I warned her that, even with my army severance, these places were going to be outside my price range. She brushed it off as “mortal concerns.” The realtors fell over themselves to meet her demands, and whenever we went shopping or out to eat, her credit always seemed to be good. I got the impression that money was no object for the former Succubus.
Which raised many questions about her. Lyanne was frustratingly evasive about her past. I thought perhaps opening up about my own life would help ease her into opening up to me, but she was equally uninterested in my life up until the point I found the Night Flail.
“Where did you live?” I asked over lunch on the second day. We had stopped in at some no-name bistro for soup after Lyanne had thoroughly rejected a loft in Brooklyn. “Maybe we could just stay there instead of finding a new place.”
She didn't look up from her food when as she answered. “I traveled a lot, so I don't really have one place I call home. You already saw the house I stay in while I'm in New York.”
I nearly choked on my bread roll. “You were living there? I thought you were just . . . stalking it to be creepy. Why would you stay in a place like that?”
“It looked much better back in the day,” she replied with a trace of wistfulness.
That was the first hint I got that Lyanne was likely much older than she seemed.
We eventually settled for an upper floor apartment in Lincoln Square. I had to cover my eyes when I saw the number of digits in the rent price. Lyanne didn't even flinch.
I wasn’t sure exactly how much money changed hands, but it was enough that we were moved into the apartment within a week. At some point she must have also purchased furniture, because the place was completely ready-to-live-in when received the keys.
Though Lyanne had plans other than letting us rest so easily. “Now that our living arrangements have been taken care of, we can do some real shopping.”
I was fairly exhausted by this point and it showed. “What more could you possibly need?”
She gave me the look of a stern mother about to lecture her child. “Not me, you. You can't possibly expect to keep hunting Succubi with only your wits and that flail? We need to get some long-range weapons, some tech—like an infrared camera and maybe a tracking device—and some darker clothing so you can blend in with the shadows better. Oh, and while we're buying clothes, we desperately need to update your wardrobe for the daytime, too. It's embarrassing to be seen with you, despite your superb bedside manner.”
“What's wrong with my clothes?” I asked, feeling offended.
“Oh, nothing. I'm sure it's fine for Idaho—”
“Iowa,” I corrected.
“Whatever,” she said, flippantly. “But you're living in Manhattan now. A wealthy part of it. You need to work to fit in.”
I sighed, resigned to an upgrade in certain areas of my life. “Fine. I'm admittedly a little out of place here. I defer to your judgment. About clothes.”
Lyanne walked up to me and put a hand on my chest. “Don't pout, it ruins that face. I'm just trying to help. In the end, it’s mostly up to you.” Her hand began to clench, like she wanted to dig into my chest for something. “There's something inside you, something I could just barely feel with my powers diminished. It will be more important to you than anything I can buy.”
I noticed she was touching roughly the same area the doctors had pointed to when talking about the single shard of shrapnel they had been unable to remove. “What is it?”
“I don't know.” She clenched harder, hard enough that it started to hurt, and I winced. “Could it be the cause of that smell? Or is something else? Why is it . . . why do I . . .”
She let go suddenly, looking embarrassed, an expression I hadn’t seen on her before. Her composure returned quickly, though, and she pulled me toward the door. “Come on, we have a lot of places to visit before the stores close.”
5
We settled into our new lives with relative ease, all things considered. For a novice Succubus hunter from Iowa and an affluent woman who was just reacquainting herself to mortal life, we were doing just fine. Sure, sometimes I got scolded for trying to leave the apartment in jeans and a sweater. And sometimes Lyanne strained herself trying to lift heavy things that would have been light for her back when she was at full strength. But we were adjusting.
It had been a few weeks since we’d moved into the apartment. My attempts to hunt in the other locations mentioned in The Dark Places of New York had not turned up any results. Lyanne had laughed at me. “This is how you were hunting? Just wandering through the darkness and hoping a Succubus jumped out at you? You're lucky you stumbled across any at all.”
So it seemed finding the others was going to be a little more difficult than I first imagined.
Lyanne had busied herself with collecting copies of a dozen different local and national newspapers, and circling articles for me. I was reading them one morning over a cup of hot coffee, the fancy stuff that Lyanne had imported. As someone who was a fan of strong, bitter coffee, I preferred the cheaper stuff, but Lyanne refused to have it in our apartment. “What if we’re entertaining company and they see it?”
Most of our apartment was like that. I had very little say in the way it was arranged or what went in it. Not that I could complain much, seeing as she paid for all of it, but it sometimes felt like I was more a guest than a resident. Lyanne was a fan of abstract art and our walls were covered in works by artists I didn't know representing things I didn't understand.
The articles Lyanne wanted me to read all shared one common theme: missing persons. There wasn't any link between the victims; they were a mix of genders, races, economic status, and religion. In some cases, the police suspected foul play, and in others they thought the victim might have run away. What did strike me as odd where how many of these people had disappeared from public places.
