The Loinfire Club reads... Come to Me

Come to Me, by Lisa Cach

Samira was the lowliest creature of the Night World: a mere succubus, a winged spirit bringing dreams of passion to sleeping men. She knew every wicked wish that lurked in their hearts, and yet she had never felt the touch of a man's loving hand. Nor had she wanted to… until now.

Shattered by war and banished to a crumbling fortress, Nicolae turned to the dark arts. He planned to use Samira as a tool to find a means to oust the invader from his lands and regain all that he'd lost. When she arrived on his doorstep in human form, his long-sought vengeance was lost.

A creature of the night and a ruined prince: one called and the other came. What happened next would change their worlds forever.


The Loinfire Club is reading “Come to Me,” the book with the virgin succubus. It has been anticipating this for a long time.

The book reeks of gin and tobacco. It came second-hand from the Internet, you see, and the Club could but wonder at its previous owner. Every member is initiated into the Meeting by smelling the book and recoiling the horror. The latter half of that ritual is technically optional.

(The Chronicler could now but apologise that the book really got on her nerves in many ways so there may be more angry asides in brackets than normal.)

The first word Naked had been used to taunt and scare away one of the uninitiated, who remembers that he has a very pressing engagement elsewhere.

The map is mocked for looking like a Stupid Fantasy Map, though it is, in fact, a map of Transylvania. The way the surrounding land is coloured makes it look rather... island-like.

The Balance (who is reading tonight): "Are you all sitting comfortably?"

Maramures, Northern Transylvania, 1423
The Anthropologist: "That sounds familiar. Are there any other novels set in this region?"

Naked and full of mischief, Samira crept onto the bed of the ruling prince of Maramures. She paid no heed to the wench who slept beside him, crawling over the snoring girl as if she did not exist.
(The Chronicler could but note now how in both An Original Sin and in this book, "evil" has been downgraded to "mischief." She ponders at this development.)

The prince, Dragosh, mumbled and twitched in his sleep, as if trying to dislodge a bug from his face.
(Note Dragosh, he's going to be Very Important.)

Samira tilted her head, her long, bloodred hair slithering over her bare shoulders...
The Balance: "Her hair slithers... At least we’ve got a reason. She's a demon, after all. Her hair is allowed to slither."

...her black, leathery wings fluttering once to keep her balanced as she peered into the face of her victim.
The Loinfire Club wonder at the perfect manoeuvrability granted by these wings.

Prince Dragosh had a thick scar across his cheek, and deep creases etched into his square forehead — creases from a lifetime of strife, she guessed.
Pillywiggin: "No one should be etching in one’s forehead. Etching is bad for you."
Luca: "So is being square."
Lady Miriam: "He just looks like Spongebob in my head, now."

Sometimes she thought they cared more about eating than they did about having sex.
(This is a sentence that will later come back to haunt us all. And not in a good way.)

The prince's lips were thin, his skin weather-roughened, his nose a much-broken fist in the center of his broad face.
Sordan: "That has to be a medical complication: his nose being fist."
Pillywiggin: "I'm trying hard to imagine him. A square head, etched and a fist for a nose. You’ll have to draw that, Sordan."

The Anthropologist: "This is going to be quite a world setting, where even professional sex workers, even born sex workers, have an I'm not a Slut complex."
Lady Miriam: "What?"
The Anthropologist: "The heroine is a virgin succubus. We found this out from the blurb."
Lady Miriam: "I thought you don't get to be a succubus until you have sex. Until then, you're just a 'bus."
The Anthropologist: "Well, she mind rapes them, not physically rapes them."

The Anthropologist: "Is she a fluffer? I seem to remember that from the other blurb we read."
Lady Miriam: "What?"
The Anthropologist: "She keeps men busy before the Important Demons can come eat their souls."
The Chronicler: "I'm not sure..."

The Anthropologist: "Are we supposed to find this person [Dragosh] attractive? Or is she having angst that she’s required to mind rape ugly men?"

