Page 2 of The Prospect's Succubus
After a minute, he shut the bike off, stepped down and squatted beside me, boots leaving black smears in the mud. His face was all angles and weather, eyes undercut by that constant, surgical intelligence. He looked at my arms, at the glow beneath the grime, and he knew. There’s a story out there about the Devil and bargains made in graveyards, but Vin didn’t seem surprised to see a dead man walk. He just grinned, reached out a hand, and said, “You look like shit, brother.”
That’s how it started. No questions, no speeches, just me, hollowed out and wrung dry and sucking air on the outside of a hundred-year-old fence with a biker president looming over me like my own personal Grim Reaper.
I passed out twice on the ride back to the clubhouse. Vin rode with one hand on the bars, the other ready to throttle my soul back into my corpse if I tried to slip away again. The inside of the clubhouse reeked of cigarette ash, scorched leather, and a sweetness I would later realize was blood, half-mopped up from the tile. It was a safe house for the damned, maybe, but it worked just fine for me.
They gave me water, whiskey, and space. I spent those first days watching the flicker of neon Bud Light behind the bar, piecing together how many parts of me were still in workingorder. The MC brothers, the Royal Bastards, treated me like some contagious miracle. They didn’t bother with welcome parties or awkward get-to-know-yous. They measured you by how hard you clung to the bottom rung, and whether you knew how to keep your mouth shut. I had aced both before puberty.
Vin told me his friend in the coroner’s office had ID’d me off dental records and army tags, but there was no family, no contacts, nothing to explain why I’d been left in a cemetery looking like a bomb went off in my genetics. Turns out, dying once takes all the fun out of genealogical research. I had my name, my scars, and the nightmares. The rest was muscle memory and borrowed time.
Vin kept me around, first as a courtesy, then as an experiment. He set me up with a cot in the "recovery room," which was a janitor’s closet stinking of Pine-Sol and bleach, and started running me on probie jobs: graveyard shifts, cleanup after bar brawls, message delivery to the sort of people whose names you never wrote down. At night, he wanted me to read witchcraft manuals, MC protocol, case files on things that went bump in the night around the Bluegrass. Little by little, my new life sank fangs and claws into my old one until I couldn’t remember the difference.
Within a month, he trusted me enough to staff the door during lockdown nights, and by the six-week mark, I was running solo errands. The RBMC was a strange outfit. Half outlaw bikers, half demon control force, they handled supernatural clean-up for the city, much like ex-military personnel with a side hustle in amateur exorcism. Of all the things I had expected to be after coming back from Hell, “bouncer for monsters” wasn’t one of them.
Vin never said why he picked me, or how he knew what I’d been through; he just seemed to have an internal compass for the walking wounded. Maybe he saw himself in me. Or maybe Iwas just another tool in his kit, and it didn’t matter to either of us so long as the job got done.
I still had to shave my face every two days, and every time I caught my reflection, I saw something new that didn’t belong. A twitch under the eyelid, a scar that hadn’t been there before, a brighter hardness in the set of my jaw. Sometimes it just meant I was still alive. Sometimes it meant the Hell part was catching up.I learned that every club member had returned from below.
Oh, there was Church, who said he'd OD'd in '04 and "played chess with the fuckin' Reaper," and Big Mike, who acted like he saw the Devil in his cereal every morning if the milk soured. But me, I wasn't selling stories for pity and free rounds. I’d died. Explorer’s badge, signed and stamped. I didn’t remember the trip in clean detail, just enough to know I’d left parts behind.
My job, as Vin pitched it, was simple. Kill anything that made a snack out of locals. Succubi, incubi, bog-standard ghouls, the odd shape-shifter who forgot which calendar year this was. Central Kentucky was crawling with enough old-world monsters to make the Vatican blush, but only the Royal Bastards worked the graveyard shift. We were the last line of defense between the regular, TV-watching, mortgage-paying population and the stuff in the dark that wanted to chew through their intestines.
Sometimes, when I rode shotgun behind Vin, I thought about what it’d be like to be made of regular nightmares instead of the imported kind. To get up, punch a clock, and bury your anxiety in football games and yard work. But then the wind hit my face, or the stink of burning trash and spilled gasoline whipped up behind us, and I remembered—there’s no part of me built for normal. Never was.
The phone rang, sharp as a gunshot and twice as annoying. Most people these days didn’t bother to call; they just texted, or screamed at you in person if things were urgent. So when I sawKane’s name strobing on the cracked screen, I knew it wasn’t about the weather.
“Kane,” I answered, voice flat. Didn’t see the need for hellos. You learn to conserve words when you spend your life hunting things that don’t care about them.
“Brother.” Kane sounded like gravel run through a blender, too many nights at the bottom of a bottle, and too many days chewing on the fact that his own kid once tried to eat his face. “You in?”
“Yeah.” I slotted another magazine into the 1911 and felt the weight settle. “What’s the word?”
“Shit’s heating up.” He paused, and I could picture the way his eyes darted, measuring each sentence. “The carnival’s been drawing them in like fucking roadkill. Two of the club’s psychics came in screaming last night. Said the whole place is crawling, and there’s something big at the center. Something that likes men with impulse control issues.”
“Succubus.” I didn’t make it a question.
“Right.” Kane exhaled, a wet sound over the line. “But not the usual streetwalker. This one’s old. The psychics couldn’t get a look at her real face without blowing out their own sinuses. One’s still in the ER. The other’s talking in tongues, and you know how I feel about that.”
I grunted, then stood and crossed to the window. Carlisle Carnival sprawled in the distance, its perimeter lit with cheap LEDs and the flickering pulse of old neon. Even from four blocks away, I could sense the gravity well—thousands of people orbiting a single point, drawn by smells of sugar and rot, their weaknesses exposed and begging to be exploited.
“Any other casualties?” I asked, loading the revolver and spinning the cylinder. The metal purred.
“Nothing official. But the carny crew’s jumpier than a tweaker at a gun show. Reports of lost time, guys wandering off, andwaking up in the brush with no clue how they got there. A couple of visitors called in, said they had nightmares so real they pissed themselves. All after a run-in with a ‘smoking hot’ redhead at the Ring Toss.” Kane didn’t laugh. “Sound familiar?”
“It’s her. The woman in the drawings.” My jaw locked down. The burn from my scars was back, a sullen pressure mounting under the skin. “I’ll handle it.”
There was a pause, a shared understanding that didn’t need words. Kane had seen the aftermath before; he knew I wouldn’t call in reinforcements unless the job needed body bags, plural. Still, he had to ask. “Need backup?”
“No.” I holstered the 1911, felt its weight, the warmth where it touched my skin. “If I’m not back by dawn, torch the place. Just make sure there’s no crowd.”
He exhaled again, softer this time. “Don’t make me clean up after you, Torch.”
I almost smiled, but my mouth wouldn’t cooperate. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
I hung up and let the phone clatter to the desk. The room felt smaller than ever, every inch compressed by the promise of violence. I went through my pre-hunt checklist: vest, jacket, gloves, boots, smokes, flask (optional, but always appreciated after). The jacket was patched with the RBMC skull and piston.
I buckled the chest strap, slid my hands into the fingerless gloves, and ran them down my arms. The scars buzzed, electric, as I did. Each movement was mechanical, a sequence drilled into muscle memory. It was almost peaceful, right up until I glanced at the evidence photos again.
They lay face-up on the desk, eyes locked on me in silent accusation. Grayson’s frozen grin, Vargas’s spaced-out bliss, Walters’s hollowed terror. They were reminders, not just of the job, but of what happened when you let a monster roam free.
