Summoning the Incubus Ch. 06

Author's Note: Hey lovelies! What's coming up is more of a mini-chapter than a full-length one. It just made more sense tonally for it to be its own thing since it's mainly backstory with more of a mild horror vibe than an erotic one and squishing it into the rest of the chapter I've been writing felt uncomfortable and has been delaying my posting anything at all.

I really don't recommend here as a place to jump in if you're new to the story or just here for sexy time. Chapter one is always the ideal place to begin! (Unless you only want a very short hit to find out if you can stand my writing style.)

Enough preamble. Let's do this.

Chapter Six: Kasita's Summoning

Kasita once told me about her first love. A nun by the name of Marianne.

Like I, Kasita had once been pious and had sort for herself a life of devoted sisterhood within the convent. However, while I had never made it so far as to cross the Abbey threshold, Kasita had lived in the Lord's service for at least decade past her sixteenth birthday.

She was a certain kind of content in that life. Her imagination of what a happy life should be was limited to the life that she was living, and so by that logic, she thought herself to be living well and joyously.

And yet, she felt a craving. Not articulated in the language of her thoughts but somehow present in the constitution of her body. An itch, or a whisper, or a want on the inside of her wrist or the within pulse of her throat. She could not even think to place it elsewhere in her body. She was too ignorant of what women were capable of.

Kasita had always noticed a beautiful woman's hair or fine eyelashes. She thought her friend Charity had lovely delicate hands. She sometimes noted that the Mother Superior had a very elegant way of walking.

But when Marianne arrived at the nunnery, Kasita experienced a revelation. She was instantly, utterly, and uncontrollably in love.

Marianne had hazy origins. She did not like to talk of from where she had come. She was not specific about her age or the number of her siblings. Kasita was curious, but ultimately chose to be content with not knowing. If Marianne's past was full of sins, well, she was making atonement for them now, was she not?

Marianne had a sun-kissed complexion; eyebrows that suggested her hair might be honey-blonde beneath her habit, and rich brown eyes that seemed to betray knowledge of luxury and pleasure.

And when Marianne declared, in a letter inked upon her own wrist (lest the evidence of parchment see her excommunicated) that she loved Kasita with all the ecstasy of a saint: well, the two women became lovers immediately...

When Kasita got to this part of the story, I wanted to beg her not to tell me a word more. My jealousy bubbled under my skin. She was my first love, and I could hardly bear not to be hers. But I had told her that I would listen, and so I did.

It was a chaste affair by Kasita's account. They held hands and each other when they could. They touched the tips of their noses. They washed each other's feet. Their love existed in an intense silence and was known only through actions that could be read at a glance as mere sisterhood. But they knew that they wanted each other and that was almost enough.

Marianne drew as well as wrote. Usually it was flowers, or birds or angels. She had a gift for both style and likeness, adorning Kasita's skin in beautiful illustrations that stayed hidden beneath long black sleeves, until night came and they were scrubbed away with a brick of soap...

***

The first winter of their love brought with it a terrible amount of sickness. Many women in the convent died of fevers. And so in these sorrowful circumstances, Kasita and Marianne came to be digging in the churchyard.

I do not know whose spade struck it, but festering in the ground was a leather-bound book. Beneath the soil, the colours were strange, turquoise and orange and thistle pink. It was full of unreadable language and odd pictures. Constellations and candles and beings who were not our folk.

The book made Kasita uneasy.

"Let's put it back, or burn it. Or at least if we are to keep it show it to the Mother Superior and get permission-"

Marianne put a finger to her paramour's lips. She wanted only to study the illustrations. Perhaps attempt to mix some of the unusual inks. What harm could possibly come of it? With a reassuring smile, she hoisted the book easily from Kasita's hands.

For some weeks, they did not talk about the book. There was too much grief and caretaking to be done in the convent. But Marianne did study the illustrations. She drew them, practised them again and again on the inside of her forearm. Until one day she decided that she had mastered the symbols...

She woke Kasita in the middle of the night.

"We need to go,"

"Go where?"

No answer.

In their nightdresses, the two women walked bare-foot down icy cold stone steps. Marianne's freezing hand locked tight about Kasita's wrist. Her thumb pinching at her pulse. They passed through the cloying unlit spaces of the nunnery, and out into moonlight bathed churchyard.

Kasita's heart raced. Was this dream? Were they truly stealing away?

There was red paint in the snow - black like old blood in the midnight. A star made of triangles, but not the one that Kasita knew.

Marianne was bent over lighting candles that gave off too much eye-watering smoke.

"Mari?"

She didn't look up. She had picked a silver knife up out of the snow.

"Mari!"

