Chapter 13: Succubus Reckoning
The clay pot shattered against the flagstones at Drusilla’s feet with a sound like a thousand bells breaking. There was no fire, no concussive blast. Instead, a geyser of blue-red smoke erupted, thick and iridescent as oil on water. It didn’t billow; it flowed, like liquid seeking the path of least resistance, pooling around Drusilla’s polished boots before snaking outward in tendrils that moved with malignant intelligence.
Drusilla’s triumphant laugh cut off mid-cackle. She took a sharp, stumbling step back. The smoke touched her, and for a fleeting second, her severe face went slack, her eyes wide with a confusion that was utterly alien to her. The connection to the orb in her hand—the line of sickly light tethering her to the entranced Cordelia—flickered like a bad fluorescent bulb.
“What is this?” she hissed, not in anger, but in genuine, affronted bewilderment. The smoke coiled up her legs, not burning, not chilling, but disrupting. It was psychic static, emotional noise, the sound of a radio tuned perfectly between two stations. Her precisely curated garden of specific, weaponized lust—the fuel for her bindings—was being flooded with pure, undirected dissonance.
She whirled, shoving the pulsing orb into Ambrose’s startled hands. “Hold it! Keep the connection! I’ll purge this… garbage.”
Ambrose fumbled with the orb, his hands trembling. The light stabilized somewhat under his grip, but it was weaker, frayed. His eyes, magnified behind his thick glasses, were fixed on Vivian.
Vivian landed in a crouch, her shadow-wings folding back into nothingness, the chitinous armor melting away like black ice under sun. She was just a scared, furious girl in a leather jacket again, breathing hard, her claws retracted. The effort of the flight and the transformation had taken its toll.
“Now, you little half-breed,” Drusilla spat, raising a hand crackling with jagged, violet energy. “You die.”
But Ambrose was staring at Vivian, kneeling there, panting, vulnerable. A different kind of hunger, simpler and far more familiar, eclipsed the panic in his eyes. He saw a beautiful, exhausted woman on her knees. The orb’s power, diminished but still present, brushed against his mind. It whispered not of grand conquest, but of base, immediate compensation. You have the power. She defied you. Take what you’re owed.
“No,” Ambrose said, his voice quavering but gaining strength. He clutched the orb tighter. “Not yet. She… she ruined your ritual. I want her first.”
Drusilla’s head snapped toward him, her fury shifting focus. “You insignificant worm, you will do as—”
Ambrose didn’t listen. He was riding a surge of borrowed authority. He pointed a shaking finger at Vivian. The orb glowed. A wave of force, blunt and coercive, slammed into her. It wasn’t the surgical, fear-targeted precision of Drusilla’s work; it was a crude club of psychic domination, the magical equivalent of grabbing someone by the hair.
Vivian gasped as the command took root. Her body went rigid, then slack. Her furious green eyes glazed over, the fierce intelligence dimming, replaced by a blank, waiting emptiness. A thin line of drool escaped the corner of her lip. She knelt perfectly still, a doll awaiting instruction.
A sick grin spread across Ambrose’s face. He fumbled with his belt, his hands clumsy with nervous excitement. “See?” he said to Drusilla, though his eyes never left Vivian. “I can control it. I can control her.”
He pushed his pants and boxers down past his hips. His cock, half-hard with adrenaline and power, sprung free. It was an ordinary thing, pale and slightly curved. He took a step toward the kneeling Vivian.
“Open your mouth,” he commanded, his voice cracking.
Vivian’s jaw went slack. Her head tilted back slightly, offering no resistance.
Ambrose shuffled forward, the orb held out like a talisman in one hand. With the other, he guided his cock toward her waiting lips. The head touched her lower lip, leaving a smudge of pre-cum.
Then Vivian moved.
It wasn’t the slow, seductive movement of a succubus. It was the savage, lightning-fast strike of a predator. Her head snapped forward. Her jaw clamped down.
Not on the shaft.
Her teeth, suddenly sharp again, sank into the sensitive, soft flesh of the head of his cock.
Ambrose shrieked. It was a sound of pure, undiluted agony—high, ragged, and utterly human. He jerked backward, but Vivian held on for a brutal second, her eyes blazing back to life, full of vengeful fire. Then she released him, spitting a mouthful of blood and coppery fluid onto the ruined moss.
