Chapter 1: Blood on the Welcome Mat
The rain wasn't really falling so much as hanging in the air, a permanent Pacific mist that beaded on Leo’s jacket and made the concrete steps slick under his worn-out work boots. He fumbled with his keys, the fluorescent buzz of the porch light fighting a losing battle against the damp twilight. Another fourteen-hour double at the Gas 'n' Go. His shoulders ached from hauling propane tanks, and the smell of stale coffee and unleaded was a perfume he couldn’t wash off.
He just wanted a shower, a frozen pizza, and maybe a few rounds of Darkstalkers 3 before he passed out. The idea of Morrigan’s pixelated victory pose, all confident smirk and dazzling energy, was a small, familiar comfort.
His foot hit something soft on the welcome mat.
Not a bag of garbage. Not a tossed-aside jacket. It was a person, curled in on themselves.
"Whoa, hey—" he stumbled back, keys jangling. His heart hammered against his ribs. A drunk, probably. Or someone who’d picked the wrong porch to crash on. "Hey, you can't sleep here, man. You gotta—"
The figure stirred, and a shaft of the flickering light cut across a face.
Leo’s breath died in his throat.
The hair was the first impossible thing. A river of deep, vibrant green, tangled with twigs and dark, clotted stuff that wasn’t mud. It pooled around sharp, elegant features that were porcelain-pale beneath streaks of grime and… other things. Dried, rusty smears crusted her cheek and jaw. Her eyes fluttered open.
They were emerald. An impossible, glowing emerald, even dimmed by pain.
He knew that face. He’d seen it a thousand times on his CRT monitor, in anime clips on his phone, on the faded poster tacked to his basement wall. He’d drawn it in the margins of his shift schedules.
It was her. It was Morrigan.
But this wasn’t the proud, invincible succubus queen. This was a shattered version. Her iconic halter top was torn at the side, barely containing her, the fabric ripped and dirtied. Her shorts were scuffed and stained. And her legs… Leo’s stomach lurched. More of that dark, dried fluid streaked her inner thighs. She shivered violently, a full-body tremor that had nothing to do with the cold drizzle.
Her eyes focused on him, wide with an animal terror that was fundamentally wrong on her face.
“Please,” she whispered. Her voice was a rasp, a broken thing. It held no seduction, only raw panic. “Do not… let it find me.”
She tried to push herself up, one arm buckling under her. A pained gasp escaped her, and Leo saw the wounds then. Ugly, brutal-looking welts across her back and shoulders, like something had torn at her with claws. One of her majestic, bat-like wings was bent at a sickening angle, crumpled against the damp porch boards like a crushed umbrella frame.
Logic screamed. This was a cosplay gone horribly wrong. Some elaborate, sick prank. A mental health crisis. But the wings… they weren’t straps and foam. He could see the fine, membrane-like skin stretched between bone, torn in places. They moved faintly with her shuddering breaths.
“You’re not real,” he heard himself say, the words hollow.
A weak, bitter sound that might have been a laugh choked her. “I wish… that were true. For your sake.” Her emerald gaze locked onto his, the fear in them momentarily sharpening into a command. “They drained me. Nearly all of it. The life. The power. I am… mortal. Flesh.” She said the word like a curse, her face contorting in disgust and terror. “He will smell the last of it. He will come.”
Leo stood frozen, his mind a static roar. The drizzle soaked into his collar. A truck rumbled by on the wet street, its headlights sweeping across the porch, illuminating her for a second in stark, terrible detail—the rips in her clothes, the crusted evidence of violence on her skin, the sheer, shocking vulnerability of her pose.
This was impossible.
But she was here.
And she was begging.
His mom, before she took off, had only one solid piece of advice: ‘Don’t be a bystander, Leo. In life or in line at the grocery store.’ He’d always been crap at following it. He was the bystander. He liked watching. It was safer.
Looking down at the crumpled, trembling form of a fictional demon queen on his shitty welcome mat, he knew bystander time was over.
“Okay,” he said, his own voice strange to him. “Okay. Just… stay still.”
He crouched, his knees popping. The smell hit him then, up close. Not just blood. Something ozone-sharp and decaying, underneath the coppery tang. He slid one arm carefully under her shoulders, the other under her knees. Her skin was ice-cold. She cried out, a sharp, bitten-off sound, as he lifted her.
