Incubus Ch. 06

The retired priest's residence looked not unlike a university dormitory – utilitarian and architecturally undistinguished. Two multi-storied wings extended from a central tower that overlooked a large courtyard. Spotlights illuminated the cross affixed to the peak of the tower.

Kat drove slowly past the residence and parked several streets away. At this hour there were no pedestrians. She stepped out of her Range Rover and retraced her path back to the residence. The heels of her boots echoed in the deserted street. A cold, unforgiving wind gusted in the tunnel created by the vacant buildings on either side of the street, whipping Kat's long black hair behind her. The moon rode low in the heavens, appearing and then vanishing behind scudding clouds.

Not for the first time, Kat questioned the wisdom of her plan.

Since Britt and Damian had been cured, Kat had felt dangerously unmoored. The simple symmetry, comfort, and predictability of her life with Damian had been thrown into disarray. Fate had a way of doing that – blindsiding you when you least expected it and then laughing as you stumbled along a new and unexpected path. She could almost hear the laughter. How could a succubus expect comfort, after all? That she had enjoyed any was remarkable enough.

For the life of her, she could think of no other way that she could have acted. To save Damian, she essentially had to sacrifice her relationship with him. It put her in mind of that odious declaration -- if you love someone, set them free. Bullshit, she thought, and as if to prove it, her life reeked of it right now.

She didn't blame Damian. Hell, she'd be lying if she said she wouldn't similarly embrace the happiness that had been offered him. However, Damian's understandable preoccupation with Britt had left Kat bereft of the anchor she had relied on for eons.

She ducked into a dark alley. Scraps of newspaper and candy wrappers eddied by the hulking dumpsters that sheltered scavenging rats.

At first, she fought the self-pity that threatened to engulf her, knocking around the old farmhouse alone and venturing forth to feed only when her nature demanded it. She tried to convince herself that her selfless sacrifice for the one she loved was a reward in itself. For a saint it might be; for her it wasn't. As the days passed, the melancholy she barely disguised had evolved into vague anger and then into unfocussed rage.

When Damian was home, he studiously concealed his own exhilaration, which just enraged Kat more.

Through it all, the rage intensified.

Kat knew herself well enough to recognize the growing need to lash out, to direct her rage somewhere, but felt powerless to prevent it. No, not powerless. Unwilling. She needed the cleansing of a righteous conflagration.

She'd chanced upon the first in a series of newspaper articles just before Britt had made her appearance in the kitchen that morning. Britt, fully recovered, heart-rendingly beautiful and innocent and blessedly ignorant of what had awakened within her. Try as she might, Kat couldn't muster up even a vague dislike for this woman. She'd been pulled into a demonic liaison against her will and had borne the pain and uncertainty with remarkable strength. No, Britt was perfect for Damian. It was too bad that she was perfect for Kat too.

When Britt had kissed her that morning, the memories of what they had shared had come back in a flood. It would be a chapter she might revisit later in life, when time had dulled the memory. As it was, the kiss underscored the impossibility that the three of them -- Britt, Damian, and Kat -- could share their lives with each other equally. If you love someone and all that crap....

The impotent despondency that Kat had felt at that moment found its focus in the subject of a newspaper article. Yet another disgraced priest had come to light, one in a long and loathsome procession of clerics who preyed on the young, vulnerable, and innocent. In short, a predator.

She'd circled the article in red, not quite knowing then what she'd do with it, but knowing that it was significant. Over the next few weeks, she voraciously researched this priest. Perhaps fate was again playing a game and setting her on another path. As her anger grew, she willed for her path and the priest's to intersect.

In the alley, Kat shimmered and lost substance, growing almost invisible. She would now appear as a phantasm, a hint of movement that had haunted the peripheral vision of humankind throughout the ages.

This would be an old-school visitation.

Kat swept up the remaining distance to the residence, pausing by trees, hulking skeletons now bereft of their leaves. She projected into the residence for activity. There was none; the residence slumbered.

Kat thought it would have been difficult to locate the priest's room, but it wasn't. She stalked the silent halls, projecting into rooms as she went. She rejected those rooms in which the occupant transmitted unease or disgust at the man who now shared their domicile. So much for Christian charity. Eventually she found a room that was thick with the miasma of despair and fear. She ghosted through the halls once again to be sure.

