Incubus Moon

by Andrew Cheney-Feid

  I just prayed the spider wasn’t in a snacking mood.

  “Tempt away,” I said with equally forced amiability.

  He crossed the expansive room to an ornate coffee table situated between a pair of burgundy leather, wing-back chairs. Two crystal wine glasses sat in waiting, which he now filled, and then motioned for me to take the opposite chair.

  I hesitated, glancing back at the open doorway through which we’d entered, the clanging of alarm bells in my head joining the cold shudder running up my spine.

  “Expecting someone?”

  “No,” I replied too quickly. “Well, maybe Andrea.”

  He smirked. “I can assure you, we are quite alone.”

  I approached the armchair with tentative steps, Dimitri studying my progression with keen interest. The wince of pain from my wounded knees as I sat down didn’t go unnoticed.

  “You are injured.”

  I waited for the sharpest stings to subside before responding. “That’s one of the reasons I stopped by.”

  He raised open palms. “And the others?”

  The cool, tufted leather creaked beneath me as I settled in to regard my circumspect host. His white, button-down shirt, tapered gray trousers, and black Italian loafers without socks were Euro-stylish all the way. Although it was the curious onyx ring on his left, middle finger that caught my eye. I hadn’t noticed last night.

  He held the piece of jewelry up for inspection. “A family heirloom.”

  Of course he’d seen me eyeing the ring. Were he an ordinary man, I’d have thought his action perfectly natural. But Dimitri Ravello was not an ordinary man. He’d plucked the thought from my mind. I’d felt him do it, like the delicate caress of silk against the inside of my skull.

  This was followed by a warm ripple of energy descending around me, similar to what happened between us poolside last night. It appeared to hinder his ability to invade my thoughts.

  Guess I could add mind-reader to the growing list of talents that made this man so unlike most, and far more dangerous.

  Also, I had no intention of drinking the wine he’d poured. There was even less reason to trust him now, especially since he was growing more attractive by the minute, the sound of his voice more hypnotic. His skin held a tantalizing olive sheen that hadn’t been there moments before, his body fuller through the chest, shoulders, and thighs. Even the fabric crotch of his trousers appeared rounder and more inviting. The man was trying to bespell me.

  “You should know that hypnosis doesn’t work on me.” A modest lie. “I’m not into men, either.” Which was mostly the truth.

  My declaration elicited a cocked brow from him. “Good to know that we share at least two things in common.”

  Time to be blunt: “Who are you, really?”

  He leveled an amused gaze at me, his eyes igniting from within like dancing green flames. “A better question might be what am I?” Another cold frisson traveled up my spine. I’d come here today for answers and, by all accounts, it looked as though I was about to get them. “The question I find more intriguing is what are you, Austin Iverson?”

  My gut tightened and adrenaline raced into my limbs. Every fiber of my being wanted me to bolt. And yet, I made no effort to leave.

  “All I can tell you is that I feel an inexplicable connection to the blonde woman in your drawing room. The one in the portrait.” I recalled her sapphire-gray eyes from my recent vision that had held Dimitri with such love, her voice gentle as she spoke to him, until he viciously attacked her. “I even dreamed about the two of you last night.”

  His unruffled expression faltered. In that same instant I experienced another wave of metaphysical mind-intrusion. “How extraordinary.”

  The incubus in me couldn’t help thrusting a sexually charged image of our dream intimacy back at him, a move which visibly sped up his breathing. “I thought so.”

  I sensed his own psychic protection rise up around him, though not quick enough to keep me from glimpsing a series of images. In them, I saw Francesca again, visited the deep forest where they’d kissed in a clearing under silver moonlight for the first time, saw her out on the broad palace balcony from the portrait, her blonde hair and scarlet skirts billowing out behind her in the wind, the angry red and orange sky above both beautiful and menacing.

  Dimitri had been painting her and was trying to coax her inside and away from the gathering storm winds.

