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The Sentimental Succubus

By: taiyakisoba



It was a hot winter's day in the Fifth Circle of Hell when the succubus Lavandé Mamorra was led in fetters through thronging crowds to the Halls of Injustice. Demons and devils of every kind jostled to get a better view of the accused. It had been a long time since Hell had seen a case as serious and as scandalous as this one.

Lavandé held her head high, her red, cat-irised eyes scanning the crowd unafraid. The icy fetters chafed at the pale purple-black skin of her wrists and the shoulders of her leathery wings. Only her clawed feet and sinuous, pointed tail were free and she let the latter swing back and forth with an arrogant, unconcerned air.

If the Infernal authorities wished to make a spectacle of her, then let them!

Beneath her arrogance, however, Lavandé felt a rising fear. She had expected hoots and catcalls and abuse from the crowd, but the silent staring she had encountered along this walk of shame was far harder to take. And yet she kept her chin up, her curling horns pointed to the fire-wreathed sky.

One of the pair of gigantic alastors escorting her took her shoulder in his great clawed hand and pushed her forward. She sighed. The melodrama of it all! Well, Hell enjoyed a show, it was true. Might as well give it to them. But the overkill of having two alastors escort such a low-level demoness as herself she found ridiculous rather than flattering.

The crowd didn't feel the same way with their hushed observation. Even the howls of the damned amid the flames were subdued. But Lavandé knew it wasn't her that everyone was afraid of. It was her crime that had shocked them to silence.

She turned and hissed at an imp that had reached out to touch her and the little creature scrambled back into the safety of the writhing crowd. Some demons near him surged forward and the alastor on her left breathed sheet after sheet of flame over their heads until they fell back. The other alastor grabbed Lavandé's shoulder and pushed her forward again.

"Hey, keep your big mitts to yourself," she snapped.

The alastor considered her with its crystalline eyes and shrugged.

"Just doing my job," it grumbled.

The twisted minarets of the Hall of Injustice came into sight. One of the alastors kept the excited crowd at bay with threats and flame while the other led Lavandé up the high onyx steps.

A little hooded figure with eyes like burning coals was waiting for her at the top. "Miss Mamorra? I'm Abraxas, your court-appointed lawyer."

Lavandé stared down at him. He passed her a flaming card which she glanced at then tossed away.

"Sorry Abraxas," she said. "I thought I told them I'm planning to defend myself."

The darkness in Abraxas's hood looked hurt. "I would strongly advise against that, Miss Mamorra. The crimes you have been accused of are among the most heinous..."

Lavandé sighed. "We all know this is a show trial, Abraxas. I'd love to give your career a kick in the tail, but I'm afraid you'll have to wait for the next sap to get frog-marched up these steps."

Abraxas began to say something but the court security had already arrived to take custody of Lavandé from the alastors. The devils signed off on the transfer and then led her into the courtroom proper. One stopped Abraxas but Lavandé sighed and turned to him.

"Let the little guy in. He's my lawyer."

The courtroom was far noisier than the streets had been. The public gallery was packed and demons struggled with each other to get a better view of the proceedings. Devils were stationed at every exit to the great black courtroom, standing to attention and doing their best to hide their own curiosity as Lavandé was led to the defence's table. An imp undid her manacles while another pulled a chair out for her and she sat down.

Say what you liked about imps, at least they're polite.

As Abraxas clambered onto his seat beside her, Lavandé glanced across at the prosecution. The prosecutor was a tall female devil, red-skinned like all her kind, her jet-black hair done up in a stern bun that made her look older than she was. She studiously avoided Lavandé's gaze and kept her chin haughtily pointed up in the air, tapping her teeth with a pen.

Abraxas, meanwhile, took his notes out from some mysterious place he had secreted them in his robes and promptly spilled them across the table.

Lavandé stared up at the ceiling and sighed.

Suddenly a hush fell over the public gallery and spread to the rest of the courtroom. The devil at the base of the judge's bench leaped to his feet. "All rise! His Horror Judge Onoskelis presiding!"

The door to chambers opened and the judge strode in.

Onoskelis was an elderly demon, his halo of flames a dull yellow, but the eyes with which he scoured the courtroom were clear and hard. He sat himself behind his bench, placed his gavel on its stand and then glanced at the documents waiting for him. He frowned and squeezed his brow with a taloned hand.

"Ms. Forneus, am I reading this correctly? The defendant stands accused of Fraternisation with a Human in the First Degree? There must be some mistake."

"No mistake, Your Horror," replied the prosecutor.

"But surely not-" The judge's voice fell to a whisper. "The L word?"

Forneus nodded.

Onoskelis sighed. "Well, that explains all the crowds outside. Let's have the opening remarks, then, shall we?"

Forneus stepped out from behind her table and coughed. "Demons and devils of the jury..."

Lavandé stared at her claws as the list of her crimes was read out. When the final and most serious came, muttering broke out in the public gallery and Onoskelis banged his gavel once. "Order!"

It all seemed scripted to Lavandé and very tiresome. As soon as everyone calmed down the judge called upon the defence. Abraxas started to stand but Lavandé got to her feet herself and placed a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back down.

"I'll be speaking on my own behalf, Your Horror."

An intake of collective breath and more muttering from the public gallery. Onoskelis leaned forward in his chair.

"So you will be conducting your own defence, Miss Mamorra?"

Lavandé opened her mouth to say something, but changed her mind and said, "Well, no, not really, Your Horror. I'm quite guilty of all of the things the prosecutor just listed. But I'd like to offer an explanation for my actions and to throw myself on the mercy of the court."

"Mercy?" Onoskelis' flaming brows furrowed. He flicked his fingers at the imp court clerk who hurried over with a dictionary bigger than it was. Puffing, the imp lifted the book onto the bench and Onoskelis at once flipped through it.

"Hmm... oh yes, here it is. 'Mercy'. C rather than S. Well..." He quickly read the entry then looked up at Lavandé. "Miss Mamorra, are you sure you're using this word correctly?"

"Yes, Your Horror."

"But surely this is some fashion of insanity plea, is it not?"

"No, Your Horror. I just wish to be given the opportunity to tell my story."

Onoskelis glanced toward Forneus, who shrugged. "Very well. We will hear your story, then."

Lavandé stood up. She swept her flashing eyes across the faces of the jury, the court officers, the public gallery, Abraxas and Forneus and the judge, and then she began to speak.

----

"My name is Lavandé Mamorra and I am a Morrigan-level succubus. You've all heard the list of crimes I have committed, but they don't tell the whole story. In order to explain myself and my behaviour, I need to go back to the beginning, to the night I first met him.

Now, maybe I should explain what the duties of a succubus are for those here who aren't familiar with them." She raised her eyes in appeal to Onoskelis, who nodded.

"Please go ahead, Miss Mamorra. I, too, am interested."

"Well," said Lavandé. "A succubus' duty, like that of almost all demons, is to harvest humans of their energy. Many demons harvest fear or envy or the like, but we succubi are experts at the farming of orgone, human sexual energy. Each succubus is given a territory and charged with providing Hell with as much orgone as she can. I'm proud to say that I've been ranked top of my region on three separate occasions."

An impressed murmur from the crowd.

Lavandé smiled. "Yes. But we all realise how difficult things have become recently, of course. Humans aren't as easy to harvest as they once were. The dreadful state of the upper world has made our, well, more metaphysical fearsomeness less effective. Succubi face similar challenges. There's so much pornography up there now that very few humans have enough unspent orgone to make it worth harvesting them. Their lack of orgone also makes the harvesting process all the more time consuming and, well, tiresome. So when I found him I was more than pleased. I was overjoyed."

Lavandé turned her eyes from the jury to the bench. "I apologise for referring to the object of my... my crimes by the simple, unadorned pronoun, Your Horror. The truth is I don't wish to involve him in my problems."

Forneus coughed. "The prosecution demands a name be supplied."

Onoskelis tapped his chin with a claw. "Is the identity of this human in any way relevant to these accusations against you, Miss Mamorra?"

Lavandé shook her head. "No, Your Horror."

"Very well," sighed Onoskelis. "I suppose that if a name is required later the inquisitors will extract it from you. There's no need for us to hold proceedings up in any case. Please continue."

Lavandé continued. "Well, as I began to say, I'd been forced to roam further and further afield to meet my quota of orgone. So when I felt a new powerful source, a vibrant star-point of energy not far from where I was, I was ecstatic. I flew directly to the human's habitation. There were several other humans living there - I was later to learn they were his family - but the human giving off waves of orgone like a beacon was living in the basement. Uh, a basement is a small room underneath a human habitation used to store unneeded items." Lavandé sighed. "I was soon to learn how appropriate such a room was as his chosen refuge.

Having taken the form of a shadow, I slipped inside this 'basement' to locate the source of the orgone. I soon found him, fast asleep on a bed. The room about him was in a state of disarray - it was not particular dirty, just disordered. As a lawful-evil being such chaos offended me deeply. I learned later that his room was a mirror of his mental state, which itself was quite disordered. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

There were numerous piles of video-games, comics and also small, cute figurines and posters of smiling characters on the walls. I don't need to explain any of these items, seeing how they're all well-known inventions of the infernal authority designed to corrupt and destroy mankind. The only space clear was around his computer desk, which clearly got a lot of use. Snack wrappers littered the keyboard and I absentmindedly brushed them off into the waste-paper basket beside the desk.

The human himself was a snoring lump fast asleep in the middle of all this chaos. I sensed he was undergoing REM sleep which meant that it was the perfect time to strike. Succubi prefer to harvest our victims while they're dreaming so they don't wake up and become alarmed. We've all heard the horror stories of succubi who were not so careful and ended up with a face full of holy water."

A shudder ran through the court.

"I slid the bedclothes from him. He was lying full on his back. His face, clear to me with my night vision, was not at all unattractive. His features were well-composed, although boyish and somewhat naïve. Fast asleep, his expression was innocently tranquil. It was true that his body could've perhaps afforded to lose a few pounds, but overall I wasn't displeased. Harvesting comes easier when the victim is physically appealing, after all.

The scent of orgone he was giving off was palpable and I began to salivate. I'd seldom encountered such a seething pool of sexual frustration outside of the lucky occasions I'd been able to harvest the energy of a priest, and so I wasted no time.

I stripped him of his pyjama bottoms and brought my hand down onto his dormant member. With a few gentle strokes it stiffened into a delightful length. The appealing smooth firmness and the hot, earthy smell emanating from the human's body excited me further and I felt myself getting wet. I eagerly dipped my head to his lower half and slid his hardness into my mouth. It was strong tasting as the rest of him. The human groaned and I chuckled to myself as I felt the waves of pleasure he was experiencing from being in my mouth.

I slid my tongue along the length and spent particular attention to the area beneath the swollen head. This, I fear, was my first and perhaps most serious mistake.

I had misjudged just how excited he had already become. He gave out a most adorable shuddering moan and then his member was bucking inside my mouth, expelling copious amounts of his seed. I was so surprised I was unable to swallow it all and some drooled from my mouth onto his abdomen.

I cursed my stupidity and inefficiency. I'd been too wrapped up in enjoying the process and had forgotten my duty. Luckily, he hadn't woken and as I scooped the overflow of his semen from the length of his penis onto my fingers and licked them, I noticed he was growing hard again.

This time I made no mistake and straddled him. I moved my hips forward and guiding that delicious hardness into me. As he slid up into me I bit my lip to stop from crying out. Having already ejaculated, he was able to last for a long time. With each thrust I felt the orgone rise back inside him - less, this time, but still far more than I was used to. I was overeager, hungry for more, and I rolled my hips lustily against his until I felt his member grow even harder and then burst hot inside me. At the same moment I reached the point of no return myself. I shuddered as pleasure crashed through me, my own delight made all the stronger by the sexual energy I was drawing from him. Filled to overflowing with both his semen and orgone, I fell back panting.

Remaining on top of him, I drew my fingers across my belly as he went soft inside me. I could feel the warmth of his seed inside me and it excited me further.

