by C. J. Pinard
“Quinn. Nice to meet you, dark stranger,” she purred, her voice both feminine and raspy.
Tristan thought this comment was odd, but continued. “This is my friend, Lauren. We’d like to get to know you better.”
Lauren had to hand it to him – he was a smooth talker for sure.
Quinn measured Lauren with an intense stare. As tough as Lauren thought she was, she admitted to herself that Quinn’s icy blue stare made her a bit uncomfortable. There was something behind those cold eyes that Lauren found creepy, almost frightening. She stole a glance at Tristan, who seemed to be enjoying the female’s attention, and quickly realized why succubae only chose male victims – they were the only ones who fell for their charms. While Lauren’s hackles were raised and she felt on full alert at the eeriness of this woman – this creature – Tristan seemed to be completely smitten with her.
And that scared Lauren even more than Quinn did.
Truth was, the cold stare reminded her of her father’s when she was young. He was an iron fist in her household; it was his way or the highway. She and her two sisters – and especially their mother – all cowered under her father’s controlling ways. He drank too much, which made his belligerence even worse. Lauren was the oldest of three and as soon as she graduated high school, she bolted from home to attend the University of Florida. She was glad her sisters had each other, and was happy they’d be leaving home in two more years, as they were twins and would both be turning eighteen. Lauren felt being under her father’s thumb had led to her being so tightly wound herself, and tried every day to relax, but wasn’t having much luck.
She was happy she’d been placed in New Orleans after graduating from the academy. Being from Tampa, it wasn’t a huge adjustment for her, but it was far enough away to ward off the guilt trips her parents would most likely make about her not visiting enough if she lived closer. She was only twenty-four and had secured first a place in the FBI, then a slot in the BSI when one opened.
Not that she had applied for the BSI.
The unsolved case of a voodoo priestess had sealed it for her. The woman was found unresponsive in her tarot card shop, called in by a customer, and when Special Agent Lauren Clark arrived, she could see the victim lying face-up with a buck knife protruding from her chest. What was odd, though, was that the victim also had a lot of dried blood smeared around her mouth.
That, and she was completely naked.
After the voodoo priestess was transported to the morgue, Lauren waited for a report of cause of death. The next day she received a call from the medical examiner. “You wanna meet me down here while I do the autopsy?” he’d asked Lauren over the phone.
She shuddered at his question. She normally would not. But her boss had encouraged her to sit in on a few and had told the M.E. to call her for the next one. She walked the two blocks to the medical examiner’s office and headed straight for the room she hated the most. Just part of the job, she’d tell herself every time she walked through the doors of the smelly, sterile room.
“Hey, Miss Clark. I’ve got her in drawer three,” the young man said, setting his tools down in neat rows on the gleaming metal table he’d prepared for the autopsy. Dr. Erick Collins had only been on the job two years so he was still excitable as he talked about the cases. Lauren thought it was cute. He even flirted with her when she was there.
But he was still creepy. I mean, who chooses to do this for a living anyway?
M.E. Collins pulled drawer number three open and flipped back the sheet. Lauren was surprised to see the body looking normal and not sullen and ashen like most African-American people started to look as they decomposed. She chalked it up to it having only been about twenty-four hours since death.
Erick began chatting about a new restaurant in the Quarter as they were getting ready to move her to a rolling gurney when, seemingly at the same time, both the special agent and the medical examiner noticed there was no stab wound in her chest any longer. They each opened their mouths to say something to the other, when suddenly the voodoo woman sat up and screamed bloody murder.
They both backed up and Lauren went for the door of the morgue to call for help when, before their eyes, the naked woman looked at the scene before her and quickly shifted into a large reddish-brown wolf. It snarled at them both, then bolted through the open door. The police never caught it, and Lauren never saw Dr. Erick Collins again.
A shudder trickled down her spine again as the DJ of Club Muse made an announcement about people bogging him down with song requests and it bolted her out of her memories. Her eyes shot over to Tristan, whose eyes were entirely too close to Quinn’s – whose own eyes were now jet-black – and she leapt over the sofa they were sitting at and right onto Tristan.
∞∞∞
They had parked in an alley about five blocks away and had to walk and not talk all the way there. Both were now exploding.
Lauren slammed the car door and started up the sedan. “What in God’s name is your problem?” she yelled at Tristan.
“Woman, you are way too demanding for a Saturday night,” he replied, slamming his own door and looking at his partner with disdain.
She stared at him incredulously. “Are you shitting me, Ellis? That was a damn succubus. She almost had you!”
“I had it under control! You didn’t have to drag me off like that. You made me look like some whipped little bitch!”
Lauren put the car in drive and peeled out into traffic, barely missing an oncoming car.
“No more. I can’t do this again. It’s not going to happen again,” she seethed.
Tristan had his arms folded. “I’m your partner! You don’t trust me?”
“It’s her I don’t trust! You’re male, Tristan. Don’t you get it? It’s not your fault. You were perfectly comfortable in her presence while I felt like peeling off my own skin every time she looked at me. She made me physically sick. She’s evil.”
