Succubus Hunter

by Daniel Pierce

  Off to the side, lying face-down behind one of the piles of books, was the victim. She had a black bag over her head, the front moving as she breathed, and her dress was stained with blood. I only hoped we weren't too late—I knew she was alive, but I didn’t know if she was broken. Lyanne was already making her way around the room toward the victim, so I stepped into the circle and prepared to face the Sister.

  The Sister didn't react to my approach. I let The Night Flail dangle from the end of its chain as I took careful steps into her reach, ready to strike out with a counter if she rushed me. She didn't make any move like she was going to attack. But I kept my guard up, knowing just how rapidly the Sisters could snap into action.

  I began to grow suspicious as I stepped into the flail's range and the Sister still had not made any move. If she didn't react now, I would easily be able to take her out. One more step, and I was close enough that there was no chance she could get out of the way in time, even with her enhanced speed. There was something wrong here.

  It was probably a trap. Almost certainly a trap. And yet something felt so off that I found myself slowly approaching the sister, weapon at the ready but not swinging, and reaching a careful hand out toward her. I lifted the mask and underneath was the face of a young woman, her mouth gagged, her eyes pleading with me for mercy. Suddenly I realized the reason for that odd posture--under her robes she was bound tightly into that position.

  And the other realization came a moment too late. “Lyanne!”

  Lyanne had already turned the fallen woman over and removed the black bag from her head, revealing another ivory mask. Before she could even cry out in surprise the Sister struck, punching Lyanne in the chest so hard that she went flying through the air, coming down to crash against one of the steam pipes. There was a disturbing hiss as the fabric of Lyanne's outfit was scalded off and the flesh underneath was burned. She collapsed to the ground in a heap.

  In a fury I charged the Sister, the Night Flail raised like a whip. I lashed out, letting my rage fuel the power behind my strike. The Sister leaned slightly to the right and the flail sliced past her. I struck again, the chain making a loud crack from the rapid recoil. My target ducked and the flail chipped the wall behind her, pieces of concrete whining away like bullet fragments.

  My attacks were wild and without focus as I was blinded by my anger, and the Sister was able to easily to easily avoid them. It was like trying to strike a leaf in the wind, always fluttering out of the way on the breeze. She got in close to me and grabbed my wrist, stopping my next strike mid-swing, and squeezed down. I heard a loud crack as the bone in my wrist was snapped like a twig.

  I felt my knees buckle as the pain threatened to cause me to faint, and I was only held up by the strong grip the Succubus-reject had on my wrist. There was a pleased humming coming from behind the mask as she tossed me over her head and back against the wall. It was only by some stroke of fate that I missed the steam pipes as I collapsed next to Lyanne.

  With an effort I rolled to my side and came face-to-face with Lyanne. She was completely out, and the burns on her side looked so serious I worried she might be dead. I let out a relieved breath when I saw her chest rise and fall. Unconscious, but fortunately still breathing.

  Seemed I was on my own. I'd like to say I was confident, but I was struggling just to get my feet under me. My first attempt failed, and I fell back flat on my chest. With my next I managed to get to my knees, but the dizziness became so bad that I couldn't make it the rest of the way up. I wondered how many injuries a man could take before the world never stopped spinning, and fought the urge to vomit, but just barely.

  The Sister of Pain walked slowly toward me, taking her time to savor this moment. Something about the dress combined with the mask made her more intimating than the others I had fought. Or maybe it was just the powerlessness I was feeling. She stopped when she came up to the victim, forced to wear her robes and used as bait. The masked face turned as she regarded her.

  And with one quick motion, so fast my eyes could barely catch it, she snapped the victim's neck. It took my brain a moment to comprehend what had just happened: the rapid strike, the unnatural jerking of the victim’s head, the slackness to her body a moment later as her neck remained bent at a lethal angle.

  Once I’d come to terms with her death, everything became clear. The dizziness faded, strength surged through me, and even the pain of my broken wrist barely registered with me. Nothing else mattered anymore—not my injuries, not Lyanne lying wounded on the ground, not Tandi or the mission. All there was in the world was me and this monster, this soulless creature that took pleasure in harming others, who could kill innocents without a morsel of remorse.

  I had failed to save that poor woman. But I could, and would, avenge her.

  The creature hummed again, louder this time, apparently amused by my second wind. It would be the last moment of joy it ever experienced.

  Striking with the flail while my wrist was broken was agony. Even in my focused state I could not ignore the torrent of pain every time I extended my arm to lash out, but the pain could not defeat me. It only added fuel to my fire. The attacks were clumsy and slow, and the Sister barely had to move to dodge out of the way. I had no chance of striking her with the flail.

  I didn’t need to. With every strike I was slowly maneuvering myself, taking steps that made it look like I was retreating while I was actually making a careful circle around the room. If the Sister had chosen to rush me that probably would have been it for me, but she was enjoying the futility of my attacks, and the ease with which she could dodge them, meaning she was in no real danger. I hoped that arrogance lasted just four more steps. Three more. Two more.

