“Why me? I’m at the end.”

The elderly man was half asleep and his words — thin, dusty syllables — seemed to come from a great distance.

What could she tell him? That she hoped that her stain on him might be less than on someone younger and with more of a future? That a merciful god might overlook this recent taint. If God weren’t merciful, there wasn’t much she could do about it other than hope that his transgressions were more numerous than a moment with her. Let damnation come to those who truly deserved it.

“Surely there are those more willing and better able.”

“You were more than able. And willing.” Kat winked.

The old man smiled. “Surprised the hell out of me that I still could at my age.”

Kat placed her hand on the man’s cheek and it reminded her of waxed paper. She left it there for a long moment.

“You’re so pale,” the man said.

Kat was surprised that his rheumy eyes could distinguish her pallor in the darkness of his room. “I don’t get out much.”

The man closed his eyes and Kat couldn’t bring herself to remove her hand. The man smiled at this simple contact or perhaps at the memories it evoked of other hands that had rested there in the distant past. His memories swirled in Kat’s mind. A French girl during the war who’d foolishly fallen in love with a young German soldier. What had happened to her after he’d been sent back to the fatherland when it was certain that the war had been lost? Had she lived? If so, how long had she been shunned by her countrymen for obeying her heart over her brain? Other lovers, better times. Wraith-like memories like milky photographs. And finally a wife, his rock for over five decades, now gone. He longed to be with her again. This cheek had felt many hands, some in anger and others in tenderness and love.

“Why me?” he asked again.

“Your energy is like watered wine.”

The man regarded her again, this impossibly young wisp of a thing whose name he didn’t know, who had given of herself in a way no one had in far too long. A gift she’d given him, a recollection of vitality and life and of an intimacy so profound that it had momentarily robbed him of his breath.

“I don’t understand, but I thank you.”

He won’t make it through the night, thought Kat. I hope that he thinks of his loved ones when he breathes his last, rather than of me. I don’t deserve that.

“Sleep,” whispered Kat.

“You’ll be back? Tell me you will.”

“I’m sorry.”

The man sighed, having already lived through so many exits and recognizing the signs. He knew that the gift would have to be enjoyed in memory. Like all gifts in the end.

“Sleep.”

The man soon did and Kat finally removed her hand.

***

She exited the building that housed the palliative ward with less furtiveness than she’d entered. She stepped into a warm summer night. The moon rode high above her, accompanied by the same stars with which it had shared the heavens for time immemorial. This part of town was quiet. Here the city slept. But for the distant hum of a lone automobile in the distance, all was silent.

Kat took a deep breath. She was tired and still hungry, though the old man had taken the edge off the latter.

“Ah, so here is my dark angel of the palliative ward. I can just imagine their surprise — expecting the reaper and getting you instead. I bet they think they’ve died and gone to heaven.”

It was a voice that Kat recognized instantly. She soon found him. Jean-Paul leaned against the wall. A shadow among shadows. He disentangled himself from the darkness and approached her with that lazy, shoulder-rolling walk of his.

“How did you know where I was?”

“When geriatric lust is in the air, I know that you can’t be too far away.”

Kat punched him hard on the shoulder, but he only laughed. Jean-Paul was tall and solidly built, a poster-boy for square-jawed Nordic types. Kat tucked her arm in his and fell into step beside him. In the confusion and upheaval that marked her first meeting with Jean-Paul, she had instinctively disliked him. Brooding and gruff, Jean-Paul had seemed unapproachable and dangerous. She saw in him an old-world demon against whom she could no longer measure up. Over the subsequent months, Kat had revised her first impression. The veil of animosity had gradually lifted, revealing an affable and generous spirit. She now counted him as a friend.

“Come with me. I’m about to feed.”

“I’m not hungry.”

For all of his lightheartedness, Jean-Paul took his duties of incubus seriously. His was a single-minded devotion to his master. When hungry, Kat knew that Jean-Paul could be cruel and terrifying, reveling in the gradual debasement of his prey. Kat had no interest in seeing him feed.