“I know, I know, sorry,” he mumbled, fumbling with his keys again, juggling her weight. She was lighter than he expected, a terrifying fragility in her frame. He got the door open and kicked it wider, carrying her over the threshold into the dim, musty warmth of his basement suite.
He didn’t have a couch, just a beat-up recliner. He laid her down on his unmade bed, the blankets still tangled from his morning rush. She immediately tried to curl up again, her good wing twitching, trying to fold around her.
Leo stood back, his hands hovering uselessly. The garish light of his desk lamp fell on her, making the scene even more surreal. A supernatural being was lying on his Super Mario bedsheet.
“What… what do I do?” he asked. “What do you need? Water? A doctor?”
“No doctor,” she hissed, the pride flickering for a second through the pain. “No human medicine. It is… energy. Life force. I need… sustenance.” She looked at him then, really looked, and for a fleeting moment, he saw the predator she was. The calculation. The hunger. It vanished, replaced by weary shame. “I need you to share your strength with me. Normally, I would invite you to take me. To enjoy my body. I would drink from your life force in the heat of passion. But he......hurt me.”
“So, what, then? You just… fade away here?” He gestured around his dingy room, at the game consoles and stacked comic boxes.
Morrigan closed her eyes, a tremor running through her. “Perhaps. It would be… a quiet end. Better than what he has planned.” Her eyes shot open again, fear flooding back. “You must hide my presence. Shield it. This place… it reeks of mundane loneliness. That is good. It might… mask me. For a time. Give you the chance to hold me and caress me. Let your strength seep into my body and heal me.”
“Who’s ‘he’?” Leo asked, grabbing a clean towel from his laundry pile. He approached slowly, like one would a wounded fox. “The one who did this?”
A true shudder of horror passed over her. “An incubus. A parasite of my own kind. I was… careless. Arrogant.” She laughed, a dry, cracking sound. “I thought him a plaything. He was a harvester. He has been hunting our kind, draining us to a husk, for a century. I am his greatest prize. And he will not let me slip away.”
Leo knelt by the bed. Gently, ignoring the way his pulse thundered in his ears, he dabbed the towel at the less terrible smear on her cheek. She flinched, but didn’t pull away. Her emerald eyes watched him, ancient and lost.
“So we hide you,” Leo said, the ‘we’ coming out without his permission. “And we figure out how to get your… juice back. Without killing me or anyone else.”
“We?” she murmured, her eyebrow lifting a millimeter. It was the faintest ghost of her usual arrogance.
“You picked my porch,” he said with a shrug he didn’t feel. He wiped a smudge from her chin. His hand was calloused, rough against her preternaturally smooth skin. “Guess that makes you my problem.”
Outside, the drizzle picked up, tapping against the basement window well. Somewhere in the rainy darkness, something that had crossed dimensions was hunting. And in his bedroom, Leo, the gas station attendant, was wiping blood from the cheek of a succubus queen, wondering how the hell his pizza-and-video-games night had turned into this. The world had gotten impossibly, dangerously bigger in the span of five minutes, and there was no going back.
The world had gotten impossibly, dangerously bigger in the span of five minutes, and there was no going back. Leo stood there, the damp towel in his hand feeling useless. Morrigan shivered again, a full-body tremor that made the bedframe creak.
“You’re freezing,” he said, the practical words a lifeline. “And… we need to see how bad it is. Can I… look?”
Her emerald eyes, dull with pain, held his for a long moment. Pride warred with necessity. Finally, she gave the faintest nod, a surrendering slump of her shoulders. “Do not pity me,” she whispered, the command weak.
“Not my style,” he lied, his throat tight.
He started with the obvious, the tears in her clothing. Using a pair of nail scissors from his desk, he carefully cut away the ruined halter top. The fabric fell apart, revealing the graceful curve of her back, marred by four parallel, deep gashes that oozed a faint, silvery fluid. He swallowed hard. He cut the shorts next, his fingers clumsy. As he peeled the stained material from her hips, the full extent of the violence unleashed upon her came into the unforgiving light of his lamp.
He had to look away for a second, his stomach clenching.
Her vulva was swollen, an angry, violent red against the pallor of her skin. Cruel, bruising marks mottled her inner thighs. Worse, her anus was visibly torn, a small, bruised wound that made his breath hitch. Dried and fresh fluids crusted her skin there. A split on her lower lip, now that he looked, matched the brutal story written across the rest of her.