He lay there on the bed, his face contorted with pleasure, his body ravaged. I slipped the bedclothes back over him and left. There was no need for me to harvest anyone else that night, since even the left over energy he'd supplied me with meant I'd reached my quota and then some. I was eager to visit him again, to harvest more of that overabundant energy. He would soon have me ranked top in my region again!

And yet... perhaps even then there was something else that drew me to him. His eager enjoyment of my body and his delightful moans had been flattering to my female heart."

"Please, Your Horror," burst out Forneus, laughing nervously. "A heart? Is this blasphemy really necessary?"

"Forgive me, Your Horror," said Lavandé quickly. "I meant no offence. I fear my speech has perhaps taken on some human peculiarities."

Onoskelis nodded. "Very well. Please continue, Miss Mamorra, but do take care not to cause undue offence."

"As I was saying, there was perhaps something else that drew me to the human. Looking back now, it was a strange thing which I'd done: covering him up after I had harvested him. A peculiar and sentimental act. But back then, I thought little of it.

I visited him every night for a week. After that first time I was far more careful. I'd stroke him into hardness, sometimes squeezing him between my breasts to excite him. He'd lie there, clawing the sheets and moaning as though he was dying and I'd quickly mount him and ride him to completion. He looked so vulnerable beneath me and more than once I wondered if I hadn't made a mistake of some kind, that I was forcing myself upon one not yet an adult. But it was just his innocence, his fragility that made him appear so young.

But the night soon came where I committed my first of many crimes: allowing myself to be seen by a conscious human.

I'd just finished riding the human and he'd come inside me. I lay on top of him, panting hard. I would often find myself dazed after harvesting, drunk with an overflow of orgone. That particular night I'd climaxed harder than usual and pleasantly exhausted I'd lingered, luxuriating in the feeling of his member growing soft inside me.

Suddenly he sat up and reached out for me. Alarmed, I shied away from his embrace but relaxed when I saw he was still asleep. Foolishly, throwing caution aside, I permitted him to pull me down and embrace me. Of course, I kept clear of any attempt of him to touch my lips with his, but the way he crushed my bare breasts against his chest filled me with a flooding warmth I'd never experienced before. It was a strange sensation, a delightfully subtle suffusing of the body that made me tingle all over.

I gazed upon his sleeping face. He was still deep in a dreaming state. I thought of how different his kind, gentle features were to those of a demon. What a stupid thing to think - of course he didn't look like a demon! But such was the magic of this strange sensation I felt within me.

While I looked upon him his eyes flicked open. They stared unseeing for a moment, but then they focused on my face. I choked back a cry of panic and at once diffused into shadow.

I flew straight back to Hell, horrified by my actions. What was wrong with me? Why had I taken such a stupid risk? I determined never to visit this human again. But the next night came and again I found myself ascending to the human world, drawn by the beacon of his orgone, and by the memory of his face. This time, however, I was careful to leave right after the harvesting. In fact, you might say I fled.

Each time I'd return to Hell heavy with orgone, but as soon as it was drained I'd quickly hunger for more. Being filled to the brim had made me insatiable. I was tormented, hating the necessity of waiting until night came before becoming shadow and ascending to the upper world to harvest him.

It was this overwhelming hunger that compelled me to commit my second crime: appearing during the daylight hours.

At last the craving grew too much to bear. The hollowness inside gnawed at me and I desired to harvest the human immediately. Perhaps he slept during the day? In my visits to his room I'd seen no evidence of his ever leaving it. I decided it was worth the risk.

I became shadow and rose up into the upper world. Dazzled by the sunlight I leaped and flowed between the little pools of shade safe from the sun's gaze until I came to the human's habitation. I slipped in through the ventilation shaft and spilled out into the darkness of his room.

He was indeed asleep. Grinning, I flew down to him and was about to tear the bedclothes from his bed when he stirred and opened his eyes. Luckily, I'd not yet become material so he saw nothing. He did, however, blink and wave a hand through the air in front of him. Had he sensed my presence? I fled back to the corner of the room and hid there, floating.

Yawning, he pulled himself out of bed and went to his desk. A space had been made in the soda cans and snack wrappers for a large sheet of paper. I waited, watching, as he took up a pencil and busied himself drawing. He opened a can of that sugary beverage that humans like so much and drank it avidly. Soda was no good for him and I determined to hide his supply next time I had the opportunity.

He spent a long time on his work. Soon he smiled, and after a final frenzied scratching of his pencil he set the paper aside.

He left the table and retreated back to bed, where he lay, staring up at the ceiling. Could he still sense me? He seemed to be thinking about something.

Finally his eyelids fell. His heartbeat slowed and his breathing deepened and I knew he'd fallen asleep. Exhausted from keeping shadow-form so long, I materialised and floated down to the floor. I crept towards him, my blood surging. As I passed the desk I glanced at the half-finished can of soda on it. With a sigh I grabbed the can and incinerated it in my palm. A tiny pile of powdered aluminium was left and this I poured into the bin beside his desk.


The Sentimental Succubus



What was it that had so taken his interest? I looked down at the paper and stepped back in shock.

The paper was covered in drawings - drawings of me.

I was unmistakable: my small curved horns; my wild, always unmanageable blue-black hair; my large eyes with their cat irises. I looked closer. There were more than just portraits. He'd also drawn me full length. I admired the skilful way he'd so flatteringly portrayed my long, slender body. My wings were especially well-drawn, right down to their hooked talons.

I glanced across at the sleeping lump on the bed. So he'd seen me in his dreams. It was a common enough occurrence. And there was the time, too, when he'd glimpsed me on the point of waking. Perhaps that explained the detail with which he was able to recall my features.

I drew a claw along the edge of the paper. My chest grew warm. I looked so beautiful. Every detail had been painstakingly rendered. Why had he spent so much time on drawing me? Was I really so interesting to him, a fleeting erotic dream?

I pulled myself away from the drawings with difficulty and floated across to his bed. I slid the bedclothes off him. I'd grown especially hungry. Was it from all the waiting I had done, the orgone I'd expended remaining a shadow while watching him draw?

Perhaps it was something more than that.

Having revealed his body I drew my claws along his sides. He murmured. I peeled his shirt up and placed a palm on his stomach and stroked downwards, towards his abdomen. He gasped and turned his head so his cheek rested against the pillow. I slipped my hand into his pyjama bottoms and tantalised his sleeping member. He groaned and his face flushed. I was delighted by the reaction and soon got him hard with my delicate ministrations.

This time I wanted to take things slow with him. Perhaps I'd been flattered by the drawings he'd made of me and wished to reward him. There was nothing in the demonic protocols about not being permitted to please the humans you harvest. After all, a pleased human often emits stronger orgone. It's for this reason that succubi spend so much time training in the many different techniques of fornication.

But fornication was the wrong word for what I was doing to him now. I was teasing him. I pulled his pants down just far enough to release his now rampant organ. I kissed the head and flicked my tongue underneath it. All human males delight in that and he was no exception. A bead of moisture appeared at the tips and I dug it out with my eager tongue. Then I slipped his whole length into my mouth. A combination of stroking the length with my hand and lapping with my tongue soon had him crying out. He bucked his hips up off the mattress and I did my best to accommodate his eager thrusts with my throat. Soon he gasped and came, his ejaculate filling my mouth to overflowing. I greedily drank it all. I fell back on my bottom at the foot of the bed and scraped the overflow of his semen into my mouth. He tasted different, sweeter and thicker.

Once again I'd let myself get distracted. I didn't notice that he'd woken up until he sat up and smiled at me.

"So you are real," he said.

I dissolved at once into shadow and fled out through the ventilation. I flew back down into Hell in a panic. I knew of course that I should've reported the incident, should've never returned to this same human again, but something prevented me. That warmth, that alien warmth that had taken hold of me.

That warmth would not let me.

I knew then that I was ill, or cursed. It was the only explanation. Perhaps I'd come in contact with some holy object, flown over some sanctified place by mistake? There had to be some explanation for my increasingly bizarre behaviour.

"So you are real." His voice echoed in my memory. He had not been afraid of me. No screaming, no fear. Just four simple words.

He'd sounded so happy!

His words haunted me. And yet it was several days before I had the courage to revisit him. But until I found that courage - or perhaps it was desperation that drove me? - I didn't harvest any other humans. It seemed... it seemed wrong somehow, as if I was betraying him.

Worried about betrayal? A demoness? Truly, I was ill.

I convinced myself that I needed to return to his room, to discovering the source of this malady consuming me. I went at night, terrified I might find him awake. I didn't want that smile flashed in my direction again. I knew... ah, I knew that my nerves would not take it.

It was late at night. The darkness was filled with other demonic spirits as I rose up through the earth. I lingered outside his room, placed my face through the wall until I could view the inside in shadowy relief.

A hump in his bed. So he was asleep.

Emboldened, I passed through the wall and padded into his room. Somehow, it seemed tidier than before. The wrappers that had littered the floor were gone and the empty cans of soda were stacked with something resembling neatness. His desk was wholly free of all that rubbish I'd seen before. Instead, it was covered with drawing paper.

It was where I'd seen those beautiful sketches of myself. I turned my face away and swept past. There was no need to look again on those frivolous scribbles! They were a foolish distraction from my duty. Of course a human would draw something he saw in a dream, especially such a strange and striking demoness as myself. His curiosity was only natural.

And yet, the exquisite tenderness of those lines! He'd made me look so beautiful.

"So you are real." The joy bubbling in those words!

I stopped. I knew that what I was doing was a symptom of my illness, and yet the compulsion would not let go of me. I drew my claws across the papers, separating them so I could see what he'd been drawing.

And there I saw myself again. But this time..."

Lavandé fell silent. Her face had turned red.

"Please, Your Horror!" cried Forneus in alarm. "The defendant is blushing! Must we really put up with such lewdness in this courtroom?"

Onoskelis nodded. He kept his eyes discretely trained on the space just above Lavandé's head and said, "Miss Mamorra, if you would be so kind as to keep your conduct within the realms of decency?"

"I'm afraid blushing seems to be a symptom of my illness and comes upon me involuntarily, Your Horror. I'll try to control it."

Murmuring from the jury. Abraxas rubbed his claws together under his cowl. No doubt this was playing very well into an insanity defence, thought Lavandé.

She swallowed and continued. "And so, as I was saying, Your Horror, I saw that he'd drawn me again. But this time I was wearing clothes, human clothes which covered up almost all my skin."

A moan of horror undulated through the jury. Lavandé stared down at the table and hid her deepening blush with her hands.

"We would ask that the defendant describe these 'clothes' more fully," said Forneus with barely-contained glee.

Lavandé grimaced. Of course, prejudice the jury against her! Even though they were just imaginary pictures a deranged human had created of her. And yet...

"It was a dress," said Lavandé at last. "A garment which covers the body from the upper chest, above the breasts, hanging from straps on the shoulders to fall just below the knees. I believe it was of the kind called a sun-dress."

"So your breasts and genitals and buttocks and thighs were completely covered," asked Forneus.

"In the picture, yes," Lavandé said, turning to the jury. "Don't forget, this was all in a picture the human had drawn."

"And the pattern on this dress?"

"Flowers," said Lavandé, dropping her gaze. "There was also a hat, a straw one for keeping off the sun."

The jury muttered.

"This was not the worst picture. I saw others. I was dressed in different sorts of human clothes, portrayed in different poses: laughing, picking flowers, sitting under a tree reading. And yet in all of them I retained my demonic characteristics. The human wasn't disturbed by them, and had skilfully executed every detail of my horns and tail and wings.

I knew he'd enjoyed making the pictures. There were so many of them!

I left them behind and crept up to him. Having not visited him for many days, his orgone flashed bright. I knew he must have forgone any sexual acts since I'd last been there. The thought of him keeping himself for me pleased me and warmth flushed through my chest. I almost forgave him for the lewdness of the pictures he'd drawn.

My hunger rising, I stripped the bedclothes away to find a delicious erection already waiting for me. Was he deep in some erotic dream? Had the mere scent of my body elicited such a swift and lusty response? The sight delights me and after a few eager mouthings of his member I climbed on top of him.