She stood before a door. This was the room.

Behind this door slept one who had betrayed trust and defiled innocence more thoroughly than any demon could.

To the ignorant, such a person might be seen as an ally in the cause of evil. Kat knew differently and seethed in disgust. She, at least, would remain true to her nature.

She suppressed the fury that now seeped around the edges of her control and eased into the room.

In the bed, twisted in the sheets, the priest whimpered as an unearthly cold swept the room.

* * *

The moonlit room was modest. It contained little more than a dresser, a bed, and a night table on which lay a well-thumbed bible. It was an appropriately nondescript room for the barrenness of the soul who resided in it.

Kat noted the crucifix on the wall and shook her head.

The priest twisted in his bed.

"Sleep, father," whispered Kat. I don't want you awake yet, she thought.

The priest grew quiet.

Kat regarded the figure, half disbelieving that such corruption could reside in such an innocent, grandfatherly shell.

Kat hovered over the bed and reached down to draw back the blanket. The priest flailed for the covering as the cool air of the room eddied around him.

"Shh."

Her ethereal fingertips trailed up his inner thigh to brush his flaccid member.

"You know you want this..." whispered Kat.

The priest responded to Kat's touch.

"...blessed release."

The priest's hand inched across the bed to his groin and slipped under the waistband of his pajamas.

"That's it."

How weak, thought Kat. Still caressing the very thing that had wrought such suffering.

"I can help you, father."

The priest moaned pitifully.

"I want to help you."

* * *

Even in sleep, the priest could not escape.

He knew he should be strong, rise up to the challenge the Lord presented to him, but he knew himself. He was weak, unworthy. He couldn't fight it.

The dream came to him, as it always did, like an unpleasant houseguest he had no courage to turn away. It was a dream that would taint his days and set him on a quest for absolution that would inevitably fall short.

He grasped himself.

"I can help you, father."

Half asleep, he pried open an eye. The room was dark and he was alone. A dream. Just a dream. He drifted off again, surrendering to whatever his fevered unconscious threw before him.

"I want to help you."

"Help me," he whispered.

* * *

Kat felt ill, revolted by this piece of human carrion that she had targeted.

Why am I doing this? she thought. Was it her job to haunt this man as he haunted the thoughts of his victims? Was this justice?

She overcame her revulsion and exposed the priest's hand as it weakly fondled his organ.

Get this over with, she told herself.

She lowered herself over him and spread her lips. She tentatively licked the glans that the sleeping priest helpfully presented to her.

Such weakness.

She lowered herself further still and took him in her mouth, feeling him harden as she did so. She caressed him with her tongue.

It would be much easier to bite it off and be done with it, but that would be unsubtle. Even then, she increased the pressure of her teeth against the base of his cock. It would be so easy.

A timorous whimper from the priest brought her back and she spat his now hard and saliva-slick cock from her mouth.

Get this over with, she told herself again.

Kat straddled the priest and reached behind to stroke him, running her fingernails up the underside of his organ.

She positioned him at her anus and pressed down, circling her hips. With her hands on her buttocks, she spread the halves of her ass and bore down, almost breaching the first ring of muscle.

"Do you like it, father?"

"Yes," whispered the slumbering priest.

* * *

He felt the delicious pressure of flesh against his erection and the subtle movements designed to give him entrance. On the brink, in several ways. He could end it now and draw a line in the sand beyond which he would no longer go. Let this day mark a new beginning. Own up to the misdeeds of the past and start anew. The path of virtue was not yet closed to him. Yet he couldn't. The flesh was weak. He heard his own muffled cry that accompanied the blessed yielding as he penetrated and the flesh of the other embraced him tightly.

He moaned. To be enveloped by another....

"Do you like it, father?" That mocking voice again.

"Yes," he murmured, even as he desperately clung to sleep lest the dream evaporate, leaving only unfulfilled solitude. "Yes."

* * *

Kat lowered herself in increments, taking him inexorably within her. There was no pleasure in having this parasite invade her. Perhaps reward would be in seeing his eyes when he recognized her for what she was.

She rode him then. The enjoyment of the game she felt with others was absent here. If he only knew that even a demon felt violated and revolted by his touch.

The cadence of the priest's breathing signaled that he was almost there.

She squeezed her muscles around him, eliciting enough real pain to dissolve the fiction of sleep.

