“Got it.” She guided the moped out of the garage and along the street. Mundanes were about, but they didn’t pay much attention. Apparently they were used to seeing girls of that dating service making house calls, and of course some men liked to tackle them in pairs. One man we passed took a good hard look at the pair of us, then changed course to walk toward the CIRCUMSPECT DATING entrance.
We came to an apartment complex, parked, and headed in and up to the third floor. There was a woman in the elevator, but Suzy made a gesture and the woman ignored us. I recognized the magic: a tune-out spell, probably bought from a Witch. The woman saw us but we didn’t register in her consciousness.
The apartment door was locked, with a DO NOT DISTURB sign hung on the knob. Suzy touched the knob, focused, then turned it, and the door opened. More incidental magic: an unlocking spell. Why struggle with heavy magic, such as walking through walls, when mini spells sufficed?
We went to the bedroom. A middle-aged man slept on the bed. “Damn,” Suzy muttered.
Now I understood the “orientation” problem: how could she engage him in sex when the operative part was buried under his body? To try to turn him over physically would likely wake him, and waking sex was not the business of a Succuba; the client had to be asleep.
She tackled it. “Turn over, dear,” she whispered in his ear. “Turn over. Turn over, handsome.” About the eighth repetition it seemed to register: he turned over and lay on his back.
Now Suzy hoisted up her skirt. She wore no underclothing. She opened the man’s pajama fly, lifted out his limp penis, and gently kneaded it. It responded immediately; I realized that her touch was magic, causing instant arousal. Soon he had a formidable erection. Then she got on him, fitted him slowly into her, stretched out on him, and kissed his mouth.
The effect was dramatic. His body hunched, thrusting deeply into her and ejaculating immediately. I saw her buttocks flex, and realized that she was squeezing him internally, milking the last of his semen. “Good boy,” she whispered, kissing him again. Then she drew herself off him, closed his fly, and let her skirt drop back down as she stood on the floor. She hadn’t even taken off her shoes.
She walked to the bedside desk and picked up the two-dollar bill on it. Then we departed the apartment, leaving its occupant still sound asleep, but with a smile on his face.
“Two dollars?” I asked when we were clear.
“Traditional gratuity. It hasn’t changed in a century, at least not for us. The fact that it’s a two-dollar bill is a signal that he’s expecting me. Now let me Change.”
She invoked her magic and shifted to male form, becoming Innis. It happened much faster than my own Change; this form of Supe specialized in it. He reached down to zip up the skirt, which I now saw was more like culottes, convertible to a man’s shorts. The shirt needed no adjustment; it now covered wider shoulders instead of a full bosom. I made a mental note to get a similar outfit for myself; it was efficient.
“Now the next,” he said.
“Your Change,” I said as we rode down in the elevator, the two of us alone. “How soon do you have to do it, after sex?”
“There’s no time limit. It’s just that we can’t have sex twice in succession the same form; we have to Change. Since we have to have sex frequently, we generally Change immediately after a tryst, to be ready for the next. My last client last night was female, so I did her then Changed and spent the day female.”
The next client was just down the street, in another complex, on the second floor. She was married, but the two of them seemed married in name only. He was still up watching TV football, but she was not with him. We slid by him with another tune-out spell and entered the bedroom. There she was, spread out invitingly, sunny side up, naked. She was well formed; it seemed a shame that her husband was more interested in the game than in her.
“Hello you gorgeous creature,” Innis murmured appreciatively. He sat beside her and stroked her full breasts, then kissed them. She made a little moan of pleasure as her nipples swelled. Then he stroked her vulva, and I saw it too expand, stimulated.
He mounted her and touched his member to her vagina. Her breath quickened. He pushed in half an inch. She began panting. It was apparent that his touch turned her on, making her eager for the culmination. He advanced a little farther, and she practically rose up to meet him. Finally he thrust in fully, spread his body on hers, and kissed her.
