Diary of a Succubus Page 6

  “You really are remarkable. After what I’ve seen from you…look, I’m MIA from the cartel and the Feds. It’s been two weeks since I last made contact, so they’ve got to figure I’m dead or defected. When I suddenly reappear…”

  “This can work, Vincent.”

  “Why are you even bothering with this discussion right now? You’re used to convincing people more efficiently than this.”

  “I’m trying the old-fashioned way.”

  He sighed with resignation. “Seems the most efficient way to clear my name is to put Mellado’s head on a pike out front of Grauman’s Chinese. I don’t mean that literally.”

  I grasped his hand in mine. Vincent was a rare specimen, eager to fight but humble enough to set aside his ego and let a skilled woman lead. In all my time, I’d met only a few such men. Most others were milquetoasts or monsters.

  When passion arose in me, I never quite knew if it would sway toward darker tones. That was the constant quandary of my heart, whether to love a man or take his soul.

  Once, they put a name to my kind. Demon lover, succubus. But long since then we’d fallen into myth, obscured and disavowed, wiped off the face of the earth. It had been more than a hundred years since I’d heard rumor of any others. For all I knew, I carried the final bloodline.

  I wanted to see how far I might draw Vincent into my world. Could I lure him back to the club? Was he that brave? That committed? Questions falling away like clothing in a striptease.

  “One more thing,” I said. “Do you know this man?”

  I’d loaded John Jay White’s passport photo on my phone. The man known as Asmodeus. That stark and empty face, that cold menace. One look and Vincent lost all traces of a grin.

  “Yeah, I know that bastard all right.”

  Here was a tantalizing surprise.

  He unzipped his jacket and pulled down the V-neck of his white undershirt. In the valley between his pectoral muscles was a burn scar, still blistered and healing. An upside-down chalice, branded into his flesh.

  Chapter 21

  The night was lush. City lights glinted along the chrome of passing sports cars and clubs rumbled their drums like rival tribes. On my car radio, Isabel’s pulsing electro-dance song “Seductress” played like a private call to arms.

  Sapa Inca threw its vibrant energy out into the street. Last night’s horrors were wiped clean, like they’d never happened. Never mind my thumping heart, my restless eyes. The blanket of dread that kept trying to smother me.

  At the entrance, six of Mellado’s guard stood breathing like bulls as Vincent and I approached them. No slipping through unseen this time. I wanted an audience with the king.

  “Welcome back, hombre,” the bouncer told Vincent. He shrugged and waved us past the ropes as if to say, hey, your funeral.

  The live music inside synced with the breakneck chatter of my mind. Prismatic lights swept across the dancers like a lighthouse beam over a storm at sea.

  Vincent and I took our positions on the dance floor, poised for the one-beat, Los Angeles style. In that last second of stillness, we merged into a single current of energy and danced.

  Amid all that rollicking percussion and brass we marked the beat of the clave. We aimed our steps like fencers, forward and back, thrust and parry. We learned each other’s contours.

  Vincent’s hand spread wide on the small of my back. Our cores kept centered while our limbs brushed together to the rhythm. It was sleek seduction.

  With bolder force, he ushered me through each new cross-body lead, each spin, testing what liberties I’d allow. My dress wound against my thighs and whipped free again. I swayed back against his solid chest, jacketed in his arms.

  Never had I danced with such raw synergy. A devil in a black cocktail dress and the man she’d unleashed. When it was done, he held me at arm’s length. His chest heaved and his face glistened.

  The silence that followed was fraught. I sensed the anxious tremble of the others around us. We’d drawn all eyes to our dance, but nobody dared to openly admire the scene we’d just made in Mellado’s lair.

  Then came the applause. One lone pair of hands. The crowd disbursed from around Diego Mellado as he stepped down onto the sunken dance floor in his alligator boots.

  “Bravo! How about that, folks?” Mellado cast about for approval, but it was just theatrics. It pleased him to command the room as if he had every single club-goer by the throat.

  Vincent positioned himself in front of me. I had to forgive his mistaken bravado. He wanted retribution. This creature had stripped his free will and branded him like cattle.

