A few days later, Cassie and I were at work; she was checking out a goth chick that was buying a book that purportedly explained how to use love and revenge spells (an interesting combination, but we sold a bunch of them) while I was explaining the differences between two brands of voodoo dolls (for the record, I was talking out of my ass; real voodoo dolls can only be made with hemomancy, blood magic, something I know very little about.) As the customer walked toward the cash register, I heard the bell on the door announcing someone new had come in.
“Hey there, thanks for coming to Strange Attractions!” I said as I looked over, and there stood the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She had dark skin, long black hair, and almost glowing purple eyes; she was wearing skin-tight leather pants, a leather top that was more of a bra than a shirt, and leather gloves that went up to her elbows all of which were a shiny black; she looked like Halle Berry in that terrible Catwoman movie she did in the early 2000s. When I say she looked like Halle Berry, I mean excluding her eyes she looked exactly like Halle Berry did twenty years ago; I can’t really explain this, but this woman was like sex incarnate. She saw me looking at her and gave me a devious smile. When our eyes met, I instantly saw visions of me taking her right in the middle of the store. My hands subconsciously moved to rip my shirt off; as she walked toward me, she gyrated her hips perfectly in sink with her steps. As she got closer, I started walking toward her, my head growing fuzzier and fuzzier every second as all thoughts except those of her flew right out of my head.
{What? Shut up, look at her,} I replied in my thoughts.
“Dante, Dante, DANTE!” Cassie screamed though I could barely hear her.
“It’s ok Cassie, I’ll handle it,” I replied coming back to my senses. I shot her a look that I intended to convey the message don’t interfere, but I don’t know if she got it or not. “Why don’t we go into the backroom?” I asked Halle Berry. She wasn’t Halle Berry, but she never told me her name, so that’s what I’m going to call her.
“Why don’t we?” she asked still smiling. Her voice threatened to pull me back into a sex trance, but I fought it. I walked to the backroom with her closely behind me; as I closed the door, she wrapped her arms around me from behind and licked my neck. I froze, fighting every urge in my body to flip around and pull her closer to me. I turned around, stepped back away from her with my eyes closed reciting alphabet backward in my mind to keep my sanity.
{Z, Y, X, V, U, T….}
“What are you doing Dante? Don’t you want me? Because I want you; you can have me right here,” she whispered sensually.
{O, N, M, L…} Ok, this wasn’t working.
“Just give me a minute,” I gasped.
“What do you need a minute for? I can think of a better way to spend the time,” she laughed, and she rushed forward and grabbed my crotch. At that point, I knew I was in a losing battle, so I only had one way out. In the last few minutes before my will was ripped away from me, I went back to the dam in my mind. I had done this many times, so I was well practiced at this point; I opened a small hole in the dam, and I focused all of the power that surged into my soul directly into my eyes. I had activated the democculus; when I opened my eyes, I saw Halle for what she really was; she shared the same basic shape as the illusion she had been displaying, but she had pale purple skin, a grotesque, asymmetrical face, and her leather boots ended in hooves. She also had a snake tail with a black and purple diamond pattern; Halle was a succubus. Succubi and their male counterparts, incubi are creatures from the In Between that feed on mortal souls through sex. When two people have sex with one another, that’s the closest they can ever be; in a sense, they are showing their souls to each other. Succubi and incubi take advantage of this intimacy to rip away small pieces of peoples’ souls; souls do have the ability to regenerate, but this is a very slow process, and someone that repeatedly sleeps with one of these creatures will become a shell of their former self. All of their thoughts, feelings hopes, and dreams ripped away leaving a robot with the memories of who they used to be, but none of the spark.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Halle had her eyes closed and her head pressed against my chest; luckily, she hadn’t seen my eyes. I didn’t need them anymore, I knew what she was, and the last thing I needed was for her to know I was possessed. I resealed the dam reverting my eyes to their natural state and grabbed her by the hair pulling her head back. We locked eyes, and she flashed that wicked grin again; I bent down as if to kiss her… and slammed her head on the wooden desk in the office with all of my pneuma enhanced might. Her head broke through the wood, and I lifted it back up and slammed it into another part of the desk leaving two face shaped holes in the wood. I threw her to the ground, summoned my sword, and held it against her throat. She may have been a creature of the In Between, but succubi are primarily physical creatures, which means they can die.
Cassie burst into the room shouting, “Dante?? Are you ok? I don’t know what that thing is,” she paused as she saw the scene before her. “But, she isn’t human,” she finished. “Did you have to destroy my desk?”
“It was the desk or me,” I said shrugging.
“Well, the desk doesn’t teach my employees how to create fire or bring monsters into my shop,” she quipped.
I chuckled and bent down keeping my sword against Halle’s throat. I couldn’t see through the illusion anymore, so she looked exactly like a petrified Halle Berry. “Who are you, and why are you here?” I asked calmly.
“Don’t kill me!” she screamed.
“If you tell me what I want to know, I won’t have to kill you; will I?” I replied.
“I hope you’re joking. She’s a monster; how many people has she killed?” Cassie said as she squinted at me.
“I’ve got this; I’ve interrogated quite a few monsters in my time. Now, who sent you?”
Halle was trembling at this point, “Th, th, th, the Gnosilepides!” she managed to squeak out.
“That’s funny, because I watched them all die, and besides, summoning creatures like you was never part of the modus operandi,” I said confidently until something occurred to me. There are still other chapters of the order around. “Wait… were you sent by the Eurasian chapter??” In addition to the American chapter which as the name suggested is over the Americas, there are two Eurasian chapters for the east and west as well as an African chapter. There’s even an Australian chapter that also governs Antarctica.
“Athena is recreating the American chapter, and she’s looking for talent. That’s why I was sent here as a gift to entice you to join!” Halle sobbed. The Greek god Athena? No, surely not; this was just a person, probably a practitioner, using someone else’s reputation to seem more threatening.
“Aww, they got me a monster to devour my soul. How sweet.” I let my sword disappear, but I readied myself to resummon it should it prove necessary. I bent down to look Halle straight in the eyes. “I want you to go back to them and say, ‘Thanks, but no thanks and no means no. Do not come back here; never even speak my name again, or I will kill them all.’”
Cassie eyed me nervously, “Isn’t that a little extreme? The Gnosilepides are protectors of the innocent; anyone with that goal can’t be that bad.”
“Anyone with that goal wouldn’t require the service of monsters. GO!” I screamed the last word at Halle, and she turned and ran without looking back.
“You should have killed it; any poor bastards snared by it are on you now,” Cassie said sternly.
“If it didn’t return to this... Athena, how would she have responded? She might have sent two after me or summoned something even more dangerous,” I stated wisely. Ok, maybe not wisely, but it wasn’t one of my stupider decisions.
“I guess you’re right. Should we be worried about these ‘Gnosilepides?’ What if they send agents to come after you?” I walked out the back door with Cassie following closely behind me; I rummaged through my pocket, retrieved a cigarette, held my right thumb up to it an orange sigil appearing, and a flame sprung up from my thumb lighting it. “You know that’s disgusting right?” she asked.
“Yeah, I know; I know,” I said carefully exhaling smoke away from her. “I strongly suspect Athena and her crew if she even has one are a bunch of C-list practitioners looking for a way to gain power. After that display, they’ll probably pretend I don’t exist.”
Cassie gave me a stern look. “I hope you’re right; I really do.”