Diary of a Succubus Page 4

  I pivoted and leaped back at the car, tucking my body into a midair roll aimed straight for the windshield.

  It was a reckless maneuver, so I was nearly as surprised as the front passenger when I burst straight through and dropped into his lap amid a shower of glass.

  “Mierda—” the driver squawked, but I kicked out my bare heel and drove his skull into the doorframe. Suddenly unmanned, the car lurched forward again.

  “Shut your eyes, Gloria,” I said, but I doubt she heard past her own hysterical screaming.

  The passenger pulled his SIG Sauer .45 and pressed the barrel against my forehead. Good reflexes, but nothing close to mine.

  Faster than the naked eye could see, I snatched his wrist and whipped the gun beneath his chin. It was even too quick for his brain to stop the nerve impulse it had already sent to pull the trigger.

  The noise was deafening but the mess was worse.

  In the backseat, Gloria tucked herself into a fetal ball and went quiet from shock. Either that, or I couldn’t hear her through the tinnitus.

  I wanted to wipe the splattered blood from her face. I wanted to reassure her she was safe. But that would have to wait.

  The rolling sedan veered right and struck the Dumpster where Vincent and I had danced our violent tango only a moment before.

  In the same instant, I bolted upright and shouldered my way through the moon roof. Another burst of glass. Shards bit through my skin. Adrenaline dulled the pain, for now.

  One of the remaining thugs dropped to the pavement while the other was wedged in the backseat foot well, his rear hanging out the door. Neither of them saw me perched on the car roof.

  It was almost a pity, how determined they were to catch me. They’d die without ever laying their eyes on me again.

  I plunged my hand back down into the car and tore the steering wheel from its column. Then I whipped it like a discus at the man getting up from the street. The impact threw him back. He wouldn’t be getting up again.

  In almost the same motion, I dropped silently to the street just behind the last goon. He grasped for Gloria’s ankle, brandishing a thick hunting knife in his other hand.

  Her fear rushed through me like an electric jolt. Nothing mattered in that instant but saving her.

  My hairpin blade slid between the vertebrae at the base of the attacker’s neck. His groping hand went limp. It was an instant and permanent off-switch.

  Regret chilled my heart just then. I’d binged on violence. I’d taken too much. I was drunk and filthy with it.

  But these men weren’t innocents. They were Mellado’s vicious dogs even before he tinkered inside their heads with his voodoo. Putting them down was almost a kindness.

  “Gloria…Gloria,” I called, brushing her hand with mine. Her eyes snapped open, stark white in the shadows. She flinched away from me and whimpered.

  What else should I have expected? To her, I must’ve seemed like a demon who’d just burst out of hell.

  “Listen, you’re safe,” I began. “You can—”

  “Drop the weapon!” came a voice nearby. Vincent.

  Standing in the beam of the single working headlight, he held a gun on me two-handed, with unwavering aim. Even with that welt on his forehead.

  “Vincent,” I sighed. “Don’t point that gun at me, please.”

  “Lady, what the hell did you—”

  “There’s a girl here who needs your help. Take her to safety, right away. Your game is up.”

  Vincent cocked his head. “What game?”

  “You’re not one of them,” I told him. And then I burst into a sprint toward Vine Street.

  Chapter 14

  A woman sprinting down Santa Monica Boulevard in a bloody and tattered dress wasn’t going to go unnoticed, not even in West Hollywood.

  So I took to the backstreets, slinking when I couldn’t outright run. It was almost an hour before I reached the Peninsula Hotel.

  I slipped in through the garden and entered my villa without disturbing a soul. I didn’t dare step on the Oriental rug. Instead, I peeled away my bloodstained clothes in the bathroom.

  As I drew a hot bath, the mirror reflected a stark, full-body view of my injuries. Lesions and punctures all down my shoulder and back, embedded pebbles of glass. My left hand was singed from the gun’s muzzle flash, and my soles were a mess from my barefoot run.