  Vincent didn’t realize Mellado could kill with a whisper.

  “Relax, my friend,” Mellado said. “You have my respect. I’ve never known a man to refuse my gifts, and then come back to the party, parading such a beautiful woman. Hollywood could hardly do better than you.”

  “What you did to me wasn’t a gift,” Vincent said.

  “Careful now. Don’t be crass in front of your lady.”

  “I’m my own lady, thank you,” I said, insolent despite myself. I’d marched into this place like a warrior, but I’d never faced an enemy like this. A pater dominus presenting himself to the world in the guise of a human.

  Ancient names were all we had to describe what he was. Demon. Incubus. But it was even worse than that. He wasn’t simply one of the horde of incubi I’d pursued all my life. He was an emperor among their kind, like the devil himself, lording over the rebel angels.

  My own flesh crawled at the thought of it. Mellado reached his hand out to me, a debonair smile on his lips.

  He had that sensual allure, like all incubi. They basked in an aura that blinded people to their true beastly nature. Charisma was the key to the human mind, the first step to possession.

  I was smitten, yes, but I wanted to believe I could resist complete mind control.

  Yet what did I ever know about pater domini besides legends? Witch hunts, inquisitions, stoning and mutilations. Through the centuries, they’d driven my kind, my sex, to extinction.

  “May I have this dance?” Mellado asked.

  The indifferent Incan gods gazed down from above. I could see Vincent’s rage simmer just below the surface, but he didn’t interject. He had to have understood it would come to this.

  “Of course,” I said, taking Mellado’s hand.

  The band slowed their tempo, and we danced like swaying cobras, searching for the moment to strike. Every slip of his hand across my torso was a rush of pleasure. His animal magnetism was nearly overpowering, his scent like a potpourri of spices. His strength rippling through every move.

  To just give into him, like drifting off to sleep…

  His black eyes penetrated mine. The surrounding crowd melted away. Had they taken Vincent? I had visions of men encircling him with knives like Caesar on the Ides of March.

  That rakish grin. Could Mellado sense that I was a succubus? Even at the height of my power, could he turn my thoughts to his?

  When the dance was done, Mellado led me away by the wrist. Maybe I didn’t care where we were going or what happened to Vincent. So freeing, such a relief to end my resistance and simply let myself be led.

  We reached a secluded booth with tufted leather-back seats. It seemed remote from the rest of the club, though I could still feel the heat of the crowd. A glass center table cast a red glow over the semicircle of strangers gathered there.

  Wait, not all strangers. One face I recognized. A thin white man with a sweep of silver hair. That same blank gaze, that same nothingness, had almost deflected my attention away from him.

  It was the gemstone eyes that gave him away.

  Chapter 22

  On the way to Sapa Inca, Vincent had told me who had burned the Deus Inversus insignia into his chest. A symbol of his enslavement. It wasn’t Diego Mellado. It was Asmodeus, at Mellado’s command.

  Undercover with the FBI, Vincent had infiltrated a distribution ring in Las Vegas, but two weeks
ago a deal in the desert was sabotaged by Mellado’s men.

  Gunshots resounded across the canyon. Executed informants. A hot muzzle on the back of Vincent’s skull, the absolute certainty of death.

  Instead, they took him to Mellado. The cartel knew his secrets, as if reading his mind. They bent him to their will. And Asmodeus marked him.

  “Sit,” Mellado insisted. As he took his place across the table from me, a glassy-eyed blonde handed him a cigar she’d already lit in her mouth. Mellado’s men gazed at his exhaled smoke like they could read the future in it.

  All except Asmodeus, whose eyes tracked only me. I felt molested, like he was reading invisible glyphs written onto my flesh, tracing my centuries of history. I wanted to gouge those eyes right out of his skull.

  “You haven’t told us your name,” Mellado said.

  “Lilly Anna. I should be getting back to my date.”

  “What would you like to drink, Lilly Anna?”

  “I don’t drink, Mr. Mellado.”

  “Is that so? Tell me, what do you know about me?”