  Less compelling, and far more troubling, was the recognition that I unsettled Dimitri Ravello. He viewed me as a threat now.

  I’d been arrogant and foolish to imagine that I could stroll in here and best whatever this man was. And I no longer needed the warning bells inside my head to tell me that the scales had tipped against me.

  Dimitri was on his feet in a blur of movement no human could ever accomplish, his eyes ablaze with deadly intent. “Tell me of this dream.”

  In a mad scramble to my feet, he darted around the coffee table and seized me by the throat. I tore at his hand, struggling to break free of its crushing grip, but a howling dissonance filled my ears, forcing my incubus strength to retreat. I could feel my life force fading, my body spasming around the burning lack of air in my lungs.

  The scent of rotting citrus rose up around us. Death had come for me.

  Instead of claiming me, though, the cloying odor pulled me back from the edge. It suffused my oxygen-deprived brain, permeated the pores of my skin to sink deep into muscle and bone, into every molecule of my body. I could feel it reanimating me.

  I could also breathe again!

  I felt strong, too. Really strong.

  Strong enough to break free of whatever in the hell Dimitri Ravello was and shove him away from me with such force that he landed on his ass clear across the room.

  “You want me to tell you what I saw?” A floodwater of memories that weren’t mine to recall crashed into me. “I saw you murder her. You murdered Francesca!”

  A maelstrom of emotions distorted Dimitri’s features as he clambered to his feet and rushed me for a second time. I blocked his attempt to get at my throat, but he managed to secure me by the arms and shook me so hard that my teeth actually chattered.

  “By the Dark Gods, tell me what you are!”

  I answered him by driving a knee up into his groin. Inhuman he might be, but an old-fashioned ball-slam brought’em down every time.

  Dimitri crumpled to his knees in a volley of curses, allowing me to put some distance between us. Not enough, unfortunately, to make it to the patio door.

  When he came for me again, I saw the pupils of his eyes narrow to slits, then widen, the way a predatory animal’s did just before it struck.

  My heart thundered in my chest and adrenaline was pumping furiously into my legs. I needed no more than thirty feet to reach the covered patio. It might as well have been a mile.

  Dimitri laughed and two elongated incisors descended. “You won’t make it that far.”

  The heavy velvet drapes covering every window, the complete absence of sunlight in the room, the fortress-like construction of the house, and the nightmare vision I’d had of him.

  The Shadow Walker was a goddamn vampire!

  “Clever boy.”

  He was trying to mind-roll me again; his thoughts urging me to go to him, that everything would be fine once I did. Instead, I willed a stronger psychic barrier around myself.

  Fuck. Books and movies had gotten it right all along. Vampires were real!

  All the more reason to make a mad dash for the patio door and reach bright sunlight in time. If I couldn’t, the monster was right, I really was going to die.

  “Yes, Austin,” he said in a low, threatening growl, “you are. But first, you will tell me if there are others like you.”

  Exactly the way it happened last night with the singer seconds before she fell, I envisioned myself at the patio door. Sweet miracle of miracles I was suddenly standing in front of it. Freedom was mine. All I had to do was depress the door handle.

/>   Dimitri anticipated the move, his body slamming into mine and pinning me against the oak door with such force that pinpoints of light exploded behind my eyes. The vampire then swung me around by the collar to face him and shoved me against the iron door handle. I cried out, my spine spasming from the impact with the cold metal.

  “Are there others like you?” he demanded, his eyes aglow with an unholy light, his muscular body pressing into mine with greater intensity. “Tell me!”

  “I don’t know, I swear!”

  “Lies!”

  I wailed in renewed agony when he forced me further into the door handle. My spine was going to snap from the force of the handle crushing it. But this was the least of my concern, because his mouth collided with my throat and he sank fangs deep into my neck.

  We stumbled sideways into a squat column crowned by a marble bust, the protruding piece of metal mercifully released from my spine. The statue toppled to the floor and broke into several large chunks, a distraction I used to drive an elbow up into his jaw.