In one, a college student had been seen entering a study hall by at least three witnesses. The study hall was a single room on the third floor of the science building. No one had seen him leave, and his bag and laptop were left behind, his laptop still powered on. None of the windows had been opened and there were no other exits to the room. The prevailing theory was that he had gotten up and left to use the bathroom or grab a snack from the vending machines and it was just coincidence that no one had seen him leave.
The next article was a bit creepier, because it had video evidence. On the surveillance tapes of Midtown bar, a woman was shown getting up and entering a single-occupancy restroom. She was seemingly in there for a while and a line started to form. Eventually, one of the other patrons got frustrated and kicked down the door, only to find it empty. The restroom had no windows and the video showed no one leaving. The police had no answers on that one.
“How can people just disappear like that without anyone seeing anything?” I thought out loud.
Across the table from me, Lyanne was enjoying a breakfast that could have fed an entire baseball team. Eggs and bacon, waffles, and pancakes, all washed down with wine even though it was the first thing in the morning. It was still a mystery to me how she could eat like that.
“Oh, probably portals,” she said between bites of scrambled eggs.
I frowned at the former Succubus merrily gorging herself. “Succubi can make portals now?”
She still didn't look up from her food. “Succubi, no. Demons, yes.”
“Wait, Demons?”
Lyanne finally took her eyes off her breakfast to look at me curiously. “You really don't know anything about the supernatural world? Alright, let me explain, because it’s a lot to take in.” She drew on her plate with her knife as she spoke. “Curses have to come from somewhere, right? For a Succubus, this means either another Succubus or a Demon. Succubi make pretty good soldiers if you can control them, with how easily they can blend in with regular people and their skill in manipulating them. Some go rogue and eventually go feral. The rest are made to fight in the eternal war between humans and
Demons.”
I scratched my head. This was a massive shift in my worldview. “So were you turned by a Demon?”
She looked oddly uncomfortable at my question. “Don't worry about who cursed me. They're long gone, and I became my own master to stave off going feral. Focus on the people in the articles.”
My attention shifted back to the papers in my hand. “These are all people you suspect were taken by Demons.”
“It's a possibility.” She pushed her plate away as if she had suddenly lost her appetite. “Demons don't just kidnap people for no reason. Okay, well, sometimes they do it just for fun, because they’re inveterate assholes. But most of the time it’s because they want something. That means if any of these people suddenly turn up, there's a good chance they’ve been converted.”
I looked at the stack of papers and felt a sinking feeling in my chest. Until now, I had been operating on the notion that Succubi were rare. That maybe I would have to hunt a dozen of them then I would be able to return to my old life. But if people were being turned at this rate, there could be a countless number of them.
“Wait a second,” I said as I recognized a problem in Lyanne's explanation. “Half of these missing people are men.”
“Incubus.” She was smirking for some reason. “They have a few tricks of their own, but they're generally weaker than a Succubus.” She gave me an appraising look, then smiled. It was radiant in a way I’d not seen before. “Unlike you. There’s nothing weak about you, and it makes me—”
“Makes you what?” I said, returning her gaze. We were intimate in more than one way, and there was no need to dance around the fact. I knew this woman, and she knew me. What she did with that was to be determined, but what I did with it was simple. I wanted her, and judging by how she regarded me, it was mutual.
“I’ll ask you again, why me?” I said.
To her credit, she didn’t pretend not to understand. “You’re handsome, and you’re brave, I think. I also think you’re honest, and you wear it on your face. It’s like nothing I’ve seen in—in a long time. I find it to my liking,” she said with a shrug, then looked away.
“Thank you. I’d say the feeling is mutual, but I don’t think you’re handsome. I think you’re beautiful in ways I can’t understand, but we’re going to find out. Now, before we both embarrass ourselves with confessions of love, tell me why the Incubus is weaker.”
Lyanne shrugged. “What I understand is that, because men value power more than women, the Demons wanted to mess with them by making them weaker. That's just a rumor, though. Either way, Incubi shouldn't be too big of a threat for you with that weapon you have. They might even be a good source of information if you can keep from killing them too quickly.”
I followed her train of thought. “Information such as who is controlling them.”
“If you can get to the one in the charge, you can stop them from cursing anyone else. Plus, you might get a chance to 'rescue' the Succubi under their command.” Her voice took on a playful tone. “Think of all those beautiful, grateful women, ready to thank you in any way you see fit.”
It was impossible to resist playing along when she got like this. “You aren't going to be jealous when I bring home my twenty sister-wives?”
That devious smile of hers drove me crazy. “Not if you bring me back a couple of handsome, un-cursed Incubi from time-to-time for me to play with.”
“I'll be sure to find one with a chest full of hair and a big, bushy mustache.”
She rolled her eyes. “Never mind, then. You know just how to take the fun out of things.” She shuddered. “Hair. In my mouth. No thank you.”
“If this is a subtle ploy to get me to wax my undercarriage, I’m going to go ahead and say hell no before this discussion goes any farther,” I said, chopping the air with my hand.
“Your pelt is safe with me, love,” she said, grinning and then swigging at her wine.
“Good. Now, back to business.” I raised my arm and felt the presence of the Night Flail, though it was currently hidden from sight. “I wonder if this thing will work as well on Demons and Incubi. I was kind of getting the impression it was a Succubus-specific weapon.”