Drool dribbled from the corner of the wench's parted lips, and a thin film coated her exposed teeth. Samira shuddered and moved her wing away from the girl's gaping maw. If this was the best that Maramures had to offer in the way of nubile young beauties, Dragosh had her sympathy.
Big L: "Maybe he has a thing for ugly women."
The Chronicler: "All beauty is objective, remember?"

Big L: "Are there going to be incubi?"
The Anthropologist: "It could be working on the D&D supplement where there are six different species of succubi but only one mention of incubi in the entire book."

She turned her attention back to the nymph-deprived prince.
The Anthropologist: "Is that like a sort of nutritional problem? Imagine going up to your doctor who says, We've done some tests and we find that you've got an nymph-deficiency..."
Lady Miriam: "It could be a House plot."
Big L: "It's not Lupus... it's Nymph deprivation."

A fanning of lines spread from the corner of each of his eyes, speaking of hours spent squinting into the sunlight, surveying the field of battle and happily counting the bodies of the slain.
The Anthropologist: "You'd think if he'd won the battle he'd know better than not to stand squinting into the sunlight."

Dragosh was a strong ruler, she guessed. Fair. Hard. Which meant a lot of people probably hated him. Such was the perversity of humanity.
(The Chronicler wonders if that is a subtle jibe at those who dislike President Bush and other such unpopular "hard" figures of authority. Also considering the rebellion against God, one of the usual backstories of such night gribblies, it seems a bit odd.)

The Anthropologist: "It sounds like she's really bored, theorising his life with some bizarre branch of physiognomy. As though she's forced to stare at the same corner of the ceiling for a long time and trying really hard to find it interesting."

Samira looked back over her shoulder at her friend Theron, standing by the door to the prince's chamber. He was an incubus, a male dream demon who existed only to give dreams of sex to frustrated mortal women. Samira was a succubus, and gave such dreams to sex-deprived men. They were both demons of the Night World, winged beings who gave sexual fantasies—and sexual nightmares, when warranted—to dreaming mortals.

Pillywiggin: "Isn't there another series of books called Night Word?"
None of the members of the Loinfire Club recall the books, (but the Wikimobile proves it's existence.)

The Anthropologist: "Wait... are all the demons homophobic? Because that would basically make them more conservative than normal humans, which just isn't right."
The Chronicler: "She's just the BFG but with more sex."

The fantasies were fun, and the nightmares even more so. Samira's nightmares were a punishment to men who had behaved badly: men who ogled women's breasts while talking to them; who made rude remarks about the size and lumpiness of their wife's buttocks; who thought foreplay was for sissies; who passed gas in bed. The list of tiresome male failings was endless, and Samira's inventiveness legendary amongst other succubi. She had a natural flare for female vengeance, and enjoyed it if only because she was good at it.

The Anthropologist: "So the demons job is to enforce greater degree of sexual conservativeness, thoughtfulness and decency... that doesn't sound like the way it's meant to work."
Sordan: "Fail!Demons."
The Anthropologist: "It sounds like they were originally meant to be sex angels, policing the world of human sexuality but the editors thought that was a bit too... weird."

The Loinfire Club also notes the angry misandrist undertones to that speech. And the triviality of the crimes. And that rape, the greatest of all sexual sins, isn't listed... which is especially pertinent considering the later actions of the hero and how he is curiously nightmare-free.

Dragosh, however, had done nothing wrong recently. Nothing that called for a sharp slap on his nose—
The Anthropologist: "That's the shittest demon punishment ever. I've come to torment you and..."
Sordan: "Bitchslap!"

...unless Samira counted finishing first when he'd made love to the wench, and then falling asleep on top of her. A crime, yes, but so common among men as to go without remark.
Big L: "Which is clearly a lesser crime than farting in bed."
The Anthropologist: "It's good to know that sex demons are relativist in these things."

The sheer amount of random misandry gives rise to Random Sexism as a new category for The Club to drink for.