“Come on. You can’t tell me that your husk of a friend satisfied you.”

He hadn’t. Kat still felt hollow and listless. How long had it been since she’d truly sated herself? She couldn’t remember the last time. Not since she’d left Damian and Britt. Now she snacked on those whose souls had already been sacrificed, or those so old that it really didn’t matter anymore.

They turned onto the main street. The Heidelberger Schloss — Heidelberg Castle — loomed on the hill to the right. A great brooding ruin, twice struck by lightning and partially destroyed by the resulting fires. No wonder the court had decamped to Mannheim, not wanting the finger of God to point to them a third time.

Bars did a booming business in the old town, even at this late hour. Tables spilled out onto the street. In contrast to the quarter they’d just left, here was life. Laughter, music, and the clinking of wine glasses and beer mugs assailed them from every side. She was transported back centuries to when she’d also walked these streets. Here was life, now as then, despite its fragility, brevity, and occasional meanness.

“It might whet your appetite for younger fare,” said Jean-Paul, continuing their conversation as though it hadn’t been interrupted, bringing Kat to the present.

Kat shrugged.

They passed the Hostel-Pension-Sudpfanne, a hostel with a few tables out front. A few students, arguing in English, occupied them. He squeezed her arm. “Don’t look now, but you’re being ogled.”

“I doubt it,” Kat lied. In fact, she’d felt the sudden interest like a prickling wave of heat. It wasn’t like the way people normally responded when an incubus or succubus projected. Kat hadn’t been projecting, for one thing. This reaction had come unbidden and intensely focused as though someone had homed in on her. The response was filled with the usual yearning and tension, but at the same time imbued with purity and an unexpected knowing.

“Give yourself some credit; you’re hot, even among the non-geriatric set. You walk as though the world is your runway.”

Kat ignored him and scanned the crowd for anyone paying her more attention than usual. She couldn’t identify the source. Frustrated, she walked more slowly, guardedly reaching out with her mind, a fine tendril that probed here and there for the source of this sudden interest. She couldn’t get a good fix. This was a student town, after all, and it was late at night. Fueled by alcohol and hormones, there was enough carnal expectation in the air to make it difficult to get a read on anything.

She and Jean-Paul turned the corner and the feeling dissipated. Kat shook her head to dislodge the sense of unease that had settled over her.

“Where are we going?”

“One of my pets,” said Jean Paul. A pet was his term for someone he’d visited more than a dozen times. Kat pitied them. They’d feed him until they were useless to themselves or anyone else, worn and hollowed out by temptation and fear and a hunger that could never be sated. At best, they’d become the perpetually dissatisfied, absorbing the energy of those around them like black holes, until they found themselves bitter and alone. At worst, they’d become the prostitutes and junkies, the mean and dispossessed, the dark army that lurked in the shadows and spawned their own flavor of temptation and debauchery.

But a demon had to feed.

***

They entered a building that had once been the home of some successful businessman or minor nobility. The building had long since been gentrified and converted into flats. They climbed to the third floor.

“I may need your help tonight, Kat.”

“Sure. Whatever.” She didn’t want to be there.

“She’s getting used to me. Having you there might spice things up a little.”

Kat shrugged.

“And who knows,” continued Jean-Paul, “maybe you’ll get your appetite back for fresher fare.”

She seldom hunted with another demon and wasn’t particularly interested in women, but she didn’t have the energy to argue. It seemed that whatever sustenance she’d derived from the old man had been spent already. The hunger gnawed at her again, but by now the hunger was an old friend.

“Her husband is away most nights, drinking with his buddies.”

“Alright already. I’ll ride shotgun.”

They entered the silent flat. Jean-Paul already looked wraith-like and insubstantial, bleeding at the edges. A phantasm.

