That boy downstairs didn’t have to give up his innocence.
Only the fire moved. Mellado’s shadow swelled and shrank in its wavering light. No soldiers, no guards appeared.
Slowly, a cloud of doubt drifted in. The distant murmur of the party carried on. Nothing changed. How could a creature with such power make this fatal mistake? He’d died like Mark Norman Harper did, like nothing at all.
It shouldn’t have been this easy…
Diego Mellado was the Angel Czar, certainly the most powerful demagogue I’d ever killed. Yes, he was the head of Deus Inversus, but only in name. I realized that now. He was a puppet for the real mastermind, the real pater dominus.
There had to be another force keeping all these soldiers in thrall. And Vincent had already told me who, though neither of us recognized the truth. It wasn’t Mellado. The incubus who branded Vincent was also the one who enthralled him.
Shanti tried to warn me, too. Don’t face him alone.
And now Asmodeus had me trapped.
Chapter 28
I had to get out, but my dress was a tattered mess. So I peeled the button-down shirt from Mellado’s corpse and wore it as a makeshift outfit. I retrieved my hairpin blade and slipped it back in place.
I threw back the curtains to the unwelcome surprise of bare walls. Mellado’s room was a windowless cell. I swallowed the urge to scream. Even in death the bastard strove to ruin me.
My only escape route was back through the halls, but if I was to go out there, I had to look the part. A monogrammed bathrobe from his armoire helped me look convincingly like a lover in post-coital bliss.
The double doors were thick mahogany and bolted shut. Still, they gave me no trouble besides the awful racket of the locking mechanism as I ripped it from the wood.
I held my breath in anticipation of the guards, though none of them came running. I was almost disappointed. The spirit of Diego Mellado still raged inside me.
But I had to resist. The compound was crawling with more men than I could count, powerful incubi, and Asmodeus himself. I had no hope of battling my way out.
So I headed away from the active heart of the house, out to the far end of the eastern wing. A thick-necked guard manned the back stairs landing, but the evening shadows let me slip past him unseen, down to the armory I had already explored.
Tucked away back here was a bathroom, and inside it, a window overlooking a stretch of lawn and botanical garden. Beyond that was the ten-foot wall that separated me from freedom. If I could slink through without raising alarm…
But once again, a boy stepped out from behind the armor. Not the child cambion from before, but his older brother, Roberto. In swim trunks and a damp muscle shirt, he wielded a Japanese katana as bright and sharp as the day it was forged.
“Where are you going, whore?” he asked.
My heart sank at the sound of his voice. It was barely verging on manhood and it tried desperately to sound commanding.
“I asked you a question,” Roberto said.
“I came down to use the bathroom.”
“Where is my father?”
“Upstairs, sleeping.”
“He never sleeps.”
“Roberto, I don’t want to hurt you…”
My warrior fire went dim with the thought of killing this boy. It struck me as perverse, like bedding a child. Sex and death were the reverse faces of a single coin that only adults should spend.
A stark white hand clasped Roberto’s shoulder from behind. A featureless face took shape, then the unmistakable eyes. The true pater dominus.
“Shhh,” Asmodeus whispered to the boy.
“No,” I gasped.
But it was done before I could breathe the word. Asmodeus slipped the sword from Roberto’s hands. With a silent flourish he passed its blade across the boy’s slender neck, like the final brushstroke of a masterpiece.
“Succubus,” Asmodeus said, brandishing the sword at me.
Panic gripped my heart with such force I almost fell to my knees. Somehow, I lunged for the bathroom door and smashed it clean off its hinges.
The window was straight ahead, but I lost my footing over the splintered wood. Inertia threw me headfirst into the wainscoting. I saw it coming, such a thundering impact, my spine would be shattered, my brain wiped clean.
But something else happened instead. Grass between my fingers. Crickets in my ears. I was dusted with Sheetrock powder and crumbled brick, my head a vibrating gong. But somehow I was conscious, alive.