  The monster staggered backwards with a howl, blood gushing from his mouth and nose.

  This gave me the instant of freedom I needed to grasp the velvet drape covering the nearest window. With one hand I seized the dusty fabric, the heat it had absorbed from the day oddly reassuring. “Let’s see if the stories are true.”

  I yanked on the soft panel, sending a dozen wooden rings raining down on me and clattering across the floorboards. The move paid off. Late-morning sunlight exploded into the room, forcing Dimitri to retreat deeper into the study.

  With blood thundering in my ears, my body running on pure adrenaline, I threw the heavy oak door wide and sprinted onto and across the covered patio, before diving out onto the sun-drenched lawn. But the monster loomed in the doorway behind me, a lurid vision of fangs and hands curled into feral claws that sent me scrambling backwards and into the shade of a tree; the same tree under which the gardener had been working earlier.

  The fresh, damp earth was cool beneath my hands, but I winced at the stabbing sensation in my right palm. The Shadow Walker saw this and leered at me from the safety of the shaded patio, his breathing ragged, his expression primal.

  I took my eyes off him for a fleeting moment to see what I’d fallen on and scuttled in renewed horror out into the sunlight once more. It hadn’t been a piece of glass at all. Protruding from the damp earth was a well-manicured, red fingernail attached to a bluish finger.

  In a run-for-my-life stampede away from the earthen grave, I raced toward the plant-covered wall separating our two properties and leapt into the air. I clipped the cap piece of the tall stucco wall with my wounded knee and tumbled over the other side of it.

  Just as I hit the ground I heard Dimitri call out, “What’s the matter, Austin? You didn’t like Andrea, anyway.”

  God, please let me wake up from this nightmare now.

  Dimitri’s laughter reached me from the other side of the wall, a terrible wet sound at the back of his throat, because it was mixed with my blood. “Welcome to the real world, incubus. And come sunset, I shall show you exactly how real it is.”

  CHAPTER 19

  I had no intention of sticking around until sunset to become my psychotic vampire neighbor’s next victim. Poor Andrea.

  If only Christie’s garden pagoda hadn’t thrown a wrench into that escape scenario. It was what I’d landed on during my life-or-death vault over the dividing property wall, and doing so had left me more than a little fuzzy in the brain. Toss in the damage to my spine from a door handle trying to bisect it and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that I probably wasn’t going to be running in any getaway marathons anytime soon.

  Although the funny thing about pure terror was that it had a miraculous way of motivating a person to action. Especially when the alternative meant letting the very thing you feared hiding under you bed or in the closet as a small child eat you!

  Monsters, as it turned out, were very real.

  With that in mind, my first instinct was to get inside. I was too easy a target out here. The second was to call the police. The third and more practical impulse was to get the hell out of Dodge lickety split. Then a more terrifying thought occurred to me.

  If I took off now, would Dimitri turn on Mark and Christie in retaliation? Fuck!

  In any event, where would I run to? The local archdiocese to stock up on a year’s supply of holy water and communion wafers? Did that stuff even worked on real-life vampires? They weren’t supposed to exist.

  Just like a real-life incubus isn’t supposed to exist.

  Yet here I was, pushing my pain-riddled, freaked out ass off the ground and limping back to my guesthouse in anticipation of a murderous creature of the night to drop in and rip out my throat. If ever there was a right time to use alcohol as a balm it was now!

  A series of knock at the door caused my entire body to tense.

  The monster had come to deliver on his promise!

  Except that Dimitri Ravello probably wouldn’t bother to knock. Not when he could just kick down the door, which he’d have to do standing in direct sunlight. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and my front door was west-facing. At this time of year, however, the sun would be setting in a few short hours. It wouldn’t be long before he could do just that.

  Another series of knocks were followed by a man’s voice. “Officer Davis. L.A.P.D.”

  I’d forgotten all about phoning the police. Shock had a way of doing that to a person.