She caught her reflection in the mirror. She’d similarly shed much of her physical being. She looked like a figure in an old photograph, time having robbed it of definition and vibrancy. She could just make out dark eyes that seemed to float over pale but firmly-defined cheeks. No doubt her pallor derived partly from the thin gruel she’d permitted herself over the last months. In this state, her full lips bore little of the deep red lipstick she’d applied before setting out. However faded, it was still the only splash of color on a monochromatic canvas defined by luminescent flesh, raven-black hair, and dark, haunted eyes.

Even in his insubstantial form, Jean-Paul looked vital in comparison.

They eased into the bedroom.

Jean-Paul hesitated. “The husband’s here.”

Kat noticed a large shape in bed next to the woman. She scowled at Jean-Paul, who should have known that the woman hadn’t been alone. Hell, she should have known too. She was losing it.

The woman was already responding to Jean-Paul’s presence, habituated like a junkie to the ecstasy and the terror.

“Make sure you keep him quiet, would you?”

Before she could respond, Jean-Paul had drifted to the woman’s side. She had already swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat on its edge, blinking sleepily, searching for the nocturnal visitor she both needed and feared.

Jean-Paul seated himself on a chair in the corner. “Come here, mein Schatz,” he whispered.

The woman’s gaze swiveled to the source of the summons. She was not beautiful in the conventional sense. Her face seemed incongruous, there was no other word for it. Individual elements — eyes, nose, and lips — were beautiful, but the whole didn’t appear to hang together. Illuminated by little more than the light of the moon that seeped between the slats of the blind, Kat could discern her shape beneath the filmy material of her nightgown. She was thin. Small breasted and narrow-hipped.

She approached Jean-Paul with tentative steps. Unfocussed eyes revealed the unconsciousness of her actions. High, arched eyebrows lent her a look of perpetual surprise. She obeyed hesitantly, but her caution could not hold her need in abeyance.

She came to a stop between Jean-Paul’s splayed legs. There was no mistaking her hunger. Kat wondered what had brought her to this point, of having attracted the attentions of an incubus. Was it unfulfilled desire? A self-destructive impulse? An unconscious willingness to court danger, whatever the cost?

The woman knelt between Jean-Paul’s legs like a supplicant. Her slight breasts pressed against the sheer fabric of her night gown, rising and falling with each breath. Kat could see her nipples, proud and erect against the fabric. Tentative fingers reached for him and unbuckled his belt. With more urgency now, they unfastened the button of his trousers, lowered the zipper, and pulled. The object of her desire sprang free and she held it in her delicate hands like a totem.

“You’re as hungry as I am, aren’t you?” asked Jean-Paul.

Kat didn’t know to whom he was speaking.

“So hungry,” whispered Jean-Paul.

Kat caught a movement out of the corner of her eye. The husband reached for the spot vacated by his wife and found nothing. Kat sensed his sleepy confusion and anger at her absence.

“That’s it,” whispered Jean-Paul.

Kat wanted to turn away but couldn’t. These were the opening steps in a dance that had changed little in countless centuries. The music was the ebb and flow of lust, the point and counterpoint of action and reaction.

The woman lowered her face to Jean-Paul’s thickening member. Already he was large.

“Cold,” the woman whispered, commenting on the temperature of the incubus’s organ.

“Give me some of your warmth, then.”

The woman’s tongue appeared between her lips, extending until it touched the tip of Jean-Paul’s penis. The contact caused the woman to shudder with either bliss or dread. A low moan rumbled in her throat. Both hands now grasped Jean-Paul’s girth. They appeared impossibly small in relation to him. Her delicate, pale hands appeared to glow against his dark and thickly-veined staff. The woman settled on her heels and opened her lips for him, teasing the tip of the glans into her mouth.

Kat marveled at the thrall in which Jean-Paul held her. She can’t possibly manage it, thought Kat.

The woman lowered her head until her lips slipped tightly over the base of his head.