“Oh, god,” he breathed, the words escaping before he could stop them. A white-hot wave of rage, foreign and fierce, flooded his veins. This wasn’t battle damage. This was desecration.
“He… enjoys consumption,” Morrigan said, her voice a flat, hollow thing. "I am a succubus. Submissive to men as a rule, by nature." She stared at the water-stained ceiling. “Only, he didn't want me submissive. The physical violation amplifies the metaphysical theft. It weakens the will. Makes the life force… easier to siphon. Like tenderising meat. So he made it hurt, until I struggled. Then he conquered me.”
Leo didn’t trust himself to speak. He just nodded, a hard, stiff motion.
Gently, so gently, he slid his arms under her. “Bathroom,” he managed to say. “We need to get you clean.”
She didn’t fight him. Her head lolled against his shoulder as he carried her the few steps to his tiny, mold-spotted bathroom. He set her down on the closed toilet lid, her bent wing awkwardly pressed against the wall. He started the tap, testing the water until it ran warm, not hot, and plugged the tub. Steam began to rise.
He turned to her. This was the most intimate, terrifying thing he had ever done. With meticulous care, he removed the last remnants of her clothing. She was utter perfection and brutal ruin fused into one being. He avoided looking directly at the worst of the injuries, focusing instead on the task. Supporting her weight, he helped her step over the rim and lower herself into the water.
She hissed as the water touched her, her body going rigid. But then, slowly, she relaxed a fraction, the warmth seeping into her chilled flesh. Leo grabbed a clean washcloth and a bar of unscented soap. He knelt on the linoleum, the hard floor biting into his knees.
He started with her face, wiping away the crusted traces from her cheeks and split lip. His touch was feather-light. He rinsed the cloth, worked slowly down her neck, over her collarbones. He cleaned the long, elegant lines of her arms. She watched him, her breath beginning to even out from shallow pants into something deeper.
When he moved to her back, avoiding the gashes, he felt the tension there too. He poured cups of warm water over her shoulders, watching the grime and silvery blood dilute and swirl down the drain. He was clinical, careful, distancing his mind from the fact that this was Morrigan Aensland, naked in his bathtub.
But his gentle, steady touch was having an effect he hadn’t anticipated.
As he carefully washed her stomach, his knuckles barely grazing the skin just above the waterline, he felt a subtle shift. Her breath caught, not in pain this time. He glanced at her face. Her eyes were half-lidded, her lips parted. A faint flush was blooming on her chest.
He continued, moving to her legs under the water. He supported her calf, washing the long, powerful muscle. His thumb stroked a soothing line along her shin.
A soft, unmistakable moan escaped her.
Leo froze. His eyes flicked up. Her nipples, visible just beneath the water’s surface, had tightened into hard, dusky peaks. The terror in her emerald eyes was now mingled with something else—a deep, instinctual hunger. Her succubus nature, suppressed by trauma and near-fatal draining, was sparking back to life at the sensation of safe, caring hands on her skin.
“Your… energy,” she murmured, her voice thick. “It’s not just… seeping. It’s… you’re offering it. Through your touch. Your intent. Unconsciously.” She trembled, but now it was a different kind of shiver. “It has been so long since anyone touched me without wanting to take or break.”
Leo’s hand still rested on her leg. The air in the small room was thick with steam and something electric. He understood then the double-edged sword of his compassion. He was healing her, but he was also stoking a fundamental part of her that was dangerous to them both. Her libido wasn’t just desire; it was a component of her survival, and it was waking up.
He didn’t pull his hand away. He finished cleaning her leg, his movements still tender, but now hyper-aware of every reaction he drew from her. The little sighs. The way her hips shifted slightly in the water. The dark, knowing look in her eyes that was slowly replacing the hollow fear.
He had cleaned the physical residue of her ordeal from her skin. But something new, complex, and perilously charged had just begun.
But something new, complex, and perilously charged had just begun. The steam clung to the tiles and to their skin. Leo’s fingers were still on her calf, under the warm, cloudy water. Her moan hung in the air between them, a vibration that went straight to his groin.
“Do you feel that?” she whispered. Her head tilted back against the porcelain, exposing the long line of her throat. “A low current. A pull. That is me. Starving. And that…” She opened her eyes, the green now glowing like banked coals. “…is you. A lantern in this fucking mortal gloom. You’re shining, Leo. And I am so dark.”