  The Night Flail struck out, not targeting the Sister but something behind her. One of the steam pipes burst open from the impact and a jet of steam exploded forth with such force that the entire room shook. I was knocked from my feet and landed on my back, looking up at a ceiling that strained by the sudden shockwave. Thankfully, it did not buckle.

  When I regained my feet, I saw what the steam had done to the Sister. The steam jet had faded, the pipes shut down by some fail safe, and it revealed the blistered, ruined body of the Sister. Parts of her flesh had been boiled off, revealing the bone underneath, and what was left was red as a lobster. Most horrifying, the creature moaned piteously, still alive despite its terrible injuries. I would need to finish it off.

  But first, there was something I needed to see. Something I felt compelled to see.

  I approached the remains of the Sister, bent down, and lifted her mask. She was either not conscious of it or was in too much pain to try and stop me. Underneath the mask was . . .

  nothing. The creature didn't have a face. The mechanical features of the face were there: two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, but the eyes were a blank white, the nose was little more than a bump, and the mouth was a simple slit. Beyond that the face was featureless, devoid of so much as a single describable characteristic. It was more like a child's doodle of a face than one that belonged on an actual person.

  Lyanne appeared next to me as I was still looking down at the formless face in horror. “I see. So that is what this is about.”

  The relief I felt at seeing Lyanne on her feet again bordered on elation. It was as if the world had been holding its collective breath for this moment. “Lyanne—Jesus, I’m glad you’re alive. Thought you were done after that impact and steam bath.”

  She was clutching her burned side and grimacing, but she managed a nod. “I'll be alright. My body should still heal at an accelerated rate. More importantly, I think I know Tandi's game now.”

  At the moment, nothing felt more important than Lyanne's recovery, but she was right. “It has something to do with why this one has less of a face than a Lego figure?”

  “Yes. The process used to create Succubi involves giving up a piece of one's self, a bit of one's own life, to curse your victim with an unnatural one. For demons this matters little
, they have a near infinite supply to give, but for another Succubus it is draining. It’s unusual for a Succubus to be able to turn more than two or three. I’ve been wondering for a while how Tandi was able to create so many. Here is our answer.”

  Lyanne knelt down next to the Sister and looked at her with something resembling pity. “She is taking more than she is giving. The Sisters of Pain are more than mere accidents. She takes from them the very things that make them alive, then uses that life to grant the curse to more Succubi.”

  I felt a pit deep in my stomach. It was bad enough when I thought the Sisters were a result of the Succubus curse gone wrong, but to think they had been made like this on purpose. It went beyond sick. I put the suffering creature out of its misery with the flick of my weapon, and she didn’t even try to resist. Her end was a silent dissolution, and then she was gone.

  “All that just to create an army?” I asked.

  “I imagine there is more to it than that. If she is capable of taking this much life, she is almost certainly sapping life from the Succubi she creates, as well. A smaller amount, enough to make them hungrier, and thus more compliant to her will. By creating such a large network of Succubi, all of them feeding her their life, her powers would grow exponentially.”

  The pain was coming back to me now, making it hard to follow Lyanne's train of logic, but I found her conclusion. “You're saying Tandi is probably tougher than anything we've faced so far.”

  “I'm saying the difference would not be measured in inches, but miles.”

  Eve rushed us to an emergency room after taking one look at our injuries, despite our protests. Fortunately, her ability to Charm in the service of doing good was in full effect, and she convinced the doctor we saw not only to not take our names, but that his services were going to be provided completely off the books.

  My wrist was set and put in a cast, the doctor saying I was very lucky pins weren’t required with how bad the break was, and I needed several stitches in the back of my head. The only other thing he could do was give me some ointment that was supposed to help with the swelling in my face and some painkillers for all my other aches and pains. He became a bit confused when studying Lyanne's burns, swearing at first the burns on her upper torso were third degree and potentially needing skin grafts, but on second glance the burns were clearly second degree. Eve's spell put his mind at ease and convinced him to ignore the sudden change, so he covered the affected area with burn cream and bandaged it to prevent infection.

  Sara met us on our way out of the hospital in a flurry of panic. Apparently, the NYPD was already looking into the body of the last victim, found in the library basement, and people matching mine and Lyanne's description were wanted for questioning. It was time for us to get out of the city.

  We drove back to Vermont, Sara again taking the wheel, letting the exhausted members of our group rest on the long drive. The whole way I kept imagining sirens appearing behind us, and me trying to explain our presence at the library right before the body had been discovered. That would be a hell of a way for my Succubus Hunting career to end—thrown in jail for the murder of a woman I tried to save. At least in prison Tandi probably couldn’t get to me.

  Probably.

  The mood was a melancholy one as we reached the estate, my hunting headquarters. We had defeated four of The Sisters of Pain and rescued two of Tandi's victims, but we failed to rescue two and it weighed upon our collective conscience. If only we had been faster, if only we had been more prepared. These were the things going through all our minds.

  For the first time since receiving the Night Flail I began to wonder whether a mistake had been made in giving this duty to me.