"Shhh," she coiled a hand about Kasita's face and pulled her into a hard kiss, filling her mouth with her tongue, "Be a good girl for me, don't make a sound,"

Things happened too quickly after that. Marianne recited a spell.

The air smelt like death. Kasita cried silently. Marianne's knife rested at her throat. A dense fog gathered.

The Prince of Cerise emerged from the mist. Dressed in black silk robes, his eyes smouldering dimly, his crimson skin webbed with black tattoos, his wings dense with dark oily feathers and two short dull horns rooted at his brow. An incubus.

Marianne positioned Kasita in front of her, restraining her at her waist.

"Good girl," she was whispering in her ear, "This will all be over very soon, I promise,"

"Which of you is the virgin?" hissed the incubus.

"This one," said Marianne, jostling Kasita slightly forwards.

"I see," The Prince flared his nostrils. "...I don't normally like them this frightened,"

"Well, what difference does it make? A sacrificed virgin is a sacrificed virgin," she laughed cruelly.

And now Kastia was openly sobbing, bewildered, paralysed with fear and utterly, utterly heartbroken.

"Oh shush shh," Marianne cooed in her ear again, "Don't be such a stupid dyke. Be my good girl, my sweet little virgin. Shhhhh,"

"Urgh. You humans are disgusting," muttered the Prince, "No respect for the nature of hedonism. What pleasure can be had from a crying lesbian? Who am I? The King of Azure?"

The Prince took a vast breath and blew out all of the candles. He unfurled his feathered wings.

"Wait! What about my magic!?" Marianne screamed.

"Your magic?"

"I put together the pentagram - don't I absorb my power once the ritual is completed and the virgin is dead? That's what I did all this for!"

The Prince was visibly repulsed.

"Oh no. You have mistranslated. A virgin sacrifice is not a murder. It is a gift of a first experience of sexual surrender. It is a loss only of ignorance of life's finest joy... not a loss of life at all."

"Jesus wept." Marianne spat at the ground. "So just fuck her then."

"I will do no such thing. She didn't summon me. She didn't ask for this."

"You know I'll have to kill her anyway? If you're worried about her "having a bad time", maybe you should be worried about that? No sense keeping her around if she's worthless to me."

"Do not attempt blackmail me, whore. Your human lives are all short and sad. If hers is shorter and sadder..."

And for less than a moment, Kastia's red-rimmed eyes met those of the incubus, and despite all that was said, she gambled to trust him.

"Then it will be by your doing not mine."

"I- I'll do it." Kasita managed.

"Oh, look now, there's my good girl!"

And in the moment that Marianne's grip on her hostage loosened, Kasita grabbed knife by the dull side of the blade and pulled it from her captor's hand. She made to run, but was tackled round her legs. Panicked on the ground, she flung her arm in far too many wild, frightened motions, clutching her weapon with white knuckles as blood spit from thin wounds on Marianne's face and hands. Kasita kicked and fought. She got her free hand on the handle of the knife. She got her legs free of Marianne's weight, as the other woman - kneeling on the floor - clutched at her bleeding face. She got to her feet.

Kasita could run away. She felt the moment last for longer than she needed. But she didn't. Instead she wrapped both hands around her knife and stepped towards her injured foe. She drove the silver knife into Marianne's back. The scream was high, but short.

Kasita tried to pull the weapon free, but it was stuck fast in the viscera of the body. She wanted to vomit, but the feeling just sat there, sick and lead heavy. Her heart still thundered. She wasn't even relieved or grateful to be alive now that the danger had passed. Breathless and crying, she collapsed against a headstone some way away from the pentagram. Nothing in her being felt right.

The Prince put a tentative hand on her shoulder, but she flinched and he withdrew.

"I thought... that she loved me... what do I do now?" she whispered.

"I'll bookmark a page for you. For when you're ready." The Prince patted the book that was sitting in the snow.

"I never want to see that book again,"

"Very well," The Prince picked up the book, flipped through it quickly, and then tore out a single page that he folded into quarters. He then threw the remaining book on the ground and with a snap of his fingers set the tome ablaze.

"...I didn't have to kill her." Said Kasita.

"I don't much mind that you did."

"The Lord does,"

"You and I may need to have a longer talk than I expected," sighed the Prince of Cerise. "Here," he pressed the page into her small hands, "Get yourself somewhere safe and far away from here, and when you're willing, this is the spell you'll want." He unclipped part of his black silk garment and set it about her shoulders. He stayed with her. They talked.

The pastel-gold sun entered the winter sky. And then he said he had to go.

Kasita buried Marianne herself. She never went back to the convent.

***

Thanks for reading! Hit me with your feedback if you've got opinions!

Love, Betty X