  I could barely look at myself, especially knowing most of the blood on me wasn’t mine. Even when the men I killed deserved it, murder left me sick and hollowed out, wondering what fraction of a soul I had left.

  The bathwater stung, but it was almost a relief. Here, I could finally regulate my heart rate and focus on healing both my body and my mind.

  I had to push away thoughts of that other bloody bathtub with Terra inside it, and the killer Diego Mellado had sent to New York to murder her.

  It took single-minded concentration, but I willed the wounds to contract, pushing away the embedded glass and stopping the blood flow.

  After a few minutes, I released the red-stained tub water and scooped the handful of glass from the drain. Most of my cuts were now only slightly worse than shaving nicks. They’d vanish completely by morning.

  Let me tell you, healing at this rate wasn’t exactly a field of roses. The pain was like standing naked in a campfire, and soon I’d have to eat like an Olympic weight trainer to recuperate the energy I’d expended.

  I had to cut and dye my hair every week to prevent six fresh inches of exposed roots. I trimmed my nails every other day. My face-altering plastic surgeries, no matter how radical, always reversed themselves within a month or two.

  And the amputations on the tips of my shoulder blades would soon start breaching like new teeth through gums. Not a chance in hell I could expose that secret to the world.

  Once, in Saudi Arabia, I lost my left hand to a scimitar. It took a year to grow back, but it did grow back, a miracle that surprised even me.

  I’m not invincible. I’ve seen the deaths of others like me, when once there were other women like me. Decapitation, disembowelment, defenestration, immolation, starvation, hanging…I’ve seen far too much.

  And tonight was much too close. I’d taken my worst misstep in decades. I’d stumbled right into the lair of a creature I didn’t even fully understand. I failed to kill him, and now I would most certainly become the most wanted on Diego Mellado’s hit list.

  I’d never been this close to cutting off the head of Deus Inversus. And as far as I knew, he’d never been so near me, either. After so many years of searching and sacrifice, I had to see it through.

  For Terra and for all the girls I lost before her. For Shanti and the ones I still had a chance to save. For myself, and the treacherous road I’ve been traveling since that figure in the cavern transformed me on my fifteenth birthday.

  Three hundred and fifty years ago.

  Chapter 15

  Healing wounds brought fitful sleep. Even in a luxe bed with down pillows and Italian sheets, the pulsing nerves kept me half awake and haunted by distant memories.

  The winter of 1666. That first night in the gorge alone with the figure in the woods, abandoned by my father. My despair cuts through time as sharply as ever.

  The fire burns almost white, but I can’t feel its warmth. I’m shivering with cold and fear, too exhausted and petrified to move. I’m alone with this hooded stranger. The figure’s robes quiver behind the flames, but he doesn’t move or speak.

  Maybe he’s not alive at all, just human remains propped upright. I’m going to freeze or starve to death. I’ll end up like this robed skeleton.

  When he finally moves, I’m struck all over again with terror. I scurry against the rocks like a cornered animal. He reaches a bare hand toward the lip of his hood.

  He’s going to show himself. A wild man who will steal my virtue. A wolf-man who will eat me alive. I don’t want to see, but I can’t turn away from seeing…

  Under the hood was no monster. No man, eit
her.

  She had a look straight out of a biblical story, a maiden only a few years older than me with bronzed skin and almond eyes, a race I’d never seen before. Proud cheekbones and spiraling tresses of black hair.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “Your father thinks he can barter you for miracles, but you are free now. I can do nothing to help your family. Fate decides for them. I can only save you.”

  She brought me back to the fire and wrapped me in thick animal skins, but even after her comforting gestures, nothing could still my violent shivering.

  Then, never taking her eyes from mine, she offered me my first clear glimpse past the horizons of the natural world, past everything I knew.

  She drew her sleeve back from her dark and slender arm. I thought she wanted me to admire her flawlessness beside my scrawny, weathered limbs…

  Until she thrust her arm into the fire.