His eyelids fluttered.

"Be here with me, father."

She rode him, not allowing the priest's growing confusion to detract from the stimulation.

"Let's both give thanks for what we are about to receive."

"Who..."

The priest came fully awake, torn from the embrace of his dream. His eyes widened. This was real.

"Fuck me, father, for you have sinned."

A strangled noise seeped out of the priest's open mouth.

Kat tightened herself mercilessly around the base of his cock.

"Do you like this, priest?"

Kat revealed fully herself then. She sighed as she materialized. She could see horror in the priest's eyes as he recognized her.

Kat fingered her horns, snapped her wings open, and allowed her tail to caress her breasts. She leaned menacingly over him. Her black hair tenting around his head, the glow from her eyes reflected in his, their noses bare inches apart.

"Or did you prefer it when you dreamt I was a child?" she growled.

The priest gibbered in terror, mouth articulating sounds that might have been a prayer.

This was the point at which Kat normally fed, when terror and arousal peaked. However, the priest's taint lent his energy a rancid foretaste. Kat recoiled at his contact, almost retching as she absorbed the first tendrils of the priest's energy.

"Remember: I am to you what you were to them, priest," she hissed.

She drove herself onto him anew and allowed her fury free reign.

The priest's fingers scrabbled on the bed as he came, like desperate crabs seeking purchase on shifting sands. His breath came in short, wheezing gasps and a sheen of sweat bathed his face. He clutched his chest.

His moan had nothing to do with fulfillment. His last rattling breath had everything to do with the closing of a chapter.

Kat sat upon him as he writhed beneath her. The glow in her eyes faded as the life left his. At length she disengaged from the priest and stood at his bedside. He now lay motionless, eyes affixed unblinking at the ceiling, looking reduced and fragile.

Kat placed the bible on his chest and drew his cooling, liver-spotted hands over it.

She didn't feel guilty for having dispatched the priest. The possibility of this postscript to his sorry life had been in the back of her mind all along. If there was any justice in the world, he was now making the acquaintance of her master. Neither did Kat feel any particular satisfaction. The priest was dead. One predator had bested another. Nothing else had changed.

The rage, she knew, would be back. For now, it slumbered.

* * *

Damian returned home after visiting Britt and stopping in at a particularly impressionable young single mother. He'd fed upon her like a glutton as her fear battled gamely with a hearty and seemingly boundless sexual curiosity.

She was delicious.

He would visit her again.

The house was empty, but more than that, it felt empty, as though its soul had been sucked out. It was unusual that Kat would not be home at this hour.

Damian flipped on the radio and found a series of newspapers arrayed on the kitchen table as the news of the priest's death broke on the local newscast.

Damian thought nothing of it. Disgraced priests had been much in the news in the last few years. Damian could imagine the sighs of relief and muttered thanks in the corridors of the archdiocese that this one had died before the sordid mess could be aired in the courts.

An article in the top-most issue had been circled in red. He scanned it:

... local priest facing child pornography charges is allowed to stay in the tri-cities ...

... must report regularly to police. The conditions also prohibit access to computers and the internet and being in contact with children and teenagers under the age of 18....

... is being welcomed to live at a priest's residence run by the archdiocese, the archbishop announced Thursday afternoon....

An alarm went off in his head. What was Kat's interest in this story?

He quickly scanned the remaining issues. All featured articles, going back in time, detailing the downfall of this priest.

"Shit," muttered Damian.

He stood irresolutely in the middle of the kitchen, clutching a newspaper in his hand.

It can't be, he thought.

He scrambled to the office and booted Kat's laptop. She'd been spending a lot of time locked up in the office of late. He opened Google, selected View All History, and quickly found a link to a press release from the local archdiocese:

"When our brother called our offices, there were no options available to him respect to a residence in the tri-cities area. In the spirit of Christian charity, I have granted him permission to stay at our Retired Priests' Residence.

"I appreciate that our brother faces serious charges and pledge our complete cooperation the authorities who are responsible for the administration of justice.

"I also appreciate how this matter has saddened our ministry and community...."

"Shit," muttered Damian again.

There was no doubt in his mind that the priest's untimely demise and Kat's interest in him coincided in a terrible way.

On impulse, he checked Kat's browsing history again and found a Mapquest query for the address of the retired priest's residence.