I shot a glance back at the hole I’d created when I ran through the side of the house. No time to marvel at that feat. Asmodeus was just behind the window now, sword in hand, an unstoppable force.
Despite the throb in my head, the nausea, I sprang up and bolted for the palms and cypress trees ahead. The encumbering bathrobe fell away.
Boots thumped the lawn like a cavalry of horses, closing ranks from all directions. Black-garbed mercenaries blended with the night. Guttural shouts. Spears of white light flashed to the snarl of automatic gunfire. Rounds ripped up the dirt around my feet.
A savage bite at my calf, another in my buttocks. Cartridges finding their marks. Just as I reached the cover of thick palm fronds, three banks of sodium-vapor lamps doused the garden in broad daylight.
“Lights out, you idiots!” a voice shouted.
I had my advantage. Long black shadows mottled the pine-straw ground and gave me cover. I crouched and leaped and spun my way through the garden, hairpin in hand. A soldier cried out, swiveled his gun.
My blade should’ve found its easy mark. But I stabbed him off-target, left him howling instead of dead. The gunshot wounds were taking their toll on me, blurring my vision, clouding my muscle memory. How many hits had I sustained?
I rushed the security wall, but my injured legs were slick with blood and spasming in protest. When I leaped, I barely clutched my fingertips over the ledge. Hoisting my body took every last drip of endorphins.
I teetered above the concertina wire a second too long. One final burst of gunfire erupted from below. Rounds threaded up my arm and plunged between my ribs. I heaved for a breath that wouldn’t come.
I dragged the coils of sharp-toothed wire along with me as I fell. No sight, no sound. A plummet down the rabbit hole.
And then I floated in a vacuum, in total nothingness.
Chapter 29
I drifted in the timeless dark, cast back to the moment of my second birth, another kiss.
Ten years I was her apprentice before my clock stopped ticking. I was twenty-five when I became a succubus, cloistered in another cave, this one decked with drawings of ancient men.
My priestess was a mystery to the end. I followed her to France, fleeing war in the colonies. I was young and desperate to learn the secrets of her craft.
Together, we charmed our way into Louis the Fourteenth’s royal court. We destroyed incubi. Scandal and death trailed us, fair accusations of witchcraft.
Then came the cave initiation. The two of us hidden away together, we mingled our blood, we blended our breath and our tears. Her kiss was like a mother’s breast to the suckling child. It was Holy Communion.
In the heat of my transformation, my mind bloomed with her memories. I saw the ebbing tide of time, the open sea from the prow of a ship, men singing her praise around a ring of stones.
Through her eyes I gazed into the bottomless well of history she’d witnessed. I saw the ziggurats of Babylon from on high, felt the ripple of her wings as they reached full span and held her aloft. A whisper of her most ancient name…Lilith.
Did I want to become a succubus, to know the secrets, to see through the veil, to be ageless and always ecstatic in my senses? For this, would I set myself to the Sisyphean task of hunting down monsters, seducing them, destroying them?
Yes…yes…yes…
She gave me everything, a deluge of power that nearly drowned my mind. Her kiss left me dazed and agonized for hours. My scapulae broke through the sk
in and ossified long hollow growths of new bone. Like an opium fiend I lay curled on the cave floor, chanting in long-dead tongues.
She gave me everything, even herself.
When I finally came to my senses, our campfire had dimmed to embers. But my eyes were sharper now. Even in that weak orange light, I saw her desiccated corpse seated across from me, still wrapped in its robes.
I held her body and wept. I raged at the soul she’d poured inside of me. I pulled at the fledgling wings still sprouting from my flesh, desperate to give it all back if only she wouldn’t abandon me. But she lied, just like my father had. I held her memories but I was still alone.
The priestess knew the ceremony would kill her. Neither a succubus nor an incubus could transmit its power to a mortal and survive. Only a cambion could inherit the gift without destroying the giver. She knew, but she let me take it anyway.
I carried my bitterness for two more years before I finally found closure. My travels brought me back to Massachusetts, and one morning I crossed my family’s farmland through a dense fog.
