Grimoire

Read it aloud only if you are lonely, and only if you mean it.

Marcus Delacroix is forty-one, a big, broad antiquarian bookseller with olive skin, a salt-and-pepper beard and short dark hair gone heavily gray, built like a wall from twenty years of rowing the river at dawn. He has spent six years alone in the back of his shop on a cobbled lane in old Saint-Aubery, mending other peoples books by candlelight and getting very good at not noticing how quiet it is.

Then he restores a water-stained grimoire from a dead womans estate and finds one page marked with crimson silk, and a note in the margin meant for him.

On All Souls Night, with a candle in every window on the lane, he reads it.

Two women answer. Lysandra, platinum-haired and pale in a crimson satin corset gown. Seraphine, deep brown skin and black curls in clinging strapless black satin. Both lush, both wicked, both crowned with curved black horns, and both very, very hungry.

They will tell him exactly what they are. They take nothing he does not freely give, and they ask before every single step. He sets the limits. They do the rest. And if he wants them gone, all he has to do is close the book.

They have until dawn to show him what he has been missing.

He has until dawn to decide whether to turn the key.