She erupted like a volcano, her whole body shaking with the rapture of her orgasm. He thrust repeatedly, not because he needed to, but because that magnified her pleasure. I could almost see the ejaculate pumping into her, pulse after pulse.
Then he withdrew, slowly, leaving her shuddering with aftershocks of pleasure. “I wish I could stay the night with you, you phenomenal creature, but I must be on my way,” he said with regret as he picked up the two dollar bill. She just lay there, in fading bliss. Was she really asleep?
Innis Changed, becoming Suzy and adjusting her clothing. “She’s always fun,” she said. “She really appreciates our visits.”
We walked past the husband, still locked in the game. Did he have an idea what he was missing? It seemed like such a waste.
We rode on to the first client on the other list. “This will be a little different,” Suzy said. “Because I don’t know him. He may recognize the difference.”
As it turned out, there was no such problem. The man was dead drunk. Not only was that sloppy, his penis remained determinedly limp. “Crap! I can’t afford to take time. I’ll have to suck him.”
“Oral works?” I asked.
“No. It has to be traditional penis/vulva.” Suzy got on the man, fed his limp member to her vagina, and closed it around him. Then I heard a faint humming. “Vacuum,” she explained. She got him hard, then kneaded him peristaltically until she drew his ejaculate from him.
Succubi had powers I had not thought of.
Between clients we had a chance to talk. “How exactly did Increase/Succula die?”
“We spent much of the day figuring that out. Increase had been dead several hours before we located him. He had gone out on his route, but not returned. I had a duplicate of his client list, so I followed it, and discovered him dead on the floor in the client’s apartment, pale as a mask, no mark on him. We brought him home and had the doctor examine him. He had bled out internally. He had been dosed with enchanted red squill, normally used to kill rats. It thins the blood to the point where clotting can’t occur.”
“I didn’t realize you folk ate or drank when on your tour,” I said.
“We don’t. He didn’t eat it. As near as we can tell, it was in the ejaculate of the client. Succula took it in, Changed, and that activated it and took her out within an hour. Had she known, she would have come home before Changing and we could have cleaned it out of her with minimal damage. But the Change affected every part of the body, and the squill spread though the whole of him and took him out before he knew. He just lay down and died.”
“In the ejaculate! And it didn’t affect him?”
“It would have, had he done a Change or equivalent. It was inert until then. He must have injected it into his prostate, and let the ejaculation carry it on out. Then he departed while Increase died. It was a brutal, ugly scene.”
“I hate to say it, but that does seem to fit the pattern of our serial killer. He took out a Demon by putting his bottle in the freezer and leaving.”
“Well, catch him! Torture him. Kill him. He deserves it all.”
“But if each of you have a regular client list, wouldn’t this man have been vetted before?”
“Yes, of course. All Innis’s clients were safe. But we discovered that the regular client had had an accident and spent the night in the hospital unexpectedly. The killer came in to take his place, we think without his knowledge. So he was there, sleeping in the client’s bed, when Succula came. She must never have thought to verify his identity; it was routine, one of many. One horny sleeping man is much li
ke another. She milked him and died.”
Another fiendishly clever murder plot. “If it was an intruder primed for murder, was he really asleep?”
“He could have been. But it might not have mattered. We do it with sleeping folk, but can do it with a wakeful one if he plays the part, making the motions. Most men aren’t good at that; they get near a hole, they want to jam into it. But if he let Succula stimulate him, mount him, and take him in, it would work. We do think it was a Supe, because no mundane would have the wit for such a sophisticated ploy, or the ability to accomplish it.”
“Wouldn’t Succula have recognized a Supe?”
“Certainly. But there are occasional Supes on our client lists; they sleep too, and hunger for more sex than they get by day. Some like to do it with us, especially females, because we always make them climax. Males tend not to care much whether the females get theirs, and some females may get tired of sex entirely so leave their males hungry. I’ve had sex with Supes, both ways. If they play the roles, they get the services.”
