The Succubus: A Lawson Vampire Novel (The Lawson Vampire Series)

  The Succubus

  A Lawson Vampire Novel

  Jon F. Merz

  Contents

  Disclaimer

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Also by Jon F. Merz

  Copyright © 2017 by Jon F. Merz

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Disclaimer

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Prologue

  She lets him guide her into the hotel room, all pretense of perfunctory introductions abandoned as they fall into the wall just inside the door, hands grabbing each other, mouths already open with tongues entwining.

  Tasting.

  Licking.

  Gasping.

  Moaning.

  His hands find her skirt, pulling it up her thighs, exposing her underwear. He moves from her mouth, down to her breasts, still covered by her shirt, and continues diving further south past her waist and into her mound, his tongue pushing against the thin fabric, before his fingers pull it aside and he engulfs her in a sudden rush.

  She moans louder now, her hands clawing at his head, urging him on, forcing more of herself onto his face and his flickering tongue that knows just where to explore with just the right amount of force. He seesaws his technique back and forth between soft exploration and insistent probing. The result is a tidal force of epic proportions that wrack her entire body in one seismic spasm that sends her up and over the edge of ecstasy falling into the slipstream of a hazy afterglow.

  He rises and her hands are fast at the belt buckle to his pants, yanking it free and plunging her hands down into his crotch, seeking, questing, finding her prize that she squeezes and urges on to its full girth.

  There are words, of course. There are always words. Mutterings of lust. Urging, imploring, pleading, whispering, sometimes guttural declarations that are coated thick with a verbal musk of desire.

  They haven’t moved from the wall and as he slides into her, there’s a gasp - an exhalation - of that moment of coupling when it finally happens. Maybe a shared grin between them as the full illustration of their lust for each other is finally revealed.

  And celebrated.

  He moves slowly at first, unsure of how she likes it. The last thing he wants to is be too quick, too ordinary, too every-other-guy-out-there. He’s proud of what he can do, what he can accomplish, what he can make her feel.

  But she’s insistent now. And he gives into her coaxing, thrusting faster, letting her set the rhythm as best as she’s able to given their positioning. Sweat stains the wall behind them. They’re both breathing like they’ve run a marathon.

  She grabs at his buttocks, exposed as his pants pool around his ankles, and pulls him in deeper. She wants more than he can give but she tries anyway.

  He’s gasping for air.

  She’s moaning in his ear, urging him to fuck her like she’s never been done before.

  It’s then that he realizes the truth: that she’s the one in control. That any pretense of him being the hunter has been nothing but a lie.

  He doesn’t care.

  He’s here, now, inside her. She’s moaning. Louder. Louder. Ever so much louder. For a moment, maybe he worries that their neighbors will call the front desk to report the presence of a racket on the fourteenth floor.

  But he knows they won’t. And the thought vanishes quickly as he feels her nails rake his buttocks again. He scents the first tinge of blood on the air. But it only drives him wilder than before.

  There’s a lust here he’s never known before. Not with any woman. Not ever.

  And he wants to feel just how far he can go.

  He pumps now for all he’s worth. In and out, in and out, in and out like some sort of cliche Hollywood cutaway of oil drills or trains barreling down the track.

  He’s both of those now - a cartoon image of what he thinks of himself. Gone is the predator, the suave and debonair man who stalked his victim and brought her back to this hotel to make all of her fantasies come true.

  Gone.

  He’s been reduced to what he really is: a man who lusted after a woman who was lucky enough to find himself between her legs.

  More, she whispers.

  He pumps harder. Harder then he ever has before. And he feels the coming orgasm brewing somewhere down deep in his scrotum. Part of him wants to hold it off and he wonders if he can, but a bigger part wants to explode like he never has before.

  He’s been chasing it his whole life. That edge-of-oblivion orgasm that leaves him wondering if he’s dying or already dead, if he’s ever going to have something like it ever again.

  The rising tide swells up from the root of his primal being - that core instinct for procreation - and shoots through thousands of years of civilization and proper public behavior - finally and blissfully erupting out of him and deep into the wetness of her soul.

  He doesn’t even realize he’s been cut, he’s too elated from the orgasm to feel any pain.

  Any alarm.

  But maybe the scent of blood becomes too much and alarm bells finally go off. Confusion grabs at his brain still trying to recover from his primitive lust. He looks into her eyes.

  Those eyes.

  Black as the night.

  Black as her soul.