No, Theron had asked Samira to deliver this nightmare to Dragosh as a favor to him, to fulfill his end of an outrageous bargain he had made with a human named Vlad.
Some would say that it had been a bargain made with the Devil, but Theron wasn't the Devil.
The distinction between Devils and Demons intrigues the Club, but the author is silent on the subject.

And delivering this nightmare meant breaking half a dozen rules of the Night World.
The Balance: "This sounds like possible future angst."

It was just another nightmare, after all. How much harm could it do? Dragosh had probably done something to deserve it.
The Anthropologist: "Apart from having a fist for a nose."
Big L: "I'm sure there'll be a fisting joke soon."
The Anthropologist: "The fist-nose could be a sort of alarm-system in case people attack him in his sleep. He doesn’t have to wake up; It just punches people. Which would explain why none of the pretty women would sleep with him since they get punched."
Lady Miriam: "Or many he's simply headbutted so many people his head has become a fist."

No man was innocent. She ought to punish them all just as a matter of course.
More drinks to random sexism.
The Anthropologist: "That's quite interesting radical feminism coming from a virgin succubus."
(The Chronicler notes, in retrospect, this looks a lot like the All Men Are Bastards belief many heroines adhere to before the hero appears.)

Samira climbed atop Dragosh's barrel chest, squatting weightless upon his rising and falling rib cage.
Big L: "Dear God, is there anything about this guy who isn't horribly malformed?!"
(The Chronicler points out the author naively not understanding the connotations of the term hagridden, the Balance suggests it's just part of the author's attempt to desexualise the succubus... but we'll come to all that later.)

The prince's latent sexual energy was feeding her powers and rousing an echo of his hungers within her ethereal body. She had no physical desires of her own, and only felt lust when she reflected it back from a man.
Big L: "O rly?"
Sordan: "Not a slut!"
Pillywiggin: "I’m not sure what that’s worth drinking for, but I’m drinking anyway."

The Anthropologist: "Essentially when she does have sexual fantasies they’re transsexual ones... her sexual identity must be really screwed up. She'll either identify as asexual or a man."

A jumble of images and emotions washed through her. Faces of men: worry; anger; distrust. The face of a young girl, tawny-haired: love; protectiveness. The vicious chaos of battle, Turkish armies in their foreign garb, with bloodstained spears and swords: fury; fear; bloodlust; determination. Peasant farmers in their tunics, bent in the fields: approval; paternal concern.
Pillywiggin: "He’s thinking very quickly."

The greatest enemy of Dragosh's family, the black-haired Bogdan of Moldavia: distrust; grudging respect; anxiety.
Big L: "Damn you BOGDAN!"
(The Wikimobile tells us that Bogdan of Maldavia did actually exist...)

These were the echoes of the prince's thoughts, the impressions of his days, the bits and pieces of his history.
Pillywiggin: "Why isn't he dreaming of a giant codpiece chasing him down an endless corridor? People dream of random shit..."

Again, and even more strongly, Samira sensed the tawny-haired girl. She knew already, from Theron, that this was Dragosh's youngest sister, Lucia, [...] Samira sensed Lucia's purity in Dragosh's mind. Innocence.
The Loinfire Club: "Eeeeeew!"
Big L: "I see where this is going. And it's not good."
The Anthropologist: "Is the fist-nose on the Y chromosome? I keep getting mental images of this beautiful supermodel with tawny hair and that face..."

A deep love and pride in Dragosh, that this fragile angel among mortals should be his responsibility to protect and cherish, to keep untouched by the foul, lewd hands of other men.
The Balance: "Dodgy... dodgy... "
Sordan: "No one else can rape my younger sister! Only I can!"

Talk turns to Cao Dai in a bizarre tangent and the matter of Victor Hugo being their saint.

From those inner emotions and images she began to weave the requested nightmare: Dragosh's beloved sister, the innocent, tawny-haired Lucia, was standing on a table in the great hall of the despised Prince Bogdan of Moldavia. She wore only a thin sleeping shift.

Big L (who had briefly left the room): "Are they still describing the sister in loving detail?"
The Anthropologist: "No, we've moved on. Now we're about to have rape."

