I ended up inviting Freya to my room at the William Claymore. It was a gorgeous and comfortable space, which was only a short cab ride from the hospital where Freya spent most of her day. And I decided security wasn't an issue. I checked in regularly with the house detective, and I didn't spend all that much time in the place. There was little chance any of my enemy's agents had seen me coming or going. In the end, meeting Freya at my room wasn't any more dangerous than meeting her anywhere else in a city of 4 million people.

Besides, I was fairly confident that I'd murdered most of the private detectives in the city. There was nothing in the news media regarding a number of bodies found in a West Side warehouse. That either meant that the corpses had not yet been discovered, or my enemies had made it a point to clean up my crime scene in order to avoid any flack that might come their way from the revelation.

Either was possible, but the question didn't seem pressing. I had a date.

The subtext of Freya's most recent post was that she was taking the morning off and expected to have me to herself for the duration. I refused to disappoint the woman. It wasn't too long after sunrise that my phone pinged, and I went to answer the door.

She was much earlier even than I'd expected, and when I reached the door, I found a breathless and obviously agitated Freya-Lynn waiting. She moved as if to speak, but instead stepped across the threshold and threw herself at me.

Not a word was spoken as the two of us drunkenly capered and staggered, ensnared in one another's arms and legs, nearly falling a half dozen times, toward the bed by the balcony. For all the frenzy, somehow clothing flew around the room, like shopping bags caught up in a windstorm. We soon were breathlessly entrenched in one another's flesh, and we did not rise or speak for nearly two hours.

My first act when next we caught our wind was to give her a loving kiss and to update the official log.

"You really don't have to do that," she whispered with a sweet laugh.

"Darling, you have no idea what I had to do to keep hold of this blessed relic. I had to battle a small army of bandits and kidnappers."

"No vampires?"

"Just a few lackeys."

"Did you win?" She kissed one of my favorite spots, and I think I may have gone blind for a moment.

"Ohhh ... it was touch and go for a while."

She sat up and with her gentle hand began caressing the full length of my back and backside. "Can I be honest?"

I just finished my notes, but didn't turn to face her. The touch of her hand was too much. "Of course, always."

"I came up here to break things off with you."

Somehow, I believed her. But her words didn't trouble me. "What happened?"

"I've been shaking all morning. I've felt guilty since I got back from Florida, but not guilty because of the sex, guilty because I didn't feel guilty about the sex." A sound emanated from her that might have been a whimper. "And the sex is all I've been able to think about."

I dared to venture, "I don't see the problem."

"It's just not fair ... I, whew ... I think you cast a spell on me. I've never felt this way before."

I could hear the tears in her voice, and I turned to take her in my arms. "We can quit this if you want."

"Oh, I can't," she whispered. "I thought I found the courage last night, but coming up in the elevator this morning ... I just ... I just couldn't stop shaking. Doing this was all I could think about. Ugh. I think I had a little orgasm on the third floor."

By reflex, my hand snaked toward my notebook.

"Don't you dare. You didn't work for that one."

Fair enough. "I don't want you to be upset."

"I've been possessed by a demon," she announced.

"What?"

"I've been possessed by a demon," she repeated. "Some sort of fuck demon, like an incubus or a succubus or a ... one of those things."

"Those things don't exist, darling."

"If you can be a vampire, I can be possessed by a fuck demon."

I kissed her soundly, and was grateful that her tone had lightened. But I truly didn't want to see Freya upset. I kissed her ear and whispered, "I could leave."

"No, I'd just track you down." Her body again began a gentle rhythm against mine. "I always thought Brandon and I had fantastic sex, laughed about it with friends. I had no idea something like this existed. He um ...."

"Go ahead," I whispered. There was nothing about which I was squeamish.

It was with just a tiny voice that she said, "He and I have never had oral sex."

What sort of monster had this poor woman married? I began to think not so badly of myself. "There really is only one answer."

"What's that?" Her voice had returned to the same husky whisper she used during sex, and the rhythm of her perfect naked body against mine had increased. For the first time, I noticed that she gently but firmly had dug her teeth into the top of my left shoulder.

"We have to fuck," I said. "You and I will fuck so much that you'll get sick of it. Fuck me morning, noon, and night, whenever you have a spare moment. At the end of six months, you won't be able to look at my pussy without a sense of revulsion."

A series of excited moans escaped her, and she whispered a near incomprehensible, "That's a good idea."

It was, in fact, a terrible and a juvenile idea, one that even I knew wouldn't work. But the horny brain believes whatever it wants, and the little jest relaxed my sweet friend for the moment.

We would find a way out of this. I was terribly smitten with Freya-Lynn and would do what was necessary, even if that meant leaving her.

***

We were several hours more entangled and enmeshed in one another, a passion that lasted so long that Freya missed two meetings she was scheduled to attend. When finally I was able to usher her to the door, our goodbye kiss led to yet another round of frenzied screwing on the nearby couch.

She didn't depart until the early afternoon, and we promised to see one another again soon. I did not doubt we would.

That my friend was using me for sex didn't trouble me at all. I didn't want to be rid of her, didn't want to let go of her at all, but if her passion was so overwhelming that it ruined her life and her happiness ... well, I wouldn't stand for that.

But if it truly was the sex to which she'd been addicted—rather than her love for me—I could have lived with that. As silly as the notion sounded, my initial childish impulse just might have been the correct one. If it merely was my body she so coveted, then one day soon she would weary of the delights of a forbidden playground.

It may surprise you to find that her biting me did not cause me great worry. Our love making in Florida had been passionate but sweet. This morning's bacchanalia was a hurricane, as she threw herself against me like a tidal surge. Several times, to my deep delight, she bit me with such passion that she nearly broke the skin. I could never do the same to her, but the smell of my own blood, of the blood of any of my kind, does not trigger my hunger.

Thinking about her biting me left me a bit peckish. But had my lover bit me through to the quick, had she drawn blood, it wouldn't have caused me great trouble.

Perhaps that was some sort of survival mechanism nature had placed in my kind to keep us from preying and feeding upon one another. I'd bitten others of my kind, but the taste and smell had no effect on me. Who knows why we are the way we are.

Who knows why any of us are the way we are? Should I dismiss entirely the idea that Freya might be possessed of a demon? It seemed a ridiculous notion at first. As I cleaned up afterward, though, I pondered the possibility.

I've seen a great many things in my long life that I couldn't explain, and for a very long time I believed in gods, and demons, and witches, and magics. But I could not honestly say that I'd ever seen any of them, and eventually they were things that I'd dismissed. It had been an article of faith for me for the last hundred years or more (a fairly long time, even by the way I chart life) that such things were nonsense.

But humans lived in their own world, wholly unaware of the true existence of creatures like me. Would it be out of the realm of possibility that other worlds might exist in this earthly plane, worlds of which I knew nothing at all?

The lover I met in my room that morning was the same sweet, caring, and passionate woman that I knew in Florida. She touched, squeezed, kissed, and caressed with the same feeling and verve. Her whole heart and body were giving and loving. But there was a hunger in her that morning. Freya-Lynn had thrown herself at me like a woman starving, a woman possessed. And I loved it.

I wanted to get to know this fuck demon.