Page 103 of Succubus

I know what I need to do next. I need to kiss her. I need to use my dark power. I need to be the succubus she is trying to destroy.

But even as I think this, I know it won’t work. I don’t feel it in me, that rise, the movement of it. It isn’t there.

Dick Face said I could command it, even if I didn’t want the person I wanted to kill. I thought I had done that, with Joel. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe I never learned how.

If my voice doesn’t work on her, if my words can’t shift her brain, then that’s it. I have nothing. And now she’s moving again; her eyes seem to refocus.

“Ella, leave!” I croak. I don’t know how quick it will be. Maybe she is more powerful than Joel. Ella can’t see this. I can’t let her watch me die.

But I can’t stop her from seeing.

I can’t stop anything.

The woman swoops down. I flinch, turning my head. Ella shrieks; she is starfishing her body over mine, trying to cover every point of contact, trying to hide me under a blanket of her. The woman peels her off me, and Ella is a screeching, mauling creature in a puffy coat, as though she knows instinctively that she is my last chance.

It happens very quickly, all of it crammed into a second, it seems, slurried with dark. The woman makes a noise— Ella has clawed her, maybe—and she hurls Ella off her. Ella thuds against the pillar just beside me, a terrible weight in the sound, and falls into a heap. I flip toward her, my breath gushing out of my lungs as though my chest has been torn apart. I already know everything is wrong.

She is a huddle of clumped dark, her angles inanimate. Like a pile of extra clothing, but with too much substance.

I am gasping her name but she doesn’t respond. Her hair is on her face, her face is turned the other way, there is a small ink spill puddling where her head meets the pale stone. But it isn’t ink.

PART III

CHAPTER 33

There’s no time, no time at all. I see the black wetness under Ella’s head, and the woman is already grabbing for me. Joel is behind her, his hand closes on her shoulder, his other hand is on his stomach where the blood has spread, and he seems to be moving in slow motion, struggling through the heavy air, seriously injured. I can’t even worry about him; I can’t even react.

And then the woman’s whole body jerks, her eyes flung open in shock, whites flashing in the dim.

“Al,” I whisper.

But he is too late. Too late for Ella.

The woman chokes, writhes, fingers raking the air. She folds to her knees.

I turn my head and there he is, materializing out of the night, walking with a casual bounce in his step toward the platform where we have all collected like actors in a devastating play.

“Don’t worry, Tempest Dunlap!” he calls. “But I’m very sorry about that—your phone called and I had to make it stop calling. It was very confusing!”

I left him with my phone, so Mom could reach me in case of emergency.

Al is holding one hand up. Now he’s more visible, and he looks concerned. “Oh dear, oh dear,” he says. He lifts the other hand.

Joel cries out and I gasp as he falls.

“No!” I yell.

“No,” Al disagrees calmly in his rasping, friendly voice. “I have to protect you. This is the agreement. How did there come to be two of them here?” The woman is trying to crawl toward me, or maybe toward Al. She moves brokenly, her teeth gnashing, every tendon in her neck strung tight, a thin, keening wail of pain escaping her. Joel is clutching his stomach, curled on the ground, his breathing harsh and labored; he moans in agony.

“Al, no! Don’t hurt him! Please!” I’m struggling to sit up.

Al reaches the bottom step, gets distracted. “Ella the child! They’ve hurt her!” His hands fall momentarily as he stares at her, and the woman staggers to her feet, wobbles, and then flings herself forward. She’s a streak of rabid desperation; she’s on him, they thrash into the grass of the field. Now she’s screaming in pain. I am on my feet, stumbling. “Joel— ” I yell.

He has rolled onto his back. He opens his eyes, turns his head toward me. Somehow his glasses are still on, though crooked. “Oh God,” he says, looking past me. “Ella.”

I think I am maybe crying. But it’s hard to tell.

“You’re hurt,” I say.