Suddenly A Succubus Ch. 33 - Reflection

When I first envisioned the plot of this book, I'm not gonna lie, I was pretty damn proud of myself. Stranding Amara and Vee in Purgatory gave me the perfect scenario to cook up all sorts of interesting ideas, the most obvious being getting them to finally talk.

However, there's a huge element of suspense that's been creeping in the edges of the narrative, and our girls are starting to run out of time. In previous books, while there have been threats, they've still existed in otherwise safe places. With the cult, everyone was still able to go to school, and Amara was still able to have all the sex she wanted, so it was a very specific kind of problem.

Here, in Purgatory, there are a few questions. The most obvious, I assume, is "Why are they here?" But I love thinking about the chain of dominos this sets off. If they're here for longer, how do they survive? How do they get home? And, perhaps most excitedly, what happens when Amara is forced to go without sex for too long? I've been pretty vague about this in the past, just stating that she gets pretty weak and her senses start to dull, but nothing else.

Will she waste away? Just lose all strength and fall into a coma or something? What happens if they desperately need Amara's strength to survive, and Vee is the only person nearby?

Now, as someone whose main series is quite smutty, I've certainly seen a lot of guesses as to what might happen. I'm not going to spoil anything, but I have a pretty thorough understanding of how many aspects of my world work behind the scenes, and I can't wait to share them all with you.

Anyways, all that was a very roundabout way to introduce the premise of this starting scene. I know, I ramble sometimes. (I even considered quoting Hitchcock, aren't I pretentious?).

Thankfully, we start on a somewhat tense, if very exciting, high note. It appears our resident angel/demon duo has accidentally cuddled up in their sleep. For better or for worse, however, Amara isn't allowed to process this moment in a vacuum. The problems I teased earlier, and have been slowly building up this whole book, are starting to grow harder to ignore.

Amara's demonic side is driving her insatiably horny, and it's leading to quite a bit of frustration. I'll admit, I was giggling like a schoolwork as I wrote Amara's inner monologue here, so hopefully that came through!

Continuing on, I also get to share more fun lore about angels. I've mentioned this before, but I've seen quite a few comments from people curious about how the Church, angels, and Heaven work. I'm not going to spill all my secrets here, but I think this scene is incredibly helpful for understand Vee even more than we already do.

One neat thing about Amara and Vee is how incredibly different their supernatural origins are, both on the page and on a meta level. We see everything Amara sees, and we're just as lost as she is. Vee, however, has known about her heritage for ages, and has all sorts of cool secrets buried in her brain, but I've hidden a lot of that from the audience.

As a quick example, look at Vee's parentage. I teased this all the way back in Chapter 10. Here's the excerpt, for those of you who don't feel like checking.

—

“My family is… well, it’s complicated. This may sound a little silly, but because of who my parents are, there’s a lot of pressure on me to live up to certain expectations. I try my best to stay on top of everything, but it can be exhausting at times.”

“I don’t think that’s silly, tons of people have parents trying to push things on them. Are they like, public figures of some kind?”

“I guess you could say that. I'm also not entirely their kid, which can be a bit odd at times.”

“You mean you're adopted? Or they used a donor?”

“…something like that. Let's just say I have a pretty confusing family tree.”

—

At the time, while the audience knew Vee was an angel, there wasn't a lot of other information to latch onto. Back in the present, I finally have the chance to fully detail what Vee meant by her earlier words.

The other big thing I think this scene shows is that Amara and Vee are continuing to feel more comfortable with each other, which is nice. After so many chapters of tension and miscommunication, it's a breath of fresh air to be past the difficult conversations and finally in the beginnings of a new normal.

Switching POV, we jump back to Tessa and Nick next! These two are a lot of fun, and it's nice to see Tessa a little more comfortable with opening up. One thing that I can struggle with sometimes (Well, I'm sure most authors do) is trying to keep my character's voices unique, both in literally how they speak but also how their chapters are written. Tessa is a little brash and standoff-ish, and I try to make that obvious whenever we're in her head.

To me, this is something that comes up in interesting ways when she's talking about things she's scared of, such as what Amara did to those cultists. This little subplot is actually something I hadn't planned, but it felt so natural to the character and I'm really glad I worked it in. Tessa has always been so gung-ho about monster fucking, but she's also been incredibly distrustful of Vee, and this book has flipped the script. Even if she might hesitate to admit it, she's now seeing Vee's point of view when it comes to Amara's demonic heritage. (Or at least, what Vee used to think. Both girls have done some interesting growing, and they've kinda switched sides, haven't they?)

The other fun thing we get from these scenes is more insight into Nick. He's such a soft, sweet little boy, and I like digging into what makes him tick.

We also get our first conversation between our main group! My original plan was for this scene to be longer, but the pacing didn't seem to fit that, and I like the sense of urgency the shorter connection gives us. We're obviously closer to seeing Amara and Vee safely return home, but it's a work in progress.

It's finally time to check in with Chloé again! As tense as her chapters are going, she's also helping me with a very crucial part of the story - timing. Through her, I'm able to establish that finals week is over, the campus is mostly empty, but there are still a few students sticking around. This kind of context is stuff that can be easy to forget about, but I think it really helps ground the story, especially when we're dealing with interplanar nonsense like Purgatory.

That's all set dressing, though. Chloé is real star of the show for this scene, and it's been interesting digging into her suspicions throughout the book.

One thing I've always felt very strongly about is that Chloé is not a forceful person, and she's incredibly soft-spoken. She's not the type to jump to accusations, or to break into people's houses, and that's why I think pairing her up with Naomi is so interesting. Even though Naomi is a newer character, I think I've done a good job of instilling a sense of how she acts.

Of course, I'm aware that people think she's a little suspicious. Is she just a student? Is there more to her journalistic desires? Guess you'll just have to keep reading, won't you? :P

Long story short, Naomi serves as a bit of a wildcard. She's the one pushing Chloé to double down on her suspicions, but she's also doing some questionable things while relying on Chloé's trust. After all, Naomi has been pretty suspicious of Amara since this book started, and she was able to convince Chloé to show her where Amara lives. I'm sure that readers will have less-than-pleasant opinions about her and her actions, but if nothing else, I think she ads a really interesting texture to the story.

Inside Amara's apartment, Chloé gets her first solid hint that something weird is going on. In my initial draft of this chapter, I focused much more heavily on the fire damage, and even had Naomi suggest that Amara was the reason the Palace burned down, but that conversation didn't feel right. There's a big difference between "My friends are probably hiding something" and "My friend is totally an actual arsonist". I wanted to keep the air of mystery going, but also to lighten any accusations coming from Naomi. I like this version much better, as to Chloé, I don't think it matters as much what exactly is happening. She's not after the objective truth, like a certain journalist might be, she's instead focusing on the fact that her friends are 100% hiding something from her.

And lastly, we end with a short little scene where we return to Amara's POV. This scene was important because I wanted to show how quickly Amara is fading, like she's hit some kind of cliff and all her resistance is gone. This was another scene where I got to show Amara wrestling with her own desires, but they're a bit louder now, aren't they? Gosh, I sure hope they can get home before she loses control of herself.

Nyx <3