by A L Hart
Jera was a virgin.
It was one of those things that should have been obvious given the nature of a succubus’ bond, but was blinded by, well, the nature of a succubus.
“You’re afraid,” I said softly.
Poorly chosen words.
Something else I’d learned about the twins: they were indisputably beautiful in every catalogue way, but they weren’t called demons for nothing.
One moment, Jera’s face was twisted with agitation, and the next, I struggled to comprehend the sudden macabre scene cut before me. long, anatomical-defying serrates sprouted from a mouth once soft and pink like a rosebud, the razor shards no different from the inside of a bobbit worm’s mouth. The somber grays of her eyes flashed a deadly silver, tapping at the edges of my composure. The sauna rippled like a desert mirage as heat exploded from her.
“Jera—”
Claws snared my shirt, dragged me close. “You, human, are nothing to fear.”
The voice, it was one born in gruesome depths, crawling to the surface with barbs and knives.
My heart thrashed then, maybe at how easily the woman that was supposed to be sick handled me like a piece of paper, or how up close, I noticed the white fangs were a double row, descending from the back of her gums like jagged, cavernous rocks.
There was nothing remotely human about the female before me.
If I’d been aroused before, be it natural or a product of the pheromonal scent she released, I was committed to celibacy now.
Note to self: temperamental Jera is one thing, enraged Jera is another thing.
“I only meant . . . What I meant to say was I know it’s your first time, but we don’t exactly have time to take it slow like normal—”
She discarded me, flinging me back against the tiled wall like a rag doll, that silvery gaze more atavistic and prehistoric than I’d ever seen it before. Why did the idea of sex infuriate her to this extent? She insisted she didn’t fear it, removing the possibility of a traumatic history. What then? Did it simply revolt her?
Or did I revolt her?
Mouth dry, heart thumping erratically, I clung to the shirt at my chest where her hand had been. “You know I’m only trying to help.”
Back to me, head lowered: “That’s the problem.” It was a shallow whisper, but a profound sadness flowed in its undertow.
Below, black claws retracted, pale fingernails replacing them, and I didn’t need to see it to know her fangs were retracting. I could hear them crushing back into her skull, the humanistic ones sinking back into their guise. The room’s temperature returned to a near chill, the heat returning to its owner.
She left without another word.
Ch. 3
The wind rustled past the high terrace, the blue-black clouds traipsing over the manse leisurely. Sprawling for acres and acres were pastures of blue, high grass, their fingers stretching for the Above as the wind brushed through them lovingly. The scent of charred, burning trees still lingered. Smoke lolled in the distance and the sweet, putrid smell of bestial carcasses came in from the north, breezing along with the cool air. Death’s lullaby sang in their wisps.
Morning had yet to come for seven days now. Night hadn’t been seen for just shy of eighteen. The thick veil of violet-blackness reigned, squeezing the life from the empty plains until the dreary call of hollowness poisoned the veins.
“F-forgive me,” pleaded a familiar voice. That of lilacs and musical intonations.
“Always.”
“Next time, I can control it.”
“Of course you will, my light of lights.”
Lies. The both of them. Twisting and dancing in falsities, filling their bellies with them, their black hearts and darker minds.
One day, she knew, the truth would be seen.
How ugly they were.
How ugly they all were, indeed.
Black lightning crackled at the gloomy, tired horizon, velvet hues flashing through the cirrus clouds, yearning for the morrow. Another chance to destroy all which was.
And all that would be.
I woke with a start, Danny leaned over me, shaking my body as best his smaller one could manage.
Gaze bleary from the dark, head aching, I looked around me.
I was at the coffee shop. After returning home from the dojo and opening then closing the shop for the day, I’d fallen asleep in a cleared space in the storage room, which just so happened to be beside the ventilation system, the press of heat sinking into my back drowsily.
It was nighttime still, the sky dark, the windows frosted.
I’d fallen asleep.