The fields were barren and the farmhouse derelict. I expected to find that my kin had been run off or killed by natives, until Father stepped onto the porch. His spine was withered and his hair faded white, but he held his musket as surely as ever.
“You cursed me, witch,” he said.
The priestess robe obscured my face. He mistook me for her, though in a way, he was not wrong. Father spat in the mud and denounced me, denounced her, as a fraud. Despite the human sacrifice he made of his daughter, his wife had died in childbirth.
“What of the child?” I asked.
“She lived,” he sneered. “Sent her off with relatives.”
Approaching my father, I pulled back my hood. His face went slack with horror. The musket sagged in his weakening arms. And then in a gust of insight, I understood why I had come back after so many years.
To end my grief, to accept that I was alone.
I said, “One kiss, father, and all will be forgiven.”
Chapter 30
An eternity passed in seconds. I was floating, weightless, but only because I’d plunged into the deep end of the neighbor’s pool.
I surfaced with a gasp that barely found air, still tangled in the razor wire. The clouds of my blood were vivid in the underwater lights.
Somehow, I found the strength to lift myself onto the deck and wrench away the last of the wire. My body wanted rest and my mind begged surrender. But I was a succubus. I carried a world of memories in me, and I refused to die. Not here, not tonight.
The soldiers were scaling the wall. Any second they’d have their guns in position. Though even my slightest movements were torture, I had to rise, I had to run.
Gunfire sputtered, the air buzzed with rounds. I cut through a hedge and startled a flurry of birds to flight. South and westward I trespassed yards, stumbling now and then, flushed of all thought except escape.
Bel-Air came alive with flashing lights and sirens. A helicopter passed overhead, trailing a searchlight.
I collapsed on a patio behind a darkened house. A ringing in my ears, my eyesight blurred. The next time I dropped would be the last, I knew.
I hadn’t a clue whose house this was. The digital alarms shrieked when I broke open the locked French doors. By a stroke of luck, the cordless phone was there in its charging cradle on the kitchen counter.
When Vincent answered, I dragged a ragged breath into my only functioning lung. “Hilgard…and Sunset. Meet me…there.”
After hanging up, I drank ravenous gulps from the sink. The razor wire teeth had shredded Mellado’s shirt and slashed long cuts across my torso. I couldn’t bear to take stock of the gunshot wounds.
Shuffling more than running now, I skirted the eastern edge of the Bel-Air Country Club, a few blocks from UCLA. I must’ve looked for all the world like a zombie freshly risen from its grave.
With a flush of new hope I staggered onto a walking path. A college kid waited with his skateboard at the intersection. He jolted when he saw me, then raised his phone for a photo. I couldn’t care less.
A pair of headlights washed over the pavement. When the car screeched to a stop, I was standing just outside the passenger door. My Infiniti, and Vincent in the driver’s seat.
At the sight of him my drive was depleted, like a marathon runner breaking through the ribbon. I slumped against the car and pawed at the door handle with my limp hand. I couldn’t even hook my fingers.
What happened next is a jumble in my memory. A man caught my fall, draped me in his arms. I felt his body tremble and balked at the alarm on his face.
He laid me across the backseat, shouted questions in a language I couldn’t interpret. Blood seeped into the upholstery.
Vincent. It was Vincent. He was jostling my head to keep me conscious. “Hold on, Lilly Anna! Hold on! The Medical Center is right around—”
“No hospital! Just…drive…”
“Lilly Anna, you—you’re in bad shape,” he breathed. “I don’t even know how you can be…”
I knew how close I was, hanging by a thread. Strangest of all, I had Diego Mellado to thank, if I survived. Against his will, he’d sacrificed the life force I needed now to fight these grievous wounds.
Another stretch of time disappeared. Vincent was driving, though I didn’t know where. Overhead, streetlights and towering palms flitted past.
I was at peace in my backseat cocoon. Already I felt my lung tissue binding itself. My breaths deepened, and the oxygen sharpened my mind.
