Deception of the Demon Girl

by Eddie R. Hicks

  This is where I wished there were more demons in the city. At least they can’t be killed by succubus sex. Weakened, winded, maybe knocked out, but demons always had enough in them to keep on living, humans not so much.

  The bus quickly got overcrowded, as dozens of people, like me, were forced to stand in any available open space. Arms brushed against mine, sending tingles of excitement that fed into my thighs. A woman backed up into me and her hands accidentally touched my ass. She was quick to say sorry. I wanted to tell her to shut up and keep touching it.

  I had to get off two stops early before I lost my cool. Even then, I glanced at a man and his friend who also got off the bus when I did and was tempted to bring them home and have them tag team me.

  The long elevator ride up, alone, to the safe house that we converted into an office quelled my thoughts and desires to feed. After a quick exhale releasing all the built-up sexual stress, I went for my phone, its screen was still blank. So much for calling Alice and telling her what was up with her brother.

  Sticking your wet phone in rice was a myth, it didn’t do shit to get my phone running again. Time for a new phone. Seems like I’m breaking or losing them with each case.

  Emily was inside the office by the time I got in. Her cat ears picked up when I walked in, leaping off the couch like a kid excited that her parents got home from a long day of work.

  “Jesus, Reika, what the fuck!” Emily said, greeting me.

  Shutting the door behind me, I went searching for booze stashed away in my desk’s drawer. Oh, and I should probably answer her too. “Plant zombies ain’t got shit on me.”

  I found a small unopened bottle in the second drawer, stored away in case of an emergency, like now. As I poured the continents of the bottle into my mouth, I tossed the damp and burned envelop across the desk to Emily. She didn’t pick it up. Turns out, as I was searching for the booze, Emily went back to her couch, watching TV.

  “So, I go missing,” I said, took another hit of the drink, then wiped my lips clean. “And you watch TV?”

  “I just got back after spending the whole day looking for you,” Emily said, her eyes remaining forward at the TV screen. “You’re welcome by the way.”

  “For what? You didn’t find my ass in the end.”

  “What happened?”

  Booze bottle in one hand, the envelope in the other, I sat with Emily, forcing the envelope into her hands.

  “They took me out, almost drowned me.” I drank some more, and that shit was good and was quickly making me forget about my succubus lust cravings growing between my legs. “Henry pulled me out along with that package.”

  We went over the envelope’s contents together. The two of us agreed that the pictures of Jim and I were taken from secret cameras, back before I had the ability to disrupt their ability to operate. Next came the note I couldn’t make heads or tails of, Emily took one look of it, and knew what was up.

  “This is Russian,” she said.

  “Yeah, I think one of those plant zombies used to be a Russian gang banger. What does it say?”

  Emily scanned the note, up and down falling back on her knowledge of the Russian language, one of many she picked during her five hundred plus years living on the planet.

  “Can’t make all of it out,” she said, keeping her feline eyes on the wet paper. “It’s ramblings about wanting more of the flowers. Something, something, cleanse the city and make it safe again, something, prevent a war by removing …” She paused, giving the impression that there was more.

  “Removing what?”

  Emily made a fierce cringe showing her cat-like teeth in the process. Lowering the note, she faced me and revealed. “By removing you, Reika.”

  “Crazy talk,” I snorted and put the bottle back to my lips.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Dude was a fucking zombie. He must have been losing his mind when whatever it was that turned him into that, got into his head, and then wrote that.”

  The bit about them wanting to remove me didn’t faze me either. People are always trying to kill me, the Russians especially, it was nothing new.

  “The flowers …” I muttered, thinking back to the horror I saw, and narrowly escaped from with my body in one piece. “Those zombies had big ass vines coming out from their backs, all connected to something I couldn’t see.”

  “A bigger plant?”

  “That’d be my guess. Well, a bigger flower, the vines were covered in oversized rose thorns.” I went to take another drink and then stopped with the bottle two inches away from my mouth. “Whatever this flower is, it’s dangerous, probably making the zombies.”

