Balg’s key opened the apartment door without a sound. Felon moved in quickly, quietly locked the door behind him. He hurried cautiously through the living room. It was late 20th Century female. The walls were pink, the carpets red. Victorian era remake chairs and chesterfield gathered around a maple wood coffee table on a dark Indian throw rug. Magazines fanned out across the table’s shiny surface. Plaque-mounted prints hung on the walls. Felon hated it at first glance. Fucking women.
His eyes scanned for and found the fire escape’s black iron silhouette at the end of a hallway that brought him to the bedroom and bath. A feathered spirit catcher hung in the window that opened onto it. To his left, he passed a small kitchenette with tiny breakfast nook, stove and fridge. The apartment was small, well maintained, and intended for a single occupant.
He opened the bedroom door on silent hinges. The bed had a floral-patterned comforter in place and a pair of pillows in lace-trimmed covers. He closed the door behind him. Balg’s envelope had contained a photo of the woman: a redhead, five-foot-six, athletic build and chestnut eyes. The photo had been snapped as she climbed from a car, unaware. Chrissy Morgan had a candid carnal look that vaguely stirred something in Felon. The combination of apparent youthful innocence and sexuality started to explain the Demon’s interest in her. The bio completed it.
Age: 27 (Pre-Change), Occupation: Secretary for City Phone Company. She worked from 8:30 to 4:30. Arrived home after a workout at Silver’s Gym at approximately 7:45 p.m. if she didn’t eat out with friends, 9:30 if she did. The file said she was meeting someone from work at the gym at seven-thirty. She’d be home after that.
Morgan was a member of the New Life Group-an organization that sprang up fifty years after the Change promoting a New Life in a New Age through temperance, nutrition and exercise. Its founders believed the regimen encouraged the growth of latent powers in the mind. Felon thought it was a waste of discipline. Chrissy went to bed early and got up early. She was Demon bait.
The assassin glanced at his watch: nine o’clock. It was early, but success depended on the element of surprise. He looked around the bedroom and walked to the closet. Folding lattice doors: perfect. Felon could set up his hunter’s blind behind them. He stretched, took a deep breath to relax his body before entering, and then pulled the closet doors shut after him. He settled himself cross-legged behind perfumed dresses and suits. He pulled his gun from its holster, checked the silencer and laid it in his lap. He waited.
The Incubus would be dangerous. The assassin had long ago learned to shape innate fears into reflexive defenses-so much so that he had almost lost the ability to flinch or be surprised. And his life, his individuality became irrelevant when he started killing. The storm of concentrated fury protected him like razor wire.
Felon heard the door click. A muffled voice followed, a woman’s humming a formless tune. There were thumps and bangs of a briefcase dropping and shoes being kicked off. Then he heard the quiet rustling of a nylon rain jacket falling to the floor or over a chair. Felon lost sound of her, until he heard clicking, a beep, and then garbled monotones as she listened to her phone messages. He’d seen the ancient reel-to-reel by the door. A long beep, and more clicks. There followed a rushing of water and more humming. Then the bedroom door opened. A dim light flicked on. Felon’s hand reflexively tightened its grip on the gun. He watched her through the slats, moving rapidly toward the closet. She flung the doors wide.
The assassin was hidden behind the long dresses and coats. His pulse raced when he smelled her perfume, and the breeze from her movements touched the hair on the back of his hands. She was dressed in a pair of tight black leggings and tunic. He couldn’t see her face, but he had glimpsed it as she approached the closet. It was Morgan.
With quick motions her tunic was a tangle on the carpet and her tights were down and off. Felon’s position allowed a detailed view of her taut buttocks as she walked away; but he blinked his eyes mechanically, the thought of killing more important than arousal. She slipped into her bathrobe and left the bedroom. Faintly, he could smell the woman’s scent rising from the tangle of clothes on the floor an arm’s reach from him. He raked the gun across his ribs to keep his focus.
When the Incubus was engaged, Felon would stand and fire. He had four clips in his coat pockets, two in easy reach thrust through his belt. Felon’s heartbeat surged at the thought of the kill. Stahn might have any number of tricks up his sleeves, but a low-level Demon like an Incubus was unlikely to waste energy transubstantiating a weapon from the Infernal places. Balg said it took too much power.
Felon looked up as the woman re-entered the room in her bathrobe. She hooked it on the back of the bedroom door and strode naked to her bed, lit the lamp beside it before returning to the entrance and turning off the overhead light. When she walked into the bathroom, Felon studied the kill zone. The Demon would appear somewhere near the bed. That was the only certainty. The assassin’s blind had a clear line of sight. He would wait for Stahn to begin his work.
Morgan returned wiping her lips with a towel.
“I’ve got to sleep tonight,” she muttered, dropping onto the bed while lifting an electric alarm clock to set it. Distantly, Felon smelled peppermint. The woman chuckled, threw back the covers and climbed under them. Her pale hand reached out, and clicked off the lamp. Darkness settled. Out in the living room a light had been left on causing a rectangular slash of dim yellow to cut a section from her bedroom carpet.
Felon focused on his gun. He felt its weight, its shape. He studied the dimpled surface of its grip. The assassin located each of its clips with his mind, weighed them, measured them, imagined the precise hand actions required to eject and load. He imagined these mechanical actions until the gun oil was strong in his nostrils. Minutes passed uncounted.
