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Want to sample before you buy? Read on:
[Opening section of the story, in which we visit with Jo and Candy six months ago. And what they're up to (involving some sex, some gore, and a lot of blood spattered widely) would probably violate our hosting service's TOS. So. Instead we start the preview from:]
Three Days Ago
Jo breathes deep the crisp, Italian air, Rome still chilly enough even in late May for a scarf and light sweater this early in the morning; she and Candy up with the sun. But that golden light beating down on her skin is a benediction, her face and neck flush with its heat as she drinks in the riot of perfumes blanketing the streets. From the heady, lilac-tinged notes of wisteria growing everywhere in great clumps to the softer clove undernotes of sprawling azaleas, the honeyed green and citrus tones of orange blossoms, and the chalky tang of salt on bodies and sun-warmed buildings sweating out their age, Rome seems eager to share everything it has to offer. And Jo is happy to take everything it has to give; their stay not particularly long, and so much to see.
She smiles as Candy’s own scent – the salt of last night’s exertions and this morning’s unfortunately but necessarily brief follow-up – hits her a moment before the almond and hazelnut haze of the espresso she hands off as she rejoins her best friend, colleague, and fellow hellion. Perhaps a touch less literally in Jo’s case – only Candy of the pair of them a succubus by birth, Jo having come to it through a natural alchemy neither of them still entirely understand. Some side effect of the feedback loop they discovered that first night Candy fed off Jo, back during Candy’s final year at uni. Jo, a campus legend whose own appetites had been more than a match for those of a succubus already. And then some, having worked her way through a good swath of the student body in her time.
The two of them have widened that circle considerably in New York in the almost a year that’s followed since she graduated. An ad agency catering primarily to the city’s premiere fashion houses and operating out of the Garment District, run by two women who can sell anything to anyone with just a hint of necessary persuasion, makes for a thriving business. As well as a broad clientele of eager people with money to burn and a strong desire to have someone else handle the more fiddly and grounded details of their business. And if a few of them a month happen to go missing, well, who’s going to miss the less pleasant and more predatory members of the New York fashion scene?
“You’re a life saver,” says Jo, kissing Candy in exchange. Her fingertips brushing the impossibly soft flesh of Candy’s bared shoulder in thanks. Making promises she will absolutely be keeping later as her eyes remove Candy’s tank top.
“We aim to please,” says Candy in a Midwestern drawl against Jo’s lips, before she pulls away.