Jean-Paul grew within her and a muffled shriek accompanied the painful stretching of her lips. The woman appeared caught upon Jean-Paul, unable to either advance or retreat.

“A little more, my pet?”

The woman fought to take more of him against the pain she was surely feeling. Her head pitched from side to side as she grasped and pulled against Jean-Paul’s hips. Remarkably, she managed another inch. Her jaw looked to be on the verge of dislocation, lips taut around his circumference. A thread of saliva hung from her chin. A muffled shriek emanated from the wife as another inch of disappeared into her mouth. She struggled against him, gagging and crying, even as her hands snaked around his hips to pull him more deeply into her.

“That’s it,” whispered the incubus. “Open yourself to me.”

The air was thick with desperate, mindless hunger and the whimpers of the woman.

The husband twisted in the sheets and moaned, no doubt responding to the dark passion that swirled in the bedroom.

“Kat?” whispered Jean-Paul in warning.

She turned her attention to the husband. She could see his eyes move beneath the lids. The sound and energy of his wife’s lust must have invaded his dreams. Kat noted the growing tumescence between his legs, tenting the sheets.

The husband’s arousal seeped into the atmosphere of the bedroom. Kat could feel his hunger and the potential energy he offered. It spoke to her. Kat felt again how hungry she really was. Months of abstinence punctuated by the occasional snack had left her weak and hardly able to withstand the allure of a full meal. The husband twisted in the bed again, responding to the sounds made by his wife.

Kat leaned over the husband’s ear, her lips brushing against him. “Shh,” she whispered. “You’re mine tonight.”

That was the first step. A promise that spoke to the soul. The man became quiet, sleepily expectant. His hand slipped down to his groin.

The woman had managed yet more of Jean-Paul and her throat was distended with him. It was now evident that she was attempting to withdraw. Her hands pressed on his thighs, yet her mouth remained fully locked on him, rising and then descending in slow, painful increments. She would remain so until he chose to release her. Kat hoped it would be soon.

The woman’s whimpering rose into a sustained, muffled shriek.

Despite Kat’s command to him, the husband was obviously floating up to the surface of consciousness. Alarm now mixed with arousal. The combination of the two caused Kat to close her eyes and absorb it. An appetizer. A delicious teaser. Her being thrilled at this foretaste of a possible meal.

The husband was very close to waking now.

“Damn,” muttered Kat.

She leaned over the husband again. “You’re dreaming,” she whispered to him. “Dream that you’re with your wife and that I am she.”

Kat pulled the husband’s pajama bottoms down to his knees and climbed on top of him, pulling up her skirt and straddling his hips. She sat back on him and could feel his cock, hard and insistent, lengthwise against her pussy.

His hands found her breasts and she quickly removed her blouse. Coarse fingers roughly pinched her nipples.

A wave of desire washed over her. This one emanated from the husband.

In the corner of the room, the wife had been released from Jean-Paul. She sat on his lap and he touched her jaw with his fingertips.

“I’m sorry I caused you pain.”

The wife nodded and Kat was struck by the apparent concern and tenderness from her fellow demon. Was it genuine or part of the dance?

“Let me do something for you,” whispered Jean-Paul.

Kat could see that tears streamed down the woman’s cheeks, yet she nodded eagerly.

The blow came out of nowhere.

“Fucking tease,” muttered the husband.

The husband’s fist had connected with her jaw. It might have hurt has she been more substantial. As it was, most of the blow passed through her, causing more surprise than pain.

The bastard, thought Kat. How dare he strike me? Or anyone else for that matter?

There’s a score to be settled. But after.

Kat settled herself more firmly upon the husband and then slid her pussy along his length as she stretched herself over him. The anger that had flared in the husband subsided just as quickly, replaced by appetite.

Having passed over the length of his now-rigid cock, Kat pressed herself against its crown, allowing its tip to nestle between her labia.

The husband mumbled his satisfaction.