Bogdan's five sons sat around the table. [...] dressed them in the colors of Moldavia, with the silhouette of a wolf on the shoulder. The wolf—it was the symbol of the ancient Dacian race from which they claimed descent, which had inhabited Moldavian lands for millennia.
The Chronicler: "Gang rape, no less."

Samira made the dream Lucia quiver at being the center of such crude male appraisal. The girl shivered in the cold, her nipples hardening, their points visible through the thin linen of her garment...
Sordan: "Boobs!"
The Anthropologist: "I think we need a subcategory for nipples."

She tried to cover herself with her arms, but the movement caused her shift to fall off her shoulder.
The Anthropologist: "That's a very badly fitting shift."
The Balance: "Well, it is a dream shift."
The Anthropologist: "Well, you shouldn't trust succubus labour. No outsourcing for you!"

Her hair draped against her cheek as she bent her head forward, leaving the back of her neck exposed.
Lady Miriam: "Maybe they’re vampires."
Sordan: "There's not much blood in the back of the neck."
Pillywiggin: "They're spine fluid vampires!"

He tried not to look directly at Lucia, her blatant sexuality touching on a deep taboo within him.
The Anthropologist: "Her blatant sexuality as a rape victim!"
(The Chronicler notes that his association with pure innocence and blatant sexuality comes through in other parts of this narrative, but we'll get to the distressing Lolita problems of this book later.)

She was his sister. His little sister.
The Loinfire Club: "Eeew!"
Pillywiggin: "However, the correct response."

As far as he was concerned, she was a blank doll beneath her clothes.
The Anthropologist: "That's even more freaky!"

She did not have the body parts of a normal woman, and certainly none of the desires.
Pillywiggin: "No, actually she’s a man!"

Samira watched Dragosh's reaction with amusement. He was bothered that it was his Moldavian enemies who surrounded Lucia, but even more disturbed by seeing his innocent sister in a sexual situation.
The Anthropologist: "I'm not getting over the blatant sexuality of a teenage girl about to be raped..."
Luca: "Didn't she get this out of his mind earlier?"
Sordan: "She's seducing him in his mind using his virgin younger sister?!"

A soft cry of distress escaped from deep within Dragosh's throat.
Big L: "I'd be disturbed."

...but Samira was suddenly inspired by Dragosh's reaction to watching his sister...
Big L: "You’d think she as a succubus has lots of experience with gangrape."
The Chronicler: "Not Virgin succubi."

She decided to throw in a little extra torture for him, via Lucia herself. This could be fun.
Lady Miriam: "Still, good sadism."

Samira made the dream Lucia toss back her tawny lioness hair...
The Loinfire Club break off into a discussion of what colour 'tawny' is exactly...

...a salacious glint in her eye, a hungry grin forming on her soft lips.
Sordan: "Now she’s going to be gangraped and enjoy it?"
Pillywiggin: "Pass the gin..." (whimpering in a way that implies something about the previous chain-smoking, gin drinking, previous owner of the book and this section of the chapter)

The Anthropologist: "It’s the level of wrongness that you get during a fumble in a Mary Sue roleplay game, not the first scene of a romance novel. I'm not sure that reflects well on us, though..."

Dragosh gasped, his body going tense. "No, no, no, no!" he scolded, and loudly clapped his hands together, as if startling a cat away from a bowl of cream.
The Anthropologist: "Scolded?"
Sordan: "I'm getting a mental image of the a sort of Bad Kitty scolding... not really extreme enough for this scene, is it?"
The Anthropologist: "No, Lucia. We’ve discussed this already. No more crazy orgies or else you're grounded..."

Lucia gave as much heed as would a hungry feline.
Chimes of μ are heard around the room for the catgirl reference.

At this point Lady Miriam attempted to beat Pillywiggin to death with empty chocolate biscuit packet.

