“Come on, wake up, cutie.”

A sex dream, one of those clinging, persistent dreams that still hangs off you in tattered shreds no matter how hard you slam awake (and for that voice, I am assuredly slamming awake at full scramble-power-on), lurid and intense details all evaporating as I open my eyes, but the mood of it a deafening echo in my...head. Without this, I might startle more to open my eyes on this anime devil girl straddling me, looking at me with this sort of deranged, hungry smile and reaching out to touch my face.

...whoah.

Holy fuck, it really is you. Holy fuck but I have missed that face.

Holy fuck WOO I did it I pulled if off!

HI!

Okay, fine, really I wake up to the most amazing breasts right at eye level, huge and roundly perfect and straining to spill out of the scanty leather bikini top that only dubiously contains them. This is a bit unexpected, but there are worse ways to wake up and by the time I’m awake enough to feel that odd starkness of reality that tells one they’re not dreaming I’ve had the time to groggily check out the girl they’re attached to quite thoroughly: unlikely proportions with curves to match her unreason­able breasts, ram’s horns (sort of, they’re square in cross-section and they grow the wrong way, points at the front, convex side of the curve on top instead of bottom, and are fine and smooth instead of gnarled), black bat wings sprouting from her shoulder-blades that somehow manage to be cute instead of unsettling like actual bats, and a long barbed devil tail that’s whipping around madly like a cat about to pounce. Long metallic-silver hair, held back from complete unruliness by a wide barrette with a strange symbol silver-embossed in the center, spills over her shoulders in a windblown mess framing a soft, heart-shaped face dominated by lusty purple eyes with massive, improbable lashes, and pale, full, kissable lips.

I should be freaking out, or reacting somehow at least, but I’m groggy and horny and lust and strangeness keep kicking the ground out from under each other as I go from taking in the way the thin leather of her top outlines her nipples to being drawn by the motion of her tail that settles from lashing to loop itself into a heart shape displayed beside her hip to tracing the deep curves of her waist and pleasantly round navel with its perfect little belly button to noticing that she’s not just pale and desaturated by the gloom of my nighttime room but actually grey, her skin a pale and nearly paper-white color with no tint of pink the way an albino human would have, speckled unevenly with just-visible freckles of a color I can’t make out in the gloom...

She’s holding out a hand and saying something, but all I’m processing is her voice, which is high and breathy and melodic and cooingly sexual in reflection of the look on her face.

She says something, again, and I miss it, again, floating on a sea of sleep and lust and gray-skinned monster girl and that amazing voice...

“Kiss me? You know you want to.”

It gets through, this time.

YES, CLUMSY, I KNOW. YES, SUPERSTI­TION, I KNOW. SHUT UP. I’m not gonna risk seven years of bad sex just because I didn’t bother to tell my human they knew they wanted to, but you try working it in smoothly when you’re choking to death on miasma and wondering if the human you’ve been looking for most of your life is going to even give you the time of day. I HAD SOME THINGS ON MY MIND, OKAY?

I should jump away, or yell, or try one of those off-the-cuff exorcisms my Pentecostal friends are so into, but I don’t. It’d be hard for her to be more anvilici­ously demonic and yet, somehow, that idea isn’t sitting right...no. This is a demon, no question, there’s a strange supernat­ural frisson to her presence that tells me I’m not just experien­cing the best alien abduction ever, but this isn’t a demon attack.

You look so. Tasty. Please c’mon please...

It’s in her eyes. This creature...­doesn’t mean me harm. Before now I’ve not even been sure I really believe in all the stuff people say they read in each others’ eyes, but her eyes are huge, and expressive, heavily rimmed with black where a human would have that brighter pink, and the proportion and epic lashes and contrast against her pale skin makes them shout, makes them naked, even in the dark. They’re feral, and hungry, and lustful, but there’s no malice, no calculation, just...hope? Pleading? There’s something in her need that just drills through me. It says, “I need you”. It says, “You’re beautiful”. It says, “Please love me”. It’s heartbre­aking and beautiful and makes me think that if she does eat me it won’t be on purpose.

Your eyes, so blue, so grey, so pretty, so much deeper seeing them for real instead of reflected in your monitor, like I could sit here trying to figure you out until the Sea dries up, it’s enough to make me forget how much I need this kiss.

Almost.

And your hair’s so blonde! I thought it’d be like mine but less metal. That stupid haircut even kind of looks good all messed up like that, like a lion’s mane or something. Weird to realize I’ve never seen you in proper color before, I never realized how much that monitor didn’t reflect. Why’d you have to hate mirrors and selfies so bad?

And those lips, all big and kissable, I am gonna eat those lips right up...

And she’s familiar, like an old friend I haven’t seen in years, if only I could place her...

Sade’s balls so hungry please come ON.

