Chapter 2: The Succubus's Plea
The echo of her words—“He’s here”—hung in the steamy air, a death knell tolling through the afterglow. For a moment, there was only the sound of water dripping from the tap and their own ragged breathing. Leo, still slumped over her, felt the glorious, life-draining warmth of their connection shrivel into a cold knot of dread in his gut.
Beneath him, Morrigan began to shake. It was a violent, uncontrollable tremor that had nothing to do with pleasure. Her legs, still spread and wrapped around his hips, tightened in a spasm of fear. Her breasts heaved not with passion, but with shallow, panicked breaths.
“Leo,” she whispered, her voice stripped of its newfound power, scraped raw. Her claws, which had moments ago scored his back in ecstasy, now dug into his arms with desperate urgency. She was clinging to him like a child in a storm. “Don’t let him take me. Please. You have to… you have to stop him.”
She looked up at him, and the terror in her emerald eyes was absolute. It was a primal, soul-deep fear that erased four centuries of arrogance. “I am afraid,” she confessed, the admission torn from her as if it physically pained her. “I have not known fear like this since I was a fledgling. He will not just drain me. He will break what is left. He will make a toy of my essence. Do you understand? You must protect me.”
Her trembling transferred into his own bones. The plea, from a being he’d considered a goddess of the night, was more terrifying than any threat. It made the danger real, solid, and present in the waterlogged bathroom.
Protect her. With what? He was a gas station clerk. He was naked, drained, and holding a succubus in a bathtub.
But he had said ‘we’.
“Okay,” he heard himself say, his voice surprisingly steady. “Stay here. Be quiet.”
He moved, peeling her limbs from around him with gentle firmness. The separation was a cold shock. He slid out of her, a mix of their fluids leaking into the bathwater. He climbed over the tub’s rim, his legs watery and weak, water sluicing off his pale skin onto the flooded linoleum. He felt lightheaded, hollowed out. Donating blood at the clinic had never felt like this.
He didn’t look back. He padded, dripping, into the gloom of his bedroom. The shadowed shapes of his familiar life—the game consoles, the poster of her on the wall—now seemed like artifacts from a dead world. He went to his closet, shoving aside hanging flannels and a winter coat. He knelt, his wet knees soaking into the carpet, and felt behind a stacked pile of old comic book boxes.
His fingers closed around the long, cloth-wrapped bundle.
He’d bought it six years ago at a flea market in Vancouver, a foolish impulse buy from a vendor selling “authentic martial arts antiques.” It had cost him two weeks’ pay. His friends had called him an idiot. It was almost certainly a cheap replica, the steel probably brittle, the hamon line on the blade just acid-etched for effect. But he’d cared for it. He’d learned to oil the blade, to wrap the tsuka. It was the only object he owned that wasn’t purely utilitarian or fandom-related. It was a thing of intent, however misplaced.
He unwrapped it now, the simple cotton saya scabbard cold in his hands. He drew the blade out a few inches. The streetlight from the window gleamed dully on the steel. It looked like what it was: a cheap katana. Not a holy sword, not a legendary weapon. A piece of decorative junk.
He stood, gripping the scabbard in one hand, the bare hilt in the other. He was naked, holding a fake sword, dripping bathwater on his floor. The absurdity of it almost made him laugh. Then the scent hit him again, stronger now, filtering under the bathroom door and from the direction of the basement’s main entry.
Blood. Ozone. Rot. And something else, a cloying, oppressive musk that smelled like a butcher shop left in the sun.
A soft, skittering sound came from the direction of the outside wall, near the foundation vent. Like claws on concrete.
Leo’s breath hitched. He took a step towards the bedroom door that led to the main room of his suite, his heart hammering against his ribs so hard he felt it in his throat. The sword felt both ridiculously light and impossibly heavy.
From the bathroom, he heard a faint, desperate sound. A whimper, quickly stifled.
He had told her he would protect her. He had brought her into his home. The ‘we’ was now a tangible, terrified presence trembling in his tub.
He tightened his grip on the cheap leather of the tsuka, the diamonds of the wrap digging into his palm. The steel was a lie. His strength was a borrowed, depleted thing. But the fear in her voice had been real, and it had sparked something older than fear in him: a stubborn, stupid refusal to let a monster have what was, for tonight, his.
He took another step into the dark main room, towards the source of the smell and the skittering. The porch light was dead. The only illumination came from a dusty digital clock on his microwave.
2:17 AM.
Something heavy and deliberate began to drag itself up the concrete steps outside his door.