  I cried out like I was the one being burned. Her face was wrenched with pain. She growled curses in a foreign tongue. But still she didn’t pull away. Full seconds passed before she finally took her arm from the fire, and it sizzled and smoked and cast off a noxious stench.

  I couldn’t speak. I could only gawk and retch at the rippled and twisted burn consuming her arm. It wasn’t some magic trick. She was in terrible pain, grunting and hissing as she pressed her forearm into the fresh-fallen snow, desperate for some measure of relief.

  And then, after a moment, her face settled into a meditative calm. She showed me her burnt limb. Sweeping her fingers lightly over the damage, she flaked it away, as if it was nothing more than settled ash.

  Underneath, her skin was as pristine as it had been a moment before. The sight of it stopped my shivering. I knew what I’d just witnessed. I’d heard warnings my whole life.

  Witchcraft. The kind that got you hanged on the gallows tree on Boston Common.

  “Do you want this power?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I gasped, with a longing I never felt before.

  “You are wrong. This power brings loneliness you cannot imagine. Forty generations have lived and died, and I am left behind, alone. Always alone.”

  I couldn’t possibly appreciate what she was offering me that night, a curse and a miracle in equal terms.

  Now, here I was in Los Angeles, centuries and a continent away from that gorge in the Massachusetts woods, smack in the middle of twelve million people, one of the biggest populations the world has ever known.

  But I tossed and turned alone on a California king–sized bed so large I couldn’t reach the edges. I’d seen the birth and death of twelve generations, and still I remained. Here among all these strangers, and my need for human connection only seemed to ache even more deeply over the years.

  An hour before dawn, I got out of bed and showered again. This time my cuts were totally gone. Fresh skin vibrating with expectation. My bloody dress went into a plastic bag, then inside the handbag I carried. Leaving it around to horrify the maid would be a foolish move.

  The valet out in front of the hotel hunched against his podium, yawning. But when he saw me, he snapped to attention, suddenly eager. I asked him to fetch me the red Infiniti Q50 the hotel was letting me borrow.

  The morning was as sharp and promising as an orange plucked fresh from the tree. The valet said, “You sure know how to greet the sunrise,” looking me over with a tad too much enthusiasm.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Believe it or not, I have a date.”

  Chapter 16

  I weaved with two-hundred horsepower up the Pacific Coast Highway, blasting KROQ. Past Malibu I took a beach access road toward the towering, craggy headland of Point Dume, the famous site of the final shot from Planet of the Apes.

  And there he was, my dawn date, lounging on the sand just beyond a lifeguard tower. He was the only soul on the beach, nursing a take-out coffee as he contemplated the rolling waves.

  The sight of him gave me an unexpected rush. My hunger ought to have been sated after last night’s events, but sometimes I swear the priestess preserved me in a perpetual state of youthful hormonal unrest.

  I cut across the beach in my Spiritual Gangster harem sweats and Puma sneakers, sensible shoes for once. My long shadow caught his attention.

  I had no idea what he’d do when he realized who I was. I silently mouthed the seconds it took. At two, he lurched to his feet in a burst of kicked-up sand.

  “You!” Vincent said. “You followed me.” He dropped his coffee, hands splayed and ready to fend off whatever martial art I might throw at him this time.

  “You could read it that way,” I admitted.

  “Tell me what the hell is going on here.”

  “I spared your life last night. Twice.”

  “I saw you kill four people. Expertly.” He was just about shouting, but amid the waves and the surrounding cliffs, nobody would hear. I’d picked the perfect hideaway for whatever I decided to do.

  “They were going to rape and murder an innocent woman,” I said. “Please tell me you got Gloria out of there safely.”

  “She’s safe,” he said, marching past me toward the parking lot. I didn’t want to plead with his backside, no matter how tightly sculpted he was in those cargo pants and white tee.

  So again I called out “Vincent!”

  He spun around. “How do you know my name, anyway?”

  “You told me.”