“I’m only half-succubus, you idiots!” she snarled, surging to her feet. The shadow-stuff boiled up from her skin once more, the armor reforming, the talons sprouting from her fingertips. “The other half is all me!”
Ambrose stumbled back, collapsing onto his ass, clutching his mangled, bleeding crotch and howling. The orb rolled from his nerveless fingers, coming to rest against the roots of a wisteria.
The scream was a shockwave through the garden’s heavy air.
It sliced through the personalized hellscapes Drusilla had crafted for Jan and the others.
For Hank, the invisible, obsolete ghost in his own kitchen, the sound was a plate shattering. The image flickered, distorted. The laughing children pixelated. Fatima, swirling flowers, turned her head. For the first time, she seemed to look at him, not through him. Her brow furrowed in confusion. Hank? The word was silent, but he felt it. The hollow ache in his chest stuttered, replaced by a sharp, strange fullness. It was chaos. It was noise. It was Liana Ludus, blooming in the poisoned soil of his fear, twisting the narrative. The children weren’t mocking him anymore; they were singing a nursery rhyme in a language he didn’t know, loudly and off-key. The fear was still there, but it was buried under a wave of nonsensical, riotous confusion.
He blinked. He was on his knees on mossy flagstones, not in a sunlit kitchen. Fatima was a few feet away, also on her knees, shaking her head as if to clear water from her ears.
For Stacy, Rick’s retreating form and the younger woman’s smirk dissolved into static. The park bench melted into a carousel, spinning too fast, its calliope music a garish, deafening racket. The heartbreak was still a wound, but it was a wound wrapped in neon blinking lights and the smell of cotton candy. The pain was there, but it was… busy. Overwhelmed. She gasped, the sob turning into a choked cough of disorientation.
All around the garden, the targeted nightmares shattered under the cacophony.
Jan vomited onto the moss, the void of her failure filling suddenly with a thousand chattering, irrelevant thoughts—what she needed to get at the grocery store, the tune of an annoying commercial jingle, the precise feeling of the strap-on against her clit during the ritual. The crushing weight was gone, replaced by a dizzying, manic clutter in her mind.
Aaron, Annie, Katie, Jules—they all surfaced from their personalized abysses, gasping, disoriented, but free of the paralyzing, specific terror. The clay pot’s dissonance had done its work, polluting the signal.
But Drusilla’s garden was not just a psychic construct. The physical bindings remained.
Mara’s typing never slowed. Her fingers flew across the keyboard, executing clause after damning clause. Behind her, Zack’s robotic thrusts continued, his face a mask of blank exertion. On the divan, Molly lapped at Ginny, Ginny’s back arching in a silent, scripted ecstasy. They were trapped in the physical feedback loop, their bodies acting out the programming even as their minds might have begun to flutter beneath the surface.
Drusilla, shaking off the last of the dissonant fog, saw her advantage crumbling. Her eyes locked on the orb, lying near the sobbing Ambrose. She lunged for it.
“No you don’t, you bitch!” Katie “Boom Boom” Manelli shouted. She was up, her black dress torn at the shoulder, her eyes wild. She didn’t aim for Drusilla. She aimed for the space between Drusilla and the orb. She thrust out her hands, palms forward.
The air compressed. Then it detonated.
There was no fire. This was a Glorious Kaboom of pure concussive force, a shaped charge of will and magic. It hit Drusilla like a runaway truck made of sound and pressure. She was flung sideways, crashing through a trellis of night-blooming jasmine, wood and petals exploding around her.
The orb, however, was lifted by the blast wave and sent skittering across the flagstones.
Right toward Hank.
He saw it coming, a glowing, malevolent marble. Without thinking, driven by instinct and the chaotic energy roaring in his veins, he dove. Not to catch it. To smash it.
His mechanic’s hand, calloused and strong, closed into a fist mid-air. He brought it down like a hammer on the orb as it zipped past.
A sound like a universe cracking echoed through the garden. A web of fractures, glowing with stolen light, spiderwebbed across the orb’s surface.
The tether of light connecting it to Cordelia snapped with a psychic twang that everyone felt in their teeth.
Cordelia’s head jerked up. Her eyes, which had been vacant pools of reflected light, suddenly swam with awareness. Pain. Confusion. Then a dawning, furious recognition. She was held fast by the invisible bonds, but she was present.