“Mellado’s dead,” I said aloud, testing my voice.
“Are you kidding me?” he said with an incredulous laugh.
“Don’t go back to the hotel. He’ll track me down.”
“Who will? You said Mellado—”
“Asmodeus,” I said. “He knows what I am now.”
I reached through the center console and Vincent took my hand. He held it firm and resolute, like we were tandem skydivers in free fall.
“You mind telling me, then?” he asked. “What you are?”
So I did. I told him everything I needed him to believe.
Chapter 31
No matter how much I refused to retreat, I was Vincent’s helpless passenger. At least until I recouped some strength, until I could think straight again.
He took me into the suburbs north of Burbank, to the home of a fellow agent he knew would be away at Quantico. An old flame, he admitted, who still hid her spare key under the same potted cactus.
I found fleeting solace in her backyard Japanese garden, no bigger than a boxing ring. Just a moment to breathe, freshly showered and bandaged, I lay in a lounger beside a laughing clay Buddha. My naked body burned like a furnace as it mended.
The glass door finally slid open. I could feel Vincent’s reticence even before he stepped outside. He was enduring the aftershocks of what I told him. I’d known men who pined for their ignorance back, like a prophet refusing the voice of God.
“I can get you a blanket,” he said.
“The cool air helps.”
He splashed mineral oil onto his hands and kneaded it into my neck. I leaned forward, suppressing the pain that fired all through my torso. His touch was exquisite. It nullified the ache left over from Mellado’s hands.
Vincent’s breath quickened as his touch passed over the knuckles of my spine. Cautiously, he traced the calcified ridges of bone now barely obscured by my tattoo.
“Mellado thought he could make me kill you,” I said. “He thought he could control me. But he didn’t know what I really was.”
“So you’re my guardian angel? Wings and all?”
“I’m no angel.”
His fingers circled the bandage taped over my exit wound. “You were shot five times, Lilly Anna. With high-powered rounds. I’ve never known a woman to survive…”
“If it helps, I’m not exactly a woman.”
“A succubus,” he said, testing the taste of the word.
&
nbsp; I leaned back and watched the stars shimmer overhead.
“But you clipped your wings?” he asked.
He was right to wonder. I could be soaring above all the wretchedness of this world.
“I wanted to be down in the dust with humankind,” I said.
Vincent withdrew his hands, brooding again. He was a man of decisive action. He thrived most when his worldview went untested, but now?
He said, “When we made love…I didn’t know…”
“I have a human body. I have a human soul.”
My fingers brushed his jawline. Even through our secrets, our bodies told the truth. In that bed with him last night I felt invincible. I flew, even without my wings.
But now I was chasing heartache down its fated path.
“So where do we go from here?” Vincent asked.
“You? Back to Vegas to tell your story and get your reputation back. Minus the demon lover.”
“Lilly Anna, you can’t go after Asmodeus alone.”
I’d escaped Mellado and his firing squad, yet I should’ve known letting go of Vincent would be the thing that finally broke my nerve. I suddenly felt shame for my nakedness.
“Vincent,” I insisted. “I’m a demon. The urge to take a man’s soul always lurks inside me, with every man I meet. I fight it every time I’m with you, do you understand?”
“I don’t believe you.”
“What if I asked you to make love to me now?”
“If I didn’t think I’d be causing you a world of hurt…”
“Then kiss me, at least,” I shut my eyes, inviting him.
The moment Vincent’s lips touched mine, I drank from his well of memory. I savored our lovemaking again through his bliss, awed at the dolphins in the waves, suffered the trauma of that branding iron. I saw myself, colored with his affection.
His vital being soaked into my wounds and numbed them.
I stopped at the first taste of his soul. I pulled away, trying to hold him but he staggered from my arms, shoes disturbing the zen of the sand’s perfect waves. He knocked the clay Buddha aside, aghast, until he dropped to the ground and slipped unconscious.
Diary of a Succubus Page 8
