8 comments/ 5931 views/ 8 favorites The Succubi Ch. 01 By: Wisconsinite (Quick note-- There's no sex in this story. Later on there will be, but this first chapter is about setting up the plot. Patience will be rewarded, however.) Mandorus flapped furry, leathern wings, fighting for lift over the darkened suburban neighborhood, cutting horizontally across the blocks of houses. She snuck a glance behind her, but saw no pursuing lights; it was early morning, and the only lights breaking the sterile darkness were streetlamps. She closed her eyes and glided for a moment, pricking her ears up and doing her best to hear over the rapid thumping of her tiny heart. She heard nothing but late summer crickets and the rush of the wind. She sighed a tiny bat sigh, opened her eyes, and banked sharply to the right to avoid a looming elm, flapping hard and managing to gain enough elevation to pass about a foot above the next roof. Her adrenaline from fleeing the Guard was waning, taking her comfort in bat form with it. At least hitting the next tree won't technically be collapsing from exhaustion, she thought. When she passed over the next roof she saw an opening, and decided to take it. Literally. The light across the street was shining from the second story of an aging brick building, easily the shabbiest house on the street, also the only one with an open window. Thanking gods, she swept gracefully through and into the small bedroom (which she just had time to take in was what the room was) but at far too fast a speed; she backpedaled hard, still smacking into the rapidly approaching wall and peeling off like a batcake. She didn't remember striking the wall, but she did remember falling like sinking. Everything was dark before she hit the ground. * * * Contrary to what a lifetime of consuming cinema would teach you, unless you're suffering from a major, traumatic, coma inducing brain injury, a concussive knockout usually won't last more than a couple of minutes. Mandorus woke up in about thirty seconds, shocked conscious by a loud shout. The shouter was a young man named Jack Katz. He'd been reading in bed when Mandorus, batform, had flown through his window and into his bedroom wall, hard. He sighed, conquering his initial surprise quickly and accepting the mundane horror of the situation; that, killed by the suicide strike to the wall or not, he'd soon have to handle and dispose of a dead bat. He took his time marking his place in his book. Stepping out of bed, Jack was knocked short by what he saw; lying on the ground where there should have been a bat was a pale young woman, nude, facing away from him. Dark chestnut tresses fell across her shoulders and down her back. Even though she was turned away from him the spray of her hair and the swell of hips brought out an animalistic rise in him, and he was instantly hard. Jack had just watched a bat take a kamikaze dive through his window, and upon investigating the crash he'd found a beautiful, naked young woman. Despite his arousal (more likely intensified because of it), he was fairly bewildered. To no one in particular, he yelled, "What the fuck!" * * * Mandorus jerked awake at the shout and spread her arms, ready to catch herself-- as she noticed that she was already lying on her side, facing a wall. Her ribs twinged, but as she swept her hands over her front to check herself, nothing shifted wrong or was overly sore. That quick check done, she noticed a warmth spreading over her backside, especially on her ass, where she tingled as if she'd just had a nice spanking. The thought made her wriggle, suddenly very lucid and very horny. Lustful gazes on her bare skin always did this to her, and she hadn't even seen the guys face yet. She turned over slowly, enjoying the heat of his gaze ass it passed from her ass and back to her hips, then her breasts and the cleft between her legs, a small dark thicket of infinite interest. When she turned her head, Mandorus knew she had him. "Please, help me," she said, eyes as wide and imploring as a hungry lamb. "I need you to close the window and turn out your light." She gave the directive in a slower, measured voice, but by no means sterile or robotic, and the hint of helpless need never left. Before Jack had thought about it, he'd switched off the lamp and moved to the window, where he closed it quickly (for some reason taking care not to bang the sill too loudly). The moonlight that shone through the window seemed somehow intensified. Jack found it bringing things into focus, like the neatly ordered neighborhood outside, tall boxy hedges and tall green recycling bins repeating off in a fractal infinity along the blacktop branch of the road, all cast in gleaming silver by the moon. His consciousness swung back into the room, taking in the window frame and how alluringly cryptic the whorls and lines were, painted over white in a pretense of hiding the wood's true pattern but only blanketing and softening it. Turned away from the alarming, intrusive, beautiful woman, he frowned, wondering at the quickness with which he'd jumped to her bidding. Jack had felt a little like this once before, when he'd taken acid with his cousin Jedd. They'd laid in Jedd's wall-hung and carpet strewn apartment, talking, thinking deep thoughts, and intermittently just sitting back and watching the walls wriggle. This was something like that, but that experience had been largely pleasant after the initial wave of weirdness had been conquered. This was overpowering, and made it feel like his thoughts were fleeting and disjointed, even as they were clarified. He turned back to the woman, and instantly understood why he had acted so quickly when she had spoken; beneath her elfin beauty, and that deep look of longing that she wore like a mask (he saw that now) was a disquieting note of very real fear. And now he did want to help her, despite whatever weird trick she had just pulled on him. Because that was just the kind of guy he was. All this ran through his mind in what felt like a jittery flash, like a projector running at an unsafe rate. By then, the room seemed glaringly bright with moonlight, and its intensity kept increasing. He shut his eyes, covered them with the heels of his hands, but the light followed him