Incubus Awakened by Kitty Thomas
14
Anna sipped her coffee while a leftover biscuit and some gravy heated in the microwave. Her foot tapped nervously on the kitchen tile as she read the same paragraph of the paper for the third time. When she managed to stop her foot, her hand started shaking. She needed a steady hand to drink coffee, so the tapping would have to be coped with. The microwave dinged and she jumped, almost spilling the hot beverage.
Luc appeared then. “Are you all right?” He propped himself against the counter and observed her. How long had he been there?
“Fine,” she lied. But the tapping wouldn’t stop. It had been a nervous tick since childhood. She poured the gravy over her biscuit and started cutting it into little triangles.
She chanced a glance to see a troubled expression knitting Luc’s brow as he tried to decipher what she was thinking.
“Anna, please. What is going on?”
“You could just read my mind if you wanted to know so badly.”
“No, I can’t.”
“But you have the thrall thing.”
“I can touch emotions and send thoughts and images. That’s different. I’m getting fear from you, but I don’t know why.”
He crossed the kitchen to sit in the chair beside her and placed a hand on her knee. “Anna, stop. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I just need to know, okay? I won’t be mad.”
“Know what?”
“I had another dream last night, and it made me think about the first night with Cain here. Those times when you were in my dreams, were they really dreams or do I just remember them that way? Did you really . . . ?”
“No, I didn’t touch you. Why would you think that?” He seemed hurt by the suggestion.
She moved his hand from her knee and backed her chair away. Being too close to him made it hard to think, and she wondered if he was using the thrall just a little bit to make her more pliant. After all, it didn’t always have to be as strong as what Cain used. She knew that now.
“I just . . . you do it with other people and don’t seem to have a problem with it.”
“I don’t do mind thrall. That’s Cain’s thing. Even when I was more evil, I didn’t do it. It’s like cheating. I prefer to hunt, to seduce a meal fair and square.”
She still wasn’t ready to let it drop. The issue was too important. “You did it once. And you do it after you feed.”
His eyes lit with recognition as it occurred to him what exactly she’d dreamed about. “I had to that time. I was starving. And yes, I do the tricks afterward, but only as a security measure. What’s to stop someone else from finding another way to hex me? I’m a sitting duck while I’m here. I have to protect who and what I am. With you, it’s different. I need you to know about me to break the curse. There’s no need to use those tricks on you.”
He traced his index finger down her cheek, and something in him seemed to shift. “Do you know how hard it is? To not take what’s mine?”
Anna wanted to deny she was his. She wasn’t. He didn’t have her heart. But cracks were forming in the walls she’d built around herself. At some point, tears started flowing down her cheeks.
Luc edged his chair closer to hers. His hand stroked soothingly through her hair as he murmured reassuring words in her ear. Anna’s arms looped around his neck, and she laid her head against his chest. She couldn’t stop the dam now that it had broken.
She was overwhelmed with the memories from the dream, the things he’d had to endure all because of a curse placed on him by a spoiled, selfish witch.
Luc’s head was bent against hers as he spoke. “I know you loved Vince. I’m sorry he couldn’t commit to you. But I’m not him. Just because things look similar on the surface, doesn’t mean . . . ”
She raised her mouth to his and kissed him. She had to, to shut him up. She didn’t want to think about Luc being inside her dreams the way she was in his, knowing things about her previous relationships. Despite her best intentions, they were becoming more tightly entwined. She didn’t want to think about any of it, and if he kept talking, she would.
“Anna,” he murmured against her mouth.
She could feel herself falling farther into a pit she wouldn’t be able to claw her way out of. The only thing she’d end up with was a broken heart. If she managed to survive him at all. She couldn’t share him with the harem but she couldn’t seem to stop kissing him either. She wanted this to be real.
The doorbell rang, and she pulled away, thankful for the interruption. Anything to stop her before clothes started hitting the floor.
Luc kissed her palm, and she pulled it away to go answer the door. Her hand tingled where his lips had brushed over the scar.
A sound like loud music blared out as she reached the front door. “What the hell is that?” Luc asked, just behind her.
Anna pulled back the curtain to reveal a white van with a cartoon haunted house on the side. Haunt Enders was painted in bright red lettering beside it along with a phone number and a slogan that was too far away to read.
The sound in question happened again. Anna looked more closely at the driver’s side. Someone was laying on the steering wheel.
“That’s the car horn.” Anna smacked a hand over her forehead. The sound they’d just heard was part of the Ghostbusters theme.
“This is gonna be fun,” she said with an eye roll as she opened the door
“We’re here about the haunting.”
The guy standing on the porch couldn’t have been more than twenty. He was short with thick glasses, unruly dirty blond hair, and a pocket protector. Forces of darkness beware. He looked like he’d decided D&D was so much fun he wanted to live out his gaming exploits for real.
Anna stepped aside. “Come on in.” Luc stood beside her but had made himself invisible, at least to anyone who wasn’t her. He was also non-corporeal since the guy walked right through him, then shivered.
“Ah . . . there’s a cold spot right here,” he said, already pleased with his findings. “My assistants will be here in a minute. They had to get supplies out of the van. I’m Dale, by the way. We spoke on the phone.” He extended a hand to Anna.
“Nice to meet you.” She was already having doubts. A man thrilled by slight temperature variations didn’t seem promising. She’d already told him the house was haunted and she needed help getting the ghost out. She wasn’t trying to assemble a case for Luc’s existence to present in court.
Moments later the other two joined him. Frank was tall and lanky, with adult acne, black hair, and navy blue eyes. Lonna was an attractive, leggy, redheaded woman in a short skirt. Frank and Dale seemed unfazed by her charms.