The effect on the thralls was immediate and violent.
Mara’s hands slammed down on the keyboard, hitting all the wrong keys, a spike of gibberish across the screen. Her whole body went rigid. The monotonous, mechanical rhythm of Zack’s hips behind her stuttered, then stopped. He blinked, looking down at the back of the woman he loved, at his own body connected to hers, with dawning, horrified comprehension. “Mara?” he croaked, his voice raw.
On the divan, Molly pulled her mouth away from Ginny with a wet, startled sound. She looked at her own hand on Ginny’s breast, then at Ginny’s wide, shocked eyes. The scripted passion evaporated, leaving behind a naked, mutual embarrassment that quickly boiled over into anger—not at each other, but at the violation.
“What the fuck?” Ginny breathed, scrambling to cover herself.
“Get off her, you son of a bitch!” Molly snarled, whirling toward where Zack still stood, frozen behind Mara.
But Drusilla was not finished. She climbed out of the wreckage of the trellis, her suit torn, her hair a wild tangle. Blood trickled from her nose. Her face was a mask of pure, undiluted hate. She saw her orb cracked, her control wavering. She saw her recruits waking up.
Her gaze landed on the closest, most vulnerable target: Jan, who was still on her hands and knees, shaking her head to clear the last of the psychic detritus.
“You,” Drusilla seethed. Violet energy, darker and more violent than before, crackled around her hands. “You started this. You and your pathetic joy.”
She raised a hand, aiming not to paralyze, but to obliterate.
A shadow fell across her.
Vivian landed between them with a thud that cracked the flagstone. Her wings were spread wide, a wall of living darkness. Her mother was awake but still bound. Her friends were free but wounded. This woman had taken everything. The timid, apologetic part of Vivian was gone, burned away in the fury of the last twenty-four hours.
“You don’t touch her,” Vivian said, her voice a low, demonic growl that vibrated in the chests of everyone who heard it.
She didn’t use magic. She didn’t craft a complex spell.
She simply lunged.
Her talons raked across Drusilla’s chest, shredding the expensive fabric and the skin beneath. Drusilla shrieked, more in outrage than pain, and lashed out with a whip of violet energy. It wrapped around Vivian’s armored forearm, sizzling, but Vivian didn’t flinch. She yanked, pulling Drusilla off balance, and slammed her head forward.
The crack of their skulls meeting was horribly solid. Drusilla staggered back, her spell breaking.
Behind them, Stacy had found her feet. The chaos inside her was a storm, but she could direct storms. She saw the fight, saw Drusilla vulnerable. Her hand went to the pistol at her back. She drew it in one smooth motion, her training overriding the manic energy. She took a shooter’s stance, breath calming.
“Vivian, down!” she yelled.
Vivian dropped, a black blur.
Stacy fired.
The shot was deafening in the enclosed garden. It hit Drusilla high in the right shoulder, spinning her around. She cried out, a sound of genuine shock. She was a practitioner of psychic corruption, of emotional warfare. A 9mm bullet was a vulgar, mundane, and brutally effective argument she was utterly unprepared for.
She stumbled, clutching the blossoming red stain on her suit.
Aaron saw his opening. While everyone was distracted by the gunshot, he moved. Not with speed, but with purpose. He knelt by the cracked, glowing orb. He didn’t touch it. Instead, he placed his ink-stained fingertips on the flagstones around it. He closed his eyes.
Fair Bargain magic was subtle. It wasn’t about power, but about equity, about balance, about the fundamental fairness of an exchange.
“The contract is void,” Aaron whispered, his voice resonating with a quiet authority. “The terms are unjust. The power taken was not freely given. The binding is therefore invalid. By the scales, I sever the tie.”
The glowing cracks in the orb flared once, blindingly bright. Then the light—the stolen, leeched energy of Cordelia—poured out. It didn’t return to her. It dissipated into the air, into the earth, a debt forcibly repaid to the universe.
The orb darkened, now just a cracked, glassy sphere.
With a sound like a sigh, the invisible bonds holding Cordelia vanished. She slumped forward, catching herself on her hands, her blonde hair falling around her face. She was free.