Damian dropped into the chair and buried his head in his hands.

How could he have been so blind?

He called Britt.

"Have you seen Kat?"

"No. Not recently. Why?"

Damian cursed. "I think she's done something terrible."

"What?"

"I'm not sure, but I have a good idea. I'm coming to see you. I'll tell you when I get there."

At that moment, a tone emanated from the laptop.

Damian cursed and clicked around until he stumbled upon Skype and a voice came out of the laptop.

"Hello?"

"Hello," Damian answered, surprised.

An attractive woman appeared on screen. "Am I correct in assuming that this is Damian?"

"You are."

The woman smiled. "I was just calling Kat to see how it went with you and that girl."

"We're both fine. Who is this?"

"Forgive me. I'm Isabel D'Avignon. Kat sought my help in resolving your problem."

The wheels in Damian's mind whirred. D'Avignon. The name rang a distant bell. Avignon was a papal city, an ancient city in France, once a beacon to their kind. Isabel D'Avignon. One of the ancient clans? It couldn't be. Could it?

"Am I correct in assuming that we obey the same master?" asked Damian carefully.

"You would be correct."

Damian was astounded and humbled at the effort Kat had expended on his behalf. Links between clans were tenuous and infrequent. Isolation preserved anonymity.

"In that case, I have to thank you for whatever assistance you provided. Both I and Britt have fully recovered. Unfortunately...."

"Yes?"

"Unfortunately, Kat has gone. I think she has crossed the line."

Isabel's face creased. "Tell me more."

"A clergyman had died. A priest. Disgraced, but a priest nonetheless."

Isabel sat back, shocked.

"I believe that Kat is involved. Right now, I don't know where she is."

They regarded each other across the internet.

"I know what she's capable of," said Damian. He closed his eyes and remembered their demonic salad days, before age, experience, and mutual comfort had mellowed them.

Isabel spoke to someone beyond camera range and then returned her gaze to Damian. "We're packing our bags. We'll be there tomorrow."

"Is it necessary?"

"If you feel even somewhat responsible for this -- and I suspect that you do -- my sense of responsibility eclipses it. I suggested this path and in my arrogance allowed her to follow it unsupported. If anyone is to blame, Damian of Pannonia, it is I."

"Let me tell you how you can reach me."

"Don't trouble yourself. We will find you."

* * *

Britt and Damian started at the crunch of tires on the gravel of the drive. Both leapt up and ran to the window. Unfortunately, it was not Kat's Range Rover. Instead, a long, black Lincoln drew to a stop by the front door. A large man emerged from the driver's seat and rounded the car to open the passenger door.

They had spent the past day on tenterhooks. Without any clue as to Kat's whereabouts, Britt and Damian remained at the farmhouse in the hopes that Kat would appear. It wasn't as though they could ask the police to file a missing persons report.

Damian went to the front door as Britt continued to examine the new arrivals from the living room.

A woman emerged from the rear of the car. Like the driver, she was blonde and slender, and even from a distance Britt could see that she was remarkably attractive.

At the sounds of the visitors in the foyer, Britt joined Damian to greet them.

Introductions were made. Isabel's companion, Jean-Paul, regarded Damian with undisguised disdain and Britt with some suspicion. He was large and stood several inches taller than Damian.

The woman, Isabel, removed her black leather gloves and slipped her long manicured fingers into Britt's hand and regarding her with undisguised curiosity. She combined beauty with unconscious refinement, yet there was nothing distant about her. She exuded warmth and empathy and Britt calmed the moment they made contact.

"Britt. I had so hoped to meet you, though I wish the circumstances were better." Isabel spoke with a soft French accent.

Britt nodded, suddenly at a loss for words. Damian had briefly explained the history of European demons during their vigil for Kat. After having wandered from empire to empire for hundreds of years, many demon clans had spread to the major cities of medieval Europe -- Bruges, Florence, Lutetia. The Avignon clan was one of the more illustrious and accomplished, having survived and thrived side-by-side with popes and their followers. Legend had it that their master was particularly pleased and amused with their ability to rub elbows with the Papal court during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and as a result relaxed many of the strictures that bound them. With increased latitude from their master and their proximity to this particular seat of power, the Avignon branch had grown in influence and prestige in both demonic and human circles.