His lust flooded her being as she pressed against his tumescent cock, allowing its tip to enter her. Already the husband’s breathing quickened. This one won’t last, thought Kat. The mean bastards never do.

His hands cradled her buttocks and his fingers explored the cleft, alighting on her anus. Her muscles clenched around his probing shaft as the ungentle pressure of a finger sought to enter her ass. A little lube would have been nice, thought Kat.

As they dream, so they live — Kat had come to realize this. Just as alcohol revealed man’s true nature, so did sleep. That this one would strike her in a moment of intimacy explained a great deal about the wife’s willingness to entertain an incubus. There was always a reason.

The finger within her ass hooked and pulled painfully as the husband bucked and thrust beneath her. There was no gentleness here, just the selfish striving for release.

Kat glanced at Jean-Paul and the wife. She stood on the balls of her feet, straddling his legs. Jean-Paul’s impossible length and girth pointed up like a totem to the tender apex between her legs. She lowered her hands and grasped him, rubbing the tip of his cock through the wet furrows of her sex. With a small moan of anticipation, she positioned him at her entrance. With a gasp, she bent he knees and accepted him into her.

It seemed impossible that someone so slight could harbor something so large. Her labia stretched taut over his circumference as she descended. She moaned in pleasure and pain as she claimed him. Jean-Paul’s eyes were closed as he navigated her along the knife edge between damnation and ecstasy.

The wife rode Jean-Paul with a single-minded dedication to his pleasure that was hard to watch, descending until the pain became unbearable and rising again quickly for relief, and then repeating the process. In spite of the pain, her arousal was unmistakable, by the juices that anointed Jean-Paul’s glistening cock to the musk of desire that permeated the bedroom.

A sharp tug at her anus brought her back to her own meal. She almost choked on the sickly sweetness of the husband’s coming release.

Time to finish this, thought Kat.

She sat on him fully, burying him within the tight confines of her pussy and clenched herself around him.

The initial gasp at the pressure soon morphed into a moan as she squeezed him within her.

In the background, Kat could hear the wife’s own inexorable passage to release.

Kat rose, running her merciless grip up his length before plunging down again. The first wisps of doubt were insinuating themselves into the flavor of his desire. This inhuman pressure could not be right. His eyelids fluttered.

Kat hadn’t realized that she’d resolved into her demon form but the look in the husband’s eyes as they settled on her revealed as much. She plunged on him yet again, reveling in the sudden surge of confusion and dread that now mixed with his arousal.

That’s more like it, she said to herself.

She opened herself to it, allowing his energy to suffuse her being. She took it greedily with a single-mindedness born of the hunger and emptiness of the last months. She tingled with it.

She rode him hard until, gasping, he spurted his seed within her, the last but most precious thing he could offer her.

She opened her eyes and regarded the husband for a moment. He stared at her in horror as he tried in vain to extricate himself from Kat. “You. You’re a…”

Kat feigned confusion for a moment. “Oh, the horns and wings. I guess they do kind of give it away. Did you expect bat wings perhaps? I prefer feathers myself. More feminine, don’t you think?”

The husband didn’t appear interested in discussing the benefits of wing types with her. She shrugged, reached for her wing and plucked a feather from it. It lay in the palm of her hand, ice-white and delicate. The man watched, eyes still wide. Kat could feel him growing small within her. No matter, she’d gotten what she’d so desperately needed.

She pursed her lips and blew gently onto the feather, sure to angle her hand in such as way that the man could see. Slowly, the feather morphed into a thin white snake, about eight inches long.

Kat stroked it with her index finger. “You recognize the symbolism, of course,” she said.

The man nodded as the snake wound itself between her fingers.

“Good,” said Kat.

She dismounted and the man scrabbled towards the head of the bed, as far from her as he could get.

“I’m not done with you,” she said. She knelt on the bed beside him. The snake navigated the tender spaces between her fingers, knotting itself around them and then slipping free. The husband watched, hypnotized.

