In the morning, I finished the case file, ate some toaster waffles and put on my tactical gear under my roomy, grey exterminators’ coveralls, then headed to the office to get in some target practice before dusk. Once it was evening, I could go looking for the succubus. Not that they couldn’t hunt during the day, of course. They may have been the inspiration for human vampire myths, among many others, but the details were grossly inaccurate, at best. Sunlight didn’t bother them in the slightest, but they did tend to hunt in the evenings, when most humans went out to party or relax or find… companionship. It was nothing mystical, just good tactics. They wouldn’t be hunting when the prey was scarce, when people were at work or busy with their daily concerns. They waited for a target rich environment. And so did I. In the meantime, I took the elevator up to the office. I hated every minute of it, but it took too long to get to the 11th floor using the stairs, especially carrying my duffle bag. As the doors slid open, I unclenched my teeth and stepped into the lobby. The reception desk was empty at the moment, but that wasn’t entirely unusual. There was plenty of security in place; someone was probably watching me right now. I waved cheerfully to the cameras and swiped my key card to access the secure area. Getting down to the training floor required another elevator ride, back down and into the subbasement of the building. There was only one elevator that went down there, hidden away in these offices; most people didn’t even know that the subbasement existed. The training floor was deep underground and heavily soundproofed, a secret and secure place for target practice and tactical drills. As busy as the agents were, we were all expected to get regular practice in, it wouldn’t do to get sloppy out in the field. Deaths may be somewhat expected, but collateral damage was not. Take down the threat, but always protect the civilians. As I approached the elevator, a door opened in the hallway and a man stepped out and turned towards me. He had blonde, tousled hair and eyes the colour of cornflowers. The feeling in my gut was a familiar one, just like at the club last night.
“Hello, love,” he had just a touch of a British accent, it probably drove most women mad. “Aren’t you glad to see me? Come on and give us a kiss.”
I could feel his will pressing against me, his desire a physical presence in the room. I stepped towards him, slowly, drawing close until our lips were almost touching. I put my arms around his neck and whispered breathlessly in his ear,
“You wish, Carmine.”
He smiled and shook his head. He had, of course, know that I was messing with him. Partials, like me, were the only ones who could feel his influence and ignore it. Immune, like Tom, never noticed it at all, and an ordinary person would already be falling all over themselves to obey his request. To me, it was merely a strange itch in back of my skull, easy enough to ignore, if I wanted to, or to use, if I needed. It was an ability that very few had, and it was why I was able to do my job.
“I really do,” Carmine chuckled. “You have such an attractive… life force.”
“Is that all you ubarae ever think about?” I rolled my eyes.
“What else is there?” Carmine’s smile was positively lecherous.
The ubarae, incubi and succubae, probably thought about sex even more than most humans did. After all, they required it for their sustenance, drawing life energy from humans during intimate contact, when their defences were down. As such, intimacy was as pleasurable to them as a good meal and good sex combined. As far as I was concerned, it sometimes gave them a bit of a one-track mind.
“We are not having that argument again.”
“I really do feel sorry for you. Your life must be so empty, unable to experience the pure pleasure, the…”
“I have plenty of pleasure in my life, Carmine. We aren’t having this conversation again.”
There was a time, when I was younger, that his comments would have bothered me. But age and experience had taught me that most, human or ubarae, would never understand people like me, and I couldn’t blame them, I didn’t really understand their needs either. To each their own.
“What brings you here?” I asked, firmly changing the subject.
“Just here for some Immunity assessments,” he replied. “Putting all the fresh-faced kids through their paces.”