How long had it been since I last slept, seven days?
“Boss, someone’s downstairs,” Danny said quietly.
Something in his voice sent me upright, eyes alert. Whatever dream I’d been having sank to the depths of my thoughts. “Who is it?”
Eyes wide and startled, he shook his head. “I don’t know.” Then he added, “They’re bleeding.”
I was up and taking the stair five at a time, the shop shadowed at this hour, the owl clock ticking away above the entrance door, where sure enough, a shadowy figure lay collapsed on the asphalt beneath the awning.
Danny was hot on my heels, not missing a beat.
“Go wake the twins,” I told him, unlocking the door and all but throwing it open.
Icy winds gusted in, trailing its glacial fingers over me and nipping down to the bone. The man laid out on the ground resembled all in which winter brought. Pallid skin gone blue, hair frozen solid, crystalized from precipitation. He looked anywhere from sixteen to an unlikely twenty-one. Blue jeans and a turtleneck clung to him, cracked glasses lain beside him where he must have collapsed and snapped them.
Beyond that, I sensed the lime green threads of his dark energy, beating inside him like a pulse. What more, the color was a faint one. I used to think the fainter the color, the weaker the host. But all immortals and infected humans alike had their own unique shade of dark energy. If they were weak, the pulse of dark energy was significantly slower, shallow. But a faint aurora?
He was an infected human.
As I hurried to drape his arm over my shoulder, I noted there were no abnormalities on him. Just a young man.
With blood running from his temple and mouth.
“It’s too early for this,” Jera grumbled from the staircase, glaring at the unconscious boy.
Beside her, Ophelia had come prepared with blankets in arm and the first aid kit.
Together, we all hoisted him into the office, where there, Danny lingered at the door, reluctant to enter.
Our eyes met briefly and a massive brick settled into my stomach, black paste rotting on my tongue as I recalled the last stranger I’d brought into my office. Was he too seeing his brother’s corpse on the desk? My ineptitude?
“Just wait out there, kid. Watch the door for anyone else.”
Eyes still wide from his own walk down memory lane, he nodded and turned for the front of the shop.
Ophelia laid down a blanket on the lounger where Jera and I settled the boy. Despite his age, he was . . . big. Muscular, tall, but his face had all of the youthful edges of someone who’s main concern would be making varsity. And that was with the bruises marring his profile.
“What do you think did it to him?” I asked, grimacing at the purple-blue sheen of skin along his left jaw and temple, the swollen set of his lips.
“It could honestly have been anyone or anything,” Jera said, hopping onto the desk and analyzing the body.
Ophelia tucked a blanket around him then smoothed his short, straight hair back from his face, inspecting his head. “I don’t think he’s a caste of demon or faery,” she said.
I shook my head. “No, he’s definitely human.”
Now she shook her head. “He smells like an immortal. We all have certain hormones that affects our aging process. He has them.”
Then was my previous theory on what divided an infected human and immorta
l’s dark energy wrong? It wasn’t as if I’d encountered enough of either to make a proper conclusion.
“Then what is he?”
“Freezing,” Jera said, arm extended.
Lia and I stepped aside as the blast of heat erupted towards the boy. Sultry waves wafted by my face like the inside of an oven.
“We’re warming him, not cooking,” I reminded her.
At that, she shrugged and dropped her arm.
On the lounge, deep choking coughs hacked up from the boy. His entire body jolted beneath the series of sputters then convulsed, the coughs becoming horrendous gagging. Lia had a trashcan beneath his mouth the moment he sprung upright.
It took a moment, but when the three of us scented whatever exited him, we simultaneously reeled back, hands over our noses.
It smelled like something worse than death. Sewage mixed with heated, month old decayed meat. The smell instantly took over the office, until all at once, I found myself struggling not to be the next one gagging up their insides.
Lia hurried to grab the bookshelf ladder to open the office’s high window.