Felon was brought from his meditative state by a gasp-slight, instantaneous-the sudden intake of air a person makes touching a toe to cold water. He opened his eyes. The bed covers, top sheet and all, had floated up toward the ceiling. Chrissy Morgan’s well-exercised body lay asleep, naked and exposed. She reacted to the chill by turning on her side and drawing both knees to her chest. Worried little sounds came from her.
The covers were suspended in the air as if invisible wires held all four corners. They hovered a second before spinning away to land in a heap by the door. Felon heard snuffling, lapping noises now, wet and bestial. But in the half-light from the doorway, he could not see any physical reason for it.
Stahn was still intangible, but he was beginning his work. Morgan’s legs suddenly flexed outward as though stretching, and then faintly, Felon saw the outline of a hand like it was drawn in chalk on an invisible screen. A large human-like hand slid out of the darkness, and then another. Both were sketched at first, but grew in detail. Each hand grabbed an ankle, and pulled the legs apart. The darkness between her thighs was thrust upward as her hips turned.
Felon quietly got to his knees.
Morgan moaned as the snuffling and lapping noises continued, and now the vague shape of a massive man was appearing on the bed. He was bent over between her outstretched legs. The sleeping woman moaned and her breath drew in more sharply. She twisted her hips against the shadow head that grew steadily more visible. Felon could make out a small pair of curved horns atop the large naked skull. But he could not distinguish a silhouette or profile. Its face was obscured pressing against the sleeping woman’s groin. As Morgan made small laughing noises, she began to buck her hips more powerfully against the Incubi’s slowly resolving face. With each counter thrust, the guttural sounds she made increased-spasmodic gulps of air exploded-and the Demon took shape.
It was more than eight feet in height, and powerfully muscled. The Demon’s dark flesh was like carved granite. The muscles flexed impossibly-black blood churned through distended veins. The Incubus slipped one large hand under the woman’s buttocks and easily lifted her lower trunk and hips upward toward his foot long tongue. Morgan moaned with pleasure as the Incubus lavished her with monstrous kisses, his tongue flicking, darting in and out, his yellow fangs nibbling.
Felon lifted his gun as the creature lowered the woman on the bed. Stahn straightened now, arching his powerful back. The Demon’s penis stretched over the woman. It was two feet in length and looked as thick as Felon’s arm. Stahn gathered Morgan’s ankles with one clawed hand and pushed them back to her ears. He grinned, muttered “ficus” to himself, and then looming over her exposed genitalia he thrust. The woman screamed.
Felon stepped out of the closet, gun level with his eyes. The Incubus swung its head as he fired. The hiss of the silencer drew Morgan from her trance. She screamed again. Impaled, she was dragged over the mattress as the Demon turned. Felon moved slowly toward Stahn, looking at nothing but his head. He fired into the skull, again and again, while his free hand positioned the next clip. Stahn’s head flexed and changed with the first few bullets as he attempted to disappear, but too late, for the impact of the bullets pulled him back into physical form. Each strike punched more solidity into his dissolving head. Roaring the Demon was drawn back to the physical world.
Felon had the other clip poised beneath his gun, now ready: discharge clip, reload. Fire! The automatic thumped with each shot. The Demon howled, then shrieked as one of its horns shattered. The bullets fully reversed the earlier process and began to chew a great hole of ragged nothingness in its face. “NO!” it roared-the mirrors in the apartment burst into fragments. Felon slammed in the next clip, opened up
“NO!” The top of Stahn’s head exploded in a great eruption of black and gray. Hot red streaks flew from the gaping skull and steamed smokily on the dresser and wall. The Demon’s body could no longer resist the impact of the bullets, and was flung to the floor on the far side of the bed. The assassin leapt after it firing.
He shifted his aim onto its muscular chest until a ragged fist-sized hole was punched. Discharge clip, reload. Fire. Stahn stopped moving. Felon continued to fire. Discharge clip, reload. He stopped; then grimaced. The gun steamed in his hand. Morgan was out of her mind, screaming-her white thighs streaked with Demon blood. She threw herself on the floor and crawled into the closet sobbing. Then Stahn’s body began to smoke. Wisps of silky white thread like solid steam curled upwards. His head was missing from the top lip up-a wide pool of blood filled the crater in its chest. The rising mist was sour.
Felon turned away.
“Assassin…” The voice was deep and terrible; the words wet with blood. “Assassin…”
Felon froze, gritted his teeth, and turned. He swung his gun, stepped near. Miraculously, even as its body was dissolving, the mouth moved. Jawbones slid beneath torn flesh. “I see you,” the corpse moaned. Felon looked at its mangled head. The eyes went in the first volley.
Felon checked his peripheral vision, caught on the dresser: a white orb. The eye trailed its long gray optic nerve through a pile of gore. The slit pupil dilated. Felon raised his gun and fired. The eye burst into a glob of moisture that painted the wall behind it. The Demon’s body moaned a final time, limbs flailing weakly as it turned to smoke.
Felon wanted to kill the woman in the closet but Balg wanted her alive. He walked out of the bedroom scowling.