Drusilla, bleeding and enraged, saw it all crumbling. Her eyes darted from the fallen orb, to the freed succubus, to the armed mortal, to the demonic girl rising again from the ground with murder in her eyes. She saw Jan getting to her feet, green-gold light beginning to flicker around her fingers once more. She saw Fatima standing, her hands moving in a complex, gathering pattern of Green Moon dismissal.
Retreat was the only option.
With a snarl of impotent fury, Drusilla slammed her good hand down on the broken trellis at her feet. A vortex of purple-black energy erupted, swirling with shards of glass and splinters of wood. It engulfed her. When it cleared a second later, she was gone. Only the smell of ozone and a few falling petals remained.
And Ambrose, forgotten, still sobbing on the ground, clutching his ruined manhood.
Silence descended, broken only by the trickle of the fountain and Ambrose’s whimpers.
Then, movement.
Cordelia pushed herself up to her knees. She looked… tired. Ancient. Her eyes, the same shade of green as Vivian’s, found her daughter. A smile, fragile and heartbreakingly sad, touched her lips.
“Little shadow,” she whispered, her voice rough from disuse.
Vivian’s armor and wings dissolved. She was just a girl again. She took a step, then another, then she was running, dropping to her knees and throwing her arms around her mother’s naked form. They clung to each other, both shaking.
Jan let out a long, shuddering breath. She looked at Hank, who was cradling his bruised fist, then at Stacy, who was lowering her pistol with trembling hands. She looked at Mara, who was turning slowly in her office chair to look at Zack, their faces a mirror of horror and relief. She looked at Molly and Ginny, hastily pulling clothes on, holding each other tight.
They had won. They were broken, battered, and psychologically scarred, but they were free.
Her eyes drifted to the dark, cracked orb, then to the weeping Ambrose.
“Okay,”
Her eyes drifted to the dark, cracked orb, then to the weeping Ambrose.
“Okay,” Jan breathed, her voice ragged but steadying. “Triage.”
She looked at her friends. Hank was holding his hand, his knuckles split and bleeding from smashing the orb. Stacy had her pistol lowered, but her entire body was taut as a wire, her eyes scanning the garden for further threats. Fatima was already moving toward Hank, her face pale but determined. Katie was crouched, hands on her knees, taking deep, shuddering breaths. Aaron was helping Annie to her feet, her gardener’s hands smudged with soil and soot from the explosion.
And then there were the others.
Jules was the first to move toward them. She got to her feet and walked with purposeful calm toward the desk where Mara and Zack were frozen in their awful tableau. She picked up a discarded throw blanket from a nearby chaise lounge as she passed.
Mara blinked slowly, her fingers still poised over the keyboard. Her eyes, sharp and intelligent even through the fog of violation, focused on Jules. “Dr. Nash?” Her voice was hoarse, confused. “Why are you… here? And why are you wearing clothes?” A faint, hysterical laugh bubbled in her throat. “You’re never wearing clothes.”
“I go where people need mental health care, Mara,” Jules said, her tone warm but professional. She draped the blanket over Mara’s shoulders, then another she found over Zack’s shuddering form. He flinched at the touch, then crumpled forward, his face in his hands. “All four of you,” Jules continued, glancing at Molly and Ginny, who were clutching each other on the ruined divan, “are in need of it right now.”
Her gaze fell on the stack of dense legal documents beside the keyboard. She tilted her head, reading the top page. Her eyebrows rose. “These contracts are made out to… Wile E. Coyote? And Sideshow Bob?” She looked back at Mara. “Legally dubious, to say the least.”
Mara followed her gaze. A faint, sardonic smile touched her bloodless lips. She reached out a trembling hand and touched the pile of papers. “There was always a part of me fighting back,” she said, her voice gaining a sliver of its usual steel. “Even when I couldn’t stop typing, I could make the terms fucking ridiculous. It was the only ‘fuck you’ I had left.”
Across the garden, Annie had found another blanket and was gently wrapping it around Cordelia’s shoulders. The succubus allowed the gesture, her eyes fixed on the snivelling figure of Ambrose writhing on the moss a few yards away. As the soft wool settled over her, Cordelia’s lip curled back from her teeth. A low, guttural growl rumbled from her chest, a sound that had nothing to do with humanity.
Vivian heard it. She stood, helping her mother to her feet. The blanket clung to Cordelia’s form, but her presence was no longer that of a victim. She stood tall, her green eyes blazing with a cold, ancient fire. Together, mother and daughter marched the short distance to where Ambrose lay.