  “Wasn’t there a trade going on for it?”

  “Yeah, Giovanni had it. He was trading it for demon blood the Russians had.”

  And the flowers he was trading them had the strange magical energy that wasn’t Umbral, just like the rose Emily stole from Alice.

  “That’s not good,” Emily said, shaking her head.

  “No shit,” I grunted.

  “I mean, we left it behind, right?”

  “Oh, fuck.” When I fled that place, the blood and weird flowers that were going to be traded were left behind. If both those items got into the wrong hands, it’d create a whole lot of new problems for us. The blood could be used in creating new candidates for demonic possession. And the flowers? Fuck, if that’s what created the zombies, then we’d have more of them walking the streets. My bottle hit the coffee table ahead of us at that point. Maybe getting drunk, when I needed to be thinking critically was a bad idea. “This has to be Donovan; the whole attack was done using earth elemental talents … just no Umbral residue was left behind.”

  “Which makes it not Donovan, Reika,” Emily said. “You know it, I know it, Umbral energy residue is always left behind from magic.”

  If it wasn’t Donovan, or any other demon behind the attack and the creation of the zombies and flowers, then who the fuck was it?

  “Put the news on,” I said to her, as she was the one in control of the remote.

  Emily logged out of her Netflix account, and channel surfed about until we found the local news being played.

  The news anchor sat, delivering a report on a subject we had little to no interest on. “The public is being encouraged tonight to keep an eye out for a woman reported missing earlier today.” The news then shifted to report of yet another person in the city that mysteriously upped and vanished. The photo of a cute Asian woman appeared, long black hair and hypnotizing smile. Kind of reminded me of myself back in my collage days. “Doctor Grace Lim is a sex therapist who failed to return home.”

  Emily laughed pointing at the TV screen. “Ha! Reika, she looks just like you!”

  A grin manifested on my face. I stood next to Emily, watching the news report continue. The succubus temptress within me whispered devious ideas into my head. “Perfect chance to steal her ID,” I said, holding onto the grin.

  “For what?”

  “To feed my succubus,” I explained. “Think about it? They’ll come to me, thinking I’m a sex therapist with the solutions to their problems, and then …”

  My fingers and tongue finished the statement, making a lewd oral sex gesture with them.

  Emily cringed. “Oh, God.”

  “Relax, that was a joke.”

  “You’re such a slut these days, I can’t tell.”

  After a commercial break, the news returned showing, the view of the docks from above, recorded from a news helicopter. Blue and red lights from the NYPD lit up the darkened area, and ahead of those cars were dozens of black unmarked vehicles.

  The news anchor went on to talk about the incident, reporting about everything that happened except the zombies or the dangerous items found inside the building. Typical cover up shit, just like before when Lilith took over Lexi’s body, and Lucifer and his mooks caused a lot of shit in the city. There was someone high up somewhere, that knew of the paranormal world, and worked hard to keep most o
f it a secret. Only the NYPD and my clients knew the truth.

  Interestingly enough, the news reporter mentioned that the FBI was called in. That shit had me worried as they now had their paranormal team in operation. If the FBI was called to the scene, then it meant Gabe and his team took a backseat, supporting the FBI rather than leading the charge. I trust Gabe to do the smart thing when contaminated blood was found and destroy it. The feds? Not so much. Why? Because cover-ups, that’s why.

  I reached for my phone, though it proved to be a pointless task. It was still dead, so I made it deader by throwing it against the wall, not giving a flying fuck that it broke into pieces when it hit, making multiple clattering noises on the floor when gravity took hold.

  “Emily, let me borrow your phone.”

  Emily offered it to me, and then yanked it back as I went for it. She held up a single index finger to me and said. “Promise me you won’t break it?”

  “That depends on what Gabe tells me,” I said, yanking it from her hands.