“I wish I could tell you. I'd never seen anything like it before you used it on me. There's no way of knowing if it will work on Demons or any of their other minions.”
My arm dropped to the side. “Other minions? You mean, besides Succubi and Incubi?”
Her look was sympathetic. “Well, yeah. You didn't think they only knew the one curse, right? You’ve got to be prepared for anything, and that means a whole array of beasties.”
“Great.” I sighed and leaned back in my chair. “So what's the plan now? We just sit around and wait for one of these guys from the paper to show back up? Or another clue of where to look to fall in our lap?”
“Patience is often rewarded.” Lyanne got up, walked around the table, and slipped onto my lap. “Besides, we don't have to just 'sit around.'” She wrapped her arms around my neck and leaned in. “I'm thinking I could use some exercise to work off that breakfast. How about you?”
“I drew a line in the sand about body hair, and if you’re trying to get me into CrossFit, I’m using the flail on you right now,” I said.
She winced. “I’m a Succubus, not a Lord of Pain. Also, I have standards. I was thinking something more . . . pleasant.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I said, leaning my head to kiss the side of her neck. The skin was soft, and it rose to meet my lips as a delicious tremor passed through her body.
“That’s the idea,” she breathed. “Too many clothes.”
“Way too many.”
We fixed that problem, but not before she held up a hand, waving to her bra. “Look at this.”
I did. It was lace, white, and looked expensive. “I like it.”
“Good,” she said, then kissed me again. “Now look here.” She pointed to the panties. They matched.
“A set?” I offered helpfully.
“Yes. A set. A matching set of expensive lingerie that signals two things. I would like to set a sort of rule moving forward, since we’re going to be doing this quite a bit.”
“I’m listening.”
She grinned. “If I’m wearing a matching set, I want you. Also, I want you to notice the matching lingerie—just acknowledge the trouble I went through, and then you can have me however you’d like.”
“Agreed. Can I start now?” I asked her.
“That would be good.”
I wiped my face clear of expression and then made my eyes go ‘round, taking all of her in, then flashing over the lingerie with a look of deep appreciation. “Magnificent,” I said.
Her lip quirked with a heat that made me crazy. “Kurt?”
“Yeah?”
“You may proceed.”
I did. I removed the lingerie—after another proper show of respect—and lifted her onto my lap, but she was a step ahead of me, and I slid inside her to the hilt with minimal resistance.
“Better,” I said.
“Yes.” She began to lift herself, inch by tantalizing inch, then settle. Lift, settle. After moments of perfect pleasure, I felt her legs begin to shake.
“Let me help,” I murmured into her hair, then kissed her again, my hands on her small hips as I used my strength to keep the motion going.
“Just come,” she said. “Just come and let me feel it.”
I don’t have to be asked twice. I felt my orgasm build, roll, and break as she bit hard on my lip, arms tight around my neck as she shook in her core, muscles drawing me ever further in to the warmth of her welcome.
“Jesus. That was—” I said,
“Yeah.” She put her forehead on mine and smiled. “Told you noticing the bra would work.”
6
“How did you let her slip away?”
As I ran through the darkened construction site, my chest burning from sprinting and my legs aching from vaulting the haphazard tools and me
tal barriers, the last thing I needed was Lyanne's mocking in my ear. “She ran! How was I supposed to know she was going to run? What kind of monster runs?!”
Lyanne's soft laughter filled my earpiece. Even when she was taunting me there was something seductive about her voice. It was distracting. “You expect every one of them to stand and face you after you show them that flail of yours?”
It sounded stupid when she put it like that. There was something that just didn’t feel right about monsters that ran from you. “It'd be easier if they did.”
We had located the Succubus by investigating the pattern of missing laborers. At Lyanne's suggestion I had come to the site after dark, wearing a store-bought construction worker costume, and sure enough the Succubus had tried to prey on me. At least, until she took one look at the Night Flail.
I lost sight of my target after she performed a ten-foot vertical leap onto a nearby beam, followed by a series of acrobatic stunts that would put any Olympic gymnast to shame, but that tingling instinct told me the direction she had gone. She hadn't left the site, either because she was looking for an opportunity to turn the tables on me, or because she didn't want to run through the brightly lit streets of the city in the dominatrix gear she was wearing.
The tingling sensation grew stronger, and a familiar chill rose on the back of my neck. I was close, close enough that she could see me. From where, I had no idea.
Lyanne's voice crackled in my ear. “What’s the matter, lover-boy? You look like a deer in the headlights.”
I glanced around at the shadows of the trailers around me, so many places for the Succubus to hide. “She's nearby, but I can't see her. Anything on your end?”
There was a clicking sound as Lyanne switched between the security cameras watching over the site. “You’re lucky to have me looking out for you. The trailer on your left.”
I turned in time to see the Succubus leap from the shadows with the grace of a pouncing panther. The Night Flail whipped out and caught the creature by its ankle. With a tug, the woman was snapped to the ground.
Succubus Hunter Page 4