“What do I do?” His voice was rough. He knew. Of course he knew. But he needed her to say it. To make it real, to make it a choice.
“Touch me with purpose,” she said, her gaze holding his with a terrible intensity. “Not to clean. Not to pity. Touch me to feel. Let your hands want. Your desire… it’s a form of energy. A potent one. Direct it. I can shape it. Use it to knit myself back together.”
His heart was a frantic drum against his ribs. He moved his hand slowly, from her calf, over the curve of her knee, up the slick skin of her inner thigh. He stopped just short of the bruised, violated junction of her legs. He couldn’t. Not there. Not yet.
Her hand came down, covering his, not forcing, just guiding. She moved his palm up, over her hip, across the flat plane of her stomach, and placed it over one of her breasts.
“Here,” she breathed. “Start where the damage is less. Feed the core.”
Her breast filled his hand, a perfect, heavy weight. The skin was cool and impossibly soft. He felt the hard point of her nipple press insistently into the center of his palm. A jolt of pure, undiluted lust hit him like a live wire. It was intensely erotic, a fierce and sudden claim his body stamped on the situation, overriding fear and shock. He cupped her other breast, his thumbs finding and circling the stiff peaks. They weren’t just erect; they were demanding.
A sharp gasp escaped her. Her back arched off the tub, pushing her chest more firmly into his hands. “Yes. Oh, yes. Just like that. Don’t think. Feel.”
He did. He felt the soft resilience of her flesh, the captivating contrast of the delicate skin under his work-roughened hands. He felt his own cock harden, aching and confined in his jeans. He watched, mesmerized, as a faint, shimmering light—a pale, gold-green aura—seemed to emanate from where their skin met. The ugly bruises on her ribs, the angry red marks, began to soften, their color fading from violent purple to a faint yellow before his eyes.
She was healing. He was doing this.
“More,” she demanded, her voice gaining strength, gaining that old, imperious texture. Her hands came up to cover his, pressing them harder against her. “Squeeze. Make me feel your want. It’s the fuel.”
He obeyed, a groan rumbling in his own chest. He kneaded her breasts, his thumbs and forefinger pinching and rolling her nipples. She cried out, not in pain, but in raw, ragged pleasure. Her hips began a slow, undulating rhythm in the water, sloshing it over the side. The dim light caught the sheen on her skin, on the planes of her stomach, on the hollow of her throat.
“Look at me,” she commanded.
He dragged his gaze from her breasts to her face. Her expression was one of rapturous agony. Her fangs were visible, sharp points denting her lower lip.
“You see it, don’t you?” she panted. “The transaction. The filthy, beautiful transaction. Your lonely jerk-off fantasies given form. My survival bought with your come. Now put your mouth on me. Stop being a bystander and take a taste.”
The crude words shattered his last pretense of caretaking. This was a negotiation of power, of life, stripped of all pretense. He leaned forward, the tub’s rim digging into his stomach. He lowered his mouth to her breast and took the nipple inside.
She screamed.
It was a sound of pure, unadulterated relief. Her hands flew to his hair, fisting in the messy brown strands, holding him to her. He suckled, hard, his tongue lashing the tight bud. The taste was alien and perfect—like rain on stone and something sweetly electric. That golden-green light flared brighter at the point of contact. He could feel a strange, warm tugging sensation deep in his own gut, a gentle draining, like a sip from a straw. It was accompanied by a wave of dizziness and a concomitant surge of euphoric pleasure, as if the very act of giving was the most potent high he’d ever experienced.
He switched to her other breast, devouring her with a hunger that matched her own. One of his hands slid down her body, through the water, over the trembling flat of her stomach. His fingers trailed through the coarse, wet hair at the apex of her thighs and found her clit, swollen and hot even in the bath.
She jerked as if electrocuted. “There! Oh, fuck, yes, there!”
He circled the bundle of nerves, his touch firm, learned from a lifetime of imagining but never applying to anything but his own fist. Her reactions were a roadmap. She was soaking, and not just from the bathwater. A slick, hot essence met his probing fingers. He pushed one, then two inside her.
She was tight, impossibly so, her inner muscles clenching around him in a spasmodic, welcoming rhythm. The bruised flesh at her entrance was warm, the swelling subsiding under the combined onslaught of his touch and whatever energy he was pouring into her.
