How to Kill an Incubus: A Rae Erickson Story Read online

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  Copyright © 2015 by KimberLee

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  How to Kill an Incubus

  By: Kimber Lee

  ISBN: 978-1-68030-389-6

  ©KimberLee2015

  For Jay and Kay…

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  Chapter 1

  Waking up to an incubus attempting to—violently, might I add—pull off my Baby Phat sweatpants at three in the morning wasn’t a great way to start my twenty-seventh birthday. Granted, it was going to be pretty shitty anyway, but that was beside the point.

  The fact of the matter was that I was being attacked by something that wanted to have sex with me and preferred me comatose, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to stand for that.

  My kick to his face definitely caught him by surprise, judging from the way he jolted back and uttered a low grunt, nearly stumbling. I didn’t know if sex demons had pain receptors but I did know that years of kickboxing made my kicks a little more potent than the average five-foot-six woman. Alert and more than a little annoyed, I rolled out of bed and onto my feet, cursing when I stubbed my toe against the nightstand. Intense pain sizzled through my big toe. I felt a little warmth down there and figured the damn thing had drawn blood from under my toenail.

  Now, I was pissed!

  Damn you, Dad, I thought, dodging the incubus’ repeated feeble attempts to molest me. He was staggering around the king-sized bed. I paused, regarding him in the pale moonlight of my hotel room.

  He was drunk. And that was weird because alcohol didn’t—wasn’t supposed to—affect demons. So either this particular creature was so caught up in pretending to be human that he’d subconsciously induced the ill-effects of alcohol, or he was too weak and needed to recharge by sucking out most of my energy through what would probably be mind-blowing animal sex.

  As much as I wanted—hell, craved!—mind-blowing animal sex, I wasn’t desperate enough to willingly sleep with a creature of darkness. I wasn’t my mother.

  “You can sense me,” he said suddenly, his voice low and weirdly singsong.

  “No, shit,” I told him, because what else was I supposed to say?

  “No, at the club… earlier,” he went on, slurring his R’s. He resumed his catlike prowling toward me and I jumped onto the bed, well aware that this was a ridiculous position. “You could sense me. I could feel you sense me.” He regarded me quizzically now, his eyes meeting mine.

  The club. I mentally groaned, remembering what had gone down hours earlier.

  Nicolette was a well-known rave club in The Left Bank of Paris that I’d been staking out for the past two weeks. The real reason I was there was because Derek Karr was there and I was tailing him. It sounded glamorous whenever I thought about it but the reality was far from it. Derek was supposed to be on a business trip—something to do with a software he was developing for some fancy French hi-tech company—not on a grinding session with multiple redheads and blondes. And he did this in very obnoxious silk shirts and khaki slacks, too. Meanwhile, his wife was back in Florida.

  Anna Karr had paid me a huge lump of cash to trail her husband of fifteen years to Paris.

  At first, Karr had been all right—going to meetings, business lunches, ordering room service—all well and good for a man who was unwittingly making millions doing what he did. But come weekend? Karr decided to let loose, pretend he was Chris Brown, and hit Nicolette as if he wasn’t a forty-eight-year-old man with a wife and a teenager at home. In fact, I had enough evidence of Karr playing around to send to Anna, which was why tonight was my last night at the Ange Noir—and in Paris.

  This incubus, apparently, had checked me out at the club and followed me here. Of course, I’d sensed something at Nicolette. But an incubus would have been last on my list of suspects—which was utterly stupid of me. Clubs were their playground. Lots of fresh meat.

  “I’m warning you,” I said clearly. “You take one step toward me and I’m slashing off your demon dick. Got that?!” With what? my inner self asked me. Your fingernails?

  He looked at me, his eyes so dark they were practically onyx. But everything else about him was light—the thick waves of blonde hair on his head, the full red apple slices for lips, and the paleness of his skin. If he were human, I’d probably find him good-looking—but he wasn’t.

  Once again, I cursed the supposed “gift” my father had passed down to me: The gift of knowing who was human and who wasn’t. Ignorance was freaking bliss.

  “Demon dick?”

  He surprised me by bursting into a fit of ear-splitting, uncontrollable laughter. Doubling over, he fell to his knees, rocking back and forth with laughter. I was momentarily confused. My dad had never mentioned supernatural creatures possessing funny bones. Then again, I hadn’t exactly been keen on listening to anything he’d told me about what he did in his spare time, which was hunting demons—specifically incubi and succubi, especially since my mother had run off with one and he’d sort of taken it personally.

  “I’m going to count to ten and you’re going to get the hell out.” My voice was surprisingly calm, in light of this new situation.