  “Coming.” Biting down on the white-hot sharp pain in my back, I pushed off the sofa with a loud groan and hobbled over to the front door. A quick look through the peephole revealed a policeman holding up a badge.

  A second officer leaned in then to flash his own badge. “Officer Atwell. We’re here to ask you a few questions, sir.”

  Once I’d opened the door, Davis gave me a quick head-to-toe assessment and was first to step over the threshold.

  Short and stocky, he was fair-skinned and had a bulldoggish face. Atwell, who towered above his partner, followed him inside. His lean build, wide cheekbones, and deep bronze complexion hinted at Native American ancestry.

  What they had in common was a youthful exuberance that screamed, I just graduated from the Academy and am ready to kick some Bad Guy ass. Problem was, Dimitri Ravello’s ass would prove a difficult one to kick.

  A third individual came into view. A woman.

  Dressed in a light gray pantsuit and cream colored blouse, she was also wearing a pair of black, lace-up shoes any practical lesbian would have admired. Her ginger hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail from a triangular shaped face. Her seemingly make-up free complexion was sprinkled with a band of freckles across the bridge of her nose and cheeks, lending a somewhat girlish appearance to her otherwise professional demeanor. Although what stood out most for me about this woman was the alertness in her hazel eyes and the seasoned expression she maintained as she sized me up. It let me know that she’d been doing this for a while.

  “Mr. Iverson.” Her tone was matter-of-fact as she trailed the officers inside. She stopped at the counter dividing the living room and kitchen. “I’m Detective Caulfield. You doin’ okay?”

  I shuffled back to the sofa and braced myself for the extreme discomfort that sitting back down would produce. “I’ve been better.”

  The male officers moved to the center of the living room, following procedure, I assumed, by positioning themselves far enough away from me that I couldn’t leap up and seize their weapons. I could barely move. I wasn’t up to the task of subduing a cop and snatching away his firearm. Plus, I was the victim here.

  I should never have called the cops. Were they even capable of dealing with a creature like Ravello? Would their bullets kill him? They didn’t in any of the movies I’d seen.

  The detective leaned against the granite countertop and regarded me intently. “I’d like to ask you some questions pertaining to the 911 call you placed.”

  Despite
her petite frame, Caulfield had no problem conveying who was in charge. She couldn’t have been much older than me. Early thirties at best.

  She eyed the open bottle of tequila on the counter. “Have you been drinking, Sir?”

  “Why yes I have, Detective.” What part of the half-empty bottle at her elbow had she missed? “I’m sure you can appreciate how rattled I might be over what’s happened.”

  Caulfield took out a notepad, jotted down whatever it is investigating officers jot down, and exchanged a knowing glance with her comrades in arms. I was starting to dislike this woman, and I’d only been in her company for a few minutes.

  At the flurry of pounding feet on the stairs, we all turned to look at the door. A hurried series of knocks was followed by two paramedics bursting into the room and making their way over to me. They each carried a large tackle box.

  “Standard procedure,” Caulfield informed me. “They’ll treat you for shock and tend to the cuts and bruises on your face and arms.” Poised to write more in her notepad, she asked, “Can you tell me about your injuries?”

  I looked at the back of my hands and up my arms and blinked in disbelief. Who did these messy things belong to? Moreover, how could I have failed to notice so many cuts and scrapes? Because a homicidal vampire chased me through his house and over a wall, that was how. Kinda makes a person forget the smaller things. Everything except the terror, that is.

  “I must’ve gotten them during my escape,” I said, the red and purple abrasions beginning to smart like crazy. “I hadn’t noticed them until now.”

  She indicated the bandages on my knees. I’d managed to put on cut-off sweat pants earlier. “You seemed to have noticed those wounds. They’ve been dressed.”

  “That happened before…”

  The cops exchanged more looks. It wasn’t hard to work out what they were thinking. Something along the lines of, What’s this guy’s deal?