  His eyes sank almost shut as he toked his cigar, waiting. His entourage sat riveted, their cocktail glasses poised in their hands, against their lips.

  “They call you the Angel Czar,” I said. “You have influence across the globe. You’re the true rule of law behind a dozen state figureheads. You command armies, but your deadliest weapon is narcotics.”

  Mellado flicked ash into the lap of the woman beside him. After a breath of strained silence, he laughed. His underlings followed in an uncertain, off-key chorus. Except Asmodeus, of course.

  “Every night, I find the most beautiful woman in the club and reward her with a dance,” Mellado said. “Tonight, she rewards me back. So here’s another gift. Some advice. Your date isn’t what he appears to be.”

  “Isn’t that true of everyone?”

  “Maybe so,” he said.

  I strained to keep my attention on Mellado, but that unceasing glare from Asmodeus made me almost sick. Those same eyes had watched Terra’s life drain away in her bathtub. I wanted to leap across the table, but a deep uneasiness made me hesitate, a primal fear that seemed to have no source.

  I couldn’t stay sharp. A voice was in my head, whispering my name. The victim of an incubus won’t know she’s been afflicted. Not until the spell is broken does she realize and say, What have I done?

  Maybe I could outrun them, save myself, but any display of my superhuman abilities would mark me as a succubus. They’d tear the world in half to bring me down.

  “I have something for you, from New York,” Asmodeus said to Mellado. The accent was European, faintly German. He thumbed a small coin into the air and Mellado snatched it into his palm, displayed it to us.

  Not a coin after all, but a small copper ring, worse for wear. My heart clenched at the sight of Shanti’s jewelry. I’d given it to her myself when she was still a child. In adulthood she’d taken to wearing it on her pinkie finger.

  “Not much of anything, is it?” Mellado asked.

  I couldn’t let my breath quicken in panic, couldn’t betray even the slightest reaction as I struggled to remember if I’d seen the ring on Shanti’s finger when we met underground.

  Asmodeus’s souvenir didn’t have to mean she was dead. It couldn’t mean that. She’d written me after Asmodeus left New York, unless…

  Unless Shanti wasn’t the one who posted on the chat room. Maybe these incubi had hacked the system and lured me here with a sham. Maybe they knew what I was all along.

  “It was a pleasure to dance with you,” I told Mellado in a measured voice. “But please respect my wishes. I’d like to go find Vincent now.”

  Mellado peered at me through his trophy ring. I couldn’t show my fear, my impotent rage. My last defense was this game of tense civility we continued to play.

  “You are under the influence of a bad man,” he said.

  “Tell me then.”

  “What do you know about who you came here with tonight? What is his business with me? I won’t hold you hostage at this table, darling. But understand, that man is a sinking ship. He’s already hit the iceberg. He’s drowning.”

  Another shadow of uncertainty darkened my mind. My hands were clenched in fists, fingernails cutting into my palms. A hunger stirred, but I didn’t know what would satisfy me, what would bring me clarity.

  Mellado wasn’t wrong. I knew nothing about Vincent or his loyalties except what he’d told me himself, and what my intuition supposed.

  I’d offered Vincent glimpses of the world’s deepest secrets, and for what? What could he offer me? Why had I even spared his life that first night?

  “Think about what I’ve told you tonight, Lilly Anna. Let my advice be your guide. Tomorrow, come to my home and tell me what you’ve decided. I can show you so much more.”

  “Yes,” I said flatly. I felt so impossibly tired just then, like the suspect who confesses guilt, just to put a stop to an endless interrogation.

  “But come alone,” Mellado said. “No Vincent.”

  “No Vincent,” I repeated. “I’ll take care of him.”

  Chapter 23

  Vincent lay on my bed with his blazer and tie stripped away. The television gave the room its only light, dim and blue. The news told of an elderly Argentinian, Hector Perez, found dead on his yacht at the Port of Long Beach.

  A picture of the man, taken at a political fundraiser, flashed on the screen. “I know him,” I said, and told Vincent the rest of the story. How I’d found the man torturing the starlet Isabel to death, how I’d sliced his throat with my hairpin blade.