Enough.

Self-preserva­tion’s dubious for me lately on a good day, and then, well, this should be a pretty good way to die, and was pretty much the only thing I still wanted to do before I went out anyway. I take her hand and pull her in for the kiss.

Her hand is warm through her glove - she’s wearing long, tight, leather above-the-elbow gloves, and, I realize, matching thigh-high boots - and her lips on mine are...el­ectrifying, a kiss that detonates like a lightning strike. She leads with tongue, seeking with this desperation like she’s trying to drink me and indeed it does feel like she’s tapped into some well in the depths of my soul and is drawing something out...oh. What was I expecting her to be? But it’s not...right. Not wrong in the correct way. It should feel like dying, but somehow the well is inexhaus­tible, as if she’s such an amazing kisser (and she is absolutely amazing) that it fills me with lust faster than she can suck it out of me. She tastes incredible, sweetness and a musk I can only call just ‘sex’ and some flower I don’t know the name of. It’s exhilara­ting, and when she’s done I feel stronger, not drained.

Unnfff omigod yum why did I wear clothes for this outing? Guess I’m learning some kinda lesson about vanity or something...

How long does a kiss last? It feels like eternity and no time at all, but eventually - a very long eventually indeed - I have to breathe and when I pull away she’s looking somehow more clear, and licks her lips with a little black tongue. This close I notice she’s got the sparkliest glitter makeup I’ve ever seen on her cheeks.

Something glints at her throat, swinging: a necklace of thin black leather with a small silver heart-shaped pendant, empty in the middle so that it’s just the outline, except that at the point the inside edge curves smoothly, making a shape that recalls the swooping triangle her bikini bottom forms hugging her mound...

Omigod. I did it and I found you and now real live heart-to-heart nectar-to-nectar sex with you fine it’s just a kiss and maybe that doesn’t seem like much but that’s still sex and fucking yum.

“Oh my fuck this was worth it. Okay, we need to go. Close your eyes and brace yourself.”

She starts tugging off one of her gloves.

Go? Sure: if you’re going to fail a WIS check, fail it all the way. I close my eyes, and the leathery sound of her glove coming off slithers across me, then her bare hand hot and soft on my cheek, and she kisses each of my closed eyes a bit wetly before planting a hard kiss on my forehead. As soon as the third kiss makes contact, there a wild jump in my chest like I’m an old TV and someone’s changed the channel to another one that’s broadcas­ting the same show except in color and I’m walloped by the most awful stench you can imagine, nasty like old socks and rotten meat but burning and inorganic like chlorine, and it’s somehow more than a smell, crawling at my skin and burning my eyes like it’s trying to get into my soul and sicken me from the inside out. I’ve had nightmares once or twice about being stuck in a room with a block of sub-critical plutonium, and this feels like what the radiation does in those dreams while it kills me.

I gag, but keep it down. “What the hell? What...”

“I taught you my senses a little. I’m still weak and I need your help finding our way through the veil.”

Also you’ll go insane trying to understand limbo without ‘em, but one thing at a time.

Also also let’s get you out from those covers and see if you’re as hot as I’ve been imagining.

“How can you stand this?”

“I can’t, dummy, which is why we need to go.”

She grabs my hand, not taking the time to put the glove back on, and bounds backward off the bed, pulling me upright, to the general protest of my sleeping muscles.

Oh baby. Those old gym shorts actually exist? I totally thought they were just a fantasy! Man, even back home those’d be skimpy, and that’s if they weren’t splitting up the sides like that. I hope this is a sign of things to come.

So. Not bad. Kind of...lean, maybe even a little toned here and there. Erm. So. Tall. Neep. Mmm, you smell like...yum...­fuck it haven’t cum in watches and watches resistance is for when you haven’t been without your favorite food for like a year I just have to...get my hand into...

Standing, she’s no less epic: more than a head shorter so that (as I catch myself thinking the thought) she could turn her head aside and nestle into the hollow of my chest perfectly, but her long legs place her hips only a few inches below my own, leaving her with a curvaceous, petite torso of hentai-cartoonish proportions. Seeing me look, she starts to carefully work her free hand under the front of her bikini bottom, then stops suddenly and withdraws it, looking stricken.

BLECH EW YUCK miasma in my cunt PFEH. Gods and slutshamers that tastes nasty, I guess that was sealed better than I thought. Amazing what’ll work for a mask when you’re horny.

Ech, it’s sharp, too. You’d almost think they...



Oh. Oooh dust. You’re a preacher’s kid. Kinda not my favorite detail about you, kinda forgot that one when I ported in here. Fuckity fuck there’s probably a whole nest of perfekti right in the next...

“Need to run! Don’t listen to the whispering!”

Spikes spikes spikes come ON they’ve already noticed us, I can feel the shiver from here...

