The Wild Side: Urban Fantasy with an Erotic Edge by Mark L. Van Name Page A

Alejandro, and I forgot that Rocha was in the room with me. Until he disconnected the call.
    The shock was as sudden as if he’d thrown a bucket of ice-cold water over my head. I was so angry I actually slapped his shoulder. “You asshole!”
    He jerked away, taking the phone with him. “What’s the matter with you?”
    “You’re the one who—” I stopped, and swallowed hard. “What the hell was that?” I looked at Rocha, who was staying out of reach. “I am so sorry. I don’t know what—I never hit people!”
    “Could have fooled me,” he said, but he was giving me half a smile.
    “It was Alejandro’s voice. Have you ever heard anything like that?”
    “You really need to get out with normal people, Maura. Haven’t you ever had an obscene phone call?”
    “Oh, come on. This was way beyond some heavy breather humping his hand over the phone.” But Rocha was looking at me as if I were crazy. “You didn’t feel it?”
    “It was just some guy talking dirty.”
    “No, it was more than that,” I said slowly. “This guy was magic. Real magic.”
    “Then why didn’t it affect me?”
    “He said he doesn’t do boys. Maybe there’s a reason for that. Hang on.” I had an idea, but wanted to verify a vague memory first, so I headed for the shelves where my mother keeps her reference books. I grabbed the biggest, then brought it back to the nook. It only took a few minutes to find the page I was looking for, and another moment to read the section. “Have you ever heard of an incubus? Not the band, the demon.”
    “A demon?”
    “Don’t freak out on me now, Rocha. If you can handle witches, you can handle demons. There are lots of legends and myths about incubi, but one of the Kith encountered one a couple of hundred years ago. She wrote that incubi seduce women, with a preference for the chaste and innocent. With every encounter, they drain a woman’s vitality, bit by bit. Eventually the women die.”
    “You’re saying that guy on the phone was a demon?”
    “If my aunt can charm her 1975 Mustang, why can’t a demon use a cell phone?”
    “But how did he find Carmen?”
    “I can think of a dozen ways. He could have a spy at a cell phone company, or he could make random calls until he gets a target. He could even have snuck into Carmen’s school and written ‘For a good time, call this number’ on the bathroom wall. However it happened, once he made contact with Carmen, it would be awfully hard for an innocent girl to resist.” I couldn’t, and I wasn’t particularly innocent.
    “And that’s what killed her. A demon.”
    “Yeah, I think so.”
    He ran his fingers through his hair. “I wanted to know, but I thought I’d be able to do something about it. What can we do to a demon?”
    Carmen’s phone rang, and I actually reached for it, which was hardly normal from someone who’d ruined dozens of phones in her life. Fortunately, after a quick look at the screen, Rocha put it behind his back.
    “It’s him,” he said. “I don’t think we should answer it. Especially not you.”
    “You’re probably right,” I said, but resisting the temptation to try to grab the phone from Rocha got harder with each subsequent ring. After a dozen rings, it stopped.
    “Did he leave a message?” I asked.
    He checked the screen again. “No.”
    I didn’t know if I was relieved or disappointed. Then it rang again.
    “I’m turning the ringer off,” Rocha said. “Now what are we going to do about him?”
    “My ancestor managed to kill the one she encountered, but she had an Affinity for demon fighting. Without that, she said the best thing was to stay away from them.”
    The phone rang.
    “I thought you turned the ringer off,” I said.
    “I did.”
    “Shit!” More magic.
    “This time I’m shutting it off completely,” he said, and did so.
    I picked up the book again. “According to this, once an incubus gets a taste of a woman’s essence, he tends to go back to her over and over