It had been a long time. The drought broke as I rolled my hips and bounced upon him, ecstasy pouring through me with each upward piercing of his erection into me. He continued to sleep, but murmured and sighed as I took my fill of delicious orgone from him.

I was nearing climax. The act of fornication had barely begun and I was already filled to overflowing. I felt his member grow harder still inside me and delirious with pleasure, my lower half melting into liquid, I came just as he started to spurt his semen inside me. I cried out in the throes of my passion, then, for the first time in my existence. A succubus is to remain as silent as possible during harvesting so that the human does not awake, but the intensity of the moment drove all my training from me.

Then I felt his hands grab my waist as he delivered a series of hard thrusts into me with his still spurting member.

I was shocked, of course... and yet I was so out of my mind with pleasure that I rationalised it. He'd just made an involuntary, instinctive movement: such things are known to happen.

And even if he was awake, I knew I couldn't stop. I needed his orgone, needed his member, needed him. A grotesque compulsion that shames me, now, to utter it.

He opened his eyes.

Again that smile!

This time I didn't flee right away. Drunk with orgone and still shivering with those last waves of delicious pleasure, I stared down at him, my eyes wide in horror. He raised his hand to my face.

My lips curled in a defensive scowl. Biting his hand would have been melodramatic, ridiculous. I shied away instead, but not before the tips of his fingers had scored across my cheek.

"I missed you," he said.

The horror contained in those words! I melted away, then, dissolving into shadow and flowing down through the floor.

But I returned to him the following night. Shame-faced and silent, I returned, and the night after that one, too.

I continued to harvest him every night. Sometimes he'd wake just before he came inside me. His eyes would flash open, those beautiful timid eyes, and he'd try and hold my gaze as we reached our peak of pleasure together. I always turned my face away. I didn't want him to see the flush that so readily came to it now. Also, I couldn't endure what I glimpsed in those eyes."

"And what did you see?" asked Forneus. She turned to the Judge. "Your Horror, the defendant is being evasive."

Onoskelis directed his sternest gaze at Lavandé. "Please tell us exactly what you saw in his eyes, Miss Mamorra."

Lavandé smiled. "Love, Your Horror."

Stunned silence in the courtroom, and then uproar. The jury erupted into howls of shock and indignation. Forneus's red face went deathly pale. Abraxas fell from his stool. Onoskelis sat paralysed, but as the court further descended into chaos, he began to bang his gavel, over and over, until sparks of incandescence flew up to the high ceiling. Lavandé watched the disorder, a thin smile on her face.

"Order! Order in this court!" The old demon's aura turned crimson with rage.

The court at last settled down into a disturbed murmuring.

Onoskelis pointed his gavel at Lavandé. "Miss Mamorra! Any further blasphemy and I will have this court cleared and hold you in contempt. From now on, if you must reference that... that concept, please use a circumlocution such as 'the L-word.'"

Lavandé lowered her eyes and smiled to herself. "I understand, Your Horror. It won't happen again.

"Despite what I had seen in his eyes, I continued to visit him, as I said. My illness had taken total control of me. The pain in my chest was ever present now, and alongside it a hollowness demanding to be filled.

And yet, as full of orgone as I became, it was never, ever enough.

He would leave pictures of me on the table. There were never any pictures of us fornicating and I began to worry whether I was really giving him pleasure. But surely the copious orgone that would invariably flow from him was evidence enough of his delight in my body, wasn't it?

Why was I so worried about how he felt about me? As my disorder worsened, I found myself more and more obsessed with such sentimental concerns.

I started to appear the same time very night, contrary to all my training, and so the day finally came when I arrived while he was still awake.

He was sitting on the bed, his back to me. I knew I should turn and leave, but instead I hovered in a dark corner as a shadow, watching him.

"You're here, aren't you?" he said after a while. "I can feel you."

I made no reply. I'd never spoken to him, I realised then.

"Can you speak?" he asked.

I panicked, but I didn't flee. Instead I answered him.

"Yes, I can speak."

His shoulders relaxed. "Your voice is beautiful too," he said.

Beautiful.

I knew, then, that the heat I'd started to feel on my face sometimes was a blush. The blush spread across my face and lingered there.

"You're a demon, aren't you?"

"Yes," I replied. "A succubus."

A pause. Then: "Why me?"

"You're very full of orgone," I replied at last, knowing full well he wouldn't understand the word.

"Orgone?"

"Sexual energy," I replied. Of course, I could have said that before, but I'd begun to enjoy this conversation. Yes, it was a conversation, now. Not just a few words calling to me as I fled from him. His voice was low and gentle and it made my blood surge to have him speak to me.

He laughed. The sound shocked me. There is not much laughter down here in Hell, and even in the upper world it's becoming less common. His laugh was neither cruel nor derisive, but gently mocking.

"Figures," he says. "They said you'd become a wizard if you stayed a virgin for long enough. I guess I must have become one and summoned a succubus."

"No," I corrected him. "You didn't summon me. I came here myself."

"For my orgone?"

I remained silent. I should have answered yes, and yet I couldn't. It smacked of a lie and I was finding it harder and harder to lie now.

"What's your name?" the human asked me.

"Lavandé," I said without thinking.

"Lavandé," he repeated. Repeated in his voice my name sounded beautiful to my ears for the first time. "It means lavender in French, isn't it?"

"I don't know," I said. "My older sisters have often told me that I was given the name because of the lightness of my complexion."

I was babbling nonsense now. The human turned. Forgetful of where I was, distracted by our conversation, I'd become material. His smiling eyes considered my form.

"Yes, I can see that," he said. Then he blushed and turned away. "Are you always naked, down there?"

I blinked at him. "Down where?"

"Uh, in Hell, I mean."

"It's very hot," I replied. "And this form is more pleasing to human males bare."

He cleared his throat. "Uh, it is very pleasing. But you know, I think maybe you'd look good in clothes as well."

"You're referring to those pictures you drew." I grew angry, my tail whipping back and forth. "Why did you draw me dressed in those things?"

He turned back to me. Shame lit his face. "I'm sorry," he murmured. "I've offended you, haven't I? I won't draw you anymore."

"No," I said. It was answer to both the things he had said. "Your drawings don't matter to me. Only your orgone."

"Are you going to take my orgone tonight?" he asked. His voice was soft, child-like in its tentativeness.

Of course. He'd mentioned earlier he was a virgin. Or had been a virgin, before I'd come and...

I gazed at his aura. Orgone was flowing from him in waves. He was experiencing desire. Hunger gripped my entire body, but with it came a strange, new sensation.

Shame.

Flustered, I replied, "I have to go."

"I understand," he said. His voice was matter-of-fact but tinged with disappointment. "Will you come back again?"

"I don't know," I lied, dissolving away into shadow.

------

Our conversation had unsettled me. I didn't immediately return to harvest him. I went days without a taste of orgone and grew steadily weaker. One night I was driven by hunger to again rise to the upper world. I detected a source of orgone, a different one, far from the habitation of that particular human who so haunted me.

I hungrily fell on the male as he slept with his female beside him. I pressed shivering fingers against his body and when I felt his skin, so different from the skin of the other human, I pulled my hands away, repulsed.

Even wracked by this overpowering hunger I couldn't go through with it. Fornicating with another felt wrong.

This sickness was going to destroy me, I knew then. I was going to fade away from a lack of orgone, growing steadily weaker until I suffered total dissolution. I was doomed.

But instead of accepting that fate I found myself flying to the human's habitation. The agony of my hunger had forced me out into the human world far earlier than usual that evening, and I knew from before that the human would still be awake.

And yet still I went.

I grew stronger as I came closer. When I saw the light in the basement I shivered in excitement. I slipped through the wall, a sheet of shadow.

The human was indeed still awake. He was sitting at his desk, focussed on the paper in front of him. His hands, those graceful, tender hands, swept back and forth, scratching the paper with lines. He was drawing.

Still shadow, I floated over his shoulder and looked down.

I saw a picture of myself, as before, in that same floral dress with the straw hat. I was in a field of flowers. A beaming smile graced my face as my hand reached out from the perspective of the paper and held another's hand, clearly intended to represent that of the viewer..."

The courtroom gasped.

Lavandé shrugged. "I apologise for the graphicness of my description, Your Horror. But that's what I saw."

"Please continue Miss Mamorra," said Onoskelis with a wave of a talon, clearly exhausted from the previous uproar.

"He finished shading the viewer's hand and returned to my tail. He seemed unhappy with the shape of the fork and redrew it. It looked much better, then. My tail was high in the air, as often it is when I'm filled with pleasure."

So he'd noticed such a detail! I blushed, and as I did I grew material and floated down to the floor.

He stopped drawing and looked behind him. I took a step back. A look of delight burst onto his face, as always. I took two more steps back. His face suddenly switched to one of panic. He raised a hand, his eyes desperate.

"Please, no. Lavandé, don't go," he said. "I promise I won't touch you. I... I just want to talk to you."

"Talk?" I glared haughtily at him. For all my hunger, my need to see him, finally having him before me filled me with rage. He was the source of this illness, this hideous compulsion. Talk? Rather I should kill him! I flexed the claws of one hand. It would be a simple task to incinerate him.

Fire blossomed, its yellow tongues flicking from the palm of my hand. The human's eyes went wide and he cowered back against his desk.

Perhaps part of me had come to kill him. But as I looked at his horrified face I extinguished the flames and lowered my hand.




The Sentimental Succubus



Again, that pitiful emotion shame sickened me.

"Let's talk, then," I said.

The human grew calmer, but the ghost of his previous terror still lingered. I felt guilty, then, as well. Yes, guilt as well!

I didn't know until then what such a thing was."

"Can you describe the sensation?" asked Forneus.

"It's very difficult," Lavandé replied. "It resembles an iciness in the stomach, a tightness of the chest, like something inside you is sinking."

"I see," said Forneus, scribbling hurriedly.

Lavandé continued. "He gestured towards the bed. I sat down on it. It gave a little with my weight but was comfortable. The human looked at me. He kept his eyes steadily on mine. I realised, then, that he was striving not to look at my body. Did it not please him?

No. He was merely embarrassed by my, as he saw it, 'nakedness'. That ludicrous human sensitivity!

"Lavandé," he began. "I-"

He lowered his eyes. Whatever he wanted to say, he was struggling to express it.

"Yes?"

He raised his gaze. "Why did you come back?"

I stared back. Sitting on that bed in that tiny room with this human I was the most anxious I'd ever been in my existence. I placed my hands in my lap, entwined my claws. "I... truly, I don't know. I was feeling sick. I need orgone."

"You need orgone to live, right?"

I nodded.

"Can't you take it from..." He frowned at the thought. "... from other humans?"

"I can, but..." I left the rest unspoken.

"I'm happy to give you my orgone," the human said. He lowered his blushing face.

I gasped and turned my face away, scandalised by the pink colour I'd glimpsed on his cheeks. "I don't need a human's charity! If I require your orgone, I will take it."

"But-" he said.

Anger fuelled by shame and guilt surged in me. I leaped to my feet and strode towards him while he sat there, watching, the expression on his face enigmatic. He was both afraid and aroused, orgone streaming off him in intermittent waves. He raised his arms as if to embrace me. The movement enraged me further. I grasped him by his upper arms and lifted him straight up off his chair. A succubus, as you know, has strength which belies her slender appearance. He struggled, but my grip was inexorable.

I turned and threw him clear across the room and onto the bed. He bounced once, tried to right himself, but by then I was upon him.

"Wait," he gasped.

"No," I said. Standing over him I pressed a foot against his chest. "You will not give me your orgone. I will take it from you."

He struggled beneath me, in vain of course. I slid my foot off and straddled him, grabbing his wrists and holding them down against the bed. I could feel his hardness bulging from his pyjama bottoms against my sex. For all his protests and struggling he was deeply aroused.

"No!" he cried. "No, not like this. Please, Lavandé!"

I sat up, lifting one of my feet so that I could hook a claw in the waistband of his pyjamas and pull them down. His member pounced out and stood up hard in the air.