“Supes take care of Supes.”
“Exactly. If I’m male when we finish the night, and you are worked up, I could do you.”
“Thank you, no,” I said quickly, without explaining further. Had I been Phil, the chance of sex with a Succuba might well have turned me on. But perhaps fortunately, I wasn’t.
We continued the rounds, and did manage to complete them by dawn. One of them was the man who had been hospitalized; he was back home, a bandage around his broken arm, sedated, but clearly happy to enjoy his nocturnal dream. He was obviously not the killer.
All of which left me pretty much where the other murders had: with no viable suspects. I had verified that Suzy/Innis hadn’t done it, and really no one else could have, without that client list.
I thanked Suzy for her help, and she thanked me for mine; I had enabled her to make it through on schedule.
Next day I described it all to Syd. “So it’s a mystery how the killer knew where to do it,” I concluded.
“I wonder.” She did some spot research. “Hospital admissions are an open record. If someone knew that a particular patient was patronizing a Succuba…”
And that of course was it. Our killer had been alert for such an opportunity, and struck when it presented itself. “But that means that these killings are truly crimes of opportunity, not passion. No way to run them down by motive.”
“I wonder,” she said. “I am thinking that one could be passion, and the others opportunity, done to conceal the real one. What they have in common is their randomness. If we can run down one with genuine motive…”
“Queue!” I said. “Demon Damne dumped her.”
She nodded. “But there are problems.”
“She has an alibi,” I agreed. “And I know she’s innocent.”
“About that innocence: I have a notion you may not like.”
“Let’s have it regardless.”
“Your secondary power is to read inner minds when folk are doing their magic. That’s invaluable. She’s similar to you as a Were. Suppose she has a similar mental ability?”
“Similar?”
“Only different. The ability to be completely, telepathically persuasive. At least when a person’s mind is open because of Changing. Projecting rather than reading.”
“Oh my,” I breathed, seeing it. “While we were both Changing, and I was reading her, she was giving me the certainty of her innocence.”
“Can you accept that intellectually?”
“Intellectually, yes. Emotionally, no. But maybe I had better trust my intellect, this time. It does make sense. But there’s the matter of her alibi for the Demon murder.”
“I’m still working on that. It is suspiciously convenient, doubling your satisfaction that she is innocent. Almost as if planned.”
“Almost as if planned,” I echoed. “We need to study that situation and that alibi again, in case there’s a hole in it.”
“That’s what I’m working on. So far I’m balked. That timing is not just your belief; it’s real.”
“Still, it may give us a viable suspect, for a change.”
“That could be. But proving it is another matter.”
That, indeed, was the problem. We finally had a suspect, but without proof, we were still helpless. However, it was progress.
Chapter 10:
Zombie
We struggled with the details of the several murders for another day, figuring out how Queue could have done them all, but that Demon murder alibi balked us. That was the one that provided Motive; without it we had no real case. And that was the one with a physical obstruction: Queue could not have been in two places at the same time. So maybe she cunningly had set it up that way, knowing that we would eventually catch on to the persuasion projection; we still could not get around it. How had she worked it? We had to suspect her, because the alternative was to have nothing. I found my certainty of her innocence slipping; either it was wearing off, or my intellect was winning over my belief. Either made sense; an imposed belief was bound to yield eventually to reality. Maybe it would have been different if I had been deeply religious, accustomed to never questioning faith.
Nonce called, back from her excursion and eager for news and diversion. I joined her for a date, and her thighs were as friendly as ever, but it was also evident that her passion was receding. As she said, Witches tended not to be romantically permanent. There would not be a breakup, merely a compatible fading. “But you won’t be hurting,” she said brightly. “You’ve got Molly on tap. She’s your kind, another Were. She’s pretty, nice, innocent, and she thoroughly loves you. She even rooms with a suspect, facilitating your tracking. What more could you want?”
