Suddenly A Succubus Ch. 05 - Reflection

I should really stop saying "This chapter was fun to write!" because I'm gonna say that for every chapter so it kinda loses its punch. Anyways. This chapter was fun to write!

We start on our mystery angel, who's ready to reveal more about what she's doing. Last time we saw her, I kept things pretty vague, and while there's still a lot of confusion in this chapter, it's certainly changed direction. Most of her first scene was building to the reveal that she's an angel, and with that out of the way, we can see her getting to work.

I purposely left out any details about her magic, but I will say a lot of the phrasing was pretty carefully constructed so we could understand her thoughts about it. A bunch of work was put into all of her scenes, especially these early ones, as there's a lot going on with her.

The most important bits are that she learns the demon is a succubus, and she places a little tiny trap in the staircase. I'm sure that won't come up later.

Returning to Amara, we get see how long she's been waiting in the magic circle trap. It was interesting writing this scene as someone who knows everything that's about to happen, because it's a lot of new stuff. I'm immensely curious how this scene reads to the audience, just because there's a bunch of twists in a row.

This is also the start of Amara being exposed to the larger world of magic that exists around her. Her life so far has been pretty isolated, and it's been easy for her to not worry about anything other than hiding her tail. This chapter plants a lot of ideas, both in Amara's head, but also the audiences.

First there's the arrival of Vince, who claims he's eager to help, but we learn pretty quickly that's not the case. He knows a lot more than Amara expected, which certainly gave him the upper hand in their early discussions. Revealing his true intentions definitely felt a little icky to write, he's not really a nice guy, but he's also pretty temperamental. 

We also get more hints of Amara's growing frustration out of her transformation. She hasn't come around to loving it yet, but she's willing to meet it halfway and doesn't feel like she can do that. 

One thing I've always struggled to pin down is exactly what kind of intellect Amara is working with. She's definitely not the brightest,  but she's got a quick mind under the right circumstances. In my mind, she works best when she already has all the pieces, and just has to re-arrange them. When she doesn't have that, however, such as the research she attempted to do earlier with Nick, she can lose focus pretty quickly.

And of course, now we get to see her fully commit to being a demon. It's a show, of course, but she's putting her various strengths on full display. She's hot, she knows that, but she can also read people. She's good at pinpointing what their goals are, and working out a way to twist that to her advantage. This particular trait of hers doesn't come up as frequently in this book, as she's also pretty overwhelmed trying to come to terms with her transformation, but it's an aspect we'll see more frequently in the future.

It was great fun to watch her seduce Vince. I love when characters take charge of their sexuality, and since Amara's powers are literally tied to sex, it's something I'll be able to play around with a lot in the future.

Her efforts are successful, and she manages to grab her blood back, but ultimately she's still trapped. This is another point where I wish I could see what you all were thinking, since we're on the verge of another twist. Amara hears a distant argument, realizes someone else is about to see her, and does her best to switch back to 'innocent college student'.

But, shockingly, that new person ends up being Tessa. As fun as it was to write this reveal, it's definitely a beat that I think might have been more fun if we'd seen more of Tessa before now. In the hypothetical future where I do a re-write, I might add more plot to the early chapters, so that we get more time with Amara's friends before all the twists start coming.

Setting aside how much setup and payoff this moment gets, however, we still get to see Tessa psychically throw someone across a room. I actually did quite a bit of thinking about how Tessa's magic worked to make sure this wasn't outside her skill level. Once she's finished with that, we also finally get a hint of what's been happening due to Amara's absence - all her friends are looking for her. While we can assume Nick has been exponentially more worried, I thought it was interesting that we learn all this from Tessa.

Then, at long last, we get to the first real point of tension between Amara and one of her friends. With no other option, she reveals that she's a succubus, with absolutely no idea what that might mean to someone who understands magic. 

This was another scene that took some time, and quite a few re-writes, as I have a very specific image of Tessa in my head. She's hard to pin down, and her actions are certainly more flamboyant than her friends, but she's still got a lot of conflicting emotions. So, she's scared of Amara, but also lets her go pretty quickly, and I wouldn't be surprised if that seems a little strange to people. This is intentional, though I'm not sure how much people read into these interactions.

Once the drama is out of the way, though, we get a really sweet reminder that Amara and Tessa are still friends. Amara gets to finally talk about losing her virginity, and the two of them get a chance to kind of meet each other again for the first time, not that their secrets are out.

They'll be spending a lot of time together moving forward, and I think I did a good job getting that started here.

Nyx <3