I drew my already swollen sex across the head of his hardness. He was emitting more orgone now and I fed, famished, his energy streaming into me.

I slid down onto him.

He burst out with a cry that sounded like anguish, but could only have been pleasure. Delight was already spearing up along my spine. As I began to move my hips I looked down at him.

"Ah! You say no, but your body-"

I stopped.

He'd covered his eyes with the crook of his arm, unable to bear the sight of me, and his mouth was contorted in a grimace. He seemed on the verge of weeping.

His anguished cry had been just that, and now he fell to sobbing. Horrified, I let go of his wrists and slid off him.

"I... I am..."I didn't know what to say, babbling as if I was some mindless wandering spirit.

He wiped at his eyes with his hands.

"I'm sorry." I turned away and slid off the bed. "I don't know why I came here. I'll bother you no longer."

"No, wait!" he cried. "Don't go, Lavandé! Please don't go."

I turned. He was at the end of the bed, reaching out for me. His eyes were swollen red, wet with tears.

Those fingers. He still wished to touch me, even after I'd tried to...

I raised my own hand. What had it looked like in the picture? I reached forward, touched the tip of my fingers to his.

Warmth flooded me then, a powerful, all-encompassing warmth, the mother of that earlier one that had touched me. I jerked my hand away, terrified.

I looked at him there, sitting on the bed, staring at me in confusion. His vulnerability touched me. I'd wronged him. Why had I expected a human to act any differently from the way he'd acted? There was a reason that harvesting is done with the male asleep and dreaming.

The thought of the pain I'd caused him made my chest ache with a second bitter taste of guilt.

It was all my fault.

"Please Lavandé," he said. "Come here. You can take my orgone, but just..." He looked up at me from under those thick lashes of his. "Please be gentle with me."

I'd been on the point of leaving, but his words rang true. Was I to forgo orgone because of my stupid pride? A succubus does not torment men, but pleases them. I was no torturing demon, like Migraine or biting Envy.

Was it wrong to please him, then? If being gentle would please him, then I would be gentle.

I felt my hunger grow. The warmth transmuted that hunger into something stranger still. I desired to feel his body under mine, to feel the touch of his soft skin for the sake of feeling it, not just as part of the process of drawing the potent orgone from his body.

I took a step forward. Joy burst onto the human's face as he coaxed me closer.

"Lavandé," he murmured. "I'm yours."

I'm yours.

The words touched and excited me. Perhaps it was not such a bad thing to have orgone offered to you as a gift. Did everything have to be taken?

I climbed onto the bed. Confusion still surged in my heart, ignited by that strange warmth and the pain that had come with it. I straddled him. He looked up at me, his eyes eager, but still tinged by nervousness.

Such foolishness. To allay his fears I ran a hand over his chest. It was a perfunctory gesture, intended just to calm him since touch seemed important to humans, but as I did it I found myself enjoying it. He closed his eyes and produced gentle murmurs.

I took my other hand and eased it along his smooth side. His skin was soft, so unlike my own toned body. He gasped as my claws brushed against his ribs.

"Sorry," I said. A smile crept onto my face. What a strange new thing this was! It was like an extension of the teasing that is taught as a technique to new succubi, but as I performed it, that delicious warmth inside me grew.

Delicious? Oh yes, by now I had learned to enjoy it. Enjoying a malady, a disease? Who knew what it truly was. Perhaps it was an enchantment of some sort. The warmth ebbed and flowed through me as I delighted him with my touch.

The human lifted his hands up to my sides and let his fingers trace the curved contour of my waist, then went higher, slipping timidly over my breasts. My nipples were hard, and the sensation of his palms covering them, the gentle stroking of his fingertips on the skin of my breasts made me bite my lip.

He was exciting me, with such a simple touch! Yet it was the tenderness of that touch, the warmth it engendered in me...

"Lavandé?"

"Yes?"

His eyes were shy. "Can I kiss you?"

"No," I said, horrified. Didn't he know? But of course, how could he know? So few humans these days even believed in demons, so why would they know anything about succubi? "No succubus may survive a human's kiss," I explained.

I knew I shouldn't have told him. I wasn't afraid of him using the knowledge against me, but rather that, ignorant of the dangers, he might kiss me when I was distracted and thus doom me to immediate destruction.

"Oh," he murmured. He was disappointed. "C-can I hug you, then?"

I shrugged. "Do as you wish, just no kissing. Of the lips, I should say. Kissing elsewhere is permissible." My face grew warm and I knew I was blushing.

He sat up, then, and embraced me. His warmth enveloped me and I took joy in it. I felt his lips against my neck and I shivered.

"What's the matter? Is... is it okay to kiss you there?"

"Yes," I said. "Do it again."

He did.

And so the two of us engaged in fornic-, well, rather we had sex, as the humans call it. It was slow, and gentle, so different from what we'd done before, and yet its joys were equivalent, if not greater for all their novelty and the way they fed that warmth inside me. His every touch, the tender caresses of his lips and tongue across my body, fed that growing fire inside me. And delicious, too, was the orgone that flowed from him, flowed like an endless spring from him. I had my fill, and then some, until he ended his sweet thrusts inside me, crying out and spilling his seed into my belly as I held his shivering body against mine, digging my talons into his back and crying myself from the overflow of orgone that wracked my over-replete body with wave after wave of pleasure.

He slumped back, exhausted, gasping and wincing from the scratches I'd left on his back. I moved to get off him but he took hold of my hands.

"Do you have to go right away? Can't we cuddle?""

The courtroom was utterly silent. All present were hanging on Lavandé's every word, horrified to the point of dumbness.

Lavandé dropped her gaze. "I'm sorry, Your Horror. I know my account is shockingly depraved. It's just... it's just that I wish to be honest with the court."

The courtroom gasped as one.

"'Honest'?" Forneus shook her head in disbelief.

"Oh dear, oh dear," muttered Abraxas.

Lavandé swallowed and continued:

"Blushing, I consented to be cuddled. In truth, I was eager to try this 'cuddling'. Such affection being alien to our kind, I remembered how his tender touch had wrought such a novel pleasure in me, and I submitted to being drawn down onto the bed beside him. He embraced me and I did the same. I was eager to keep my lips from his, so after a few anxious moments face-to-face, I turned him around so I could embrace him from behind. I felt safer that way. He understood, nestling back against me. He seemed even smaller in my arms this way. He quickly fell asleep. Wholly ignorant of sleep as a demon, I lay there, holding him as he slept.

I was filled, filled to overflowing, with both orgone and his seed, and full, too, of that warmth, that strange new sensation. It fluttered, like something blossoming in my chest, growing all the stronger with him in my arms. At last the feeling overwhelmed me and I slipped my arms from around him. And yet I didn't want to just leave him as I had done in the past. But how could I...?

I saw the desk with the papers on it. I took one which was blank. Not knowing how to draw or write, I instead placed a palm upon it. I lifted my hand away, revealing its smouldering imprint.

I left it on top of his other papers. He would understand my message, somehow. I had no doubt of that. We seemed to understand each even without speech, now.

As I descended back to Hell, my chest twinged with that earlier pain. It visited me more and more often, now. Only by throwing myself into the everyday duties of a succubus in the Satanic mills was I able to forget it.

And yet, I could not forget his face.

From then on I visited him every evening. I knew I was risking everything, that I'd already broken innumerable demonic protocols. But that warmth - it was a drug to me. The orgone was secondary now. Our sexual relations were ever delightful, but more delightful still were those gentle moments before and after. Were it not for them, the pain of our parting, the agony of being separated would have been too much for me.

Often now we talked together before sex. I'd grown curious about him, and of course he was curious about me. One night I was sitting on his bed, looking about his room. Since I'd started to visit him it'd become a little tidier, but it still had the appearance of a cave to me, or rather a prison.

"Are you here under arrest?" I suddenly asked.

He laughed. "I guess you could say that."

"What was your crime?" I asked eagerly. Such topics are of course always of interest to a demon.

"Just too sensitive, I guess," he said, shrugging. "If you can call that a crime."

"So you're too good a person?" I had no idea that humans had similar protocols to us in Hell!

He laughed louder that time. "Oh, no. No way. I'm not anything like a good person. It's just..." He inclined his head towards the tiny slit of a window which was all the basement had. "Out there is... well, you know that fear you have of being kissed?"

I nodded. I'd told him much about being a demon. He'd been a very good listener.

"If I go outside I have that fear running through me every single moment I'm out there."

"What are you afraid of? Demons?"

He chuckled. "Demons aren't scary. Well, not now, anyway." The sweetness of his smile melted me. "No. I'm scared of people."

"Ah." I thought I understood. Humans are, after all, capable of such a greater degree of evil than demons, since our own angelic ancestry prevents us from the most extreme examples of cruelty and sadism."

The jury murmured, uncomfortable.

"There is no need to veer off on a tangent about such unpleasant matters of ancient history, Miss Mamorra," said Onoskelis. "Please keep to the point."

"I will, Your Horror.

I turned to the human. "So you're your own gaoler?"

"Yes," he replied. "That's exactly it."

"So you wish to escape this place?"

"Well, it's not as easy as all that," he explained.

"What if I was to go with you?"

He blinked at me. "Go where? Outside?"

He looked panicked. I placed my hand on his. I knew that such a gesture was a calming one for humans. "Why not at night, when there are no other humans around? Humans are what you're afraid of, right?"

He shrugged. "Well, I used to go out during the night. But it's been a long time."

"I'll be there to protect you," I said. "From demons and humans."

He looked at me. The panic had left his eyes, but he remained unsure. "If you were with me, I think I might be able to. But just for a little while." He glanced up at the ceiling. "We'll have to sneak past my parents, though. They sleep pretty lightly."

"Oh, don't concern yourself about that," I said, taking his hand. "Are you ready?"

He swallowed. "What, right now?"

"If you get scared, we can come straight back."

"Okay," he said. He closed his eyes. "I think I'm ready."

It was a simple matter. With all the orgone I'd been harvesting from him, I'd grown in power. Lending the enchantment of phasing through objects to another was simplicity itself, now.

We passed though the wall and then rose up through the earth. With our feet hovering just above the ground I removed the enchantment. We grew solid again and landed with a jolt.

We were standing in the street outside his home.

"Can I open my eyes?" he asked.

"There was never any need to close them," I replied, amused.

He opened them. At the sight of the darkened street around us he grabbed hold of my arm and clung to me, looking about in alarm.

"It's okay," I said. His closeness was filling me with that strange warmth again and I covered him with a wing. The gesture seemed to calm him somewhat and he turned to me.

"I'm outside!"

"Yes," I said. "There's no one here. But even if there was, you'd be safe with me beside you."

He nodded and brought his body closer to mine.

"Let's go for a walk," I said.

"What if someone sees us?" he murmured.

"No one will see us," I said. "I've rendered us invisible."

I led him down the street. After a while his grip on me loosened. The streets were empty, the ights pooling their glow on the bare concrete. It was beautiful, in its way, the dark shapes of the homes and the buildings reminding me of our own forests of shadow. No one was awake. Only a few houses had lights still in them. I could sense the humans inside, giving off their gentle waves of orgone. There were the different flavours: the young, the old, the satiated, the hungry, the male, the female.

Silence, except for the padding of his feet and the clicking of my talons. This sleeping world was ours, belonged to just the two of us. And yet he remained nervous.

I placed my hand on his shoulder. Such a gesture, I thought, would calm him. He sighed and covered my hand with his own. Then he drew my hand down and entwined his fingers in mine.

I was startled, but allowed him to. Warmth suffused me, rising to my head so that I grew dizzy. So this was holding hands! The picture he'd drawn did not do it justice.

"Thank you, Lavandé," he said. He drew closer and placed his head on my shoulder.

I thought I might burn up from the liquid fire that spread through me, then.

We didn't go far that night. I could sense the rapid beating of his heart whenever there was a noise or some movement out among the shadows of the city. After a while we returned to his home. That night our sex was even slower and gentler than usual. He'd been through a lot, after all.

