Incubus Mini-Boss (Rise of an Incubus Overlord Book 2)
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The Rise of an Incubus Overlord 2: Incubus Mini-Boss
By Jack Porter
Incubus Mini-Boss: Rise of an Incubus Overlord
Copyright 2019 Jack Porter, All Rights Reserved.
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to person, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 1
“You don’t have to do this!” the man said between sobs. His name was Damien Moss, and he was, along with his cousin, my next target.
He shuffled his butt along the concrete floor of the workshop with a sort of desperate fear that I found satisfying, leaving a trail of blood behind him. It wasn’t too long ago when I had been a low status nobody, incapable of making someone fear me. But all that had changed when I bonded with a demon and started playing the status game for real.
“You’re right,” I said flatly. “I don’t have to do this. But I want to.”
Just because I could, I fired two more shots, aiming for the concrete between his legs. My gun coughed, the suppressor doing its job, the bullets kicking up chips of concrete. Right on target, I thought. The practice I’d had over the past week, combined with the physical upgrades Azrael had granted me, had worked wonders for my aim.
There was a time when I’d been so uncoordinated, I might have shot Damien accidentally, or even fumbled the gun out of my grasp because of the recoil.
But not any longer.
Damien flinched from the dual impact and tried to shuffle more quickly, but the bullet that had lodged in his leg had done its job well. I’d aimed to cripple him, turning his right femur into splinters.
It must have hurt like a bitch.
“But I haven’t done anything!” Damien whined, his voice pitiful and beaten.
“Really?” I asked, allowing a nasty sneer to twist my lips. I took two steps closer to him and fired once again, this time allowing the bullet to graze his arm.
It was strange, in a way. I’d spent my whole life being bullied unmercifully, by pretty much everyone. It had given me an uncanny understanding of the process. I knew how to get the best outcome from my efforts, how to prolong Damien’s suffering and ramp it up at the same time.
Damien uttered a shriek that would have made a schoolgirl proud and grabbed hold of his arm as if doing so would do any good. From my perspective, he would have been better off focusing his attention on his thigh. The way the blood was soaking his work overalls suggested that either the bullet or a fragment of bone had damaged an artery. Damien was in danger of bleeding out even if I didn’t shoot him a few more times.
“I don’t really care,” I said conversationally, even though he hadn’t answered my question. “All that matters to me is that your name came up on a contract, and I’m here to collect. It doesn’t matter if you’re innocent, up to your eyeballs in debt to the Syndicate, or a fucking pedophile. Either way, I’m going to collect my fee. Your time is up.”
Damien Moss had been shot twice and must have been in considerable terror and pain. Yet this simple statement seemed to change everything. It was like he hadn’t really believed how much danger he was in, thinking my presence was some sort of mistake, and that he could talk his way out of it.
But as soon as I said his time was up, it was like I’d thrown a switch. Damien’s face turned ghostly white, and his eyes widened with shock.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. He’d worked his way to the shelves lining one of the workshop walls and had nowhere to go. “No, no, no.”
He kept shaking his head to emphasize the denial, but his eyes betrayed him. They were still wide open, and I knew he understood that this was the day he would die.
“Yes, yes, yes,” I contradicted. I stepped up to him and loomed over him like a specter of death, my gun aimed at his head. “You’re going to die, Damien. But first, you’re going to tell me where I might find your cousin.”
Maybe a nicer person than I was might have recoiled in horror at what I was doing, but I was enjoying myself. To me, Damien’s pain and fear were exquisite, an expression of how far I had come. I stood over my victim with his life and death in my hands.
As an expression of power, it was undeniable.
I now understood why all those assholes had bullied me my whole life until I found my demon. They did it because it made them feel good.
“No,” Damien said, but it wasn’t a denial as much as a desperate plea for me not to kill him.
Out of sheer malice, I twitched my gun sideways just a little, and fired again. The gun coughed once again, spilling its load close enough to Damien that he jerked away and uttered another short shriek. I breathed in the smell of gunpowder and enjoyed the sight of Damien flopping about on the ground, wriggling about like a fish on the deck of a boat.
Just because I wanted to, I kicked his wounded leg, and listened to him yowl in pain. When he was done with that, I made sure he was looking down the barrel of my gun.
“Last chance,” I said. “I’m going to find him anyway, so you might as well tell me. Where is your cousin?”
Three things happened almost at once.
Just for a moment, Damien’s eyes flicked to one side. I heard Azrael, my demon symbiont, shout a warning in my mind.
