Page 15 of The Prospect's Succubus
Inside, the air was so dense with incense it hit the lungs like a chemical peel. Myrrh and sandalwood, with a finish of scorched sugar and whatever passed for sage in a place that bought its inventory by the case. I coughed hard and instantly hated myself for sounding weak. The tent was too hot, candles everywhere, melting down in slow-motion suicide across every flat surface.Their wax pooled under cheap crystal, plastic skulls, the kind of tarot decks you could buy at an airport. Every shadow on the canvas walls looked alive, writhing slow, like the tent itself was breathing.
At the back, hunched over a table that might’ve once been nice but now looked like a prop from a high school theater, sat the fortune teller. The woman could have been thirty or three hundred, her hair a bird’s nest of streaked black and white, skin the color of raw bread dough and just as creased. Her eyes were twin sinkholes of dark, ringed with the kind of soot you get from crying into a fireplace for a decade. She looked up, blinked once, and then gestured for me to sit.
I did, because standing made me look like I was about to run. Which, if we’re being honest, I absolutely was.
The table was draped in old velvet, fabric so threadbare it actually sparkled where the candlelight hit the holes. She said nothing, just moved a brass tray of runes aside, exposing a deck of tarot cards so battered the paint was peeling from the backs. She shuffled, slow and methodical, never looking at her hands. She was watching me, not like a predator but like an undertaker measuring your body for a future need.
“Hello,” I said, getting no reply.
I felt naked. Worse, I felt transparent, the skin of this body melting right off to reveal what was underneath. I tried to pull it tighter around my edges, keep the violet from bleeding out in my eyes, but the psychic whiplash from Torch’s last contact was still buzzing inside my skull. My palms were slick with sweat; my hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
The fortune teller started laying out cards. No preamble, no “cross my palm with silver,” not even the faintest nod to small talk. Just three sharp slaps on the table, cards arranged in a line that made me want to scream.
“I won’t bite,” I said.
“Neither will my cards,” the old woman managed.
The first card was The Lovers. Except it wasn’t the classic design. The artist had reworked it, twisted the figures into a pair of snakes coiled around a burning sword, mouths open, ready to bite. I felt a chill spiral up my spine, then double back down to settle somewhere low, behind my navel.
The second card was The Tower, reversed. The painting was even worse: a cathedral, split at the center, every window shattering out instead of in. At the base, a pair of figures tumbled, one with wings, one without.
Third card, The Devil. Of course. But this Devil wasn’t the usual red goat with tits. This was a woman, long black hair, scales creeping up her thighs, hands clutching a leash that was half in shadow, half in fire. I winced, the psychic static now rising in my ears, hot and insistent.
The old woman watched, eyes unblinking. She touched each card with one cracked, lacquered nail, then tapped them all with two fingers, as if she was testing for a heartbeat.
“Yours is not a human struggle,” she said. Her accent was city trash. “You don’t belong here, and yet you do.”
My mouth was dry. “That’s a little on the nose,” I said, trying to laugh. It came out as a rasp.
She ignored me. “He will find you,” she murmured, eyes locked to mine. “He will break you, and you will thank him for it.”
I wanted to get up, but my legs wouldn’t move. “Isn’t there supposed to be a silver lining?” I asked, aiming for irony and missing by a mile.
She shuffled the deck, then drew one more card and placed it face down. Her hand hovered above it, trembling, then she turned it with a flick. The card was blank. The edges were burnt, curling up at the corners, but there was nothing else—no image, no number, no name.
“You stand at a crossroads,” she said, voice dropping low. “Between two worlds. He will be your destruction and your salvation.”
The tent was too small. The air pressed in, candles spitting with every breath. I stood too fast and nearly upended the table. My knee hit a rack of plastic amulets, sending it crashing to the ground, beads and chains scattering everywhere. The woman didn’t move. She just looked at me, as if she’d been waiting for the mess, as if she’d seen this exact thing a thousand times.
Her eyes, so dark they were almost blue, followed me as I tried to untangle my heel from the fabric. I felt her gaze punch straight through the meat and bone of my human shell and into the thing inside, the piece that belonged to Hell and didn’t want to be reminded of it.
“You should go,” she said, softer now. “He’s still looking.”
My body remembered how to move just in time. I half-ran, half-crawled out through the tent flap, beads and incense clinging to my skin. The cold night air hit me, and for a moment, I thought I’d puke. I bent over, hands on knees, and tried to catch my breath.
The world outside was louder, brighter, but less real. The carnival was still in full swing, every light a strobe, every voice a thunderclap. I blended into the crowd, head down, arms wrapped around my middle, and tried not to look back at the tent.
But I felt it, that old woman’s gaze, all the way down the midway. It wasn’t just a look. It was a prophecy, sharp as a blade, chasing me every step of the way.
My hands still shook when I left the fortune teller’s tent, fingers clamped so tight to my clutch that I thought the skin would split. I cut a path through the crowd, eyes on the ground, every step an act of will, but the moment the tent was out of my sight, Lilith invaded. Not like a ghost or a memory or evena proper voice. She didn’t knock, didn’t wait for an invitation, just barreled straight into my head with all the subtlety of a cold front.
“NOW,” she said, and the word rang in every bone I had. It was less sound and more a freezing ache, the kind that makes your molars rattle. I’d never heard her so loud, so raw. There was no silk or sugar this time, only pure command.
The world whited out. My knees buckled, and I slammed into the nearest carnival booth, sending a rain of stuffed animals to the mud. Some teenager in a Carhartt hoodie shot me a look, but it slid right off because I was already somewhere else, body peeled open for a Queen in Hell to rummage through.
You ever been cold from the inside out? Not hypothermia—more like an arctic wind forced down your throat and into every cell, freezing the machinery so completely that your only impulse is to scream and hope it’ll break the spell. That was Lilith’s version of “hello.” She didn’t use words for effect, just the primal stab of her need, and the hunger behind it.
“Where is the soul? You are at the threshold. Why do you hesitate?”
