Page 34 of Oh No! There's an Incubus in my Hot Spring
Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum.
I put my hand to my neck and feel my pulse moving in time. Apollo smiles, grabbing my hand and placing it over his heart. The same beat is within him, too.
“What is this?” I whisper.
“We are bonded now, and I am bound to this mountain.”
I stare at the geode. “How…”
“It is a very long story,” he says, releasing my hand.
“I’ve got a few minutes to spare to hear it,” I say.
He smirks. “I will spare you the minutia, but I upset a very powerful witch. She nearly killed me and my choices were succumb to the black abyss of demise, or bond myself to this place. I chose to go on, however painful it was to surrender my physical form.
“I was incorporeal for several decades while the people who came here to bathe slowly fed me. In the later years, the resort was an illegal brothel, and I was finally able to take shape again. Not long after I showed myself to the owner and propositioned we work together in the hopes that I could gain enough power to break free of this place. They were killed not long after our arrangement, and the brothel shut down.
“I only showed myself twice more; once to a man who died that very night, and you.”
Irene’s warning from this morning comes back to me like a bolt of lightning. “What happened to him? The man before me?”
Apollo looks at his hands. “My form frightened him and he was older in years. The damage to his heart was past my healing capabilities and I…”
The geode thrums faster, and so does my heart. I touch his chest gently. “It’s okay. What happened?”
“I couldn’t leave him in the water to rot, but I wasn’t able to bury him as your kind prefer. I could’ve burned him, but that may have drawn attention to my presence. I brought him to the top deck and threw him down so he could be found. It took several days.”
He falls quiet, but the beating of our joined hearts with the geode doesn’t slow. I can’t imagine what had to be going through his head: the desperation to be free, the fear and the guilt over what he’d done.
“Why did you decide to reveal yourself to me?” I ask.
He looks at me through his lashes. “Purely selfish reasons, and a hope that you didn’t have a heart condition.”
I smile sadly. “No heart condition to speak of—yet.”
“Ever,” he says. “I will heal every ailment.”
Such long-term thinking. I wonder if he doesn’t believe I’ll ever free him from here.
“But I didn’t bring you here for a sad story,” he says, moving toward the geode. “With this, we can shape the very foundation of the mountain.”
I step up beside him. “How?”
“Magic, my witch. The intent of your desires shaped by energy and ritualistic incantations that turn chaos into rules that matter can follow.”
“So, how doesthiswork?” I ask, looking at the geode.
“My markings can be used for many things,” he says, placing his hand on the pulsing heart of the mountain. The teal lines from his other shoulder squiggle across his body and onto the geode. They course through it, then around it, and take shape in the air beside us in runic shapes I don’t recognize. They’re jagged and sharp, all angular lines and dots.
“What does it mean?” I ask.
“Apologies, this is my language.” He runs his fingers through the floating teal magic and it shifts into English.
Enchanted Mountain Springs
Floors: 3
Rooms: 14
