Page 8 of The Prospect's Succubus
The phone was already waiting for me, its face up, at the end table. I picked it up and read the notifications, “Status update, please confirm progress.” Lilith was the most inpatient bitch in Hell.
Three souls claimed, one pending. Each with a neat checkmark beside the name, each timestamped and location-tagged for infernal audit. Grayson, Vargas, Walters. I pictured their faces in the order they’d died, the heat of their last touch, the noise they made as the soul snapped free and dissolved like smoke in my mouth. Each one had been easy, almost automatic. Then there was the blank slot, the final quota—target: Torch. The girl in the House of Mirrors had been an accident. Oops!
There was a time, not so long ago, when I would have relished the challenge. The harder the target, the better the taste. But Torch had seen me—really seen me—and that was new. It was enough to make the air around me buzz. I felt exposed, not just to him but to the whole order of things, as if Hell itself had found a crack in my armor and was watching to see what I’d do next.
I got up, restless, and paced to the window. The city’s skyline was a joke, but it distracted me just long enough for the firstwave of panic to subside. I ran my fingers through my hair, still sticky at the scalp from the night’s humidity, and tried to remember the last time a job had gone off script. Not since London, Ontario, and that had ended with three dead religious leaders and a new patch of skin over my right thigh, courtesy of a Vatican exorcist who’d underestimated my appetite for pain.
I laughed, sharp and mean, and let the sound fill the room. It didn’t help. The only thing that would help was to finish the job, seal the contract, and move up the food chain. I knew the logic, knew it bone-deep, but my nerves refused to fall in line.
A fresh notification flashed on the phone. This time it was just a single word: “Do it.”
I paced the marble, bare feet leaving crescent prints in the condensation from the wine glass. I felt the urge to break something, but there was nothing here I could bear to lose. Everything was perfect, perfectly curated, perfectly fake.
I caught my reflection again in the mirror. The mask was still holding, but the eyes gave me away—too bright, too sharp. I could see the demon in there, pacing, hungry, bored with the old games, and terrified of the new one.
Fuck.
Back in the living room, I poured another glass of wine. This time, I drank it in two gulps, barely tasting it, and let the burn work its way down. I dropped onto the sofa again, tucked my knees to my chest.
Three out of four. One left. The thought should have felt like a countdown, but instead it felt like a fuse, hissing toward something I didn’t want to name.
I closed my eyes. In the dark behind my lids, I saw Torch, standing at the edge of the carnival, eyes burning, every line of his body promising violence or something worse. I tried to picture the moment I’d take him down, but every time I gotclose, the fantasy reversed itself, and it was me on the ground, teeth bared, desperate to win but not knowing how.
I laughed again, this time quieter, and let the sound die before it could echo.
In the end, all predators fear one thing, and that is being seen. He’d seen me, and I couldn’t get the image out of my head.
When I finally went to bed, the sheets were cold and the pillow too soft. I lay there, staring at the ceiling, replaying every second of the encounter, every word, every look.
I willed myself to sleep, knowing that when the dream came, he’d be waiting there, too.
This was the first time in centuries that I didn’t know if I would win.
***
I should have known the dream would have teeth.
It started in the black, the familiar abyss where my mind usually went to exhale the day. Normally, I’d orchestrate the fantasy by selecting a lover, setting the stage, and choreographing the details until I could pretend that the need was genuine, not manufactured for quota or status. Tonight, the black was sticky, slow, and nothing about it felt staged.
I drifted, weightless. Then a jolt, a hand on my ankle, fingers hard enough to bruise. Suddenly, I was yanked forward, through layers of memory and desire, until I landed with a jarring snap in a room I knew too well. The penthouse, but wrong. The marble ran liquid, the city lights outside formed angry veins, and the candles burned with blue-white flame, licking the ceiling in lazy waves.
I was naked, the shirt and all other pretense gone, and the cold bite of air made every inch of skin electric. My nipples peaked so hard it hurt, and below, the ache was a pulse, steady and patient.
I looked up and there he was. Torch. Closer than physics allowed, as if he’d just materialized out of the charged air. He stood a foot from the sofa, dressed in black, jacket slung open, T-shirt stretched over a chest that belonged in a violent myth. His arms were bare and covered in scars, every one a blue-white river that seemed to pulse with its own life. The heat radiating off him was so intense that the candle flames bent toward his body.
“Dreaming?” he asked, voice rough and low, the syllables sticky with bourbon and cigarettes and want.
I tried to answer, but my throat closed. My body did the talking—hips shifting, thighs sliding open, heart jackhammering against my ribs. He smiled, like a man who’d caught a thief and was deciding whether to break her or bend her.
He moved. The speed of it knocked the breath from my lungs. In one motion, he was on top of me, hands braced on either side of my head, his weight pinning me to the couch so perfectly I couldn’t move a muscle. The pressure of his thighs against my hips was obscene. I could feel his cock through the jeans, so hard it should have been illegal, pressing into the heat between my legs.
I reached up to touch his face, wanting to test if this was just a construct, a golem of my own making. He caught my wrists mid-air, slammed them down above my head, and gripped them in one massive hand. His palm dwarfed my bones.
“I call the shots tonight,” he said, mouth a half-inch from my ear. The words buzzed down my neck and set my entire body to shivering.
I tried to fight, just for show, but the grip was iron. He kissed me, bruising and deep, tongue demanding entry and getting it. I moaned into him, a noise I’d never made before, desperate and raw. He broke the kiss and bit my lower lip, not hard enough to draw blood, but enough to send a jolt straight to my cunt.
He pulled back and stared down, eyes burning so hot it felt like a second sun. “You want it rough,” he said, not a question. I wanted to protest, to tell him that wasn’t the fantasy, but he was right and we both knew it.