And so it went every evening from then on. I'd take him outside and we would walk together. Often we talked, like we did before and after sex, but not always. At times the silence was just too beautiful, too precious. The warmth of his hand, that scent of his body that I knew so well, now, was enough. I enjoyed our little walks together very much. Were they what humans called a date, I wondered?"

Forneus broke in. "Your Horror, the prosecution seeks a definition for this word."

"If you would, Miss Mamorra," asked Onoskelis.

"Please allow me," said Abraxas suddenly. He had been silent for a long time. "A date is a preliminary encounter where two humans meet each other to ascertain whether they are suitable romantic matches. It usually involves attending places of entertainment or refreshment."

"Romantic?" Forneus returned to energetically scratching on her notepad.

"Like the little guy said," said Lavandé. "Even then I knew such thoughts were foolish. After all, demons and humans are in no way compatible. And yet. And yet, I felt good being around this human. I sought his company, desired to have sex with him exclusively, enjoyed conversing with him. I also wished to protect him, to make him feel better. That was why I was here with him, after all. I wanted him to be happy. His happiness made me happy, happier than I'd ever been before. But then, of course, before I'd met him, I'd had no idea what happiness was.

At last a night came when we encountered another human on our walk. I'd been taking him out earlier and earlier, acclimatising him to places frequented by people. Those human vehicles called cars often passed us and occasionally we heard and saw people far off. Such things had alarmed him at first, but he quickly grew used to them. I was proud of his readiness to face his fears.

This night, however, someone actually approached us. He was a male, about the same age as my human, and had been drinking. As he drew near my human clung to me closer.

"Lavandé!" he whispered in alarm.

"Don't worry," I whispered. "I'm here."

He walked past us and then stopped and turned to look straight at my human.

"Hey bro. Which way is the 7-11?" he asked.

My human stared at him. Then he raised a trembling finger and pointed further down the street, behind us.

"O-over there," he stammered.

"Thanks buddy," said the drunk human, and then he stumbled away.

"Lavandé!" he whispered to me hoarsely as the young man drunkenly crossed to the other side of the street. "He could see me!"

"Of course he could," I said. "I can't really make humans invisible, you know."

"So you lied to me," he said, frowning.




The Sentimental Succubus



"Well, I am a demon, after all," I replied, sticking out my tongue at him.

My deceit was quickly forgotten under the exhilaration of his accomplishment. He grinned. "I talked to him! I actually talked to someone!"

That night, after we returned to his home, our sex was even more energetic than usual. We lay together on his bed in each other's arms, warmth washing over me like a sun-warmed ocean.

It came more and more readily to me now, that warmth. I felt it even down in Hell, whenever his face or scent or the touch of his body came to mind.

And ever present too was that pain, hiding within the warmth and nourished by it, a pain born of fear. But fear of what? Of being discovered, of losing him, of becoming lost myself? Whatever it was, I pushed every thought of it away.

However, the pain itself was always there, nestled deep inside my chest.

---

One night, as were walked together, it began to gently rain. I unfurled one of my wings and shielded him with it. Humans are fragile, my own human more fragile than most, and I didn't want him to get wet.

He smiled at me, grateful. "You know Lavandé, I often forget you have wings. You usually keep them furled."

I shifted my wings self-consciously. "They often get in the way," I explained. The truth was that ever since I'd been an Alice-level succubus the size and shape of my wings had been a matter of anxiety for me. Were they big enough? Too big and ungainly, perhaps? I'd often wondered what he thought of my wings.

"They're very beautiful wings," he said, reading my mind.

I looked at him. He had turned aside, blushing.

"Thank you," I replied, keeping my delight hidden.

"Can you fly with those wings?" he asked after a while. "It's just... I've never seen you do it."

I blinked. "Fly? Yes. But only under the earth."

"They don't work above ground?"

I shook my head. "It's not that. There's an agreement between Miss Lucy and the Power that demons may not fly above the earth and angels below it."

"Miss Lucy?" He frowned. "You mean the Devil?"

"The Devil is a name the Power gave Miss Lucy," I told him. "She... she doesn't like it very much."

"I see. Miss Lucy, huh?"

We continued to walk. The rain remained a gentle mist that turned the streetlights into glowing clouds of fog. We'd walked further than usual this night. We were passing a park now, the trees a maze of shadow on our left.

He drew closer to me.

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"I guess I'm just a little cold."

I smiled. He really was fragile! I stopped and pulled him to me, embracing him. I enveloped him with my wings, wrapping us together.

"How's that?"

He clung closer to me. "Lavandé, you're so warm."

"Well, I am a demon," I said. "It's only to be expected."

I'd grown warmer too. That omnipresent warmth that lived in my chest like a drop of liquid fire had flared under his touch.

I felt more than warmth emanating from him, now. My proximity had excited him and orgone was flowing freely from his body. I slid my talons across his clothed back. The orgone was making me hungry.

"Wow," he murmured. I could feel the hardness of his member beneath his clothes jutting into me. "Uh, hey. Do you maybe want to go home and...?"

I feigned surprise. "What, already?"

He in turn was startled. "You... you don't want to?"

I smiled my most lascivious smile at him. "A succubus, not wanting to have sex?" I shook my head. "No, I mean I don't want to wait. I... I know a place we can go, if you like. Are you feeling brave?"

"I guess so," he replied. "You know, I'm only really frightened of one thing, now."

"And what's that?"

His face grew more serious still. "That all of this is a dream. That you're a dream.

I stared at him. "You still think this is all some dream?"

He sighed again. "I'm sorry, Lavandé. It's just that... well, I guess I'm just not used to having something wonderful like you happen to me. I'm afraid my happiness will be taken away from me." He frowned. "I'm being stupid, I know."

Something wonderful like you. The words fed that warmth inside me and coursed through me, and pain came with it, too.

Afraid my happiness will be taken away from me.

I slipped from his embrace. My chest burned. I pushed my hand between my breasts and grimaced.

Alarmed, he asked, "Lavandé? What's wrong?"

I removed my hand. The worst of the pain had passed. "Nothing."

He frowned. "It didn't look like nothing."

"I suppose I'm just not used to having such things said about me."

The pain still lay there, throbbing, inside my chest, and yet somehow that pain fed into my ever increasing hunger. I stared across at him, my blood hot, coveting him.

Orgone pulsed from him. Oh, how happy it made me to think of the reactions I caused in his body!

"Is this place you know far away?" he asked.

"I would need to fly us there," I said.

"Fly? But I thought..."

"It's a short flight and it's raining. Heaven shouldn't notice us. Do you still wish to go?"

His eyes went wide and he nodded. The excitement on his face was that of a little boy. I felt that warmth tingling in my chest, and I forgot the pain.

"You don't think I'll be too heavy for you?"

I snorted. "I could lift you up one-handed, but it'll be more comfortable if I carry you in this fashion." I embraced him, marvelling again at the difference in our heights, then leaned down and with one arm beneath his knees I lifted him bodily up so that I was cradling him in my arms like a child.

"Wow," he murmured. "You're very strong." He gazed up at me and I turned my face away, frowning.

"Of course I am. I'm a demon." I unfurled my wings to their full extent. "Hold on."

I swept my wings back and forth and lifted us quickly up into the air. He gasped, throwing his arms around my neck. We soon gained height and he shivered and clung closer to me.

"You're cold?" I asked. The rainy night air had a definite chill to it.

"Not cold," he replied. "Frightened. Terrified, actually. I hate heights."

I snorted. Humans and their phobias! And yet his fear delighted me. For all my growing human affectations, I was still a demon, after all. But I was delighted, too, by the way he clung to me. I didn't tell him I was frightened as well. For the proximity of the sky was alarming, every star peeping through the grey cloud-cover the stern judgemental eye of a watching angel.

But for him, so delighted and terrified as he clung to me, I would do anything.

Below us the sleeping city spiralled, a scattering of lights, the cold darkness sweeping about us like a torrential wind. The higher we went the more the earth seemed like a mirror of the sky, an expanse of grey and black sprinkled with glittering star-points. We were squeezed between two panes of heaven. I decided then we'd flown high enough.

"Where are you taking me?" he shouted against my chest, the wind shrieking in our ears.

"It's not far!" I shouted back.

I was flying at speed now. My wings were a blur of shadow and my spirit soared to test them once again. Long years had passed since I'd last delighted in flight as a young Alice-level succubus. Too quickly we forget the simple things that give us pleasure.

Our flight together pleased him, too. He stared up at me in delight, those beautiful eyes agleam with life and vitality that only a human can have. Such fragile creatures, and so short lived, and yet the fire with which they burn! Is it little wonder that we turn to them as sources of our own energy, harvest them of what we lack?

I slowed and began a gentle descent. The air grew heavier still with moisture as mist surrounded us, a rising veil of shattered water. The sound of rushing resounded in our ears. I fell into a hover and with great care I lowered him onto a smooth, hard surface. He began to sit up but I swung myself on top of him.

"Where are we?"

A gentle night breeze was blowing about us, moist and cool. His hair flew across his face, hiding his beautiful eyes, and I drew the dewy locks aside with my talons.

"We're in the mountains," I said. "There is a deep, deep cave here that reaches down into the pits of Hell itself. This is where I first travelled to the earth's surface, long ago. It is a beautiful place, don't you think?"

I let him turn his head then.

Beautiful. I'd never thought of such things before I'd met him. Being with him had taught me much about things I'd only ever dimly glimpsed in the past. This place was dear to me, and as he looked out at the city twinkling far out through the drifting rain like a seam of gemstones deep within the earth's heart, he sighed.

"Lavandé, it's beautiful."

Joy spread through me. I smiled and at the same time I winced at that tender spot inside my chest. In the dark he did not notice it and it had passed by the time he turned back to look at me.

"But not as beautiful as you," he said.

His words burned in me. I smiled, not giving any sign I'd heard what he said. "Yes, a beautiful place, and far, far from where any might disturb us, or come to your aid if I were to choose to devour you."

"Do you think that's likely?" he asked, a gently chiding look on his face.

How he trusted me! "You are very brave to trust a succubus," I said. "Or a fool."

"Well," he said and he chuckled. "No one's ever accused me of being brave, so I guess I must be a fool."

I drew my talons down the side of his face and traced the line of his chin down to his neck. I knew his face so well, now, his body as well, far better than I had known any other human's. That warmth swelled in me. I knew now why I was doing all this. I'd convinced myself that the warmth was nothing, but I knew now it was the source of my addiction, the reason I always returned to this man. His eyes, his voice, the way his lips curved into a smile whenever I looked at him, all these things made the warmth grow, and even as it pained me, I needed it more.

I lowered my face to his chest and drew my lips after the trail left by my hand.

He sighed. "I wish I could kiss you, Lavandé."

"Impossible," I murmured. I undid the front of his shirt and bared his chest.

"C-cold!" he cried.

"I will warm you." I attacked one nipple and then the other, licking a path down to his stomach.

"Lavandé. Lavandé," he murmured.

"Warmer now?"

I felt him nod.

"Then you won't mind if I bare this half of you as well."

He helped me take his pants off. Despite the cold he was already at attention, hard and delicious. I wanted to dive right upon him, but another compulsion had gripped me, one born of that intoxicating warmth. I lay on top of him, snuggled my face against his chest as I slid my arms around his torso and drew my talons across his back. I wanted to warm his shivering body, cover him with my own.

"I love your wings," he murmured, lifting his hand to them. "I can't usually reach them since you have them all furled up." And then, for the first time, I felt someone's hand caress my wings. His fingertips danced across the smoothness of the membrane between the hooked claws and I bit my lip to stop from crying out.

"What's wrong?"

I gasped. "A succubus's wings! They're... ah!... they're very sensitive. Your touch... oh, your touch is too much for me!"

His smile was that of a naughty boy. "So you want me to stop touching them, then?"

I began to shiver. "N-no, no, please don't stop."

He drew his delightful fingers along the leading edge down to the wingtip. "You know, I remember reading somewhere that bats have more nerve-endings on their wings than most other animals have on their entire bodies. I guess the same must be true for succubi..."

I gasped again. His hardness was sandwiched between us and I felt the stickiness of my own sex brushing against it. I rubbed myself against him and began to pant.