Tristan calmed down a little and studied Lauren’s face and could see genuine sincerity there. “Huh. I didn’t get that from her at all.”
“See!”
“You sure you’re not exaggerating?”
She snorted and rolled down her window to get some fresh air, even though the air conditioning was on in the car. “No, I’m not.”
There was more silence as she pulled up to his apartment. He went to open the door and looked at her. “Look, I’m sorry, Clark. I really didn’t mean to scare you. I can handle myself, though.”
She shook her head. “I know your intentions are good, but you know what they say about good intentions…”
“The road to hell is paved with them,” Tristan finished.
“See you Monday. Stay inside the rest of the weekend,” she ordered.
He looked at her long and hard, then nodded, closing the car door behind him.
Chapter 13
∞∞∞
Ace Malone was watching the cemetery from his car. He tapped his long fingers on the door through the open window.
“So how was Island Duty?” he asked Erick.
Erick looked up from the book he was reading and glared at his new boss, the head of the New Orleans Immortal coven. “It pretty much sucked, but isn’t that what they all say after playing corrections officer to a bunch of incarcerated vamps and shifters on the island for two years? Eight years of medical school and I was doing something a trained monkey could be hired to do.”
Ace laughed. “Yes, well you may not see it now, but what you learned over there will come in handy one of these days.”
Erick closed the book. “Like sitting in a car in front of a very dark, old cemetery waiting for the dead to rise?”
Ace looked past him and into the cemetery again. A large, thick black iron gate surrounded it and he thought how irreverent it was that they didn’t put solid fences around where the dead were resting. It seemed that it was this way all around the South. Ace scrubbed a hand over his light blonde buzz cut and then over his light five o’clock shadow. “We�
�re not exactly waiting for the dead to rise. The undead, more like it.”
Erick snorted. “Oh, I beg your pardon.”
“Well did you at least learn to get a better grasp on your gift?”
Erick’s face lit up with a cocky grin. “Would you like me to get out and lift up the car with you in it so I can demonstrate?”
Ace laughed. “No, that won’t be necessary. Besides,” he said, looking up at the sky which was bloated with clouds, “it looks like rain. I’d hate to see you try to lift this thing when it’s soaking wet and slippery.”
“Well that’s where you’ll come in handy. You’ll just have to keep the rain off me,” Erick answered.
“Hey… I can manipulate the elements to a certain extent, but I’m not Mother Nature.”
Their super-sensitive hearing picked up a noise in the cemetery. They whipped their heads around to see someone slinking through the gravestones and stop at the one they were watching.
“Is that him?” Erick whispered.
Ace nodded, holding binoculars up to his face. “Yes, that’s definitely Elias. Beautiful bastard that he is.”
Erick motioned for the binoculars and Ace handed them over. Erick let out a whistle through his teeth. “I see what you mean. Looks like he belongs in a magazine or something.”
Elias De la Cruz was a two-hundred-year-old vampire who stood over six feet tall and had long, curly black hair and haunting brown bedroom eyes. Erick wondered if his skin had once been a warm caramel, because now it was quite pale. Not as pale as other vampires he’d seen, but definitely lacking that warm Spanish hue.
Elias was bent over a grave, staring at it intently as if waiting for something to happen.
“Where’d you get this tip from anyway?” Ace asked, taking a swig of Pepsi from a can.
“We had a vampire on the island who was about a year out from release. He somehow found out I was from Louisiana and offered up some information about the vampire clan here in Na’wlins.”
Ace laughed. “Somehow found out, huh? Couldn’t have been that strong New Orleans drawl of yours? The accents of the natives are unmistakable around here.”
“Yeah, well anyway so we told this vamp he could get out early if his information panned out. Turns out he was right. He said the head of the clan was named Elias and he was looking for a mate. Was turning young girls, trying to find the right one. Destroying them if they didn’t please him after the turning.”
Ace raised both eyebrows. “Young girls?”
Erick waved a hand. “Yeah, you know, like late teens, early twenties.” He looked to the cemetery again. “Look,” he pointed.
The observed Elias open up a large stone crypt and walk inside of it. After about two agonizing minutes, he came out holding a female with long, golden hair wrapped in a sheet or blanket.
“What the hell?” Ace said.
Erick whistled through his teeth again. “Straight out of Dracula. Someone’s been reading too much Bram Stoker.”
“That leech is older than the Irish author, smartass,” Ace whispered.
Elias walked to a small red Porsche 911 and gingerly placed her into the front seat. He went around to the driver’s side and started up the sports car, driving off slowly.
“What do we do now, boss?” Erick asked.
Ace started up his black Camaro with a grin. “Why, we follow him, of course.”
∞∞∞
“There’s a shitload of new vampires in the clan, I hear,” Tristan said, picking chicken from his teeth.
“That’s disgusting,” Lauren said, sipping her unsweetened tea.
“Wings are not disgusting. Besides, the Saints are playing, you can’t watch the game without hot wings.”
She laughed. “Yes, actually you can.”
He wiped hot sauce from his lips. “Well I can’t have beer on duty so wings will have to do. Especially since they’re playing the Vikings. I should be at home. With a beer.”
