“Mistress?”

Rachel's hand reached out to brush her cheek, and she leaned into her touch.

“Poor child. You have known so much pain, and so young. But we are very Lucky to know you. Your passion will be a blade in our hands.

“And you will be our...our moral center as well. Althea doesn't think much of our ideas of ethics and morality,” she said. Her lips curved in a private smile, as if the succubus who shared her body had just made a rude comment.

“Especially when they pertain to sex. But we need a center, Maria. Something to hold onto. Have you ever heard the expression, ‘A man shows what he is when he can do what he wants?' We have to be wary of that trap.

“Look at what she dangles beneath our noses. My family is already wealthy. And, if I can be allowed a touch of maternal pride, my children and husband are intelligent and moderately attractive as well.

Throw in the Lure of guilt-free sex and you have a recipe for disaster.

People who think they are special in some way. Better than their peers.

People who will do as they please simply because they can.

“And that will destroy us. Make us become what we hate. Greedy, selfish monsters with no thought for anything but their own desires. Perhaps the succubi are different. But we humans are not built to resist that sort of temptation.

“But you will see that dos not happen," she concluded, “You have fought against it all your life. Maybe a different battlefield, but the same war.

"Ah." Her eyes glinted.

“It looks Like my daughter has finally climaxed. Took that boy long enough," she critiqued.

“Let's see if my husband is done in there, and get this show on the road."

With exaggerated care, the being which called itself Mortimer Kincaid pressed the disconnect button on his cell phone, restraining the urge to hurl it through the wall with only the greatest difficulty.

You just can't get good help these days.

He had listened, his face expressionless, as Fontein reported his failure to get any information out of Rachel Wainwright and her wretched family. His terrified, stuttering voice would ordinarily be a source of pleasure, but tonight it simply filled him with rage.

I'LL have to kill him soon. The prospect brought him only a weary regret. Fontein had been a useful tool. But all tools outlived their time. Fontein had been slipping, his work growing sloppy. This failure was only the latest of many.

How hard can it be to find one woman in a hospital in Chicago? He knows her name. Was he just too lazy to actually make the calls?

Inefficient, he sighed, looking out the window of his penthouse apartment at the dark cityscape below. The sun had gone down an hour before. Below him, he could sense the mass of teeming humanity. It sickened him. They were all so inefficient. Humans were bad. But his so-called superiors in the Pit were even worse. It was laughable, really. He had spent time with them, some of the really sad ones, like

Pithius and Ukobach and Belphegor. They kept on whining about the good old days, when temptation and corruption had been an art.

He snorted. Why do all the legwork of destroying a human's soul when they were so much better at doing it themselves? Retail work was all well and good (or bad) but the real money was in wholesale. He could cause more genuine evil by causing a man to walk in front of a train at rush hour than most demons could in a decade. The chain reaction of anger, frustration, and petty violence as the transportation system backed up could cascade through an entire city, a slow-moving wave of hatred and despair, tarnishing every soul it came into contact with.

And those old Lumps bragged about tempting a priest or bribing a politician. By the Dark One himself, it was so fourteenth century!

Didn't anyone realize there were seven billion humans on this stinking dirtball? It wasn't like the old days, when your chosen target would probably die of bubonic plague or smallpox before the week was over.

Sure, back then you had to aim carefully. But now you could carpet-bomb an entire populace and go home early, content in the knowledge of a bad job well done.