Page 12 of The Prospect's Succubus
Have you ever watched a predator follow prey so close it could taste the hair on the back of the neck? That’s how I followed her, right up to the mouth of the ghost train. She didn’t look back, but I saw the tiniest tell. It was a flicker at the jaw, a hesitation in the heel. She knew, but she wanted me to come. It’s a kind of dare I’d never refused.
The line was a limp joke by this hour, half the crowd already drowned in cheap beer, and the rest too spooked to try anything labeled “haunted.” I slid my ticket to the kid at the booth wearing a skeleton suit so thin you could see the hickeys through it. He handed me a paper stub, eyes never quite meeting mine, and I walked the ramp like I owned it.
She was already loaded into the second car, legs crossed, hands folded in her lap. The operator waved me into the third. I made a show of checking my phone, then holstered it and slid in, every move slow and deliberate, giving her plenty of timeto glance back and confirm I was on the hunt. The ride jerked forward with a shriek, and the world went black.
That first curve always caught you off guard, a whip-snap left, then two seconds of utter dark before the next neon skull flashed overhead. The carnival outside vanished. The only thing left was the thunder of the ride and the sticky vinyl under your ass. And the scent. Her perfume, half myrrh, half something I couldn’t place, rode the air like a memory. It made my jaw clench.
The tunnel was engineered for cheap scares with its skeletons popping from coffins, rubber bats on fishing line, a looped soundtrack of wailing souls that barely covered the shudder of the ride’s wheels. But I was tracking something more dangerous than animatronic ghouls. Every time the black lights flickered, I watched her. And every time, I saw a little more of what she really was.
The first flash, nothing but hair, long and black as a raven. The second, her cheek reflecting the UV in a way skin never should—pearled, wet, a shimmer that ran straight down the throat. The third flash, and her eyes caught the light. They were violet, then red, then violet again. Not contacts. Not a trick of pigment. Demon eyes. I could draw the face from memory, and probably would, in the last ten seconds of my life.
I ran my finger along the inside of my cut and found the 1911's grip. The cold of it steadied me, like a friend’s hand in a bad neighborhood. It wasn’t a normal gun, not anymore. I’d milled the slide, replaced the springs, etched sigils along the barrel that only lit up under the right kind of threat. The ammo was mine, too, rounds packed with a silver alloy and a core of consecrated salt, the kind that left holes in bodies and doors in souls.
I counted the curves in the ride, waited for the spot where the strobes cut out for nearly four seconds. That’s all I’d need. Four seconds to get a round in the chamber, another two to close thegap. I didn’t plan to talk. Talking’s for people who want to live past dawn.
“Took you long enough,” she said, never turning around.
I said nothing. The gun’s muzzle was already an inch from her temple—not that it would help, not with the kind of power I felt rolling off her in waves.
She smiled. “So brooding. Let’s get it over with, then. You shoot, I’ll bleed, you’ll cry, we’ll fuck.”
“That how it works?” My voice sounded like it’d been scraped down with a file.
“You think you’re the first to try? The world’s full of men with guns and tragic stories. I eat them for breakfast.”
“Not me.”
She laughed, sharp enough to set my teeth on edge. “They all say that, soldier, right up to the moment they spill. But you’re fun. I admit it. Go on—pull it. Hit me with your best ritual. Show me what a man with nothing left can do.”
I pressed the muzzle to her head, half-daring her to flinch. She just sighed—a sound of absolute boredom—then reached back and ran her nails along my thigh. The touch was slow, obscene, more threat than seduction.
“You should kneel for this,” I told her, words iron. “Might be the only time you get the chance to beg.”
The train shrieked around another hairpin, tossing us together in a brief crush of flesh and leather. She twisted, and now her mouth was right at my jaw, the smell of her breath a narcotic rush.
“You think that gun is the answer, Torch? You think I’m scared of a little etching and faith? I was swallowing priests before you crawled off your first battlefield.” She laughed again. It was wetter this time, something thick in it.
The second loop through the tunnel, I tensed. Jasmine was still in her car, still posed like a waxwork, but the tilt of herhead said she was counting, too. The ride shrieked through a cardboard graveyard, and for a heartbeat, everything went silent. No lights, no screams, nothing but the clatter of the chain and the breath in my lungs.
I moved.
I squeezed. The hammer fell.
The world went white, then red, then white again. The noise was a fire alarm, a migraine, every horror movie you ever watched spliced together and played at once. I saw her mouth open in a laugh, or maybe a scream, but I didn’t hear it. All I heard was the roar in my own head, and the wet crack of the bullet leaving her body.
The ride jerked hard, and we both went flying, tangled together. For a second, the world slowed down. I was on top of her, gun pressed to her throat, knees pinning her arms to the seat. She smelled like burnt sugar and secrets. She smiled again, lips slick with something too dark for blood.
"You’re better than the others," she whispered. "But you’re still going to lose."
She twisted, and her body—her real body, the demon flesh—flexed underneath the dress. Her leg hooked mine, and we rolled, the gun scraping the car floor. She moved like a snake, bones all wrong, joints bending past what should have been possible.
The tunnel ended in a blaze of blue LED, and suddenly we were in the open air. She was gone, vanished from the car like she’d never existed. I landed alone, bruised and out of breath, the gun hot in my hand. The crowd was waiting, laughing and drunk, none the wiser that a war had just happened three feet from their sugar-high kids.
I straightened my cut, pocketed the gun, and stepped out into the night. My arms glowed blue, every scar screaming foranother round. She was out there. She was wounded, maybe, or maybe just pissed off.
My muscles screamed, not from the fight—fights I could do all night—but from the jolt of her inside my head. Whatever psychic parasite she left crawling in my cortex, it had teeth. Every few steps, I’d get a hit of something that wasn’t mine: a flash of black marble, a whiff of scorched silk, the distant echo of a woman’s voice, cold and commanding, all the vowels stretched out like a slow-motion razor. It was as if the carnival had infected me, wired my brain for every nightmare on the premises.
I fought through it, knuckles white on the 1911, scars burning hotter with every pulse. The crowd thickened near the midway, a crush of bodies oozing out from the game booths. I slipped past a mother dragging her sugar-high toddler, two teens dry-humping under the glare of the ring toss lights, and a trio of college guys punching each other for no reason except being alive.