  I dialed Gabe’s number while pacing back and forth after I stood up from the couch. It’d been a while since we spoke, and we hadn’t been on the greatest terms during that last talk.

  Gabe picked up. I heard the wind blowing in the background from the other end, as with police sirens. My guess was he was still at the docks.

  “Emily?” Gabe said.

  “Reika, actually,” I corrected him.

  “Ah, you tricked me.”

  “I broke my phone.”

  “What else is new?”

  “The shit that’s going down at the docks.”

  “Let me guess, that was you and your vigilante shit?”

  “Maybe,” I said, grinning, not that he could see it. “Do you know what’s going on down there? The news is feeding the public lies.”

  “A couple mob members were found dead, along with some weird stuff that could only be described as paranormal related.”

  “Let me guess, you’re not handling it?”

  “FBI has their paranormal team set up now. They took control of the investigation; the argument being was that the Russians were involved. Big problems like this, going forward, will be in their hands.”

  “I don’t like it, Gabe.”

  “To that, I think we can both agree.” I heard some distorted moving sounds in the background, then a car door closed, shutting out the outdoor noise. “Lately we’ve been dealing with the smaller paranormal cases. The stuff that involves the mob, the FBI is tackling, as with other cities in the country.”

  “Cities? So, it’s true then, demons left the city?”

  “Apparently so.”

  Demons operating beyond New York, it was only a matter of time before the situation got to that. They were like a virus spreading, one we failed to contain and eliminate in the city. The reason behind Jim’s disappearance, even though he was in Los Angeles, got a whole lot clearer.

  “The Russians have a stash of demon blood,” I said, leaving out the details as to why. Fucking Jim, why didn’t you destroy that blood? “It’s almost like last year, Gabe, just the Russians don’t have the ability to distribute the blood to hospitals or blood banks.”

  “They could still force demonic possession into anyone they want with that blood.”

  “And they were going to trade it to a man a client of mine asked me to find. He was going to offer the Russians some fucked up flowers for it. I think the flowers turn people into zombies.”

  “You’re pushing what I can believe, Reika.”

  “We live in a world full of magic, demons, incubus, succubus, shifters … zombies were bound to show up one day.”

  “What else can you tell me?”

  “So, you’re interested.”

  “Let’s say, I got some trust issues with the FBI,” Gabe said after a pause. “For starters, nobody told us about zombies.”

  Of course not, the FBI doesn’t want anyone to know, not even the NYPD. Cover-up again. If the FBI has their own team, then Gabe and I were going to be pushed out of this even more. I’m the queen of this fucking city. I’m the one that protects and defends it from the paranormal, not the feds, not the police, only me. And I got the fucking resume to prove it.

  “I think the demon that possessed Donovan is back in a new host since the attacks and the zombies were all Earth-based,” I said.

  “Hmm … fuck.”

  “You know Gabe; if you’d just popped him with enchanted bullets, we wouldn’t be having this problem.”

  “I had my reasons, Reika.”

  “Which, like the FBI, you don’t like to share with others.”

  There was a calming silence. Gabe no doubt processing my words, realizing we’re on the same team and the FBI were not. “Then let’s change that,” he said. “We’ll talk more tomorrow, it’s getting late now, and I still got stuff to finish up here.”

  We ended the call after that. Progress at last. Gabe was back on my side, ready to reveal all. It was right where I needed him.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Booze and sleep. It was the other way for me to recover my levels of Umbral energy, though it wasn’t enough. It was still low, I had enough in me to go full succubus on someone or bust out the light show with elemental magic for a few minutes, before I was empty.

  I made sure to leave the office with a Glock, a spare magazine, enchanted dagger, and my katana on me, just in case someone got brave. My black trench coat kept all those items hidden from the public eye while we made our way back to Hell’s Kitchen, more specifically the paranormal labs run by the NYPD.