inside, blinding him from inside his own head, washing out his thoughts in a gush of light. * * * As the young man turned around, practically leaping in his haste to do her bidding, Mandorus allowed herself a small, quick smile. At least I'm still good at that, she thought. He was quick and careful in darkening the room, done in seconds. He stayed standing by the window for a moment after he'd closed it, and the moonlight shining through gave her plenty of light to consider him by. Curly brown hair topped his head and came down to around his ears. His eyes weren't visible from where she still lay, but she could see the angle of his chin and jaw, and that the body coming down from his head was lean and tall. She replaced her masque as he moved, and when he turned around she silently recoiled from what she saw. The full moon seemed to be shining from within his skull, turning his eyes into miniature spotlights. The twin beams took in the room, then flashed onto her. Mandorus often spent her free time nude, but she'd never felt as bared as she did right then, with those eerie glowing eyes seeming to both look through her while regarding her completely. They both stayed that way for a moment, staring at each other, when Jack suddenly clenched his fists and squeezed his eyes tight, letting out a pained yell. Mandorus shrank back even tighter against the wall before realizing that she had no reason to fear for herself; he'd pressed his balled fists into his eyes and fallen to his knees, still screaming, then tipped forward onto his face and gone silent. Mandorus stood hesitantly, then walked the short distance to the ruffled bed and pulled off the sheet, wrapping it around herself as a rough toga. Padding over to where Jack lay unconscious, half-in and half-out of a rectangle of moonlight cast onto the floor through the window, she prodded him in the side with her big toe. He didn't seem to notice, and lay still. She looked out the window. "Well, shit," she sighed, and got to work. * * * Mandorus started by grabbing him under the armpits and hauling him bodily away from the moonlight; she had a feeling that the preternaturally bright moon tonight might have had something to do with his seizure. That and the magic she'd woven on him. Best not to think about that right now, though. Pushing that from her mind, Mandorus checked for the pulse of his lifeblood along his neck root. It was strong and steady, a very good sign. Heartened, she moved to his eyes, where the news wasn't as positive. Pulling up on his left lid with her right hand, the disconcerting light still shone from his eye, though less intensely than it had, she noted. The glowing white of his dark blue eye was still disconcerting, feeling to her almost as if she were crouched over the dead body of some great, bio-luminescent fish. She was confident he was knocked out. Crouching over his body, she put one arm under his neck and the other under the crook of his knees, then, with a loud exhalation, lifted him up and into his bed. Mandorus had always been strong for her size (supernaturally so, you might say). She crossed, still stepping lightly, to the bedroom door, where she paused and listened. Her hume hearing wasn't quite as good as her batform, but the conversion was unpleasant and inhabiting the body of a bat always awkward and uncomfortable, so she stayed as she was. Her hearing as a hume wasn't too bad, anyways. She was fairly certain that no one else lived here, or at least was in the house right now; there had been a fair amount of screaming just moments ago, and she had heard no scurrying of feet or tell-tale door slamming,. She opened the door cautiously anyway. It opened onto a short, carpeted hallway with a darkened stairway to the immediate right. She crept down the stairs, avoiding any creaking, and found herself on the ground floor and soon enough in the kitchen, electronic light buzzing, digging through the small, wing-doored pantry for something. Triumphantly, she lifted a white pound sack of salt, three quarters full. She walked to the front door, checked the lock, then sealed it with a mumbled hex and a hand gesture, then again by covering the barrier with a line of salt. She paused for a moment, then went to the back of the house and repeated the process with that door. She checked and sealed all of the windows she could find, finally allowing herself a deep breath. Even if, as she now thought likely, she'd opened up some Topside kid by trying to entrance him under the full moon, she was bunkered down here, in an anonymous, safe, secure location, away from the Guard burners who'd chased her here. She climbed the steps upstairs quickly; she wanted to check on the hume. He was her responsibility now, and she would rather deal with him sooner than later. Entering the bedroom, she was relieved to see that he now appeared to be sleeping peacefully, chest rising and falling in a steady rhythm. "Hello, Mandorus," a deep voice from directly behind her drawled. She jumped and spun to the noise, startled. When she saw who it was that had caught her off guard, cold fear began to pump itself through her veins, freezing her up. The man leaning against the wall on the opposite side of the door flashed her a primate's smile, all bared teeth and glaring eyes, before reverting his features back to the jaunty smirk he'd worn before. He was dressed in dark suit with charcoal grey pin-striping, his blonde hair pulled back from his forehead with mousse. He had his left leg bent at the knee, foot resting against the wall nonchalantly, and he pushed off with it, heading slowly in her direction, sauntering. "The Guard doesn't like the kind of digging you've been doing. I, personally, do not like you or the fact that you're trying to stick your nose in my shit. Now, I'm going to bring you in for questioning, so your options are to either come willingly, or let me have a little bit of fun on you first." The simian grin reappeared as he stopped, just a foot away from her. (Author's Note: This is my first story written for online publication, and really the first one I've shared with anybody. Any comments or commentary would be appreciated. I know this ends on cliffhanger, but I promise I have some idea of where this is going. Some.