“What?” As if in answer to my question a coldness that has nothing to do with thermal energy rolls over me, over us to look at the succubus shiver along with me, a freakish coldness that seems to eschew skin entirely and drop straight to the bones, setting deep muscles shivering without raising goosebumps.

Ooogh that was a bad idea...so help me Sade, if I end up being the first succubus to ever die of not being able to keep my panties on I’ll...ugh...

I want to ask what the hell is making us cold, but I’m smart enough to grok: something unfriendly to humans that a demon is also afraid of. Staying bad, running good.

I really seriously hope you got as much me-senses as I thought, because it’s getting hard to even see physical light, let alone the veil-mist. Just how close did I shave this? Would I have crumbled if you’d taken any longer making up your mind about me? Fuck.

It’s the first time out of about seventy six bazillion I’ll wish you could just port humans out of limbo.

A single step toward the door, the fact that I’ve seized her hand again brought to my awareness by the fact that’s she twisting out of my grip, tells me that whatever monster is coming for us is coming via the hall as the cold intensifies closer to the door.

“Something’s outside the door...”

“SPIKES! Do you see fog anywhere else?”

She’s scrabbling on the floor, picking up something her trembling hands won’t seem to get a good hold of, and for a surreal moment I think she’s gone for my rejection letter from MIT, left there in disgust for months since it had the impeccable timing of arriving on graduation day.

Fog? It comes to me that I don’t just have sleep in my eyes - the room is wreathed in mist, wispy and clinging. It’s rolling under the door like someone is out there with a smoke machine. I cast around the room desperately...­there.

“It’s coming in the window.”

A door opens elsewhere in the house, and heavy footsteps approach - startling my infernal visitor - then pause, and retreat, hurried, taking some of the coldness with them.

Spikes and vines and pits and lava, I can feel it from here, we’ll never outrun one that size...what do we...foo­tsteps. Your well-meaning exorcist-wannabe. Who’s already toast anyway. It’s worth a shot, but I hope you don’t get too pissed at me for it.

Now, the question is if this is going to work right or just spike us harder. Um. What was it?

“You guys are...ugh. Can’t think.”

She’s whispering, quick and urgent as one might imagine, pinching the bridge of her nose.

“Ugh. What’s the word. Thing. What kind of hei...how strict your god is.”

She wants to know about parish politics. Sure, why not? They ruin everything else good in my life, why not this too?

“What, like, are we fundamen­talists?”

“Yeah. I think. Fundamen­talist or...ugh. Words!”

“Mainline? I guess? It’s complicated.”

She shakes her head, then quails from the motion.

“No, other. Thing where you inherently suck. Believe in.”

Ugh, English, sucking as a valuable skill has got to be the only thing all four houses can agree on.

“Total Depravity? I’ve never liked...”

“Rrrgh! Not you! Them!”

She waves a trembling hand which clutches something long and narrow I’m too addled to recognize in the direction of the footsteps. As if to punctuate the motion, I hear the glass-fronted case at the bottom of the stairs that keeps my dad’s collection of old Bibles creak open, then crash shut.

“I think so? It’s complicated?”

Look, you try getting a sense of this stuff by watching someone’s sex dreams and impure thoughts and being there in spirit when they wank. I think I’m doing pretty good to have got this far (thank Sade for that one choir girl who definitely always wears open-cup bras, I’d have never heard enough sermons to piece it together otherwise), but oh my god if it isn’t like pulling teeth trying to get out of you how the perfekti that’s currently considering eating us will react to the prayers of whoever’s on their way back down the hall with a bigass holy book (yes, I recognize the sound too. You have some mighty weird thoughts when you cum guiltily).

Anyway I’m getting the idea I’m asking completely the wrong questions. I didn’t really pay attention in Religions of Earth.

Well, nothing for it. I sure hope your family’s got as much sexual guilt and embodiment-shame and hates their Moons as much as I think they do.

“Get out of sight from the door, grab my tail and don’t let go if you wanna live. We do not want this thing to get hold of my body.”

Cannot believe I’m about to do this. I really hope it works.

The rest of this takes a while to tell, but no more than three or four seconds pass at most.

I back against the wall by the door into my room.

The coldness and actinic edge of stench are back, worse than ever.

She presents her tail, so I grab hold and it loops itself around my fists like I would with a rope I really want to keep hold of. It’s naked, bare human-seeming skin the same blue-black color as her wings, and freakishly flexible, soft and fleshy instead of bony like a cat’s tail. There’s something oddly sexual about the whole effect, the flesh suggesti­vely tender and the curves of the barb at the end somewhat explicitly feminine.