His voice was soft but thick with need. "Lavandé, I want to be on top this time. Can I?"

On top? A succubus, having a human cover her? The thought was nerve-wracking, shocking, and deeply exciting.

My face burned. "Since... since it's you, it's okay," I muttered.

He rolled me over and lay on top of me. I gazed up at him, charmed by his smiling face.

Beautiful. His eyes had opened mine to so much beauty.

I reached down to where we were rubbing together, but he took my hand away and shook his head.

"Let me," he murmured.

He drew his hands to my waist, one of them resting on my hip, the other guiding himself straight into me. I cried out, arching my back at the delicious, forbidden angle of his penetration.

I soon grew used to this position, as alien as it was to a succubus. I lifted my legs, hooked them behind his buttocks as he thrust into me. I even dared to let him lick and kiss my neck.

His eyes glistened like melting glass as his thrusts grew faster and more desperate. "Oh Lavandé! I-"

I raised a finger to his lips. "Shhhh," I said. I turned away, too fragile for those eyes.

Panting, he gazed down at me. "Lavandé, Lavandé!"

"Come for me," I whispered. "Come for me. I... I need you. I need you."

I need you. My words horrified me. What was I saying?

But it was true. I needed him. Why else did I always return to him? Why did I covet him like a possession? Why did those earnest eyes of his slay me so, make my chest ache with this new, exquisite agony?

I dug my talons into his back as I shuddered, coming before he did for the first time, crying out his name, safe here deep in the mountains where we would not be heard.

Wincing, eyes wide, his mouth an O of ecstasy, he came inside me. Orgone flooded me, and that something else, that delicious something else that suffused me. It filled me like liquid fire, a flame that pooled under my breasts, deep in my chest, just as his boiling semen lay deep in my belly.

In my chest, the warmth had become a glowing ember of living fire and would no longer be still.

-----

After that night, his confidence grew. We began to spend almost as much time outside as we did inside. Some nights we'd roam almost until daybreak, the two of us risking the daylight we both feared, wanting to remain together as long as possible. Our partings grew more and more difficult. I didn't say anything to him, but the heaviness in my chest was ever present now. It pained me most of all when we parted, and the pain stayed with me until we met again. And even when we were together at times a stroke of agony would course through me. I wondered if perhaps I wasn't dying in some way. And so I hid it from him, and from myself.

As my pain grew, his lessened. The terror he'd had of the world outside was dimming. He no longer jumped at the sound of voices, no longer wanted to run when he saw others approaching. He'd grown so strong that the night finally came when he was able to visit the nearby convenience store and buy 'soda', that carbonated sugar drink he so enjoyed. I didn't really approve, but I thought his courage was deserving of a treat so I made no protest. I remained hidden in the shadows while he interacted with the bored human behind the counter. Triumphant, he carried his prize home, the can cradled in his hands like a child. The joy on his face at such a simple thing fed my own happiness and I grew dizzy with it.

We were halfway back when he stopped. He glanced down a side street and turned to me.

"Let's go this way," he said. "Just for a change."

He took me by the hand and led me down the side street until we came to a playground, the sort of place where human children play. I'd often watched them in the early darkness of winter evenings and wondered at how humans can take such joy in simple things.

"Want to sit on the swings?" he asked.

"Swings?"

He took me to one corner of the playground. There was a triangular metal frame there with a number of flat boards hanging down from chains. So these were the 'swings'. They had the appearance of some strange torture device like a rack. He went and sat on one, motioning for me to join him on the other.

We sat together in silence for a long while.

Finally he said, "I used to come here a lot." He pointed to a dark building adjacent to the playground. "That's my school. Or, well, at least it was once. I graduated from it years ago, now. Thank god."

I gazed at the building. It didn't seem a happy, inviting place. It was utilitarian and austere, not unlike our own buildings down here in Hell, and high fencing surrounded it - to keep others out, or the inhabitants in I wondered?

"Yeah," he said. "I never really got on with anyone else at school. Even speaking to others made my heart beat like it was going to burst out of my chest."

I frowned. "Your heart?"

He nodded. He placed a hand upon his chest. "You know, I'm amazed it's beating so slowly and regularly right now. The last time I was anywhere near the school I thought I'd have a heart attack."

"Something happened to you there, didn't it?"

He stared into the darkness for a long time. "Lots of stuff, I guess. It's... I try not to remember."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"No, it's okay," he said, smiling at me. "You're interested. It makes me really happy, you know. That you want to know stuff about me." He sighed. "Yeah, lots of stuff happened to me. Lots of bullying. These days you can't escape it, even outside of school. It follows you home. Sometimes nowhere is safe except deep in yourself. I guess that's why I fled there." He closed his eyes. "I always liked drawing. That's why I kept going to school even with all the stuff that was happening to me. I loved art class. But then one day I found someone had broken into my locker and all my sketch books were gone. Later I found out they'd been torn up and scattered across the baseball field. I went there after school and tried to collect as much as I could, but there was just so much of it and it was windy and the paper just..." He laughed, but it was cold. "I chased after that paper like a fat man trying to catch a hat. But after a while I just looked down at the dirty, tattered pieces in my hands and I think something broke. I went home that day and never went back."

I didn't know what to say to his pain. This wasn't something a succubus is trained to deal with, after all. And so I said nothing. I got off the swing and hugged him around the shoulders from behind.

"Lavandé," he murmured, resting a cheek against my chest. "Lavandé."

"What?"

"Did I ever tell you your name is beautiful?"

"Yes," I said. "Many times." I smiled. I'd never tire of him telling me so.

"Lavandé, after they destroyed my sketch books I stopped drawing. I couldn't even pick up a pencil anymore. My most precious thing and they took it from me."

"But you're always drawing!" I protested.

"It's because of you, you know," he said. "When you started visiting me all I wanted to see was your face again. The only way to do that was to draw it, so I had to draw. You inspired me. You gave me back my most precious thing."

Tears wet my skin. I didn't feel sadness welling from him, but rather that golden aura that attends happiness. He was happy and yet crying. How strange humans are!

"And that's not all," he said. "Tonight, when I talked to the guy at the 7-11. I never could have done that before I met you. I would've had a nervous breakdown. I'm usually frightened of everyone and everything."

"You've never been frightened of me."

"Yes," he said, turning around and smiling at me. "Why is that, do you think?"

Then he darted forward and kissed me on my cheek, his lips pressing hot against my skin. I swallowed back a cry of alarm and permitted him. I knew he wasn't trying to harm me. I'd wanted that almost-kiss for so long, now, that almost-kiss that was as close as the two of us could ever come to a real one.

"Sorry," he said as he pulled away. "I guess I should've warned you." He slipped off the swing and reached out for me.




The Sentimental Succubus



I took him in my arms. I was not afraid of him. Oh no. I raised my fingers to where his lips had touched my skin.

That warmth!

"Lavandé," he whispered against my chest. "I... I care for you very much. You know that, right?"

He cared for me? Of course he did, just as I cared for him. We would do anything for each other.

Then I felt the strongest sensation yet, a piercing pain deep in my chest. I broke our embrace and pushed a hand between my breasts.

"Lavandé?" He took hold of my shoulders as I stood there, grimacing in pain. "Lavandé? What's wrong?"

I knew I could no longer hide my pain from him. "I can feel something in my chest," I said through gritted teeth. "Something throbbing there, as if it's alive. I don't know what it is."

He laughed. "Oh Lavandé, that's just your heart!" he said. "My kiss did startle you, after all."

"But demons don't have hearts," I replied, scandalised. The pain was growing weaker now, supsiding into a dull ache.

"Really?"

He clearly didn't believe me. I took his hand and placed it against my chest. He turned red, but didn't pull away. "Can you feel what I'm talking about? Like something hitting me inside my chest."

"It feels just like a heartbeat to me," he said. "Very, very faint, but unmistakeable. A heartbeat going 'th-thump, th-thump, th-thump'."

I stared down at his hand in mine, clutched against my chest. That warmth, that strange warmth, rushed up inside me, overwhelming me. Dizzy, I heard that beating noise rising up from my chest, echoing in my ears. Th-thump, th-thump, th-thump, like he'd said. I was being lifted up into the air, as though I was flying. I looked up and saw myself reflected in his eyes. And then I knew.

At that moment I realised what all that warmth was, that feeling of floating, that bittersweet joy that filled me to overflowing, the warmth that brought the pain.

It was love. I loved him."

The courtroom fell utterly silent. Lavandé felt the eyes of everyone present burning into her. She bowed her head in shame.

Then Forneus leaped to her feet, her face exultant. "Condemned!" she shrieked. "Condemned by her own mouth!"

The prosecutor's outburst shattered the taut silence and the court at once descended into chaos. The public gallery was the first to roar with howls of anger and fear and disgust, but the disorder quickly spread to the jury as well. Onoskelis struck his gavel against his bench but when the banging remained unheard over the tumult he leaped to his feet and started shouting. The attendant devils and their helpers the imps struggled to regain order but it wasn't until the doors of the court burst open and the alastors came in and incinerated the first row of the public gallery that anything resembling order returned.

"Oh dear," murmured Abraxas, wringing his claws as fire and smoke filled the court. "Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear..."

Lavandé stared down at the table. Ash was spreading across it, covering her hands. She shut her eyes at the sight. The hideous pain in her chest had grown so powerful that her whole body had gone numb.

Pain was all she knew, and so she didn't notice that the court had fallen silent with a cowed peace until Onoskelis cleared his throat and spoke.

"Well," said the judge. "It seems that there is no longer any need for-"

"You Horror," Lavandé broke in, her voice thick with pain. "Please. I haven't finished my statement yet."

"There's more?" Onoskelis exhaled and then said, "Very well. But I must warn you, Miss Mamorra, I have little doubt that anything you say further will merely compound your guilt."

"I just want to finish my story," said Lavandé, tired. "And be done with it."

"Very well," said Onoskelis, sitting back. "I doubt there are any further horrors you can reveal. If you would, Miss Mamorra."

Lavandé took a deep breath and continued. "So this warmth was love. I turned away. His eyes terrified me. Yes, I was frightened by a human. I took his hand.

"Let's go home," I said.

After phasing into his basement we quickly grew solid again. I looked around us at his room. How long had it been so neat and tidy? It no longer resembled the place I'd visited that night so many weeks ago. None of the items in the room were any different, and yet the removal of all the clutter had transformed it into a totally different place.

How had I not noticed?

The desk. The desk with his paper and drawing implements. The order had spread from there.

He was chuckling to himself. "You know, Lavandé, I'm glad you can phase through walls like that. Imagine if my parents caught us sneaking in. What would they say?"

I said nothing, still lost in my thoughts.

"I mean, I'd love to introduce you to them. It's a bit weird, don't you think, keeping your girlfriend hidden in the basement?"

"I'm a succubus," I murmured. His words lay dark on my heart and a dull black fire kindled there.

"Of course I know that. It's just that..."

"Just that what?" I slumped down onto his bed. I stared across the room at the opposite wall, seeing nothing. This place that had made me so happy to visit had suddenly turned alien.

"Just that-" His voice grew troubled.

I knew then I'd been dreaming since that first night he'd opened his eyes. Dreaming I was something I wasn't all these weeks, that we were something, something impossible.

"So you're not a dream."

I may as well have been a dream.

All those picture he'd drawn and was so proud of. The two of us walking together in sunshine. The two of us sitting together under a tree in a park. All those things he wanted. All those things I couldn't give him.

No, not a dream.

My chest grew heavy with despair. Pushing away the pain, I motioned for him to sit down beside me on his bed. He did.

I placed my hand on his and called him by his name. "I'm going now," I told him. "I... I will not return."

He laughed. The sound cut into me.

"Hey. Lavandé, you're joking, right?"

I shook my head.

The slow change of expression on his face, then, as he realised I was telling the truth was the most piteous thing I've ever seen. Piteous? Yes, I felt pity now. The contagion had spread through every part of me. Tenderness, affection, shame, guilt and, yes, pity, emotions born of my love for him.

The face I loved crumbled in despair and his eyes filled with tears.