Luc showed no apparent interest in Lonna, either. Something which relieved Anna. She didn’t know why it mattered, but it would have bothered her if he wanted every female who crossed the threshold. Maybe he just wasn’t hungry.
As if on cue, Susan glided into the room, a pleasantly sated look on her face. She wore a pink terrycloth bathrobe, her hair was wild and mussed, and the look on her face said, I had amazing sex last night. Don’t you wish you did? She collapsed onto the couch and part of the robe slid back to reveal a long expanse of thigh.
“These the ghost people?” she asked.
Frank and Dale, who must have been vaccinated against Lonna, were gawking at Susan like she was a Christmas present all wrapped up for them. Anna looked to Luc again. She was irritated with her sudden need to watch his reaction for everything, but he was as unaffected by Susan as Susan probably was by most of the men she’d slept with for money.
She gave Anna a meaningful look, then excused herself to get dressed. Anna didn’t want to be unkind, but she couldn’t help feeling the production had been set up for her as part of the harem’s new mission to get her in bed with Luc.
Frank and Dale snapped out of it and started setting up a bunch of machines. One of the items looked suspiciously like the ghost trapper contraptions from the movie they seemed desperate to emulate. If they thought they were putting Luc in a little steel box, this would not go well.
Lonna flitted around the room, taking temperature readings with a digital room thermometer. “Where all has the apparition been?”
Why did everyone keep asking that? What did it matter? Luc was in the house. He needed to be out of the house. Anna’s life would be much less complicated once that happened. How did cataloging his favorite rooms help?
“Everywhere. He’s been trapped for fifty years by a spell.”
Lonna wandered out of the room with the thermometer.
Frank laughed. “You expect us to believe in witches?”
“You believe in ghosts, don’t you?”
He shifted uncomfortably. “We just went on TV that one time for publicity. We aren’t sure we’re full-fledged believers yet. We investigate. We take a scientific approach and do not pass judgment on the phenomena we encounter.”
Anna was pretty sure if there was a brochure, he’d just quoted the ad copy. Luc let loose with what Anna was sure was his calculated, evil laugh. She almost burst out laughing herself when Frank and Dale nearly jumped out of their skin. They might not be able to see him, but they could hear him. Anna turned to Luc, who just winked at her.
“Do you believe now?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest.
Dale shifted gears. All at once he was pure professionalism. “Maybe you could tell us a bit about what’s been happening here.” He pulled a notepad from the black fanny pack around his waist, a pen from his pocket protector, and clicked on a recorder.
Anna took a deep breath. This was a waste of time. What were paranormal investigators going to do besides say, Yes ma’am we believe there is activity of a potentially supernatural nature occurring in your house?
“Well,” she said, “it started small. Things being cleaned up behind me. Writing on the bathroom mirror. Then he beat a guy up in front of me and threw him out of the house.”
“He?”
“Yes, he.”
“How do you know it’s a male?”
“I’ve seen him. And also, he’s a demon, not a ghost.” She’d skipped that part on the phone, just wanting to get them to the house.
Dale visibly paled and turned the recorder off. He managed to collect himself. “So you just want us to try to get him out, right? Not prove he’s here?”
“Right.” Give that man a stuffed bear.
“Okay, well, I suppose we could summon him and talk to him.”
As if on cue, Frank pulled a Ouija board out of his duffel bag. Luc made it across the floor in two strides, grabbed the box, and flung it out the door.
“Was that really necessary?” Anna asked.
“Yes. They were amusing for about five minutes, but they toy with things they know nothing about. You might as well put a large neon sign on the top of the house that says, all evil beings camp out here. I don’t want that thing in here.”
Anna shrugged and turned back to the investigators. “When a demon thinks it’s a bad idea . . . ”
Frank and Dale seemed ready for retirement. Lonna returned with a little notebook indicating her temperature readings.
“We just wanted to talk to him, try to reason with him to leave,” Frank said.
“He’s already right here. No summoning is required,” Anna said. “And I told you, just asking him to leave won’t work. He’s been hexed by a witch.”
“What did you expect us to be able to do?” Lonna asked, confused. “We don’t know anything about spells.”
“I don’t know. I saw your ad, thought it was worth a try. But I see I was mistaken. Luc, thrall them.”
The demon’s eyes widened comically. “Come again?”
“You heard me. I mean, come on. A priest we can trust. These jokers? They don’t even know what they’re doing. They’re just publicity hounds. You don’t want this on the news, do you?”
He shrugged. “Very well. If you say so.”
Luc appeared before them. Frank and Dale fainted. Lonna looked like she wanted to go to bed with him.
“Hey, ghostbuster, back off.” Anna would be packing Lonna in a little steel box if the redheaded bimbo took one more step toward Luc.
When all three had been taken care of, Anna and the girls carried them out to the van. She leaned over the horn accidentally, causing a second recording to play through the loudspeaker. “Who ya gonna call?”
“Someone else,” Anna muttered. She’d just wasted an entire morning.
Half an hour later the doorbell rang, as she’d known it would. It was Dale.
“We’re here about the haunting.”
Anna smiled brightly. “We managed to get him to leave on our own. Sorry to have brought you all the way out here.”
An odd expression came over his face, then he shrugged and turned to go back to the van. Anna shut the door and sagged against it. Luc gave her an I told you so look.
“Don’t say it,” she said. “The gypsies are coming tomorrow. It can’t be more lame than this attempt.”
“This doesn’t even count as an attempt,” Luc countered. “And the priest was a lot more fun. These guys didn’t give me very much to work with.”
His eyes glowed as he stalked her, clearly intent on picking up where they’d left off in the kitchen.
“I need to get out of the house for awhile. Stuff to do,” she mumbled, before slipping out the door and out of his reach. He let her go, but the look in his eyes said he wouldn’t indulge her running from him for much longer.