Seen from behind, there’s nothing to her bikini top but the leather thongs that hold it on, tied with a half-pulled-out bow, and the matchingly-skimpy bottom is mussed as well, askew and one side scrunched into half a wedgie. Both pieces have decorative extra straps that crisscross and would look awesome and impractical if they were in any sort of order, but they’re in similar disarray. She doesn’t have a lot to do it with, but she looks like she’s been through a hurricane.

I just barely hear her mumble quickly, through gritted teeth:

“Please don’t be mad at me for possibly feeding your family member to a perfekti that’s probably already eating them...”

She’s squared off in front of the closed door, kneeling and tugging the removed glove back on, and gets it in place just in time for the door to swing open, spreading her wings as it swings.

A wall of fog washes over her, pea-soup thick, and yet I can see through it somewhat like I have IR or UV vision. The coldness, and a blistering smell that’s as if razor blades could rot like meat and then be turned into a vapor without stopping being razor blades, hits like a wall. In my head, there’s a whispering, mechanism’s voice, ranting steadily at the edge of perception, every syllable, word, and phrase taking exactly the same amount of time like an auditory monospaced font. I can’t make out the words but it feels like someone’s taking a chainsaw to my conscious mind. I’d clutch my throbbing temples if my hand wasn’t full of tail.

The succubus looks up at whoever has opened the door, hands raised pleadingly, and purrs, seductive:

“Please fuck me, da—GAH!”

It’s like she’s grabbed by her own personal tornado, whipped towards the doorway like a ragdoll, hair streaming in a silent gale that doesn’t lift even a single dust mote. Her tail goes taut and then slips through my sweat-slippery hands until the blunt back edge of the bony, hand-sized barb at the end collides painfully with my fist and I’m lurched forward, bare feet juddering along the floorboards.

Several things happen at once. There’s another jerk, and she shrieks, voice thick with otherwor­ldly harmonics, and the person in the doorway advances a step into the room and whips open a big, leather-bound book, the only part of them I can see from my vantage point by the door.

They picked up the Moffat Bible? How random.

The thought hangs drunkenly in front of me for a moment, chainsawed free from context or appropri­ateness by the constant relentless maddening whispering whispering whispering in head. Head. Head. Soul.

I’m brought back to reality by the sound of a prayer, flat-voiced with shock:

“...sus name I cast you OUT.”

The exorcism does exactly nothing to the succubus, but, there’s a sort of wave that goes through the coldness, and the whispering in my head hitches and stops growing louder. Something’s gone wrong with sound and I can’t decide if the human voice is my dad, mom, or one of my siblings.

There’s a pause, just an instant, where no one moves, and then my family member starts praying desperately, clutching the bible and mumbling so I can’t make out the words except the occasional “LORD” and “LAMB” and “JEESUS” such, hand raised as if to push all this away. After a sentence or two they fall into a rhythm...

I can’t place the voice because it’s like it’s become a part of the whispering, like my family member and whatever is beyond the door are starting to forget whose voice is whose, like there’s a note of the whispering in their voice, and note of their voice in the whispers.

Whatever force has hold of the succubus doesn’t let go immediately, but the pulling stops and she hangs limply in the air, taking heavy choking breaths.

I realize only as it retreats that the angel or demon or whatever it is in the hall had extended a tendril of itself around her, a dim, translucent, barely-perceivable limb of coruscating, angular light like some Lovecraf­tian tentacle nightmare from a universe that hasn’t invented curves yet, too vague to say that it’s gripping her in any particular way but apparently enough to pull her in. An instant later, she drops to the floor, landing hands and knees with a thud and a relieved exhalation.

For one soulgrin­ding, horrifying moment, the prayer and the whispering blend into an indistin­guishable, unparseable, unspeakable whole that hits with the maddening power of the demon’s - it has to be a demon - evil and the physical force of a projecting human voice, and then...it’s like the prayer and whispering turn in on each other, retreat into each other and into the hall and recede into the distance, muffled and far away. The grip of coldness and stench lessen greatly.

By the time I process all this, the succubus is stumbling across the room and straining weakly at the window where fog rolls in around the gaps. I bound over and throw it open, and she leans on the sill and presents her back like I’m supposed to go for a piggy-back ride. She’s still panting with choking breaths.

“Climb on. Hurry.”

This is a bit dubious, she’s rather smaller than me and I’m not really expecting infernal strength given that she couldn’t get the window open, but I’ll take a twenty foot drop over whatever it is in my hallway any day and so I oblige, nestling against her and putting my arms around her. Even with damnation closing in behind us the liquid softness of her skin and flesh and feathery silken brush of her hair is dizzying.

“Don’t break skin contact with me or you’ll be lost between realities for all eternity.”

Well, that’s not the least bit ominous, but there’s no time to consider the implicat­ions because we’re jumping out the window.

This is going to suck so very, very, very much.