The other Moldavian in front of her offered up his goblet, his eyes lightening to the golden tone of a wolfs.
The Anthropologist: "Is it often for gangrapist's eyes to change colour?"
The Balance: "Well, it is a dream..."
The Anthropologist: "But it’s still a very odd detail."
The Balance: "Probably more hinting to him that they're werewolves."

"Drink! Drink! Drink!" his brothers growled, their sharp teeth shining, the thud of their own goblets on the table a drumbeat that matched the beating of Dragosh's frantic heart.
The Anthropologist: "They have a drinking ritual strongly resembling that of my sixth form college? That just makes it even more disturbing."

She was smiling wickedly, her eyes shining. "They rut like beasts, too! They're animals, and hung like—"
The Balance: "Hung like hyphens, it would seem..."
Sordan: "Now they’re hung like Harry Potter."

Dragosh gave an unmanly shriek.
The Anthropologist: "Also known as a girly scream."

"Hung like bulls. [...]And they have tongues like dogs."
"Tongues?" Dragosh asked, startled, momentarily confused. "What of their tongues?"
The Anthropologist: "Ah, it's because he’s only had mediocre sex. That makes him evil."

"They lick me, lick me, lick—"
Big L: "There are far too many hyphens."
The Anthropologist: "Does she have a fetish for repeating the same word?"
Big L: "But the poor hyphens! Think of the poor hyphens!"

Samira held him helpless, leaving him only the power of his voice. "Lucia! You don't like being touched! You're a virgin!"
Lady Miriam: "How does he know?"
Big L: "Because she doesn't like being touched by him."

then slid his long fingers into the dark, damp place between her thighs.
The Chronicler: "Sounds really unpleasant... dark and damp..."
The Anthropologist: "Like something under a log."
Big L: "I wonder if there are woodlice."

This was his sister—his sister!—engaging in sexual acts...
Lady Miriam: "With someone else!"

"You gave me to them, and now I'm their whore," she said. "Thank you, brother, for I have sinned!"
(The Chronicler: "She's getting paid?")

Another Moldavian prince lifted Lucia, straightening out her legs and then laying her back upon the table, the backs of his hands becoming coated with dark fur, his nails turning into claws.
Sordan: "She's about to be raped by wolves now!"

He shoved her shift up past her hips, exposing the dark golden curls of her sex.
Pillywiggin: "But her hair is tawny!"
The Anthropologist: "So she doesn't match."
Pillywiggin: "Damn artificial tawnies."
The Balance: "Or artificial dark golden. We just don't know."

The hair on his face seemed suddenly heavier, his ears growing pointed, his features transforming into something half canine.
The Anthropologist: "Why does it make it worse that she’s having an orgy with werewolves?"
The Balance: "Well it does."

His body tried to rise...
Sordan: "Dodgy comment!"

but he was paralyzed by the bonds of sleep, and by Samira perched upon his chest, holding him in dream thrall.
The Chronicler: "Like being hagridden..."

Lucia cried out in pleasure, the fur-covered hands of the enemy princes slowly pulling her legs open yet wider...
Sordan: "How far do her legs go?"
The Anthropologist: "She’s a professional gymnast."

The prince between her legs latched his lips tightly to her sex, sucking and licking, shoving his face at her with a force to rock her hips and make her breasts sway with the movement.
The Anthropologist: "Don't her breasts have a werewolf on them? Doesn't that impede them somewhat from?"

Dragosh's entire body stiffened with revulsion
The Balance: "Note: his entire body."
Big L: "Is this one of those bizarrely inexplicit ones, where it just says 'sex' and we might never find out what gender these characters are."

...repulsed as much by seeing his pure-hearted sister in sexual acts...
The Anthropologist: "Sexual acts.... That keeps coming up. It's so very vague..."

She parted her thighs wider, and lifted her hips to meet the mouth and hand of the other prince.
Sordan: "She opens her legs wider... I’m sure they’re going to snap soon."