  “What are you?” the incubus asked, slowly getting to his feet. “A hunter? A witch? A medium?”

  “None of your business,” I snapped, in the same way I would have snapped at one of Dad’s old hunter buddies. They weren’t my people and I didn’t care to help them “fight the good fight”, as they put it. I preferred my low-key PI work because it paid a hell of a lot better than killing those freaks did.

  “At least tell me
your name,” the incubus implored soothingly, almost like he was trying to seduce me.

  I didn’t want to admit to myself that I was a little freaked out. Actually, I was a lot freaked out.

  I had never dealt one-on-one with any demons before and had spent the last few years after my father’s untimely demise trying to pretend that they simply didn’t exist. Aside from the occasional, creepy “sixth sense” warnings I got whenever I was in the vicinity of one, I was doing a pretty good job burying my head in the sand and ignoring the other things.

  “Get the hell out,” I fumed.

  He shook his head, chuckling. He seemed so… human, and that was the scariest part. How many women fell for his charms and cheerfully opened their legs to him? How many women woke up the next day feeling physically drained with no explanation whatsoever? How many of them just put it down to the demon’s mad sexual prowess?

  He wasn’t human. He was pure evil.

  “Andrei would like you. You’re just his type,” he said, grinning, and it occurred to me then that he didn’t sound or look intoxicated anymore.

  “Go feed somewhere else,” I spat, disgusted, and at the same time, afraid. Andrei was probably one of his billion-year-old incubus friends, and as evil and perverse as he was. The small part of me that clung to that stab of fear was praying for a miracle. I looked down at the demon and I didn’t like that small part of me at all.

  He was probably—no, definitely—stronger than me, and could probably take me down and have his way with me. Then, he could summon his buddy Andrei—who’d suck out the remainder of my life force—and I’d be dead as a doornail by the time the sun came up, with a smile of ecstasy on my inanimate face, no doubt. Mind-blowing animal sex tended to do that to a person.

  “Will do,” the demon said pleasantly. His eyes licentiously raked over my body and I instantly felt unclean, as if he’d actually touched me. “Nice Baby Phat.” And he disappeared into thin air.

  I sank to my knees, breathing heavily, and fell onto my back.

  I survived that. I survived that and it felt…good. Really good.

  But something nagged at the back of my mind.

  Did he mean Baby Phat? I thought hazily, drifting to sleep again. Or baby fat?

  “Renée, don’t sweat it,” I said, putting my BlackBerry in the crook of my shoulder as I simultaneously opened my front door and dragged my suitcase in. “I’m fine.”

  “Don’t sweat it?!” she roared into my ear, making me wince. “Honey, the man attacked you!”

  I rolled my eyes at Renée Marino’s melodrama. I should’ve known she’d blow things out of proportion. Drama was embedded in her DNA.

  “We were in a crowded place,” I told her calmly. “Namely, an airplane.”

  “Yeah, but he could’ve strangled you, babe. He did.”

  I sighed, unconsciously fingering my neck. “Yeah, but by then, he got pulled off me. Come on, Ren. It’s actually quite funny.”

  At the time, not so much.

  It was just my luck that the guy sitting beside me on my return flight to Heathrow from Charles de Gaulle just happened to be Gavin Turner—and I hadn’t recognized him. I hadn’t recognized him because I was still recovering from last night’s—well, this morning’s—incubus attack. And also because Gavin Turner had gone from being an Abercrombie model to Zach Galifianakis’ older, chubbier brother.

  “I hate flying,” he’d said conversationally, while I’d tried to find a comfortable way to sit that didn’t involve my hip being crushed by his.

  “Me, too,” I’d said, when I actually didn’t mind it.

  “I’m Gav.”

  “Rae,” I’d told him, absentmindedly giving him my working name as I flipped open a copy of People magazine. Sandra Bullock was on the cover and I loved her.

  “Rae?” His voice had turned furtive, quiet. “Are you ‘the’ Rae? The private investigator?”

  I set the magazine on my lap and twisted at the waist to look at him. “This isn’t the way I operate.”

  And that was when Gav snapped.

  It all happened so fast. One minute, he was blinking at me benignly with deep-set baby blues, and the next, his big hands were around my neck, throttling me and making his intent to crush my windpipe crystal clear. His hands were like a vise and I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even smell. People started screaming and Gav started talking, his voice chillingly fanatical.

  “You broke me and Zoe up, you meddlesome little bitch! I was with Mel once! Just once! You had no right! No right at all!”

  And that was when I remembered where I’d seen Gavin before. Gavin, who had cheated on his gorgeous wife of three months with his sister’s best friend and blamed me for the inevitable divorce.

