Her wings were folded against her back and they still took up most of the room. She had angled them down, compressed against herself, the bone-white frame and deep red membrane held close. It helped. The bedroom was still a one-bedroom apartment bedroom.

She was watching me.

I'd given myself a moment. I'd looked at the ceiling crack. Then I'd looked back at her. The amber-gold eyes with no whites hadn't moved. She was in exactly the position she'd been in when everything changed.

I said, "First question. Am I in danger right now."

---

"No."

She said it the way she'd answered everything during the squat assessment — direct, complete, no padding. Not defensive. The question had a specific answer and she gave it.

"Can you change back," I said. "Or is this it."

She shifted.

One moment she was what she was — the red skin, the white hair, the horns, eyes that were amber-gold all the way through. The next moment she was Amber. Not the word. Her. Platinum hair past her shoulders, near-white in the apartment light. Deep blue eyes. The proportions that had made me revise my estimate in the first five steps at PeakForm. The gym identity, visible and complete, as if she'd been wearing it all along and I hadn't seen it until now.

"Both are real," she said. "Neither is less real than the other. The second one's more convenient for most purposes."

---

She sat down on the edge of the bed. I was sitting on the other end. She was in her human form and she was still the most unnerving person who'd ever been in my apartment.

"What do I call what you are," I said.

She looked at me steadily. "Succubus."

The word sat in the room.

I turned it over. The word had a definition and the definition was wrong, or at least incomplete.

"I feed through sexual contact," she said. "I've been doing it for about nine hundred years."

Nine hundred years. I waited to feel something specific about it. The thing I felt was the radiator clicking on.

"That," I said, and gestured at where the wings had been. "Has that happened before."

"No." She was looking at her hands. First time I'd seen her look at anything other than me since she'd walked through my door. "Not once. Not in nine hundred years."

She went quiet. Whatever else she knew about tonight — and there was more, I could read it in how she was holding herself still — she wasn't going to give it to me at two in the morning. Something had shaken her and she was holding the edges of it.

"Does the gym know," I said.

The corner of her mouth moved. "My employment is fully legitimate. Social security number, direct deposit, CPR cert renewed last fall. The gym does not know."

"Are there more of you."

"Yes."

"In LA."

"Elsewhere. Some in LA."

---

I got up and went to the kitchen and got the glass of water she'd left on the counter earlier. Still there. I brought it back and handed it to her.

She took it. She looked at it. She held it.

No sip.

I sat back down. We were three feet apart on opposite ends of my bed in my apartment in Koreatown at two-something in the morning. She was a nine-hundred-year-old succubus holding a glass of water she didn't need. I'd been her target. Something had happened tonight that hadn't happened in nine centuries, and she wasn't telling me what.

I looked at her face.

The woman who'd watched me squat, come to the coffee shop, walked by the reservoir in the late afternoon — that woman was in this room now, holding a glass of water, and something had shaken her and it hadn't come back.

I said, "Are you okay."

She stared at me.

"You look like something surprised you," I said. "I'm asking if you're okay."

She was still looking at me. Whatever she'd had ready for every other question tonight, she didn't have this one.

No answer came.

---

She stood up.

"I should go."

She looked around the apartment the way she had when she'd first walked in — the framed print, the window. She had no bag, no jacket. She'd arrived with nothing and was leaving with nothing, which wasn't different from how she'd arrived.

At the door she stopped.

She turned around. She looked at me with the blue eyes that were blue again and the face that was Amber's face, which was also her face, and she said, "I didn't know it would end like that."

I didn't ask what she meant. I wasn't sure which part she meant.

She left.

---

The water glass was on my nightstand. She'd set it down when she stood. Some portion of the water was still in it.

She feeds on people during sex. She'd fed on me. I didn't feel fed on. I felt like the best version of a Monday morning — rested, clear, something topped off instead of taken. A succubus had done whatever succubi do and I felt fine. I sat with that. It didn't get less strange.

I sat down on the couch.

I looked at the ceiling crack.

I'd tell the building manager tomorrow.