They loomed over him, two avengers, one wrapped in borrowed comfort, the other in righteous fury.
“You pathetic little man,” Vivian spat, her voice trembling with disgust.
Ambrose looked up, his glasses askew, his face a mess of tears, snot, and pain from his bitten cock. “I just… I just wanted sex,” he whimpered, his voice a broken squeak. “I just wanted a woman to want me.”
Vivian’s laugh was a short, sharp crack. “Then you should have tried asking someone out,” she said, her tone blisteringly harsh. “You should have developed some social skills. You should have accepted that hot women don’t owe you shit, especially not a fucking magical thrall.” She leaned down, her shadow stretching over him. “Do you even know what happened to Chloe Miller? Mia Cooper? Lisa Forsythe? Maria Sanchez? Jen O’Reilly?”
Ambrose blinked, confusion cutting through his self-pity. “Who?”
Vivian’s snarl held a demonic edge. “Those five women were your first victims. Your beta tests. You enchanted them to entertain you in the nude. To be your personal harem.” Her voice dropped to a deadly whisper. “The only good thing that came from your pathetic bullshit is that Mia showed a real knack for Fair Bargain magic. Lisa had a Verdant Pasture connection so strong Annie here,” she jerked a thumb back at the gardener, who nodded solemnly, “says it’s a miracle to find it in a city. And Jen has already signed up with the Stable Mind. They’re getting help now, real help, for their gifts. But all five of them are going to need years of care because you were too much of a coward to face rejection.”
Cordelia stepped forward then. She let the blanket fall from her shoulders, standing naked and unashamed in the ruined garden. Her beauty was terrifying, a weapon honed by millennia of evolution. She leaned down, bringing her face inches from Ambrose’s. He tried to scramble back, but a root from the shattered wisteria seemed to coil around his ankle, holding him fast—Annie’s quiet work.
Cordelia’s growl vibrated in the air. “You,” she breathed, her voice like stones grinding together. “You summoned me. You used my power. You imprisoned me. Before that woman took your leash, it was you.” Her lips, full and cruel, parted. “Everything that happened here is because of you.”
Ambrose could only whimper, a dark stain spreading on his trousers.
Cordelia’s voice dropped to a whisper that carried to every corner of the silent garden. “I hunger.”
She kissed him.
It wasn’t a kiss of passion, or seduction. It was a claiming. A consumption. Her mouth sealed over his, and Ambrose’s eyes flew wide. He tried to scream, but the sound was swallowed by her. A visible energy, a vibrant, vital light, tore from his body into hers. It wasn’t the gentle transfer Vivian had learned from the Green Moon. This was a violent siphoning, the feed of a starving predator who had been denied for too long.
Ambrose’s body convulsed, his back arching off the mossy ground. His hands clawed weakly at her arms, but her grip was iron. The transfer lasted only ten seconds, but it was eternity for him. When Cordelia finally pulled away, a faint, pinkish vapor dissipating from between their lips, Ambrose collapsed.
He didn’t move. His chest rose and fell in shallow, rattling breaths. His eyes were open, staring at nothing, his face slack.
Cordelia stood up. The exhaustion that had lined her face was gone. Her skin glowed with a soft, inner light. The lines of strain and torment had vanished. She looked renewed, powerful, and eerily young.
“Holy shit,” Hank muttered, leaning against Fatima. He stared at Cordelia, then at Vivian. “She looks… she looks more like her sister than her mom now.”
Jules walked over, her notepad in hand. She knelt beside Ambrose, checking his pulse with two professional fingers at his throat. She observed his shallow breathing, the vacant stare. She stood up, brushing moss from her knees.
“I’ll contact some Golden Wand medical staff,” she said, her voice devoid of judgment. “They’ll see he’s stabilized, kept alive.” She looked at the unconscious figure. “My professional opinion is that his higher brain functions are gone. The feed was… thorough. He’ll never wake again. Or if he does, it will be screaming.”
No one argued. No one offered a different path. Molly looked away. Ginny buried her face in Molly’s shoulder. Zack was holding Mara tightly, his face wet with tears of relief and shame. Stacy simply nodded, holstering her pistol.