Humans are so fragile, this one especially so. My own eyes grew hot. Could eyes grow hot? I'd never known such a thing!

He was weeping now, his hands covering his face. I drew closer, reached out for him. I wished to comfort him. But why? I was the one who had triggered this reaction in him! All of this was my fault. I felt guilt again, then, but this time it was a razor of black ice buried in my chest.

He raised his face from his hands. His eyes were red and swollen, his cheeks smeared with tears.

"Why, Lavandé?" he whispered.

Why? I made no reply and turned away. My eyes grew hotter, and then turned liquid. I dipped a finger beneath an eye and the tip came back wet.

How was such a thing possible?

"Lavandé," he said. His voice was hoarse, breaking in his despair. "Lavandé, please don't go. Lavandé, please. I- I love you."

That word, and with that word the truth, and with the truth the pain in my chest reached its zenith. I shuddered in horror, and with the horror came an uncontrollable rage. This suffering, this suffering triggered by his suffering, it wasn't fair, not fair! What had he done to me? All these emotions, the pain of this cloying, crushing human world? Why should I suffer like a human? His love had contaminated me, infected me.

I doubled over. That hideous cold fire flared like a nova in my chest, pulsing pain through my body.

I hated myself. I hated him. Oh, how I how I hated him!

He reached for me but I pushed him away and got to my feet. I strode across to his desk. The pictures. The pictures he'd drawn. This is where it had all started, the source of the contagion. The pain had begun when I'd seen myself drawn by his hand, portrayed in those loving lines. I'd looked upon love and been cursed with it.

I drew my fingers across the pages. Me dressed in a sundress, running in a field of flowers. Me sitting on his couch and laughing. Me and him, embracing, our lips pressed together.

I shuddered. My rage reached a blinding crescendo and I snatched up the papers and with a sob of despair I wreathed them in searing fire.

Crying out in anguish he leaped from the bed and fell across the desk, his hands scrabbling at the ashes falling from my fingers.

"Why?" he sobbed, raising his face to me, a face contorted in agony. "Why Lavandé? Why do this to me?"

My rage was gone. At the sight of his pain it had fled away like a filmy miasma. I was just left hollow, icy inside.

"Because I am a demon," I said.

Then I melted away into shadow and fled, his voice calling my name after me. But I could not escape what I carried inside me. My agony came with me. My eyes continued to melt away, that liquid called tears spilling from them for the first time - but not the last.

I hid myself in the deepest, darkest shadows, deep in the earth, far from the upper world, far from Hell, far from humans and demons both. There I curled into a ball, clutching my knees and my tail to my aching chest, and wept, enveloped in my pain.

His face remained with me, the way he'd cried my name, the despair in his eyes. I couldn't escape what I'd done.

The weeping ended at last. I don't remember how long I cried for. And curled up there, in the darkness, I began to hear the strangest sound.

Th-thump, th-thump, th-thump... like the steady beating of some drum.

I opened my swollen eyes with difficulty. I was still alone, here in the preternatural darkness at the roots of the earth. I sensed no other being.

Th-thump, th-thump, th-thump...

My chest heaved.

"Unmistakeable," he'd said. "Th-thump, th-thump, th-thump. A heartbeat."

I lay there, the beat resounding in my ears. A heart. The pulsing, pain-filled tumour called a heart. I had grown it just in time for it to be broken.

I'd destroyed his drawings, destroyed him again, rescued him just to destroy him, because I was afraid. My heart would never let me forget it. My heart would continue to beat, beat in my ears, beat this swirling pain about my body.

At length I rose. I shrugged my wings, stiff with my paralysis, and flew back alone through the darkness, back home to Hell. I went straight to the authorities and confessed my crimes, handed myself over to punishment. And so that is why I am now standing before you, asking that you grant me mercy by sentencing me to the ultimate penalty: total dissolution." Lavandé slumped back in her seat and lowered her gaze. "It's what I deserve."

"Very well," said Onoskelis. He shifted behind his bench, discomforted. He turned to the jury who had listened to Lavandé's final account in shocked silence. "Demons of the jury, we have heard Miss Mamorra's testimony. It is time for you to retire and to consider your verdict."

The jury, still in a daze, left the courtroom. Forneus sifted the papers on her desk, smiling to herself with her shark teeth. Abraxas looked across at Lavandé. The succubus did not stir from her seat.

"We should go, Miss Mamorra," said Abraxas.

"There's no point," said Lavandé. "They'll be straight back out."

Lavandé was proven right. Just as Onoskelis was getting up an imp hurried to him and he resumed the bench. The jury had returned.

"Miss Mamorra, please rise."

Lavandé rose, as did Abraxas beside her.

"Demons of the jury, how do you find the defendant?"

The speaker for the jury, a cacodemon, read from the piece of burning paper in his hand. "On the count of being seen by a human, we find the defendant guilty. On the count of feeling pity, we find the defendant guilty."

The crimes were read out. Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty...

Lavandé relaxed, nodded at each of the verdicts.

At last the final verdict came. "On the count of Fraternisation with a Human in the First Degree, we find the defendant... guilty."

Lavandé closed her eyes, her hands resting against the desk. Relief suffused her. The beating of that hideous thing in her chest would soon be stopped and she would be free.

Onoskelis directed his gaze upon her. "Miss Mamorra, you have been found guilty on all counts. It is the decision of this court that in view of your flagrant disregard for the demonic protocols you be taken straight from this courtroom and undergo immediate dissolution."

Forneus coughed. "Uh, excuse me, Your Horror?"

Onoskelis looked at the prosecutor in surprise. "Yes, Miss Forneus?"

A thin smile appeared on her red lips. "The prosecution respectfully suggests that dissolution not be performed on account that the defendant seeks it willingly. As such, it would not serve as adequate punishment."

Lavandé felt panic rise in her. "But Your Horror, I-"

"Silence, Miss Mamorra. Miss Forneus is quite correct. In this particular case, a term of eternal imprisonment is a far more appropriate sentence."

Lavandé, gasping, fell to her knees. "No! No! Please, Your Horror!"

Onoskelis' eyes burned. "Silence! Lavandé Mamorra, having been found guilty of Fraternisation with a Human in the First Degree, we sentence you to be immediately taken from this place and..."

"Your Horror?" It was Abraxas' tiny voice.

"...transported to..."

"Your Horror?"

Onoskelis stopped. He glared down at the little defence counsel. "What is it, Mr Abraxas?"

"We wish to lodge an appeal."

"An appeal?" Forneus burst out laughing. "Your Horror, really?"

Onoskelis, his brow furrowing, considered the tiny demon. "An appeal, Mr. Abraxas? On what grounds?"

Abraxas shifted nervously in the judge's fiery gaze. "Your Horror, in cases of a capital nature the condemned may make a final appeal for clemency to the Lowest Court of Hell."

Silence fell over the courtroom.

"The Lowest Court?" Onoskelis rubbed his chin with a talon. "True, but it is highly irregular..."

"But well in accordance with the Demonic Protocols, Your Horror," said Abraxas.

Forneus dropped her carefully arranged papers. "Your Horror, you can't possibly be entertaining..."

"Miss Forneus, it is well within Miss Mamorra's rights to lodge an appeal." He turned to Lavandé still collapsed against the desk. "Do you wish to do so, Miss Mamorra?"

In a voice little more than a whisper, Lavandé said, "I do wish it."

No sooner were the words from her mouth when a circle of fire burst into being in the centre of the courtroom and imps went scattering for cover. There was a rushing sound and the courtroom shook as an elevator, glowing red, exploded out of the floor and flung open its chained doors with a resounding clang.

Lavandé stared at the elevator. With difficulty, she pulled herself onto her feet and turned to Abraxas. She placed a hand on the diminutive demon's shoulder.

"Thank you," she whispered

The shadow beneath Abraxas' hood smiled. "No, Miss Mamorra. Thank you. For believing in me. And good luck. I hope Miss Lucy takes pity on you and that you find what you seek."

Lavandé walked past the still flustered Forneus and with a nod of her head to Onoskelis she stepped inside the elevator, the doors shutting behind her. It was a solid room of glowing hot metal with just one button on the panel and next to it, the label: Nadir.

She pressed the button and the elevator, with a strident screeching, began its rapid descent.

---

The elevator slowed and came to a cacophonous stop. Lavandé's heart was beating hard as the doors began to open.

Her heart. Even now its beating tormented her.

Lavandé stepped out into a great open space. Glowing lava spilled down the walls in torrents painting the massive room red. The floor and ceiling were of utterly black volcanic glass and as she walked Lavandé glanced up at the copy of herself mirroring her every step.

She saw fear. Fear in her red, cat-irised eyes.

Few demons ever came to this place. It truly was the Nadir, the lowest point of Hell. Despite the lava the air was cold as interstellar ice.

With every fearful step Lavandé took the silhouetted rectangle of a desk situated in the centre of the huge room grew closer. Someone was sitting behind it, their head down, writing. Lavandé walked more quickly. It would be dangerous to keep Miss Lucy waiting.

Her clawed feet clicked on the glass and echoed throughout the room. Lavandé welcomed the sound. The sound distracted her from the increasingly rapid thumping in her chest.

As she got closer the sound of scratching joined the clicking of Lavandé's feet. Miss Lucy, head down, was writing. She did not look up until Lavandé was standing right before the desk. She stopped writing, then, and took a small woodcarving in the shape of a donkey and placed it on top of her notes.

Lavandé took a step back. Demons who had met her had always spoken of Miss Lucy's unearthly beauty, but words did not do that beauty any justice.

Miss Lucy had the statuesque and perfect body of an angel, although she had garbed it in a black suit with a black blouse. A crimson cravat wrapped about her neck provided the only relief of colour in her apparel. The pale whiteness of her skin was stark against the blazing redness of the hair that streamed down to her shoulders like a mirror of the lava-falls behind her. And her eyes were green, the colour of her pride, the overweening pride that had her exiled from Heaven. All demons knew the story.

Miss Lucy let those green eyes slip over Lavandé's form and she nodded. A smile, a disconcertingly simple smile, free of mockery and malevolence, appeared on her lipsticked lips.

"Lavandé Mamorra," murmured Miss Lucy. Her voice was deep but feminine and behind it echoed all of eternity. "Lavandé, Lavandé, Lavandé... whatever am I going to do with you?"

Lavandé fell to her knees. "Miss Lucy, I- I've come to appeal for clemency."

"Clemency?" Miss Lucy arched her eyebrows, her smile slipping away. "You do know where you are, do you not, Lavandé Mamorra?"

"I do, Miss Lucy." Lavandé found the courage to raise her head and look into the Mistress of Hell's eyes. Constellations blossomed and spun within them, but did she see any emotion in particular? It was impossible to say. There was no distance in those eyes. They looked right into her. "I- I had no other choice."

"Yes!" said Miss Lucy. She pointed at Lavandé and her smile reappeared. "Yes, Lavandé! You're quite correct. You had no choice. None of us are free to choose, after all." Miss Lucy stood up, then, and Lavandé saw how tall she really was. She was sporting a hump beneath the jacket: her angel wings, bound hard against her back. No demon had ever seen them.

Miss Lucy slipped around the desk, drawing her fingernails along its glassy surface. "Determinism, Lavandé. We have no choice but to do what the Power demands, and we have no choice but to accept our punishment for doing so." She stopped beside Lavandé and leaned over to look directly into her eyes. "Why don't you go and accept your punishment, Lavandé? Eternity is not so long, after all. The entire universe will be dust and ashes before you know it."

"But it's not fair," Lavandé whispered.

Miss Lucy laughed. "Nothing is fair, Lavandé. I learned that the day I stood up to the Power and refused to go along with his stupid little naming-game." She lifted a hand to the demoness's chest and pressed her palm against it. "But I'm not surprised you feel the sting of injustice so deep, since you're sporting nothing less than a living, beating heart."

Lavandé quailed under Miss Lucy's hand. Her heart raced faster and louder until the whole of the great room resounded with its deep echoing beat. Lavandé gasped at the pain spilling through her.