An impossible, nightmare-sized erection, brilliant red, emerged from the pelt at his loins and stood stiff and ready.
Pillywiggin: "Exactly how large is impossible?"
The Balance: "Bull-sized."
Pillywiggin: "You can make walking sticks out of bull cocks."
The Anthropologist: "Just because you can doesn’t mean you should."
The Balance: "What? Where?"
The Anthropologist: "Tourist shops in this country. It's the logical conclusion to postcards with dirty pictures on them and the like."

"They're wolves," Lucia said to her brother, grinning, her eyes glowing, the pupils turning into vertical slashes like those of a cat.
The Balance: "She’s turning into a catgirl!"
Pillywiggin: "Oh no! My sister is turning into a furry!"

"Dacian wolves. We're cats and dogs, and oh! how we snarl and fight!"
The Anthropologist: "Does it make it more beastiality-ness if they’re different animals? Beastiality squared, you know."
Big L: "And exactly how much cat does there need to be until they're not longer catgirls fucking dogpeople but cats fucking dogs?"
Lady Miriam: "Why do you need to know? Are you desperate for a computer model?"

The wench beside him stirred and opened her eyes, blinking somnolently at the dark room, then with eyes still full of dreams she made out the winged shape of Samira perched atop Dragosh. The wench shrieked as if the gates of Hell had opened before her.
Sordan: "These demons aren't scary enough to merit that sort of reaction."
The Anthropologist: "She's just woken up so she could be imagining she's seeing something interesting."

The dream shattered, all images falling away into the night, their shards leaving deep gouges on Dragosh's soul.
The Balance: "Plotpoint."

...perhaps even see a beat of black wing or a brief glow of blue eyes.
The Chronicler: "That must clash with the blood red hair."
Pillywiggin: "Mary Sue!"

...his bare feet as bony and white as a skeleton's against the stone floor.
The Anthropologist: "He now has skeleton feet. And the barrel chest. And the fist nose...."
Lady Miriam: "He's a better demon than she is!"

He ignored their queries, running naked down the shadowed corridor, his flabby buttocks quivering with each slap of his feet upon the floor.
Big L: "You’ll have to draw them... they look like really bad wings."
Sordan: "Ass wings! I pray he’s not actually going to be the hero. Because we'll have a description of his hyphen. And that can't be a pleasant mental image."

Samira peeked into the doorway over his shoulder, and with her perfect night vision she made out the slumbering form of a young woman...
The Chronicler: "Is he going to rape his sister now?"
The Anthropologist: "That would be hilarious."

...a girl, really, no more perhaps than fourteen human years of age.
Big L: "Hoh yeeaah!"
The Anthropologist: "So it's paedophilic as well!"
Pillywiggin: "Human years? What other sort of years are there?"

The browned-honey tangle of hair on the pillow told her that this was Lucia.
The Chronicler: "It’s honeyed now...
The Anthropologist: "The problem of honey and caramel is that I associate it too much with stickiness so they just have masses of sticky mess..."

He now believed the wickedness of Eve to be a seed within her, awaiting the chance to sprout and grow.
Pillywiggin: "Medical complication! That's a parasite."
(The Chronicler could but wonder at why the wickedness of Eve was promiscuity and what exactly the snake did to the first woman. Admittedly, medieval theology does have all sort of interesting interpretations on this front, but still...)

He was certain that a nymphomaniac lurked inside her, awaiting the chance to break free and rut with beasts and Moldavians.
Pillywiggin: "He's nymph-deprived; she's a nymph. That's a match, right?"
The Balance: "She's not one, it’s in her."
Sordan: "It'll eat it's way out of her, like in Alien."

The Chronicler: "How is she making life better for women? Considering how all the crimes she punishes in her job as being the upholder of sexual decency has a bizarre feminist twist..."
Sordan: "She only saves women from mediocre sex. And having their boobs gawked at. And farting in bed."

The aging prince turned away from the doorway, and with glazed, sightless eyes walked slowly back down the corridor toward his own room.
The Balance: "He's gone blind."
The Anthropologist: "It is possible to gain psychosomatic blindness in the Call of Cthulhu RPG."
The Balance: "He has just taken a massive sanity drain..."