“Look out!” he said.
And I heard someone new speak from right behind me.
“I’m right here!” he said, and my first thought was how in the hell had he managed to sneak up on me?
Then I spun about, bringing my gun around with me.
It was the wrong thing to do. The newcomer, Damien’s cousin if I’d had to guess, had planned for that. He swung a length of pipe at me, and his aim was good. He struck my
hand with stunning force, sending my gun sailing into the air and making my whole hand go numb.
“Michael Moss is my name,” he said. “And I’m the guy you’re looking for.”
Chapter 2
The Syndicate file on Michael didn’t do him justice. I knew he was tall but had no idea he would exude the wiry strength that he did. He grinned at me through a scraggly beard and spoke to Damien, who was still whimpering on the ground at my feet.
“Don’t worry, cuz. I got this.”
With that, he began swinging his makeshift weapon again.
“Fuck!” I said as I ducked beneath Michael’s swing and scampered out of the way. My hand throbbed, and I wondered if he’d broken something. But that didn’t bother me as much as the fear of being up against someone like him.
A single glance had told me all I needed to know about Michael Moss. I had known him all my life, in various guises. He was the bully who had made my life miserable at school. The asshole who had shoved me to the back of the line wherever I went. He was Chad, my roommate who had done everything in his power to keep me down.
Michael Moss laughed as his steel pipe whistled through the air above my head and dislodged the mess of spare parts on the shelf behind me. But he didn’t give me any time to recover, swinging his pipe again and again, now with murderous intent.
“Not so tough now that you don’t have your gun, are you?” he shouted, and to my chagrin, this was enough to convince Damien that all would be well. The younger, smaller cousin also started to laugh, even with the blood leaking out of his thigh.
Suddenly, I was back to being the low status loser. It was all I could do to keep ducking, keep wrenching my body out of Michael’s way with a desperate series of movements.
I dodged out of the way, ducked under another prodigious swing, and stumbled backward as fast as I could.
Then Azrael spoke in my mind.
“Get a grip!” my resident demon said, his voice filled with disgust. “Have you learned nothing in the past couple of weeks? You are not him anymore! You are a hitman, a man of increasing status, and you took out Megadeath #4!”
I ducked another wild swing from Michael and knew that Azrael was right. Sure, Michael Moss was quick, strong, and swung his pipe like Babe Ruth on a good day. If I had been my old self, I wouldn’t have stood a chance. His first swing would have caught me in the side of the face, and I would have gone down in a useless, pudgy puddle of weakness and despair.
But Azrael had given me an upgrade in more than just status. He was an Incubus and could draw power through sexual conquests. And despite my former handicaps, I’d managed to score not just with Rachel and Sandy, both of whom had chosen to stick around after the fact, but also with three random women I’d hooked up with by swiping to the right.
It didn’t matter that each of those hookups had been a once-and-done type of deal, and in fact in many ways it was better that way. What mattered was that each conquest increased Azrael’s power, which in turn gave me a boost as well.
I’d told Azrael to explain it in gaming terms. Each conquest earned me a bunch of points, which I could dump into any of my own character attributes I chose.
Bonking Rachel and Sandy had been enough to allow me to survive a duel against the Syndicate’s top hitman (along with a bunch of his men), and the random hookups I’d enjoyed after had done even more.
I was taller than I had been before. Stronger, and much more coordinated than normal. I was no longer pudgy—at all—and both Rachel and Sandy agreed I was now actively good-looking. I had also given myself a couple of additional inches where they counted most, and both girls seemed pleased by the upgrade.
The best bit? I still had a way to go before I came close to maxing out any attribute, but what I already had should be more than enough to deal with Michael and Damien Moss.
All at once, the numbness in my hand went away, and I knew that Michael’s first swing hadn’t done any permanent damage. He swung one more time, still grinning as if he was winning, but Azrael’s reminder of who I’d become was more than enough.
I was the bad guy here. I was the bully. And poor little Michael and Damien were no more than practice.
Using both reflexes and strength that were new to me, I held up my hand and caught the metal pipe, holding it in place for just long enough for Michael to realize the danger he was in. Then I gave it a twist, wrenching the pipe out of his grasp.
“My turn,” I said, and turned the words into action.
Unlike Michael’s efforts, mine were effective. In less than a minute, I had smashed the pipe into Michael’s tough, wiry body perhaps a dozen times, breaking his ribs, at least one wrist, a knee for good measure, and opening up a nasty gash on his cheek.
