by Lori Selke
He’d known I’d had a crush on him. Embarrassing, but just about everyone knew that. I knew all his classes. I even signed up for French instead of German because he quoted Rimbaud at every opportunity. (One thing I learned in that French class was that his French wasn’t too good and the quotes didn’t always match the situation. Did that change my crush? Nope. Not a bit.)
Mostly he had ignored me, until just about this time last year when he asked me to go to the bonfire with him. We’d gone out a few times and, okay, I knew better, really I did, but I had sex with him. On the first date. Under the stadium seats in the dark with the other couples making out.
I wanted him so much, wanted to believe that he really liked me. You know, liked liked me. That I would give him so much that he knew he was better with me than with one of those cheerleaders, or the popular girls who texted constantly during class and batted two pounds of black mascara at him.
And he dumped me, with no warning and as casually as he’d dated me, three days before Christmas. We were walking in the light dusting of snow in the dark, like tonight. I thought we were going to the deli for a soda and a snack and then I’d have sex with him (again) to pretend it was me he cared about. Only he had other ideas.
“Jess, you’re a sweet girl. I know you like me, but it’s not that way for me. You should find someone who really likes you as much as you deserve. I mean, I think you’re awesome and I want to stay friends. Okay?”
So emo. Yeah. I bet he even thought I’d killed myself over him. (I hadn’t—that was strictly between me and my mother, although I’d love to think that he drowned in guilt.) The worst was, it wasn’t just a crush if I couldn’t get him out of my head even after my death and acceptance into the Demon ranks and beginning my schooling in Hell. I wanted him to pay, I wanted to hurt him, and mostly I wanted to forget him.
I was still in love with him. Maybe it was only puppy love (what my cousin Amelia who was grown up and in college said. “Really, Jess, you’ll get over him. He’s so not worth it.”)
So I was going to deliver him.
It was the perfect solution. Once he was delivered to Satan, he forfeited any right to become a Demon. A mere condemned soul had no standing in Hell. Jason would no longer exist and I would have been the vehicle of his damnation—I would be vindicated and free of him. I hoped. Even if Debbie thought it was a bad idea.
“Now girls, there are different classes of succubae,” Debbie said in her second (or was it her third) lecture. “You’ve probably all heard about the succubae who come to men in dreams and drain their vitality with sex. That’s not us. Who are we?”
Uta raised her hand timidly. I loved the idea of this very delicate looking Japanese woman destroying men. They’d certainly done their best to destroy her. She had told us once when we gathered in the coffee room of the dorm during our first week of class. We’d all told our stories that first week in the lounge at the end of the hall. We’d all agreed that Uta’s was the worst. Her husband beat her whenever he came home drunk, and it sounded like most of the time he came home he was lit. Just like my mom, only she never broke my nose, my collarbone, my arm and two ribs. Finally he had beaten her to death.
“Then why are you a demon?” asked Claire. “You didn’t kill him or yourself or do anything like the rest of us.”
Uta had smiled sadly. “I cursed him. With my dying breath I cursed him and wished for him to be tormented for a million years. Those who listen for such cries, like Debbie, came for me. We are all angry women at heart.”
Uta was the wisest and most experienced of us all, and we respected her for that far more than her suffering.
“We deliver their damned souls to Satan,” she said in class, sweetly with just the barest hint of an accent. “They have sex with us, and at the moment of climax they are consumed.”
Debbie beamed at her. “Completely consumed. They become ash. You should all have several dust busters, fully charged, whenever you bring prey home. Their families have no bodies to bury and they just disappear.”
“Into Hell. Where they burn,” Uta said, smiling.
“What do we do with their wallets?” Claire asked. She was a practical one, but she’d been a whore when she was alive. Well, she insisted that she’d been a call girl and with her looks I could believe her.
“Keep the cash. Wipe the wallet carefully and dispose of it in some trash can in a transit area away from where you live. Grand Central, Penn Station, any airport are excellent choices. Wait no more than a few days. We want the family to think that he ran away, not that he’s dead. That they can continue to look for him but he doesn’t want to be found. We don’t want them thinking he’s dead.”
I was in dangerous territory (home town!) against the instructions of our teacher, and I couldn’t afford to let myself get distracted. I retraced the route I’d walked every school day for three years. Down the main street, two blocks to the left and cut across the field (dodge through the fence and cut across the commuter rail tracks where I’d died instead of going the dorky long way around) and through two more comfortably professional-class residential blocks before the athletic fields. Funny, I didn’t have any reaction to the gap in the fence to the tracks. The years of walking that way were more important than a single moment that was frozen away from my direct recall. If I remained a demon in good standing I would never have a clear memory of the fear and the pain and anger that had driven me out in the night.
I was still half a block away when the scent of burning drifted on a light gust, part of the November smell on the crisp air. A rumble of voices rose, indistinct but indicating a large crowd.
I slipped through the back fence and under the bleachers, the way Jason had taken me last year, only he’d held my hand then and kissed me under the stands, a long, slow kiss as his large hands slid slowly down my back and explored the curve of my ass. There were at least two shadowy couples secreted here now, hiding and making out the way we had last year.