She glanced up at the TV set in the corner of the small restaurant and shook her head. A football fan she was not. She pointed at his plate of wings and fried okra. “I see you’re embracing the Southern food.”
He smiled. “I embraced Southern food before I moved to the South. It just tastes better here.”
“That’s because it originated here. Duh.”
He lowered his voice and looked around. “So what do you think the boss is going to want us to do about the succubus?”
“Leave her the hell alone,” Lauren answered quickly. “I mean it, Tristan. Stay away from her. We gave our supervisors the report. They can take it from here.”
He moved his eyes from the TV back to her blue ones. “What does that mean? They’re going to kill her?”
She shrugged, removing the napkin from her lap and folding it neatly on her now-empty plate. “I don’t know, but I do know that succubae are the most dangerous of vampires.”
“Is there a reason we didn’t learn about them at the academy?” he asked, his full attention now on the conversation.
“Nobody knew anything about them, not truly, just thought they were female vampires. But we learned that not all female vampires are succubae but all succubae are vampires, feeding off of the soul instead of blood. Seems the safer of the two, right?” she asked.
He nodded. “Yes, but it’s not, it just makes new vampires like the boss said.”
“Yes, of the worst kind. When a regular vampire turns a human, it becomes just like him, blood drinking with a sunlight allergy. But when a succubus takes the soul of her victim, who is almost always male, he becomes almost feral. Most regular vampires maintain some of their humanity and try to live quietly and stay under the radar, but the soulless ones usually have to be put down. There have been rare cases where the vampires created can be tamed, so to speak, and live amongst other vampires in a clan.”
“So they drink blood like a regular vampire? They don’t go around sucking souls or whatever like a succubus?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No, we have never seen or heard of a male succubus. Not saying it’s not possible, but we’ve never experienced that. I’ve been doing some research.”
“Didn’t the boss say something about the victim killing the succubus to reverse the change?”
She nodded. “Yes, it’s rumored that if he kills her within seven days of the… assault… he gets his ‘soul’ back, and he doesn’t become a blood-sucking night demon.”
Tristan shuddered. “I wonder how many of them know this.”
“Not many,” she said. “This is why we like to follow the victims and keep our eyes on the succubus. I think the Bureau is leaning toward approaching the victims and telling them they need to kill the succubus to get their life back.”
“What if we just kill her?”
She sucked in a breath as if thinking. “I don’t think that works. I think the victim has to do it.”
“Geez. This sounds like something out of mythology and folklore.”
She smiled. “It is. These creatures have been around for thousands of years. In the last couple of centuries, they’ve become good at hiding. Guess they were tired of townsfolk with torches and pitchforks knocking on their doors and burning them alive in their own homes. And now that people don’t believe they’re real anymore, they’re becoming more bold again.”
Tristan looked down at his half-finished food and pushed the plate away. “I don’t think I’m hungry anymore.”
After the lunchtime conversation with Lauren, Tristan decided he was going to Club Muse by himself to check out the succubus without having to be on the clock. His curiosity was even more piqued than before… and he wanted to watch her intently. No talking to her this time.
Or that’s what he told himself.
Thursday nights were not that busy but they were busy enough. He arrived earlier than he should have and ordered a beer from the bar, grateful he could drink and wasn’t on duty. He chatted up with the bartender for a while and then found a seat in the
dark recesses of the club and watched as the place became more packed.
After about two hours, he spotted her.
She went to sit in the lounge she had chosen before, the same large bodyguard/bouncer at her side, who he now realized not only didn’t work for the club, but was probably not even human.
Vampire.
He briefly wondered if she’d created that particular monster and shuddered thinking about it.
It didn’t take long for the boys to line up. She had her same entourage of girls, and Tristan studied them closely too, unable to determine if they were succubae, vampires, or just humans. His instincts told him they were probably human girls, duped by this succubus to hang out with her, chosen solely on their beautiful looks, but Tristan couldn’t be sure. And he sure as hell did not want to find out the hard way.
The night dragged on. He continued to watch the succubus and her friends very closely, but she didn’t seem to take an interest in anyone in particular. So far, Tristan didn’t think she’d noticed him sitting there, but he wasn’t taking any chances by showing himself. She’d surely remember him from last weekend and surely she’d know something was up if he caught her eye again.
Tristan had been at the club for over three hours now. Young MC’s “Bust a Move” started playing through the speakers and he smiled. He loved this song.
“You want to dance?”
Tristan whipped his head around to see a girl with short, blunt hair the color of midnight ink talking to him. Her eyes were crystal blue and her skin was as white as paper. She was staring at him, smiling, and he realized this was one of her girls.
He smiled back and got up from the chair he’d been sitting in and grabbed her hand, which was cold to the touch. “Sure.”
The two danced together for the next three songs. He held onto her hips as she swayed them in a short silver sequined dress, After the third song ended, Tristan told her he needed a break. He was dripping sweat and needed a breather. He noticed his dancing partner not only didn’t seem to be sweaty, she wasn’t flushed red with heat, nor was she even out of breath. Everyone else on the dance floor was hot, as it was crowded with writhing bodies and the temperature inside seemed to match outside.