So I called her bluff. I phoned Molly in her presence and gave her my cell number. “Call me when our schedules align,” I suggested.
“Maybe after you catch the killer?”
“Sure.” As if that were incipient. I wished it were!
“But not quite yet,” Nonce said, and went back into seduction mode. If she was nettled, that was a positive way of showing it.
But now I wondered: if Queue were truly our serial killer, was it safe for Molly to be living with her?
Meanwhile Sensei Oto called Syd, and they set up a wilderness romp, jaguar and python. Syd was far from ready to replace Bear romantically, but was flattered by Oto’s evident interest, and this looked like her future. He was a good man, a bit like Bear in some ways.
And Delle Witch, she of the Penny Curse, called to let me know that her date with Burket Goblin had worked out nicely, thanks to my advice. They had had a most satisfactory culmination, and she wasn’t a virgin any more. She expected to do it again, soon. I suspect she gave me more credit than was due, considering that Nonce had set it up, but I was glad for her. Mena expected to remain her friend.
Everything seemed to be going well, except for the case I was on: the serial murderer. We needed one good break, but it eluded us.
Then another call came in: “A Zombie has been murdered,” Syd said. “They’re asking for you. Here’s the address.”
“On my way.” I just about left skid marks on the office floor as I got out to my car.
The site was an apple orchard. The Zombies were on ladders harvesting the apples. I knew why: they represented cheap migrant labor. It would have been illegal to use them, except that mundanes did not believe Zombies existed, so passed no law. There would have been a massive public protest if the eaters of those apples knew what had handled them, but again, only foolish children actually believed in Zombies or anything supernatural. So the big farmers got away with it, in the tacit conspiracy of silence. It was like allowing so many rat droppings per pound of grain, or the bloody horrors of the slaughterhouse: the eaters of breads, pasta, sausage, and such tuned it out in the choreographed denial that enabled business to function efficiently.
So where was the boss Zombie? I paused beneath the nearest tree. “Hey, I need to see Zoro.
”
The Zombie on the ladder looked to be fresh out of the grave. He still had some hair and an eyeball, and no bones were poking out of his torso. He peered down at me with that eyeball. “Zzzooo!” he wheezed.
“Right: Zoro,” I agreed. “I need to see him.”
“Zzzooo!” the Zombie repeated, louder. The adjacent Zombies turned toward him. Then they dropped off their ladders, not caring how they landed or what damage was done; they heaved themselves up and converged on me, dripping gobbets of rotting flesh. Zombies had no feeling, so injuries didn’t matter.
I did not much like the look of this. I backed off, but they pursued. I realized that they must not have gotten the message that I was expected, and there was no point trying to reason with them; their brains were rotten. I did not want to fight them; I could surely rip them apart, but not only would that be disgustingly messy, I didn’t want to hurt the Zombies I had come to help.
I ran for my car, but there were already Zombies between me and it. I picked up two fallen apples and hurled them at the nearest Zombie, but it didn’t even dodge. It just kept coming at me. Zombies were not smart enough to scare.
I turned to go the other way, but now two more Zombies were there. These were female, with matted mops of hair, wearing only tattered smocks that showed more flesh than I cared to see, because it was gruesome. A young woman in flower is a gorgeous sight; a rotten woman is not.
I dodged a third direction, finding a large two-story storage shed. I charged up the steps to the second floor, then hauled myself to a rafter that I trusted they couldn’t reach. I would have to wait there until the Zombie management realized what was up, and called them off.
But the Zombies didn’t give up. Something had really worked them up, and I realized what it was: one of their number had been killed and they were on a dull edge. They clustered below me, trying to figure out how to reach me. Then they got halfway smart and started lying down. A second layer lay on the first, and a third on the second. They were building a pyramid of spoiled meat and bone that would, in its clumsy time, reach the rafter. I had to do something. But what? I had nowhere to go from here.
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