition of the contract."
"So that's it, he's toast?" Rosa queried.
"I can't replenish him," Nurse Honey said. "He's already saturated with my energies. My body would simply absorb him."
Phil supposed he'd escaped that fate. L'mactia, the arachne, had got to him first and left him so empty his cock was stone-dead. No erection meant no sex and no sex meant Mamǝḵā Bēyˁṯān couldn't suck out his soul. Dying terrified him, but he knew it could be worse.
"Toast," Rosa said. "Shame. He was one of the better ones."