Finding people immune to the influence of the ubarae were essential to running of the Organization. After all, who else could find and monitor them? Certainly not any kind of civilian law enforcement. The ubarae had evolved specifically to blend in among humanity and prey on them. They had traditionally used their abilities to influence human minds and behaviors, by stimulating sexual desire, lust, even love, in their prey. Like the blonde in the alley last night. It lowered their defences, made them pliable, and allowed the ubarae to drain their energy. Sometimes enough to kill them. To find people who were resistant to this effect, the Ubarae Council, allies of the Organization, sent some of their most skilled representatives to test candidates for Immunity. I had gone through the same process myself, over 10 years ago now. It was actually in a classroom just down the hall from here. Back then, I had been a university student, young and broke. So, when I’d seen a sign on campus offering free lunch and $100 for taking part in a brief study, I had decided to go. Any meal that wasn’t instant ramen sounded good, at the time. The study was only supposed to take a couple of hours, and there was only one condition: you had to be asexual and aromantic. Not biologically, obviously, but they were looking specifically for people with no interest in sexual or romantic relationships. It hadn’t seemed odd at the time. After all, the university students and staff were routinely looking to study different sexual behaviors and orientations. I didn’t particularly like talking about mine, especially back then. But $100 was a lot of money and I had figured, how bad could a few questions be? So, I went. About twenty people had shown up on the 11th floor that day. A few people had wondered aloud why we were in the offices of a pest control business, but the well-dressed, professional young woman with a clipboard had simply explained that this business was providing them with free space for the study. We had been brought back to the office, set up with desks and chairs for all of the participants. Once we were seated, we had all been given a questionnaire to fill out. While we all busied themselves with answering the questions, under the watchful eye of the woman in the suit, Carmine and another woman had entered from the back of the room. 15 people had all swivelled their heads around, almost in unison. The two Ubarae had simply strolled through the room, but the effect was unmistakable. People stared, dropped their pencils. Others actually rose from their seats and followed them as they went to the front, trailing behind them like puppy dogs. Carmine and his partner, Suzette, had spoken to the test administrator for a moment and then turned to us, expertly ignoring the stares and actively orbiting people in their wake. They had then announced that anyone who wished to, could join them in the hallway. The room had emptied down to only 5. I remember thinking that we must actually be part of a psychological experiment, and the people who left must have been in on it. Maybe a study on whether people would follow the crowd out? But I was soon to learn that this was the Organization’s method of filtering out the people who were simply pretending to fit their criteria for the cash, and the people who, while asexual, were not immune to ubarae influence. The two traits were correlated, but human sexuality being as complicated as it was, it was not a clear division, so testing with actual ubarae was required to properly identify the Immune. After the initial testing and questionnaire, which was mostly a psychological assessment, only 3 remained. We had each been brought into our own isolated room, tested for sensitivity, and then given a job offer. Of the twenty people who showed up, two of us had made the final cut that time. The other was Tom. We had both been students back then, but we dropped out, told our families we were getting jobs and entered an intensive training program. Looking back, I was still not sure which was more difficult, the training, or telling my parents that I was dropping out of my biology degree program to take a job as an exterminator. Oh well, they had gotten over it. Eventually. For a while, my abrupt career change had led my brothers to half jokingly suggest that I had actually become a spy, and this was my cover. Whenever they brought that up, I would tell them, at great length and with great enthusiasm, about the methods for dealing with infestations of ants or termites or mice. In time, they had learned not to bring it up. That seemed like a long time ago now. I shook my head and focused back on Carmine.
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“Did you find anyone this time?”
“There was one.”
“A Partial?”
“No, Immune.”
“Damn. If we don’t get some new field agents soon, there is going to be trouble.”
People who were fully Immune could not be influenced by the ubarae. They were completely insensitive to the pheromones and other cues that Ubarae used to stimulate attraction, which might seem ideal, but it also meant that they couldn’t identify them in the field, unless they caught them actively feeding. Ubarae were so similar to humans that you could really only differentiate them by the feeling that their abilities elicited in their targets. In fact, some even argued that they were humans, or had arisen from humans, a subspecies, not a completely separate group. It wasn’t a settled question, phylogenetically speaking, but it didn’t really matter for the practical side of things. The partially immune, or Partials, could still feel the influence they exerted, though to a lesser degree than most, and it let us identify and track succubi and incubi that went rogue and violated the terms of the Pact. When I saw an ubarae, like the one in the club, or Carmine, I felt… it was hard to describe the feeling in the pit of my stomach. My gut was never wrong. This was why Partials were trained as field agents, while Immune were usually trained in supporting capacities. Guards, researchers, maintenance, training, medics etc. The problem was, of late, there hadn’t been any new Partials identified in the testing. Which meant that the rest of us were being run ragged. There were rumblings about evolutionary pressure and dying breeds, about Partials going extinct. Most found the notion ridiculous. Evolution was a slow process, this change had happened in the last 5-10 years, pretty abruptly. But no one really had any other ideas, either.