  Vincent shook his head. It was all too much to bear, this unrestrained reach of Mellado’s cartel, crushing humankind like the hand of an angry god.

  But I had no more reason to withhold the truth from him. When I pulled out the weapon to show him, my hair tumbled loose over my shoulders. The blade glinted blue in my hand.

  “I’ve seen your knife, thank you very much,” he grumbled. He’d been brooding since we left the club, weighted with uncertainties. My fresh revelations only unsettled him further.

  Even when I reported nearly every detail of my conversation with Mellado, Vincent still couldn’t fathom how we’d been allowed to waltz out of the club untouched, alive.

  “Would you prefer the alternative?” I asked.

  “What did he want with you? That’s what I’m trying to…” His thought trailed off. There was a rough edge of jealousy in his questions, and it made me all the more excited.

  I was still flush with the thrill of confronting Mellado and Asmodeus. My skin was charged. I wanted to break Vincent out of his funk, drape myself over his body.

  Seated on the edge of the bed, I brushed my hands through his thick hair. At first he resisted, but when I traced my fingertips across the outline of the chalice scar on his chest, he couldn’t ignore me anymore.

  I wanted to kiss his wound, drink the pain into my own body, but I didn’t have that power. My gift of healing was only for myself. But I could still blanket the hurt with pleasure.

  “I thought I was fighting a drug war,” he said. “But this is something deeper. I can’t wrap my head around it. Or you. I don’t even know what to think of you.”

  “I like it that way.” I laid on a sultry tone, vamping up the femme fatale. Men had sought to grasp me and failed. Once, in the northern fells of England, a poet came close, but he died too young. He called me a beautiful woman without mercy.

  Finally Vincent met my eyes, brushed his thumb across my cheek. “You’re trying to misdirect me,” he said. “We could’ve been killed.”

  “Instead, we danced. And it was transcendent.”

  “With me or Mellado?” he asked.

  My answer was to press my lips where his jugular pulsed, just below the skin. When he exhaled his tension, I knew I had him.

  He took my face into his hands, guiding my lips toward his. I couldn’t blame him. A kiss was the most natural human need
, the first blush of intimacy, the end of conversation, of resistance.

  But I tilted my face away, kissed his open palm instead. I rose from his arms and turned toward the television set. It was dark now, though I hadn’t touched the remote. Sometimes devices just responded to my whims.

  “I’m sorry if I—” Vincent began.

  “Unzip me,” I said.

  Vincent sat upright and lowered the zipper on the back of my dress. He turned away the folds like peeling a fruit, exposing my bare shoulder blades. The slip of his fingers spread delight to every region of my body.

  The soft light through the shades kept me half in shadow. If Vincent saw the feathery wings inked onto my back, he didn’t say a word. I stood up before his kneading thumbs found the pair of crescent scars.

  “Do you know what I am?” I asked him.

  “You’re the scariest, sexiest woman I’ve ever met.” He stood with me as if to dance again. His hands slipped along my ribs, my thighs, dragging the dress along with them. It fell in a heap at my ankles, the only stitch of clothing I was wearing.

  Naked before him I said, “You know why he let me go.”

  Vincent held back. He knew, but he searched my eyes for some hint that it wasn’t true. “What did he do to you?”

  “He wanted me to seduce you, like this.”

  I spread my hands across his chest and pushed him back onto the bed. For a human, Vincent was fast. Even as he collapsed, he clutched my hips and rolled over me, pressed me into the mattress.

  My chest heaved. My hands worked furiously at his belt. No more resisting this current that flooded my body. It carried me along, and my only anchor was this man.

  I felt his eagerness. He wanted to have me, to expose everything about me. Like the black widow’s mate, he was blind to the threat I posed.

  Again he sought me with his lips, brushed my cheekbone but nothing more. Yes, oh yes, I ached for his kiss, for that primal surge that launched everything else, but it was the only forbidden act.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “When I danced with Mellado, I could feel how easy it was to give into him, to do whatever he wanted.”