I sat down and held my head. Ginny flung herself sobbing beside me. A long time passed. Finally I got up, switched on the light, found a cigaret, and slumped on the edge of the bed. She crouched at my knees, but I didn’t touch her.
“What was it?” I asked.
“An incubus.” Her head was bent, I saw just the red hair flowing down her back. She had put on her frilliest nightgown while we were gone—for whom? Her voice came small and thin. “He . . . it . . . it must haunt the ruins. Came over with the Spaniards . . . Maybe it was responsible for their failure to—”
I dragged smoke into my lungs. “Why hasn’t it been reported?” I wondered aloud, dully. And: “Oh, yeah, sure. It must have a very limited range of operation. A family curse on a family now extinct, so it s confined to the home and lands of that old don. Since his time, no one has been here after dark.”
“Until we—” Her whisper trailed off.
“Well, Juan and his wife, with occasional guests.” I smoked more fiercely. “You’re the witch. You have the information. I barely know that an incubus is an erotic demon. Tell me, why did it never bother the Fernandezes?”
She began to weep afresh, deep hopeless gasps. I thought that despair had combined with the earlier loss of witchpower to drive her thaumaturgic training clean out of reach. My own mind was glass-clear as I continued. “Because it did speak the truth, I suppose, about holy symbols being a shield for people who really want to be shielded. Juan and his wife are good Catholics. They wouldn’t come here without hanging crucifixes in every room. And neither of them wishes to be unfaithful to the other.”
The face she raised was wild. “Do you think that I—
“Oh, not consciously. If we’d thought to put up some crosses when we arrived, or offered an honest prayer, we’d have been safe too. We might never have known there was an incubus around. But we had too much else to think about, and it’s too late now. Subconsciously, I suppose, you must have toyed with the idea that a little vacation from strict monogamy could do no one any harm—”
“Steve!” She scrambled stiffly to her feet. “On our honeymoon! You could say such a thing!”
“Could and did.” I ground out the cigaret, wishing it were Maledicto’s face. “How else could it lay a spell on you?”
“And you—Steve—Steve, I love you. Nobody else but you.”
“Well, you better rev up the carpet,” I sighed. “Fly to, oh, I imagine Guaymas is the nearest town big enough to have an exorcist on the police force. Report this and ask for protection. Because if I remember my demonology, it can follow you anywhere, once you’ve come under its influence.”
“But nothing happened!” She cried that as if I were striking her: which, in a sense, I was.
“No, there wasn’t time. Then. And, of course, you’d have been able to bounce any demon off with a purely secular spell, if you’d possessed your witch-powers. But those are gone. Until you relearn them, you’ll need an exorcist guard, every hour of the day you aren’t in a church. Unless—” I rose too.
“What?” She caught me with cold frantic hands. I shook her off, blinded by the double hurt to my manhood, that Maledicto had whipped me in fight and almost seduced my bride. “Steve, what are you thinking?”
“Why, that I might get rid of him myself.”
“You can’t! You’re no warlock, and he’s a demon!”
“I’m a werewolf. It may be a fair match.” I shuffled into the bathroom, where I began to dress my wounds. They were superficial, except for swollen knuckles. She tried to help, but I gestured her away from me.
I knew I wasn’t rational. Too much pain and fury filled me. I had some vague idea of going to the,, Fortaleza, whither Maledicto had presumably returned. In wolf-shape, I’d be as fast and strong as he. Of, course, I dare not bite . . . but if I could switch to human as occasion warranted, use the unarmed combat techniques I’d learned in the Army . . . The plan was as hopeless as any men ever coughed forth, but my own demon was driving me.
Ginny sensed it: that much witchcraft remained to her, if it was not simply inborn. She was quite pale in the unmerciful glare of the saintelmo, she shivered and gulped, but after a while she nodded. “If you must. We’ll go together.”
“No!” the roar burst from my gullet. “Be off to Guaymas, I said! Haven’t I troubles enough? Let me alone till I can decide if I want you back!”
Another instant she stared at me. May I never again see such eyes. Then she fled.
I went out on the patio and became a wolf. The demon stench was thick on the air. I followed it over the mountainside.
XVII
The Earth was a dazzle of moonlight. My nose caught smells of dust, sage, cactus, kelp, and salt more remotely; my ears heard a bat’s sonar squeak, the terrified stuttering of a jackrabbit; my pelt tingled with sensations for which men have no words. I felt my human torture no longer. The lupine brain could only hold clean, murderous carnivore thoughts. It was like being reborn. I understand that some psychiatrists have gotten good results by turning their patients temporarily into animals.
Presently the old watchtower lifted its corroded outline across the moon. Every nerve abristle for attack, I entered what had been a gateway. The courtyard lay empty around me. Sand had blown in during, the centuries, weeds thrust between the flagstones, a shard of paving jutted here and there. Near the center, was a heap which had been a building. Cellars lay underneath. I’d explored them a trifle, once, not deeply enough to come on the lair of the incubus.
I bayed my challenge.
It rustled in the tower door. A white form step out. My heart made one leap, and I crouched back. I thought wildly, Could I slash his jugular on the first bite, it wouldn’t matter if I swallowed that drug-blood, he would be dead . . .
Laughter ran around me on soft little feet. She made another stride outward, so that she could stand under a cataract of moonlight, impossibly white against the black moldering walls. “Good even, fair youth,” she said. “I had not hoped for this fortune.”
Her scent entered my lungs and my veins. I growled, and it turned into a whine. I wagged the stump of my tail. She came to me and scratched me behind the ears. I licked her arm; the taste was dizzying. Somewhere in a thunderful wilderness, I thought it was no use remaining lupine. The currents of change ran through me. I stood up a man.
She was as tall and ripplesome as Amaris, and she had the same strange pointed face and eyes that fluoresced under the moon. But the pale hair fell past her waist in a cloud, and she wore a gown obviously woven by stingy spiders, on a figure that- Oh, well, I won’t try to describe it. I suppose half the fun was simply in the way it moved.
“Cybelita . . . I presume?” I managed to husk.
“And thou art Steven.” A slender hand fell upon mine and lingered. “Ah, welcome!”
I wet my lips. “Er . . . is your brother at home?”
She swayed closer. “What matters that?”
“I . . . uh . . .” I thought crazily that one can’t politely explain one’s business with a lady’s brother as being to kill him. And after all, well, anyhow- “Look here,” I blurted. “You, he, you’ve got to leave us alone!”
Cybelita smiled yieldingly. “Ah, thy grief is mine, Steven. And yet, canst thou not find it in thy heart to pity us? Knowest thou what damnation in truth consists of? To be a creature in whom the elements exist unblent-Fire of lust, Air of impulse, Water of wantonness, and the dark might of Earth to be of such a nature, yet doomed to sink like a rat in these ruins, and howl to empty skies, and hunger and hunger for three hundred years! If thou wert starving, and two folk passing by spread a feast, wouldst thou not take such few crumbs as they could well are?”
I croaked something about the analogic fallacy.