  I didn't go straight into the house, instead opting to take a walk along the river to clear my head. It was so peaceful, such a different world from the noisy and always active streets of the city. Both had their charms; there was something about the city that made it feel alive, and the energy there could be contagious. But it could also be exhausting, and after the kind of week I’d had it was a relief to be back in the quiet countryside, the only sounds the chirping of the birds and flow of the river.

  The gurgle of the river brought back memories of that day last fall when I first received the Night Flail. It seemed like an entire lifetime ago now, a life that belonged to someone altogether different from me. That man had been a soldier, a truck driver in the US Army. He had been a man with few relationships, few friendships besides the obligatory camaraderie of his unit, of which he had been the sole survivor. This man had dressed plainly and had been satisfied with a simple life.

  There were few similarities between that man and the reflection I saw of myself in the river. In my reflection I was dressed in designer clothes, beaten up from combat but still clearly expensive, bought for me by a lover who I felt a greater connection to than any relationship I’d ever had, and had a cast on my wrist and bruises on my face from a complicated life fighting monsters most thought to be myths.

  I was so absorbed in my thoughts I didn’t notice the three women had followed me until their reflections joined mine. They didn't say anything, just stood beside me and offered their silent support. The water rushed by in its eternal hurry, and we let the sound of it wash over us until I thought of something I needed to share.

  These three had put so much faith in me, I thought it was only right I explained the story of the man they were all relying on. “I've never told any of you how I came to possess the Night Flail and became a Succubus Hunter, have I?”

  There was a chorus of assent, and I considered my words. Truth was critical, but detail mattered as well.

  I started at the beginning. “I’d just been discharged from the army for injuries I had taken from a roadside bomb. I was the lucky one, the rest of my unit had been wiped out, and I got out with no lasting damage besides a hunk of metal in my chest that the doctors couldn’t—or wouldn’t—remove. I was sent here to heal, or to finish haling, but there was more to it than just that. My mother was dying. She was on her death bed, and I knew that the end of everything I’d ever known was just around the corner. You understand, I thought the army made me a man, and that men can prepare for that kind of loss. You can’t. Or I couldn’t, anyway. My mom had always been this picture of health, and seeing her like that was--- it was wrong. Everything about it didn’t fit, and the world tilted for me the day she died. But that wasn’t all of it. After she was gone, I learned she’d had certain secrets.”

  The memories were still raw despite the passage of time, and I had to pause to collect myself. I decided to skip over the three days I had spent in a drunken haze, because even I didn’t remember the why of it. “She came to me in my dreams, and it more than a simple image. It was a visitation. It was unlike anything I’d ever know or believed up until then, and it shook me almost as much as losing her. If there is anything I've learned over the last months it's that the world is a far stranger place than I once thought, so her visitation stuck with me—I remembered it, right down to the instructions she gave me. I was to go to a rock in a river that ran in the woods near my house, one I was familiar with from my childhood. Inside the rock there was a . . . well, there was a corpse, an ancient one. And wrapped around the corpse was the Night Flail, which bound itself to me as soon as I freed it.”

  I was expecting them to react in some way, for Lyanne to impart us with some of her vast knowledge of Succubus lore, for Eve to express her disappointment that the man she had put all of her hopes into was still so new at this, and for Sara to ramble about some connection to what I had said and the facts that floated about her head. But they were all quiet, waiting for me to finish what I wanted to say.

  Though I wasn't wholly sure what that was. “With the flail came these instincts, this feeling I get whenever Succubi are around that warns me of danger. I went to New York to follow my mother's wishes and, well, you know the rest. I've never really questioned the calling, my role as a hunter, my right to wield the Night Flail
. It just felt nice to have a purpose again, so I guess I didn't want to think about it too much. Plus, I was good at. Or I thought I was. Now, I'm not so sure. These Sisters of Pain have nearly overwhelmed me at every turn, and I'm left to wonder whether I was right for this in the first place. Maybe my mother was wrong when she left this duty to me.”

  To my surprise, Lyanne became furious. “That’s utter bullshit. How can you be uncertain of yourself at this stage? Have you the faintest notion of what you have already accomplished? Do you think us such fools that we would follow you for your pretty face as you led us all into harm's way?”

  Eve took up Lyanne's argument. “You cured me and Lyanne from our curses, remember? We didn't even think that was possible. If you were just some idiot who stumbled onto the flail, you wouldn't have hesitated to kill us, but you went out of your way and risked your life to save us. How can you think you were not meant for this?”

  Sara didn’t have the others’ anger, but her voice was unusually muted. “You saved me, too, remember? I was under the control of Ragan, and he would have eventually drained me to death and moved on to his next victim. But you killed the Incubus, and you took care of me until I recovered.”

  They were right, and I felt an anger at myself for allowing myself to begin to wallow in doubt. All three of them had put their faith in me, not because I asked them to, but because they saw me as someone who could challenge the evils of this world and come out on top. My mother had tasked me with hunting monsters and protecting the innocent from them, and I would not let her down. I would not let my women down, either. They were worth my best, and it occurred to me that I was too.

  I turned back to the trio. “I’m glad you feel that way, because it helps me be clear in my purpose. We have one problem left, and it has a name. Tandi Goren.”