The freezing air to burst in had never felt or smelled better.
It was only when the boy finished puking what must have been twenty pounds of something, that I hurried to tie the bag and walk it out to the alley, holding my breath the entire time.
When I returned, the twins were huddled as far from the boy as possible, as though waiting for him to go for round two, and honestly, I wanted to do the same, but by the glum, miserable look on the boy’s face as he heaved spittle into the bagless can, something told me distance wasn’t the answer.
Still, we said nothing, waiting for him to collect himself as the outside frigidity warred with the shop’s heating.
Moments of profound silence passed before he finally looked up with hazel eyes, one of them squeezed shut from the bruise. “Sorry,” he mumbled through swollen, wet lips.
“Don’t . . . worry about it,” I said, accepting the box of kleenex from Lia and handing it to him.
With a nod to the both of us, the kid began to clean his face as best he could, the tissues coming away bloody and yellowed before tossing them in the bucket. When done, he sniffled and curled the blanket around himself as he looked at all of us. “Who are you?”
My mouth popped open.
“You should know,” Jera said, irate. “You’re the one who showed up here battered and pathetic.”
Cheeks flooding with color, embarrassed, he looked to the floors. “You’re right, I’m sorry. What I meant to say was, are you him?”
That question was aimed at me and me alone.
It’d been so silent all week, for some reason I thought maybe the cases would simply stop, but in retrospect, I should have spotted that naïve thinking from a mile away. “I am,” I said, no longer denying it like I had before. If anything, I understood how critical it was to get to the bottom of cases involving humans infected with dark energy as soon as possible. “Um, what seems to be the problem?”
My introductory line was a work in progress.
Gaze still shifty, fingers curling into the blanket, he could have been four years old. “I . . . He told me to come here. Said you’d know what to do.”
“Who?” I asked, though I had a pretty good idea. People didn’t just find me on accident. There was someone who sent them to me specifically. Someone who knew me even though I’d never seen them.
“The man with the changing eyes.”
I perked at this. Definitely the same stranger. My first case with Anisah, she’d told me she’d been approached by a man whose eyes changed colors each time she looked away. Good to know some things were still constant.
“Why are you here?” Jera demanded, voice barbed, leaving little room for anything but an answer. We may have our disagreements in practically everything, but the good-cop-bad-cop had always seemed to work with these cases.
The boy’s back straightened, but I saw his teeth gnash as her harsh tone.
Jera too must have heard it because she was on her feet in a heartbeat and standing before the kid. “This shop is private property. We do not have to open our doors to bloody scum should we choose. If you disagree with this, we’ll gladly show you back into the cold.”
The hazel stare was no match for the lethal silvers boring down at him.
Quickly, he jerked his gaze back to the floor, head bowing slightly. “Sorry,” he forced out through gritted teeth. “I don’t mean to be rude. It’s a side effect of what’s wrong.”
“Which is?”
Thick brows crinkled. “Please . . . please don’t hate me. Don’t . . . don’t call the police. I’m a good kid, I swear. I make all A’s. I’m in honors classes and take college courses after school. I volunteer every weekend at the animal shelter and nursing homes and, yes, I know I’m not perfect. I once stole my dad’s card to renew my Xbox Live membership, but I reimbursed the money the next day and even did my sister’s chores for a—”
“Get to the point.”
He blinked rapidly, his eyes glossy as he kept them on the floorboards. “Four weeks ago, I was helping my nana for the weekend because my parents were away for their vacation, which they go on every year. It was about 9 o’clock when I first turned into a werewolf, but it was around 9:30 when . . . it happened. I know because I always go to give her a goodnight kiss at 9:30 before going to bed.”
“Wait, what was that?” I said. “Werewolf?”
“I didn’t mean for it to happen, I swear. You have to believe I’m telling the truth.”
“Werewolf?” I said again, unsure I’d heard him correctly with how casually he delivered it.
