The storm above us was obviously leaner now, with pieces of the room becoming visible as its essence was used up. It was flowing into the fight, trying to stave off the inevitable for another few minutes, because the power we were generating was no longer sufficient. I watched it melt away, stripping itself of strength, of life, in a futile attempt to save me, and I didn’t even know for sure what it was.

And then something started whispering to me, out of the glittering depths.

It wasn’t a voice, wasn’t even a language, at least none that I’d ever heard. It was… feelings, emotions, passions, but so vivid, so clear and tangible, that it almost felt like I could reach up and touch them. And along with them, they brought information, although I struggled to interpret it.

I stared from the clouds to Pritkin and back again, trying to focus with a thousand questions suddenly crowding my mind: was that his incubus up there? Was that why he and Mircea were here—had Pritkin’s demon brought them? Because it had done something like this once before, in this very room, forming itself a body out of stolen power.

But if it had brought them, why not bring their bodies, too?

Maybe because it couldn’t. Maybe they had chased that fey creature straight into Faerie, where my power didn’t work. Maybe this had been the only way to reach me—

But why make them bodies? If this was a spiritual struggle, they didn’t need them. This wasn’t about the physical…

Only, of course it was, I thought, wondering how I was so slow. It may not have started out that way, but we’d turned this into a physical contest, because incubus magic was sex magic. It might manifest on a spiritual plane, but it wasn’t made there. It was made here, in sweaty hands slipping over heated flesh, in whispered words and panted breaths, in physical contact—

And, finally, I understood. I didn’t know how much of that was me figuring it out, and how much was coming from the creature boiling through the air around us. I couldn’t hear it that clearly, possibly because it didn’t have much strength left. But we could fix that, couldn’t we?

And not through a vampire’s bite.

That might feel sexual, at times, but it wasn’t. It was a trick, an illusion to quiet a violent response in the victim, and an illusion wouldn’t work here. We needed the real thing.

Help me, I begged Mircea, and sent him the jumbled thoughts that were the best I could do at the moment.

But they must have been enough, because the next second, I felt a hand on the back of my neck, bending me over, felt a heavy weight against me, felt—

“Ahhh!”