“Deeper,” she sobbed, her regal composure utterly gone, replaced by a writhing, desperate need. “Fill me with it. Fill the hollow he left.”
He added a third finger, stretching her, curling them up. He found a spot inside that made her entire body bow. He pressed it, relentless, as his mouth worked her breast.
Her moans became a continuous, chanting stream. “Yes, yes, give it to me, feed your queen, feed me your light, you mortal boy, your fucking light…”
He was painfully hard, his own need a secondary but screaming imperative. He pulled his mouth from her nipple with a wet pop. “I can’t just… with my fingers…”
Her eyes blazed. “Then don’t. Get in.”
It was madness. The tub was small, she was hurt, it was a logistical nightmare. It was also the only possible next step.
He stood up, fumbling with his belt, his button, his zipper. He shoved his jeans and boxers down his thighs. His cock sprang free, thick and flushed, jutting out angrily. He barely managed to kick his clothes aside before he was climbing over the rim, water sloshing violently onto the floor. He knelt between her legs, the warm water lapping at his abdomen.
She wrapped her legs around his hips, her heels digging into the small of his back. Her good wing beat once against the wall, a slap of wet leather. Her eyes were fully predatory now, hungry and focused. She reached between them, her hand wrapping around his shaft. She guided him to her entrance, the head nudging against her slick, heated folds.
“Now,” she hissed, her voice guttural. “Give me your life. All of it.”
She pulled him in.
Leo’s world dissolved into a white-hot singularity of sensation. She was tight, a silken, clinging vise around him, still bearing the ghost of trauma but alight with a consuming, addictive heat. He sheathed himself fully in one long, slow push, burying his face in the damp green hair at her neck. The connection was immediate and profound. That warm, draining pull in his gut became a river. He could see the light—their joined light—flooding from where their bodies were fused, spreading through her like liquid gold through cracked marble. The remaining bruises vanished. The split in her lip sealed. The torn flesh between her legs smoothed and healed under the relentless, fuck-fueled influx of his vitality.
He began to move.
It was not making love. It was a raw, driving, desperate act of transfusion. He pounded into her, the water splashing with every thrust. The bathroom echoed with the sounds of their coupling: skin slapping against wet skin, her sharp, keening cries, his own ragged grunts, the tub creaking against the wall. She met him thrust for thrust, her hips pistoning, her inner muscles milking him, pulling the very essence from his balls.
“Harder!” she screamed, her claws—actual, sharp black claws—digging into his shoulders, drawing thin lines of blood that mingled with the bathwater. “I can feel it! I can feel myself coming back! Don’t you dare hold back!”
He was seeing stars at the edges of his vision. A profound weakness was spreading through his limbs, but it was coupled with an ecstasy so vast it felt like dying might be okay if this was the final feeling. He was emptying himself into her, and she was drinking him, becoming more solid, more vivid, more real with every second.
Her body tightened around him, a seismic, clenching wave. Her scream was a sonic thing, a blast of power that rattled the light fixture. The climax ripped through her, and through him. He came with a shout that tore his throat, pouring himself out in deep, pulsing jets that she drew up into herself like a woman dying of thirst.
The golden light flared, blindingly bright, and then snapped out.
Silence, broken only by their heaving breaths and the drip of water from the tap.
Leo collapsed forward, barely catching himself on his arms above her. He was shuddering, drained, hollowed out. He felt like he’d run a marathon while donating all his blood. He was still inside her, softening.
Beneath him, Morrigan was transformed. The wounds were gone. Her skin glowed with a healthy, peachy radiance. Her eyes, when they opened, were no longer dim but brilliant, depthless emerald pools. Her lips were full and unsplit, curved into a small, exhausted, triumphant smile. She lifted a hand—strong, steady now—and brushed his damp hair from his forehead.
“See?” she murmured, her voice a rich, velvet purr once more. “Not so complicated.”
Then her eyes shifted past him, towards the bathroom door. The smile vanished. Her body, relaxed a moment before, went rigid. The predatory focus returned, but now it was edged with a cold, sharp dread.
“He’s here,” she whispered.
A scent reached Leo’s nostrils, cutting through the steam and the smell of sex. It was the smell from the porch. Old blood. Ozone. And something new: a sulfurous, predatory rot.
The porch light outside the basement window went out with a faint pop.
The hunt had found its way to his door.