“What happened at 9:30?” Jera pressed, reminding me there was another more important part to the boy’s story.
“I . . .” He took a deep breath, tears streaming down his cheeks now as he curled in on himself as though hoping to disappear. “I ate my nana.”
Ch. 4
I was jaw-dropped, completely vacant upstairs when Jera grabbed my arm and all but threw me out into the hall.
Door closing behind us, she turned and stabbed a finger at me. “Put that thing back outside. Now.”
My mouth moved but sound sat locked beneath my tongue.
“We just got off of HB’s kill-list. He is a sure ticket back onto it. They will hunt him down and find us again.”
“I . . .” Was still speechless. The boy had just confessed to being a werewolf. What more, a werewolf who’d eaten his own grandmother. Hands down the most unsettling, bizarre truth to be spoken beneath this roof.
“I will rid of him for you,” she said, turning on her heels.
I stopped her, grabbing the sleeve of her night clothes and finding my voice. “You can’t.”
“Give me three good reasons why not.”
I didn’t even have one. She was right. In previous cases, I’d dealt with humans—and he was human—that were on HB’s radar for having done absolutely nothing wrong except being infected. But to harbor a fugitive of not only the Hunter’s Bureaucracy but also, likely, the police department themselves . . .
“Not to mention the local wolf packs,” Jera added. At my expression, she explained, “If they find out some hybrid, rogue pup is on the loose and targeted for murdering a member of his own kin, they will hunt that wolf down themselves. Why? Because they have the good sense to recognize that this tiny city of yours isn’t heavily flooded with HB agents. And they want to keep it that way. Having murderous immortals terrorizing a small town will shift HB’s resources here. You don’t want that.”
“I also don’t want to leave him alone. I’m sure he didn’t intend to eat his own grandmother.”
“Are you hearing yourself, Peter?” She started for the office then, throwing the door open and confronting the still shaking boy with dispassionate, heartless eyes. “Listen, degenerate, I’ve consulted with my partner and we’ve decided we’re not taking up your case.”
A well of sorrow opened
up in the boy’s gaze. “But—”
“Our decision is final. Go back to whatever home you crawled from.”
“But I-I can’t,” he rushed out, the faucet of his eyes now opening and pouring down rivers of tears. “I can’t go home. I can’t. Not anymore. Not after tonight.”
“Not our prob—”
“Why?” I interrupted, unable to do anything but sympathize. This was a kid who couldn’t have even finished high school yet, and if what he said was true, then none of this was his fault.
He shook his head hard, sobs coming out in hiccups. Until they morphed into warped, wrecking sounds of despair.
“Kid, you have to work with me if you want my help. Why can’t you go home?”
“Because of the cops. The police, they’re looking for me.”
Jera gave me a pointed look.
“They know about your nana . . .?” I asked.
He wiped an arm along his nose, sniffed in heavily then looked up at me with bloodshot eyes. “Not her.”
The crack in his voice, the pit of despair . . .
I think I understood. “Your mom and dad, are they . . . gone, too?”
The memory of the putrid contents he barfed up slammed into me and I almost lost my dinner then and there. What had I just taken out to the trash?
The boy’s body practically vibrated as he let out a terrible noise of remorse, the chills raking through the air. I felt the energy inside of him shift, change. Just as his face started to. At this, I felt my wings threatening to tear free, my palms burning. Jera and Ophelia must have felt the boy’s energy spike too, as both of them rose defensively, black sparks corroding along Lia’s hands.
“Is this a bad time?”
The room stilled, the four of us throwing one startled glance to the door.
Niv stood, large green eyes roving over the scene, her fiery hair in its usual wild and unkempt disarray. In her hand she held one landscaped painting of the most beautiful snowy topography I’d ever seen. Flakes of brilliant iridescence drifted onto the green pastures of hilly terrain and mountainous inclines. The pale, pink and white sky was that of sugar and sweet dreams. It was unreal.