  “But why did I tell you? Why did I wake up at four a.m. with this unbearable urge to take an Uber out to Point Dume? I’ve got all of Diego Mellado’s horses and men hunting me down, but what the heck, I decided it’s a beach day? In January?”

  I’d seen this all before, the confusion and anger and terror when you can’t even trust your own head. I felt sick for him, even if it was all my fault.

  “Vincent, please. If I tried to explain, you wouldn’t listen.”

  “You did this to me, didn’t you? You…hypnotized me somehow. Planted the idea in my head. Go to Point Dume at sunrise.”

  I made an inch of space between my thumb and index.

  “Aw, God,” he said, going pale. “What are you?”

  “How long did Diego Mellado have you on puppet strings? Admit it, you know what it’s like to be controlled with no will of your own. What I did to get you here was make a suggestion.”

  When I laid my hand on his back, he didn’t move away. Nor had he bothered to shave that alluring scruff from his face. We were getting somewhere, just maybe in more ways than one.

  I longed to feel his energy coursing inside of my body, but did I want all of him, or just a moment’s gratification? I couldn’t decide.

  “Mellado’s going after all of us,” I said. “You, me, Gloria. We have to take him down.”

  “Oh, yeah?” he said. “Who says?”

  “The United States government, I’d guess. FBI? DEA?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “You don’t already know?”

  “Last night I saw what you really were, and I let you go free.”

  Restless, he headed back toward the ocean. Like Hamlet taking arms against a sea of troubles, Vincent didn’t know where to aim his urge to fight.

  “Maybe you kept me alive just to use me,” he said.

  “That goes without saying.”

  He knew what it was like to have his mind shackled to another person’s whim. He had to know I wasn’t playing any tricks on him now.

  “Tell me who you are,” he said.

  “My name is Lilly Anna. I’m one of the good guys.”

  “Reassuring,” he muttered.

  The unanswered questions were overwhelming him, even if he struggled to hide it. With his attention on the sea, a strange ease fell over his face. He whispered, “Would you look at that?”

  The sun was just cresting over the bluffs behind us, casting light through the face of an oncoming wave. At that very moment, a playful pod of dolphins surfed along the barrel, sleek gray bodies dancing just under the surface.

  In the midst of a crisis, Vinc
ent could stop to marvel at dolphins. I couldn’t help breaking out in a smile.

  “Gloria will be Mellado’s easiest target,” I said. “She escaped with you last night, so he’ll think she’s involved. He’ll go after her first. You need to take me to her, right now.”

  Chapter 17

  “Somebody’s following us,” Vincent said. He hunched forward in the passenger seat, eying the mirrors.

  “It’s the 405. Everybody’s following us.” As I weaved the Infiniti between slow-moving cars on their morning commute, I was serenaded by a chorus of horns.

  “A motorcyclist, four cars back in the center lane.”

  “If you just give me an address…” I said. All I could picture was Gloria with a bag over her head in an unmarked grave.

  It was no surprise the morning news said nothing about Isabel or the bloodbath outside Sapa Inca. Mellado could bury more than just bodies.

  My burner cell phone buzzed. Vincent seethed with annoyance while the caller and I spoke in rapid-fire Czech. After ten seconds, I hung up.

  “An associate of mine,” I said.

  “What kind of associate?”

  “Think of it as a very exclusive sorority.”

  “Ask a stupid question…” he grumbled. “What was that, Russian? Are you in the SVR?”

  “That was Czech, but I do know Russian. I can get by in twelve languages and read thirty, if you count the dead ones.”

  “Is that all?” Whatever government agency employed Vincent, I suspected he was top-shelf, ex-military, the kind that was always the smartest in the room. Being around me had to hurt his pride.

  “The biker is following your exact lane changes,” he said.

  The Ducati Scrambler was five car-lengths behind us. Its rider wore a black leather jumpsuit and a helmet with a mirrored faceplate. At any moment that bike could overtake us. I could appreciate Vincent’s concern.

  “Tell me where we’re headed, and I’ll lose the biker.”