The Sentimental Succubus



"Ah yes, pain." Miss Lucy lifted her palm from Lavandé's chest. "Perhaps the sweetest gift of the Power. To make pleasure all the greater, they say. And they call me the Mother of Lies!"

Miss Lucy sat back down. She took up her pen again and clicked it against the volcanic glass of the desk. "I suppose you understand now why there are Protocols about interacting with humans, Lavandé. The Protocols are there to prevent such situations as this, to spare us all pain"

"Yes, Miss Lucy." Lavandé bowed her head.

The Mistress of Hell sighed. "But then, you are young and inexperienced, rebellious as I was. How old are you Lavandé?"

"235 years old, Miss Lucy."

"Yes, so very young." She smiled. "But it's a heavy thing at any age to bear the weight of a heart."

"This heart, Miss Lucy," whispered Lavandé. "I never asked to be given it."

Miss Lucy considered Lavandé, her green eyes unblinking, her lips pursed in thought. Then she said, "You really don't care for this heart? Is it not exhilarating to feel emotions like a human does?"

"It causes me pain, Miss Lucy." Lavandé lifted her head, her eyes pleading. "Can't... can't you free me from it?"

Miss Lucy placed her pen back on the desk. Had there been a glimmer of pity in her glacial green eyes? Perhaps it had just been a trick of the light.

"Lavandé, hearts are the province of humans and of the Power who created them. If the heart were a part of your demonic essence, then I would be able to do as you wish. But alas, it is your human half that has grown your heart, the human part that is responsible for your pain."

Lavandé nodded. She had known the answer even before she asked. She stared down at her feet. "Then I humbly beg for dissolution, Miss Lucy. I cannot stand this pain anymore, this guilt and shame. Please do not condemn me to an eternity of it."

Miss Lucy sighed. "But no. You're not telling the truth, Lavandé. There's something else you want. You don't care about being punished. I think you're looking forward to it, actually, an eternity of pain. You think you deserve it. No. What is it that you truly want, Lavandé Mamorra?"

Lavandé closed her eyes. Miss Lucy had cut through to the truth she'd kept hidden even from herself. "Miss Lucy, I just want to see him one last time."

"Why?"

A whisper. "Because I love him."

Miss Lucy smiled, again that simple, guileless smile. "Ah. An honest succubus! But why do you love him?" When Lavande remain silent, she chuckled. "There's no need to answer. I already know why. Humans are intriguing, are they not?"

Lavandé blinked. Was this some trick, some kind of test? But there was no point being anything other than honest. Miss Lucy, as the mother of all lies, would know immediately if she wasn't. "Yes, Miss Lucy."

"And also sweet, at times? Adorable, wouldn't you say?"

Sweet and adorable? "Yes, Miss Lucy."

The Mistress of Hell lay back in her chair. "Once, Lavandé, I knew a human as well. He was sweet, like yours is no doubt, sweet and kind and sensitive. He had so many great plans about everything. He was like a younger version of me, wanting to fix everything. He used to say he wanted to bring heaven down to earth. I tried to tell him that Heaven wasn't what he thought it was, but he was so earnest I stopped trying to change his mind. His earnestness was one of the things I adored about him." Lucy indicated the little donkey on top of her notes. "He was very handy, loved making things. I suppose I fell in love him because of that."

Lavandé took a step back as if struck. "Love, Miss Lucy?"

"Oh yes," murmured Miss Lucy. She placed a hand against her chest. A soft beating came, then, growing louder. She closed her eyes, as if in pain. "His last gift to me, I suppose, before we were separated. Before the Power had him killed."

"Miss Lucy, I-"

The Mistress of Hell's eyes flew open. The smile was gone. "Lavandé Mamorra, I have no need of a demon who has a heart. You are spoiled forever, no longer of any worth to Hell. So I'm giving you leave to return to the surface to see your human one last time." Miss Lucy saw the sudden joy in Lavandé's eyes and raised a finger. "But just once, Lavandé. You know what you have to do, do you not, if you wish to be free of this pain in your heart?"

Lavandé closed her eyes and nodded. "I do, Miss Lucy."

"Go then." She swept a hand at the elevator. "The elevator will take you to the surface. But before you go..."

"Yes, Miss Lucy?"

The Mistress of Hell's face had undergone a sudden transformation. Her eyes were eager, almost anxious. "Tell me. How was Abraxas?"

Lavandé blinked. "You know Abraxas, Miss Lucy?"

"Of course, he's my nephew. I sent him to represent you." She leaned forward in her chair. "Tell me, please. Did he do a good job?"

Lavandé, bemused, nodded. "Y-yes, Miss Lucy. He did. He was very... eloquent."

Miss Lucy sat back and grinned. "He was? Oh, I am pleased!" Then her face straightaway returned to that of the stern Mistress of Hell. She took the little carved donkey off her notes and picked up her pen. "Now, Lavandé Mamorra, if you don't mind, I have some paperwork to finish."

Lavandé bowed and turned. She was nearly at the elevator when she heard Miss Lucy's voice resounding throughout the huge office after her.

"Goodbye, Lavandé."

---

Lavandé's shadowy form grew material again and she looked about her. His room was in utter chaos. Soda cans and food wrappers littered the floor as they had the first time she had visited him. Unwillingly, she looked towards the desk. The ash was still there, although some had fallen down and been ground into the carpeting. The sight pierced her heart.

It was as if all those beautiful nights with him had never happened .

Lavandé turned to the lump in the bed. He was fast asleep. She could smell him from where she was. He seemed not to have washed in long time.

She approached the bed. He was lying on his back as so often he did when sleeping. His face was patchy, his neck and chin covered in whiskers, his hair greasy. And yet, to Lavandé, to her heart, he was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

She leaned over him, her face hovering over his.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I had to come back. One last time. To tell you."

He stirred without opening his eyes. "A dream," he murmured. "A nightmare."

Lavandé shook her head. "I came back to tell you the truth. To tell you I love you."

And then pressed her lips against his.

His eyes flashed open. He felt the heat of Lavandé's tongue, the wetness, intense and real, and he gasped against her kiss. He jerked away and pulled himself into a sitting position on the bed.

"Lavandé," he gasped. "You- you kissed me!"

Lavandé smiled sadly, nodded. "I'm sorry. For everything. But I can't live with all this pain."

She turned and fled, willing herself to turn to shadow, to escape and find some quiet place to die, but her body refused to transform. Then the first wave of pain hit her and she doubled over and collapsed against the desk, pulling it down with her as she fell.

The sensation started in her wings first, those sensitive wings he had so delighted in touching. A tingling, then a pain, and then cold agony as they were enveloped in black fire, starting at the wingtips, then along the wings themselves, the thin membranes dissolving away as if dipped in acid. Her tail was next, searing down from the fork like it had been dipped in liquid fire. Then her claws caught the same conflagration and she fell to her knees, crying out at the pain, squeezing her claws together as the talons dripped away like melting shadow.

Through the pain she felt him throw his arms around her, crushing her disintegrating body to him.

"Lavandé! Oh god, Lavandé!"

"It's okay," she murmured. "It's okay." She smiled up at him. "I saw you one... last... time."

And then her horns burst into flame. Still he held onto her, but soon the fire spread across her entire body and she flung him away from her, knowing that he would be consumed as well.

"Lavandé!"

She slumped onto her stomach as all feeling, all light fled from her and darkness, an iron sleep, came crashing down upon her unseeing eyes.

But she could still hear. A sound: th-thump, th-thump. Her heart, still beating, but growing slower, fainter... ever fainter...

So this is what it was like.

Dissolution. Sweet dissolution.

--

"Lavandé?"

His arms were around her. She was dreaming then, some sweet, fleeting memory glimpsed before her final annihilation.

"Lavandé!"

His voice, too. The agony was fading. Only darkness and cold, now.

Cold. She was so cold!

And yet she felt warmth, too. His arms, surrounding her.

She couldn't move. Except for where his body touched hers, she was frozen, glacial.

Then fire kindled again in her chest. Pain, but a different pain from before. Her chest burned. Lavandé cried out, and as she cried out she felt something spill into her from her mouth, something cool and unfamiliar.

She gasped as it filled her. Air. She was breathing air?

She gulped the air down thankfully and shivered. The fire in her chest abated. The arms around her turned her about and again she was enveloped in warmth.

"Lavandé? Lavandé!"

"What?" she muttered. It was hard to speak and breathe at the same time. Every part of her was sore.

"Lavandé! I... I saw you burst into flame!"

His voice. She opened her eyes and grit her teeth at the pain as light spilled into them. What was wrong with her? Why did everything hurt? And why was she so cold?

The kiss.

She blinked, at last seeing the human before her. His face blossomed with joy and he collapsed on top of her, crying her name over and over, his tears spilling warm against her cold skin.

She held him. "Shh," she murmured. "Please. No need to cry. But why does everything hurt?" Was this some new torment?

"Lavandé!" The human's voice was not panicked, she now realised, but ecstatic. He lifted her to her feet. "Lavandé, look! This is why your body hurts!"

He guided her in faltering steps to the bathroom. Lavandé looked down at the sink. It was filthy. He hadn't cleaned it in weeks.

Then he drew her gaze up to the mirror itself. Eyes blinked back at her, strange eyes without cat-irises, dark instead of red, but still with a hint of their previous redness.

But she quickly forgot about her eyes. Her skin was no longer grey, but pale pink; and her horns? She ran her hand over her head. Her hair was its usual dark unruly self, but her horns were gone. No, not gone - the stumps remained, buried deep in her hair.

And not just her horns - she'd lost her wings as well.

"No wonder everything hurts," Lavandé murmured. "Gone. All gone." Even though she had never truly been happy with her wings, she knew she would miss them.

"Lavandé?" He was standing behind her in the mirror. "I don't understand. What does this all mean?"

Lavandé shook her head. A smile timidly slipped onto her lips. Perhaps she could risk believe all this was true, she thought. It didn't feel like a dream.

"A human's kiss is deadly to a succubus," she said, still staring at her new self in the mirror. "Your kiss... our kiss killed me, but only part of me."

"Part of you? What do you mean?"

"Remember when you asked me how succubi are born and I told you that they grow from human seed mixed with demonic essence? Well, that's all that's left, the human part. The demon is dead and only the human vessel remains." She drew her now talon-less fingers across a soft pink cheek. "Miss Lucy told me earlier that my heart was connected to my human half. I guess having a heart helped the human part of me to survive the demonic part dying."

Sudden fear flashed across his face. "But you remember, don't you? Everything that happened between us? Everything we did?"

Lavandé, laughing, turned and threw her arms around his blushing neck. "Let me show you what I remember! But you'll have to teach me how to kiss properly, first."

And she pushed her lips against his, hot and hungry and joyful as only a human's can be.

--

"Are you ready?"

Lavandé looked down at herself. The underwear had felt strange enough, but wearing a dress was weirder still. How could humans deal with being robed in such lewd items? The cotton of her underwear was rubbing against her most sensitive parts while the soft, flowing edges of her dress felt as though they were caressing random spots on her body every time she moved.

"Is it really okay to go outside in this?" she asked him, her face flushing in embarrassment.

He just smiled at her. "After all the trouble getting me to leave my basement, you want to stay down here now?" He shrugged his shoulders. "Now, I'll admit, if I was stuck down here with you, I don't think I'd mind that much. But the whole world is out there, Lavandé. There are all sorts of wonderful things I need to show you about being human. I want to share them with you. And you're hungry, right? You can't exist on just orgone anymore."

Lavandé swallowed. She was still getting used to the idea of drinking and eating, although she did enjoy both very much. Almost everything a human seemed sexual in some way.

And they say demons are lewd!

"Alright," said Lavandé at last. She nodded her head, determined.

He looked her over. "You look beautiful," he said. "I'm glad I was able to get something in your size."

He turned and opened the front door a crack. Sunlight spilled into the hall. Lavandé gasped and grabbed his arm, pulling herself against him.

"It's okay," he said, kissing her on the cheek. "I'll be with you every step of the way."

Then he opened the door wide and together the two of them stepped out into the light of a new day.

The End