  Emily and I strode in, moving deeper into the converted warehouse turned labs. In my hand was a new phone, sans my contact list and everyone else I had saved on it. I was too lazy to go searching for the SIM card on my old phone. I gave the new shiny mobile device a smile, putting it back into my coat’s pockets.

  “How long do you think that phone will last?” Emily asked.

  “I give it ‘til our next case,” I snorted.

  Well, that’s what I hoped. Having to get a third phone when midway into the current case was just going to be awkward as fuck to explain to my provider, more so than it already was.

  Charles was sitting in his usual spot in the labs, dressed in a white lab coat, typing away at some computer, adjusting the position of his glasses periodically. Whatever it was he was working on, it distracted him from noticing the two of us walk and stand behind him.

  “Charles,” I called out him. He turned in his chair, shocked, to face the two of us looking down at him. Emily offered him the rose she took from Alice, and his face turned a shade red, getting the wrong idea. I almost laughed. “This is the part where you tell us what we need to know about that rose, because we can’t figure it out.”

  He took the rose, made another adjustment of his glasses, giving it an analytical gaze. “A rose, ladies, are you trying to tell me something?”

  “I just did,” I snorted with arms crossed. “Get to fucking work.”

  “Whoa, whoa,” Charles said in a panic.

  “Relax, Charles.” My voice became a tad pleasant. “I’m playin’ you know I love you.”

  His eyes narrowed looking directly at me. “With your new abilities, Reika? I can’t tell anymore.”

  Emily gave me a pat on my back. “Reika loves everyone now.”

  “More like lusts after,” Charles said, rolling his eyes. “Oh, by the way.” He grabbed a pill bottle off his desk. “I finished the test on those pills.”

  I looked at the bottle grinning. “And?”

  “Inconsistent,” he said. “Some contained small traces of Umbral, while the other’s seemed fine.”

  I never did get around to following up on those pills. My sister had been taking them only to discover a hidden side effect. She got temporarily possessed by a Kitsune. I encountered a stripper as well that was on meds produced by the same manufacturer and they too had the same side effects.

  Turns out Doctor Schubert used to work in s
ecret for a pharmaceutical company owned by the Yakuza. What exactly he did we never did figure out, the head of the local Yakuza gang, Kojima, got possessed by a demon, but lost the memories of his host plus his own demon ones, taking with it the knowledge of Schubert’s involvement with the company.

  Come to think of it, Kojima too was taking pills produced by that company.

  “So, my sister was getting fed Umbral-laced pills for her medication?” I asked Charles.

  “She and anyone else who was taking meds that were produced from Tanaka Pharmaceutics,” he said as he placed the pills back on his desk and started moving back to his testing area holding the rose. “But like I said, inconsistent, looked like random individual pills were affected.”

  “You said they had Umbral in them, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “So, what if I took them? Would it restore my Umbral energy if I got spent?”

  He stopped and made a long pause; my words got the gears in his head moving. “Hmm, yeah it should, not a lot but if you were in a jam and needed Umbral restored on the fly, those pills should do it.”

  Perfect, just what I needed. “Give ‘em to me.”

  “Uh, that’s a bad idea,” he said, facing me. “Don’t know what the side effects would do to you. Plus weren’t these meds the ones your sister was taking for her mental condition? They weren’t prescribed to you, Reika.”

  “I can heal my body at night if the side effects start to kick in,” I said.

  “Well … that’s true,” he said, nodding.

  “So?”

  He gave his answer. “No, I need to run more tests.” And then continued moving deeper into his testing area to do whatever it was he did with his weird means of marrying forensic science with Wiccan rituals.

  I snatched the pills off his desk anyways when everyone’s back was turned. Emily has taught me well. Seriously though, whatever the side effect was for taking meds not prescribed me, I can heal through it with my powers. Being on this ‘no eating human souls’ diet was going to be the death of me if I couldn’t get my Umbral levels high enough for a dangerous situation.