“Spread your legs.”

The man shook his head.

“I won’t ask you again. Spread your legs.”

Hesitantly, the man complied, revealing the shriveled state of his manhood.

The hand that held the snake quickly descended on him. He gasped in horror as the snake detached itself from her fingers and encircled his scrotum and cock. He gazed at it, struck dumb with horror as the snake opened its mouth and a delicate forked tongue darted out. At length, the tip of its tail waved before its face and inserted itself into the mouth, entering perhaps an inch. The mouth clamped shut over it and the snake moved no more.

“Here’s the deal. You alone will see and feel the snake every day as a reminder of tonight. If you raise a hand to any woman again the snake will consume itself. You can infer what happens then. You will sleep now. Tomorrow you will remember only me and your lesson.”

“I think it’s time we leave,” said Jean-Paul.

He had tucked in the wife. His hand lay on her head in some strange and tender benediction. She now lay curled on the edge of the bed as far from her husband as she could get without tumbling to the floor.

For all of the devil’s work that had been done tonight, thought Kat, she hoped that some good had come of it.

***

“A little over the top, wasn’t it?”

Jean-Paul offered Kat his arm and she wound hers through it. The energy she’d so long denied herself still sang in her.

“I mean,” he continued, “I appreciate a good bit of drama as much as the next guy, but that was perhaps a little too much.”

Kat felt a pang of guilt. Jean-Paul had a point. Although not expressly forbidden, it was considered bad form for a demon to reveal herself to a mortal, not to mention that it represented a failure to use other, more subtle methods to achieve the desired effect. Of course, sometimes it had to be done, but to do so on the occasion of a first visitation was considered amateurish.

“It’s been a while.” That and the fact that the husband had gotten the better of her, she thought to herself.

Jean-Paul patted her arm. “Now that you’re back in the saddle, you’ll be able to refine your approach.”

They walked on, a meandering route that took them to the general area of the house that they shared with Isabel, another succubus and matron of their little family. They might have been lovers, returning home from an evening on the town.

Kat remained silent for several minutes as she replayed the events of the evening. It had all been too neat — Jean-Paul’s appearance, the husband’s unexpected presence, the need for Kat’s intervention.

“You planned this, didn’t you?” asked Kat at length.

Jean-Paul hesitated for a moment and then nodded.

“You knew the husband was there all along,” said Kat.

“And you, if you’d had your wits about you, would have known that as well. You should have felt him there long before you set eyes on him.”

It was stated lightly but there was a note of accusation in his statement. Worse, it was entirely true.

She’d been played, she realized. It had all been a setup.

Kat stopped and turned on Jean-Paul. “How dare you?”

Jean-Paul frowned.

“How dare you interfere with me, lead me along as though I were a recalcitrant child?”

“Because you are a recalcitrant child. You’ve been moping around the house like a maladjusted teenager. You’re Satan’s fucking whore, Kat, not some emo adolescent.”

She raised a hand to strike him, but he caught is easily.

“The truth hurts, huh? Well, here’s some more truth. I dare because my house is harboring a thankless freeloader who is threatening the very existence of our clan.”

Kat was speechless. She’d never had Jean-Paul’s fury directed at her.

“You might not have noticed given your pained self-absorption, but Isabel and I have been running interference for you for months. Did you ever stop to realize that however distasteful our role in the grand game, we all have a job to do? We don’t have the luxury of self-pity. Our masters are not well-disposed to coddling the weak.

“Had I recognized the danger earlier,” continued Jean-Paul, “I would never have offered you sanctuary. Now it is too late for that. You have turned their attention to this house and it has got to stop. I dare, furthermore, because Asmodeus has an interest in your failure. And you know what that means.”

The name sent a shiver down her spine. Asmodeus. She’d had no idea.

“The coddling stops now.”

Jean-Paul spun on his heel and stalked away from her, leaving Kat alone in the empty street.

THE END OF CHAPTER ONE