Someone was fucking with me.
And not in any way that was useful or fun.
I scowled at my empty lunch container, empty for the third day in a row.
"What the hell?" Suzy Q said as she shook her equally empty lunch container. Did she think it was going to magically appear?
Actually, maybe that wasn't so far-fetched, since it had pretty much magically disappeared. I gave my Tupperware a little shake. Nope, still empty.
"This is getting ridiculous," Suzy Q said with a growl, pissed off enough that I heard some of her inner wolf. That meant I needed to calm her down, because the last thing we needed was a full on were-wolf rampage through the break-room kitchen. Even though our particular newspaper didn't hire humans, so there was no one to hide our paranormal secrets from, I didn't really feel like cleaning up the mess afterwards either. I'm pretty lazy unless I've got a good reason not to be.
Like hunting down a lead for a kickass news story or hunting down a new lover to charge myself up.
I'm Kyloria Vain, affectionately known as Kyra to my friends and fuck buddies, and I'm a newspaper reporter in the Big Apple. Oh, and I'm also a succubus. Yeah, I know, way to bury the lead.
I don't really like being a succubus and I do like being a newspaper reporter, so sue me. I mean sure, being a succubus sounds great, hot sex with just about whoever I wanted on demand, but there's a difference between getting to do something and having to do something, such as eating to survive versus eating for pleasure. It's a good analogy, because that's basically what sex is to me: food.
Although, I also have to eat. Food nourishes my physical body, sex nourishes my energy and magic. I'm a pretty weak succubus, though, because I just don't have time for sex all that much - I'm too busy living. I usually manage to get my "one meal a day" from a supernatural source, because humans are more like having a quick snack, so sex with them doesn't benefit me much and, as I said, I'm lazy and I survive on that.
This week, I'm busy trying to figure out who is fucking with me.
Really, they're fucking with the whole office, but if they weren't fucking with me personally I'm not sure I would really care. Actually, it would probably be pretty funny, but I do care that they're fucking with me... and okay, I care that they're fucking with Suzy Q, too. She is my best friend, after all, but since none of it is really harmful, I'd still find it funny that they were fucking with her.
I never said I was a good person. I have my moments though, and I'm a freaking awesome lay. I've had a lot of practice since hitting my magical majority and my succubus side kicking in three years ago when I turned twenty-five. Before that, I'd just had regular demon powers. Kind of wish I still did. It would be a lot easier to feed off nature or emotions, rather than having to get down and dirty for my "food."
Anyway. I can complain about the logistics of being succubus another time, right now, I needed to focus on the problem at hand, because it wasn't as if I was going to magically change into another kind of demon.
"Fuck it, let's go to Benny's and get something there," I said, naming Suzy Q's favorite restaurant and likely the only thing which would distract her right then. It was a little bit out of the way from our office, but whatever... we deserved a longer lunch break. Our food had been disappearing for three days in a row, and nothing management had done had fixed the problem, so I didn't really care if they got pissy about us taking an hour and a half instead of an hour. "Then we can figure out what we're going to do about this."
"Why should we have to do something?" Suzy Q asked, grumbling, although she followed me complacently enough out of the kitchen, kicking at the line of salt drawn across the threshold and scattering it. Our editor, Bill, had put it down thinking the trouble must be the work of an imp. Weak demons such as imps couldn't cross salt. A day or two without any sex at all and I wouldn't be able to either, since I was already starting at a pretty low threshold of power.
"Because whatever they're doing obviously isn't working," I retorted. Hell, we were two ball-busting, headline-writing, best in the news room reporters. We'd both covered everything from murders to political scandals to drug busts and trafficking rings. Figuring out who was stealing food from the break room, makings thousands of copies of hentai babes in the copy room, switching people's desks around in the middle of the night, and in general causing low-levels of mayhem shouldn't be that hard.
I know, I know, famous last words, right?
******
Benny's a little hole in the wall, which normal humans walk right by every day thanks to some pretty fantastic wards done by the warlock owner, Benny Shade. New York has a pretty thriving paranormal community where it's easy to hide right in plain sight. Suzy Q and I worked for the city's only paranormal newspaper, so while we covered the same stories as a lot of the humans do, ours always hit the mystical bent.
Like last year when the city councilman went berserk and murdered his best friend and wife? Well, yes, the two were having an affair— as the humans reported— but that particular city councilman also happened to be a Jinn, and he actually hadn't murdered them. He'd just frozen them in the position in which he'd found them. Like the actual missionary position. They were still alive, just stuck together and unable to move or speak, which was pretty horrifying when I thought too much about it. The Witch Council was still trying to figure out how to undo it, since the Jinn had disappeared right after doing it and normally the only way to undo a Jinn spell is convincing the Jinn in question to fix it.
The human papers had reported on the affair and the unfortunate deaths (staged using the seemingly dead bodies, but the coffins in the graveyard were totally empty), while I'd managed to sneak find out all the dirty details they couldn't, such as how the Lamia, aka the wife, had actually been having multiple affairs, which she'd been using to blackmail various powerful members of the magical community. The man currently frozen with his cock inside of her was the local den leader of the bear shifters (thankfully HE wasn't married, or mated, as shifters did), so that had thrown their whole den into an uproar and Suzy Q had done the piece on that.
The bears still didn't have an official leader, since their alpha was currently unable to answer a formal challenge but wasn't actually dead. The minute he got unstuck, he was definitely going to be facing one, though. The bear shifters were pretty pissed at him, not in the least because he'd been embezzling funds to pay off the Lamia. I still wasn't sure exactly what she'd been blackmailing him for, but as juicy a scoop as that would be, Bill had told us to back off until the den had calmed down. Without a leader to enforce their rules, things could get... violent.
So really, the mystery of who was fucking with our newsroom was way below our pay grade, but it was starting to affect my happiness, which meant it had now moved up to the top of my list of things I on which was motivated to actually work.
Walking into Benny's, the smell of fresh pasta and cheese hit me like a ton of bricks and I nearly moaned. Smells were warded outside, too, because it wouldn't be good to have a bunch of humans wandering around on the street trying to figure out why a seemingly abandoned building smelled liked the best Little Italy had to offer. Beside me, I could feel Suzy Q relaxing as the warmth and friendliness of the place washed over us.
Benny's was always busy, but never fully packed. I'm pretty sure he'd put some kind of spell on it to ensure there was always at least one table open, because sometimes the dining room seemed larger than it did on other days. Not that I could prove anything and I didn't really care to. Warlocks and witches could be really proprietary about their spells.