His movements were stiff, as if he were made of wood, and the dry skin of his soles rasped against the stone floor as he shuffled along
The Balance: "Being made of wood is a medical complication, right?"
The Anthropologist: "If I was one of his guards. I’d be serious alarmed... Or maybe their lack of alarm means that he does this every night. At around three in the morning he'll run naked to his sister's room and she lies there pretending to be asleep, hoping he'll go away. At first the guards were a bit concerned, but now it's just a matter of course."

A whisper of human regret pierced Samira where her heart should have been.
The Anthropologist: "No! You're a demon, remember?"

It had been as if Lucia were the chalice that held what remained of his own innocence, his own belief in what was good and right. Now that chalice had been spilled.
Sordan: "I think the complex metaphor is beyond me."
Lady Miriam: "I think it's beyond her."

At this point in time, the Chronicler and the Anthropologist exchange notes about the article about Settling and a recent Feminist Mormon Housewives on being "invisible" and Christlike.

Every time he looked at Lucia now, he would see the wolflike sons of Bogdan lapping at her breasts, pulling at her clothes, and her ecstatic acceptance of their touch.
Pillywiggin: "Damn you! Wolflike sons of Bogdan!"
The Balance: "It's not a bad battlecry... I AM the wolflike son of Bogdan!"
Big L: "Sounds too much like Hammer of Bogardan, the Magic the Gathering card."

Samira wondered what frightful changes might happen in Dragosh himself, now that she had destroyed the one pure place in his heart.
The Balance and Big L: "My purelands have been violated!"

She was surprised by her concern, her own sudden sense of guilt. It wasn't her way to feel such things. It wasn't any succubus's way.
The Anthropologist: "Why does she have a capacity for guilt?"
Sordan: "Because she's a fail!succubus."

Then again, neither was it Samira's way to break the rules of the Night World.
The Chronicler: "What are the rules of Night World?"
Lady Miriam: "First rule of Night World.: You do not talk about Night World. Second rule of the Night World: you do not talk about the Night World. Third rule of the Night World..."
The Anthropologist: "You do not write retarded books about Night World."

She looked up at him, a question burning inside her. Was Theron's bargain worth the price they had just made Dragosh pay?
Pillywiggin: "Yes. You're a demon."

Theron touched her hair, his long, strong fingers combing through a silken red lock, and then he let his hand rest heavily on her bare shoulder. He had never touched her before.
The Chronicler: "I thought she was incorporeal."
Lady Miriam: "She's never touched by an Incubus before?"

She felt his [Theron's] sexual power coursing through his hand, setting off involuntary responses in her body that were echoes of the responses he had roused in thousands of sleeping women throughout the centuries.
The Anthropologist: "It's just a business thing. Nothing personal. Unfortunate side effect of the job."

Samira shivered, aware of what Nyx, the Queen of the Night, might do...
Sordan: "Nyx!"
Lady Miriam: "She's murdering a perfectly decent goddess' reputation."

Samira's shoulder stung where he had touched her, seared by the unexpected power in his hand, even as her sex throbbed in the shadow of stolen mortal desire.
The Anthropologist: "She allergic to Incubi."
Lady Miriam: "Or she's allergic to sex. Must be really unfortunate in that line of work. A bit like discovering you're allergic to latex last minute..."

She was eager to be away from both Theron and the scene of this misdeed, as if by escaping both she could forget it had ever happened; forget that she had spoiled the protective love of a brother for his innocent sister; forget that she had driven him half mad, and seared images into his memory that he would never be able to forget...
Sordan: "Demons aren't allowed to have angst."
Pillywiggin: "So just eat his soul."
The Anthropologist: "This is where she goes up to him and says 'If you give me your soul, I'll make sure it never happens again.'"

Theron stood on the threshold of Lucia's doorway, his glowing eyes gazing intently upon the sleeping, innocent princess of Maramures.
Big L: "Hoh yeeaah!"

And with that, the prologue closes...