I could have used the pipe to smash his skull and ended it then and there, but he’d made me angry. When he was down on the ground, I threw the pipe to one side and dragged him over to where his cousin still lay, ignoring his feeble attempts to continue to fight.
I could have drawn one of my knives to finish the job, but I’d started this with a gun, and that’s what I intended to use.
It took me only a second or two to find it, and then I was back, looming over not just one Moss, but both of them.
Damien was still whimpering, still crying like a little girl, his brief moment of laughter when he thought Michael might win all but forgotten. Michael was at least as badly injured as his cousin now, yet he didn’t cry or groan. Instead, he simply glared at me with unflagging hatred.
“Now,” I said. “My employer had a special request for this job. They wanted to allow you the chance to offer a final word. This is your moment. If you have anything to say, maybe a message to your mother, an apology, whatever, now is your chance.”
Damien responded with a whimpered, “No,” which was to be expected. But Michael showed more grit.
“Fuck you,” he said, even though it must have pained him to say it. I’d got in a good one to the side of his face, and could see the blood on the remains of his teeth.
“Is that it?” I asked them.
But they said nothing more. “So be it,” I said.
As casually as you like, I shot them both through the head.
As before, the act gave me a sense of satisfaction. A brief moment of euphoria, as if killing was what I had been put on this earth to do. The sight of them both relaxing, obviously dead, combined with the smell of blood and death gave me an erection that I intended to put to good use the moment I saw the girls once again.
Yet, at the same time, I felt there was something missing. This was the fourth job I’d done since taking out Megadeath #4, and the first where I’d had more than one official target.
It was tempting to just continue as I’d been doing, taking whatever contract suited my mood, and enjoying the buzz and the money that came with it. But that route led to stagnation.
When all was said and done, I was doing this as part of an ongoing quest to improve my status. In a world where that status, legal and illegal, came with a real number, I’d started my quest while languishing in single digits.
Now, with this double killing, my illegal status (which was the only one I really cared about) might break into the thirties. Then again, it might not, either. Because I wasn’t exactly pushing myself. I was just doing the same old things I had already done.
If I wanted my status to improve even more, I had to start doing something different.
Chapter 3
“Don’t forget,” Azrael said, interrupting my musings, “this job was supposed to be discreet. You have a mess to clean up. And a couple of bodies to dispose of.”
As usual, Azrael was correct. With a sigh, I set to work in the cousins’ own workshop, cutting Damien and Michael Moss into more manageable sections. They had all the tools I needed, and even had a whole shelf full of large sheets of plastic that I used to contain the mess.
First, I collected my trophies. A pinky from Damien, and a forefinger from Michael. I didn’t
know why I did it, not exactly, but by then it had become part of my routine. So far, I’d collected nearly an entire set of digits, left and right hands. I kept them in a sealed container in my freezer. Perhaps one day I would find a more discreet location for them, but for now, I figured that would probably do.
Then, with the trophies safely wrapped and stashed in my pocket, I went back to work, using knives and saws to hack both bodies apart. That done, I wrapped each piece up individually, like Christmas presents of the most macabre sort, and loaded them all into the trunk of my black Mustang.
Then it was a simple matter of running a hose over the workshop floor and scrubbing all evidence of my work away.
I found myself humming as I worked, enjoying the simple tasks, and by the time I was done, the workshop was probably cleaner than it had been for months. I closed the door behind me, making sure it was locked, and was whistling a happy tune as I climbed in behind the wheel of my car.
It was already evening. Likely, the people who worked at the pet crematorium I used to dispose of corpses like these would be done for the day. Nevertheless, I took a meandering route through the city and didn’t arrive at my destination until long after the sun had fully set.
I took a moment to make sure there was no one in sight and then drove my beast of a car around the back so no one could see me from the road.
“Let’s do this,” I said to myself, and got to work.
The first time I had disposed of a body this way, my roommate Chad, I’d been anxious, looking over my shoulder all the while. But it had since become just part of my routine. Sure, some of the jobs I had done were more public, which meant I could leave corpses out in plain view. But this was the fourth one I’d done like this.
It took a couple of hours to feed all of the Moss boys into the cremator, and a little while longer to shut everything down, making sure I’d left no evidence to show I was there.
Perhaps one day I would have to find a better option for disposing the bodies. I’d heard pigs were good for that sort of thing, but I wasn’t entirely sure I liked that idea. I mean, pigs were part of the food chain. Did I really want to introduce human flesh and bone into that?