“I know. But don’t worry, we go through dry patches like this sometimes. We’ll find more soon, I am sure.”
“Easy for you to say, you aren’t the one working 100-hour weeks.”
Carmine shrugged.
“Are you sure that we haven’t made the criteria too strict?” I continued.
“People are either a Partial or they aren’t. Nothing I can do about that, Ray.”
“Well, we can’t keep up this pace forever. There are too many cases and not enough people to work them. If we don’t get some fresh blood soon…” I let the thought hang in the air.
“We just have to cast a wider net. We will find people. And if we don’t, we can reach out to the other enclaves, maybe they have some to spare.”
“I hope so. I need a vacation. Somewhere sunny,” I wasn’t holding out hope, the other enclaves were no better off than we were.
“Wouldn’t that be nice?” Carmine commiserated. “Somewhere with nude beaches, maybe.”
“Don’t you get enough nudity in your day-to-day life?”
“You can never really have enough nudity.”
I sighed,
“I’m going to the target range. I’ll see you later, Carmine.”
The incubus turned and sauntered off. I watched him go. He carried himself with the easy grace and assurance of a practiced predator, which he was, in a way, so perhaps that wasn’t surprising. But maybe it was why I always had trouble turning my back on him. Once he was out of sight, I continued on my way to the basement. Arriving at the firing range, I put my bag down on the table and began unpacking my weapons and safety equipment. The handguns were the ones I kept on my ankle and hip whenever possible, a Glock 22 and a Beretta M9. I favored the more powerful Glock, but I had used it last night, so I drew the Beretta instead and turned to the target. I emptied the clip into the target and was retracting it when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I pulled off the ear guards and turned to find a woman with dark hair, limpid eyes and a very low-cut top that was struggling to stay buttoned across her chest.
“Suzette,” I greeted her coolly, and turned to reloading my weapon.
I didn’t like Suzette. And I strongly suspected that the feeling was mutual. Carmine might be a little bit crass, but he was also friendly and straightforward. You always knew where he stood. Suzette was devious. If she couldn’t bend you to her will with her abilities, she would just find another way to make you do what she wanted. She was clever and manipulative to a degree that I found unsettling. She watched me with her predator’s eyes now, assessing me for weakness, looking for an opening.
“Rayna. I was in the building for an assessment and wanted to say hello,” she still had a thick French accent, despite having moved from the ubarae enclave in France to the Canadian one over ten years ago.
“I heard it didn’t go well.”
““It was satisfactory. We found a candidate.”
“No one for the field.”
“We can only work with what we are given, Rayna.”
I jammed a fresh clip into my Beretta and reset the target.
“You might want to cover your ears,” I slipped my own ear protection back on.
The gun barked 15 times in quick succession, then I pulled the target back in. Sometimes it was a good idea to remind Suzette that she wasn’t the only one in the room who was dangerous.
“Very impressive,” Suzette observed the target, sliding back along the rail. “My presence doesn’t distract you?”
“Not in the slightest, Suzy. Don’t worry,” Suzette hated being called Suzy almost as much as I hated people calling me Rayna. But if it bothered her now, she didn’t let on.
“Could I perhaps ask you for a favor?”
Of course she wanted a favor. Suzette always wanted something.
“Depends what it is.”
“Nothing odious, I assure you. We simply need a field agent to be present during the training class today. The students are being taught about the Pact and they will surely have questions about how it is enforced, in practice. We always have a Partial sit in on the class for that reason. We had someone lined up for today, do you know Carson Schumacher? It doesn’t really matter. He was supposed be there today, but his current case took a turn, and he is now out of town and unavailable. Since you are here perhaps you would fill in for him?”
I groaned internally. I had things to do myself. I tried to avoid getting roped into babysitting duty whenever possible. But, this was important and someone had to do it. Just my bad luck that I happened to be around.
“When’s the class?”
“It is at 2, in room 1147. Thank you, Rayna.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Well, I suppose I should let you return to your work. I also have other things to do today.”
“Don’t let me keep you,” I was already setting up the next target.
“Have a good day, Agent Clay.”
As Suzette turned stiffly and strode away. I picked up the weapon and returned to my practice. I would have to hurry if I wanted to finish my regimen before the class.