The adolescent desire in them woke my mojo, the succubus sex magic that had begun to gather under my skin as I had begun the transformation from damned suicide to sex demon. I’d felt glimmers of this in class when we’d tried to raise the magic, but this was stronger, more focused, and wild. I could do—anything.
Not being a full succubus yet, I didn’t have the power that the elder sisters do. They can take one breath and the tension flows over their skin, the magic crackles in their hair, and they become so magnetic that no one can look away from them. No one. Debbie had demonstrated regularly, and damned if even in her bouncy blonde way she became utterly irresistible. After the first month, we spent the first half hour of every class practicing. “Draw the breath in deep, girls. Think of sex. You are gathering all the sex, all the energy, in the air around you. All the desires of all those people, their most secret lusts, their lurid fantasies, all of them are your power. Draw that into you and let it radiate. Connect to your own sex, to your desire, to your power. The power of your beauty and desire terrify them, girls, no mistake. It terrifies and titillates and it is part of your allure. You are sex on the hoof, you are raw desire, you are everything they ever dreamed and feared. And here you are.
“Oh, and you’re also death, but they don’t know that. Or they do somewhere, because everyone knows that sex and death are really part of the same continuum.”
I’d been pretty surprised by that speech. Debbie looked like an airhead but looks are deceiving—and deception is one of our better skills. So I felt it at the bonfire, drawing in the sexuality of the crowd, the fantasies of the tattooed man in the letter jacket, the experience of the middle aged woman sitting by the window, the pure lust of the football team watching the fire blaze. As their desire flowed through me I grew stronger and encompassed more of the town. I felt the need and despair of the woman waiting in the parking lot, wondering if she made his favorite manicotti her husband might be enticed into the bedroom on a day off. I quivered with the throbbing erection of the teenager smoking on
his back porch thinking about his hottie English teacher naked. Every image, every thrill ratcheted up the magic in my demonic ichor.
I was every one of them, the incarnation of the driving force between their legs. I felt it, tasted it, and felt myself grow greater, stronger. The energy trembled just beneath my skin and I could feel it pouring out of me as it filled me with heat and seduction.
We had practiced in class but I had never felt it like this before. I was—incandescent. My very being burned, burned to take, to use, to satiate, burned and felt so unfulfilled.
And then I saw him, a shadowed shape moving just beyond the light of the flames. The man in the letter jacket—that had been Jason. And his lust, the power I’d fed on, was not quivering for a woman or a man or anything of flesh. It was the fire that excited him, the burning and the thought of victory tomorrow. He wanted that, lusted for another trophy for the window.
My newly awakened succubus self recoiled. How could he care about something so ridiculous when here I was all hot flesh and desire only a few feet away?
Then I saw he was not alone. I moved silently, like a whisper of hope, like the taste of desire, invading the empty places in the heat. There were several young men around him and as they moved towards the fire I realized I recognized them. They’d been juniors last year but this year they were the stars of the football team.
“You guys are going to cream Ridgewood tomorrow,” Jason gave them a pep talk. I wondered how I was able to hear him so distinctly when I was so far away, but I was focused on him and my demon powers blossomed. He raised his beer and quoted A. E. Housman’s poem completely inappropriately. He said “The time you won your town the race, We chaired you through the market-place; Man and boy stood cheering by, And home we brought you shoulder-high.”
Just like with Rimbaud, he got the words but missed the meaning entirely. At least with Housman his accent was better.
I was just another shape in the dark. They were too busy with each other to pay attention, but I was riveted. I didn’t realize that I’d emerged from under the stands and had entered the crowd.
All I knew was that I embodied all the lust and desire in the world. Well, that part of the world anyway. I was standing right in front of Jason and the other young men as the effigy of Reggie Ridgewood crackled and blazed before us. I didn’t know if the heat I felt was the flame or my magic.
Then Jason saw me and his eyes grew wide, not with lust but with fear. “Jessica? You’re dead. I know you were dead,” he stuttered.
The others, not quite men but no longer boys, turned and saw me. “That was the chick who killed herself last year ‘cause you dumped her?”
Jason nodded.
I smiled and turned to them. “Do you really believe that? Honestly?” I sounded rational and cool. Inside I was quivering with the nearness of them, the scent of their skin and their sex, the need to consume them. All of them.
“You’re not dead then?” Jason asked flatly. “It’s not my fault?”
“You really thought I would kill myself over you?” I asked. “Honestly, please. I left town, went to New York, started a special advanced program.” Which was true if you thought about it that way.
“But you…I heard about your funeral and how you’d killed yourself on the commuter rail tracks, where we cut through to get to school. Everyone said it was an accident, that you’d be high or something and crossing the tracks at night but I…” He searched my face before he went on. His eyes became soft, an actor playing at grief or guilt. “I knew you wouldn’t be so stupid to just get caught on the tracks.”
“I wasn’t.”