Vivian moved to her mother’s side, tentatively putting an arm around her. Cordelia leaned into the touch, the fearsome predator gone, replaced by a woman who was just… tired.
“You’re coming home with me,” Vivian said, her voice timid again, the demon receding. “We… we have a lot to catch up on.”
Cordelia nodded, a genuine, soft smile touching her lips for the first time. She reached up and brushed a strand of hair from Vivian’s face. “I heard whispers,” she said, her voice now a gentle, melodic thing. “While I was in the dark. Whispers about you.” Her smile turned knowing, maternal. “They mentioned a name. ‘Dale.’ Who is he?”
Vivian flushed, a deep red blooming from her neck to her hairline. She opened her mouth, but a sharp, sudden gasp from the divan cut her off.
It was Zack. He was staring at Mara, his hands cradling her face. “Mara,” he whispered, his voice cracking. “What did I… what did she make me do to you?”
Mara looked at him, her lawyer’s mind already sorting through the trauma, filing it away to be examined later. Right now, she saw only the man she loved, shattered by what had been done through him. She saw his horror, his self-loathing.
She didn’t answer with words.
Instead, she twisted in her chair, the blanket falling from her shoulders. She gripped the front of his shirt—the shirt that was still stained with her own wetness from their forced coupling—and yanked him to her. Her mouth found his in a kiss that was nothing like Cordelia’s. This was fierce, desperate, and alive.
It was a reclamation.
She broke the kiss, her breath hot against his lips. “She didn’t make you do anything you haven’t done before, Zachary,” she growled, her voice rough. Her hands went to his belt, fumbling with the buckle. “You fucked me. Now fuck me again. For real.”
Her words were a command, a ritual of purification through fire. She needed to erase the mechanical, lifeless memory of the last hours with something real, something messy and human and theirs. She shoved his pants down, her own panties already torn and discarded during the ordeal. She didn’t wait, didn’t gentle him.
She guided him into her, right there in the office chair, her back to the keyboard, her legs wrapping around his hips.
Zack cried out, a raw sound of anguish and need. He was still slick from before, and she was wet—a confusing mix of violation and her own terrified arousal. He pushed into her, and it was different. It was his rhythm, his touch. It was hesitant at first, haunted.
“Don’t you dare be gentle,” Mara snarled, biting his shoulder. “Don’t you fucking dare treat me like glass. I’m not broken. Fuck me like you mean it. Fuck me like you love me.”
Her words broke the last of his hesitation. A sob ripped from his throat as he drove into her, his hips slamming against the leather of the chair. It was hard, it was brutal, and it was real. Each thrust was a hammerblow against the prison of magic that had held them. Each gasp was a reclaiming of breath.
Mara threw her head back, her throat working. She clutched at his back, her nails digging in, anchoring herself to the pain, the pleasure, the sheer, fucking humanity of it. “Yes,” she hissed, “god, yes, like that. Just like that.”
It was over quickly, a violent, necessary release. Zack collapsed against her, his body shuddering with the force of his climax, his tears mixing with the sweat on her neck. Mara held him, her own body pulsing around him, a sharp, bright climax searing through her, burning away a fraction of the violation.
She stroked his hair, her face pressed against his temple. “It’s okay,” she murmured, her voice finally softening. “We’re okay. We’re us again.”
Across the garden, Jan watched, her own heart aching with a complicated mix of grief and relief. She turned to the others. Hank was getting his hand bandaged by Annie, who was using leaves from a healing creeper that glowed with a soft, green light. Fatima was talking in low, urgent tones to Katie and Aaron, likely about magical containment and cleaning up the scene. Stacy was on her phone, probably calling in favors to keep the Chicago PD away from a penthouse garden littered with magical debris and a man in a magical coma.
Jules was now sitting with Molly and Ginny, speaking to them softly, a hand on each of their knees. The two women were clinging to each other, but they were listening, their eyes slowly losing their shell-shocked vacancy.
Cordelia and Vivian stood apart, a quiet island in the chaos. Cordelia was looking at her daughter with such naked love and pride it hurt to see.
Jan took a deep breath. The immediate fight was over. The mess, however, was just beginning. She looked at the cracked, dark orb. She looked at Ambrose, breathing but not living. She looked at her friends, bruised but unbroken.
“Okay,” she said again, louder this time, to everyone. “Now we clean up. And then we go the fuck home.”