  Two men jumped into action and attempted to pry Gavin off me and, once his viselike grip loosened, I reached out and punched him in the throat, gasping for air when he finally released me. He spluttered, choking for air, and flopped back in his seat. Unbuckling my belt, I’d shakily gotten to my feet and swapped seats with a guy on the opposite aisle for the remainder of the flight.

  “You’re crazy, girl,” Ren was saying in my ear. “You’re crazy because this job you’re doing? Yeah, it’s gonna get you killed. You know what Lorenzo was saying?”

  I kicked my suede ankle boots off and flopped back onto my couch. “What did the great Lorenzo say?” I snidely asked, although I did like Ren’s firefighter husband. I just didn’t enjoy the fact that he thought of himself as some kind of sage.

  “He said you’re doing this whole PI thing because of what happened with your parents.”

  “Is Lorenzo taking a psychology class now?” I asked sarcastically, examining my broken toenail from the previous night. It had turned a deep crimson and looked worse than I’d thought. My boots didn’t help either.

  “Think about it, babe,” Ren went on. “This is a vendetta.” She paused, letting her words sink in. “Your mom was cheating on your dad. She left you guys. Now you feel like all cheaters gotta pay. It doesn’t matter that most of them are really powerful—ergo dangerous—they still gotta pay for… for, I dunno, defiling the sanctity of marriage.”

  Yeah, she was cheating, all right—with a sex demon, I thought, wondering what Ren would say if I told her. She’d probably put me in a straitjacket pronto.

  “Wouldn’t I be after cheating housewives, if that were the case?”

  “Babe, screw that. Go back to powerful and dangerous.”

  “I can handle myself,” I said sharply.

  She had hit too close to home.

  “Like today? When Gavin Turner nearly wrung your neck like wet laundry?”

  I let out an exasperated sigh. “I never should’ve told you about what I do for a living.”

  “We tell each other everything,” she said, and I could picture her pouting.

  Everything? Ren didn’t know that I was almost defiled by a demon last night. Ren didn’t know that my father had been out banishing demons when one of them killed him and I found his mangled body. Ren didn’t know everything. She didn’t know anything.

  “When’re you coming to the Bay?” she wanted to know. “It’s been two months. I feel like all we do is have phone sex. Fly on over so I can give you your birthday present, baby.”

  I laughed at the sound of her husky voice. She was ridiculous. “Soon,” I told her. “Real soon. I just have to take care of some things here.” I would never tell her, but each time I returned to my birthplace—Sallow Bay, Florida (pop. 21, 905)—a piece of me withered away, never to grow back again. Too many fucking memories.

  “You know Jared’s been asking about you,” my best friend went on, instantly reminding me of the childhood friend I wanted to leave buried in the past.

  “Great,” I said monotonously, unsure of what she wanted me to say to that.

  “Pick up a British boy,” she instructed, “or any boy. Didn’t you say your neighbor’s got a sexy ass?”

  I bit my bottom lip, looking out the wind
ow at the late afternoon fog that’s typical of the English countryside weather. “Considering the fact that I only live here five days at the most out of the entire year, it doesn’t matter if I find him hot. Nothing will happen.”

  “Well, fuck him on one of those five days and be done with it.”

  “Ren, you are so crass,” I admonished. “Daniel Lawless doesn’t fuck. He makes love.” At least, that was what I assumed just from looking at him.

  “Seriously? With a name like that, he should be a total badass.”

  “Nah,” I said, lying on my back on the couch and staring up at the ceiling. “He should’ve been called Law-ful. He’s the type who’d pay a parking ticket on time and add a thank-you note for being rightfully punished.” I paused. “Actually, he wouldn’t have gotten a ticket in the first place.”

  Ren giggled in my ear. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sounds boring.”

  “Well, he is attractive. I mean, really attractive,” I explained, because he was.

  I was twenty-seven now, therefore way too old to be infatuated with a man. But that was the only way I could describe what I felt whenever I was around Lawless, which was—as I’d mentioned—five days out of a year. Just knowing that Daniel Lawless was getting naked to shower next door made my heart palpitate and moonwalk across my ribcage. I got tongue-tied around the guy. It felt like I was sixteen again, and it was humiliating.

  And that voice of his! God, he made a simple “hello” sound like something filthy. That wasn’t good, because while Lawless might be a good guy, I was a bad girl and we were like water and oil—we just didn’t mix. It didn’t matter how much I wanted to get into his pants. It would never happen because he would want a Mary Sue. And truth be told, I was more of an Amber Rose than a Mary Sue.