Something changed as I looked at him through the power, through succubus eyes. He wore a Rutgers sweatshirt. Last year when we lay together after he’d spent himself with sex, he’d leaned toward me in the dark. “I don’t know if I should go to Stanford,” he’d confided. “I mean, my parents would prefer Harvard, but Stanford’s really got a better engineering school and I’d like to get to California. Away from here.”
We hadn’t heard from colleges yet, hadn’t even hit the application deadline, but I’d responded as if he would be accepted anywhere he applied. “What about MIT or CalTech?” I’d asked, but he had shaken his head. He was too artistic for those.
Now it appeared he hadn’t gotten in to any of them.
I wonder what he would have thought if I’d told him the truth? That I’d gotten in to my first choice (Brown) and my second (Vassar) and I had been drunk that night on the train tracks. I’d raided my mother’s stash after she’d told me there was no money for me for college, that she had spent the small savings account my father had set up for my education on her liposuction and she was done supporting me in any case. She’d been drunk (as usual) when she told me that once I graduated I could get a job and pay rent and go to Ramapo Community College and it would be just fine and more than I deserved.
So I’d taken her vodka and left the house and wandered down toward the high school where the cross country team was practicing on that spring night. I hadn’t planned to kill myself when I left the house, but my utter despair coincided with the late train coming from the City.
I looked pointedly at the sweatshirt and felt him squirm. “Did you make it to Stanford?” I asked, my voice dripping innocence. “Or did you choose Harvard?”
His wiry hands and soft emo eyes wandered away from me, the only person in the group who was not riveted on my body. He looked just the way he had appeared in high school, but now I could sense what lay underneath.
In high school I took his soft voice, his graceful hands, as outward signs of a strong and gentle soul. He seemed so aloof, so self-contained and certain as he made his own way through the class, everyone wanting to be his friend. Now, though, I could feel the heat and sex around me, and Jason was cold. He was not aloof or elegant, gentle and strong—he was missing something. My power searched for it and I couldn’t sense it. All that pretense, all those big dark eyes, even the heat of his body in the bonfire crowd was a lie.
He lusted for something, but that something was not flesh, not woman nor man. I tasted his passion then and saw it was directed to…the game? That piece of him that should quiver with desire at my mojo responded only to his thought of the players and the field.
I did not want him. Not anymore.
Curious. I checked with the hot wet center of my desire and he wasn’t there. No energy vibrated in his blood, no response teased the air. I felt no connection to him, as if he were a rock or a tree or the half cold cup of Frappuccino I had left on the railroad track.
I licked my lips. “I’m in school in the City. Columbia.” Okay, I lied, but I’m a demon from Hell. We’re supposed to lie. Besides, if I made full Succubus, I would be eligible for the education of my choice after I finished my level 3 apprenticeship and I could choose from any university in the world. I was considering Oxford—or maybe I’d go to Brown as I’d originally planned. (Debbie had suggested Princeton so I could stay close to the City, but there was no way on earth I was going back to New Jersey.)
“You dumped her?” one of the boys asked under his breath. He was tall and his large shoulders showed even under the school jacket. “She’s the hottest thing I’ve ever seen. What’s with you, man?”
“She’s changed,” Jason replied. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be able to hear them. Instead I savored every word of the exchange. “She was kind of whiny and clingy last year.”
“If you don’t want her…”
The power moved in me, under my skin, drawn by the willing, begging prey. Just like Debbie said it would be, I could smell his surrender. The mojo knew him and I could taste the soul to deliver, rich and raucous and full of the vitality Satan adored.
Compared to him, Jason didn’t exist. I tried to turn my attention back, to remember my anger and humiliation when he ignored me at school when we returned from Christmas break. I tried, but my magic had an agenda of its own, and Jason wasn’t on it.
“Nah
, bro, you don’t need a cheap lay,” Jason said. “You’ve got to be in top form tomorrow night. Look at all these people, they’re all out here for you, for the team. You can’t let us down.”
A flicker of emotion stirred in Jason’s aura. He honestly cared about that high school football game more than me in all my demonic glory. I had felt it before, but now I knew there was something twisted inside him—something Satan might appreciate. If I could figure out how to deliver him.
But my mojo was jumping, on fire, and I had to make that delivery Right Now. It called, demanded, and yet I wanted to do something to Jason (something unpleasant.)
Oh yes, I saw it clearly. In the magic I could feel the emotions in them, the needs and desires amplified by all the lust that I’d gathered in. Jason did care about this game, and this boy who was eating me alive with his eyes was the starting quarterback. Without him the team didn’t have a chance.
And he was prey. Oh, an excellent quarterback, but otherwise kind of a dick. Which was just the kind of guy we hunted. People let him be a dick because he could play football; people like Jason encouraged him. I remembered him from last year, a junior who thought the whole world was our high school and the whole world should worship him. Will, that was his name, I remembered.
And I knew. I knew in a way I had never understood before. Jason cared about winning. He felt a deep connection to the high school and he cared about this crappy little town.
I held my hand out to Will. “Hey, Jason ditched me last year, but the truth is, you’re way cuter. Come over here.” I smiled. Jason turned and left.