  He feels the first gush of blood streaming from the open cut in his neck, across the trachea and into the carotid artery. The spray of it remarkably similar to that of his ejaculation.

  He reels back, falling out of her with his limp and flaccid member swaying in the motion, his hands clutching at his throat, aware now of what she’s done.

  He looks at her but he can’t speak. Not with a severed trachea. But he’s far from dead. Because he’s one of us. One of the vampires. He’ll heal quickly.

  But not this time.

  Not ever again.

  Because she comes for him now in that moment of confusion. Her hands hold a length of wood. Polished. Precise.

  And when she impales him with it, his first thought is whether this is the way it felt when he shoved himself into her wetness, but it fades quickly.

  His incisors lengthen as the wood rea
cts with his bloodstream and starts the imminent death spiral.

  His tongue flicks across their sharpened points.

  He’s gasping now, knowing the awful truth.

  He’s been the prey all along.

  But not for sex.

  For some other purpose.

  One he will never know.

  He slumps to the ground, the blackness coming for him from the edges of his vision, quickly shutting everything down until at last, he falls across the divide between the life he knew…

  …and the death that awaits him.

  As he succumbs, he wonders if he’s hearing her laughing from the side of life he’s leaving, or if it’s music from the afterlife he goes to.

  Then nothing more.

  1

  That’s how I pictured it, standing there inside the hotel room. The walls of the place looked like they’d been painted by an epileptic on a cocaine binge. Blood was everywhere and the scent of death hung heavy about the place. The way a slaughterhouse might look, I thought.

  Niles was doing his level best not to look too grossed out while the clean-up team went about their work. We were lucky; this happened in a hotel owned by vampires and one that catered exclusively to my kind. If this murder had gone down elsewhere in Boston, we wouldn’t have been able to get access to it and therefore we would have been shit out of luck in the clues department.

  Not that I expected to find very much here. Sure, the crime scene guys would vacuum everything up and analyze it as well as they could, but I didn’t think a killer like this was going to be careless. I didn’t think they cared about anything except making a statement.

  An announcement as it were.

  “I’m here,” I said quietly.

  “Thank you,” said Niles. “You’re such a comfort during these times.”

  I frowned at him. “Just thinking aloud.”

  “Mmm hmm,” said my Control. He motioned me to follow him to the balcony where we both sucked in some of the frigid February air. Even though it was ice cold, it made me feel better. And Niles looked as though he’d regained some of his pallor.

  “Why’d you bring me in on this?” I asked. “This isn’t the usual sort of thing I handle.”

  “I’ve got no one else,” said Niles. “And technically, this sort of thing falls under your purview. You’ve been chasing terrorists and drug dealers too much lately. A killer like this ought to invigorate you.”

  “Invigorate me?” I eyed him. “You sure that’s the right word to use? We’ve got a dead body in there. It’s not exactly invigorating for him, is it?”

  Niles held up his hand. “You know what I mean. This is something different. Something you can sink your teeth into.”

  “Jesus, you actually just said that, didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t get much sleep last night. I’m running on fumes.”

  “I guess.” I looked out across the Boston skyline and breathed. It had been a few months since I’d seen any action, and frankly, I wasn’t minding it. I’d come off a string of operations that seemed to span an entire spectrum of bad shit. The downtime in December gave me some much needed rest and recuperation. I even managed to squeeze in a trip to see Talya down in St. Thomas for seven days of nonstop sex and sun.

  Needless to say, my workout regimen had gone to hell. But I figured bedroom calisthenics more than made up for the fact that I hadn’t touched a barbell in some time. I’d remedy that later with a crushing workout at the CrossFit box I attended.

  Not the first box I’d been a member of: that place had gone to hell in a hand basket by catering to the lowest common denominator of mediocrity instead of pushing people to be better. Calling it “CrossFit lite” would be more accurate, which was a shame since it used to be an awesome place to get a workout.

  The new place was much better. They didn’t care who you were and what your excuses were, they just wanted you to get better every time you came through the door. I respected that. Plus, there weren’t any so-called lifetime members mucking up the water with their bullshit.

  “The point is,” said Niles then, “I need you on this. As many other things as I know you’ve got brewing, this seems to be more immediate.”

  “It’s one killing,” I said. I’ll bet you could get it wrapped up within a day.”

  “It’s not one,” said Niles. “It’s two.”

  I frowned. “Two? When did the other one take place?”

  “December.”

  “And you didn’t call me back?”

  Niles shrugged. “As you just said, it was only one. Plus, you needed some time off.”

  “Clues?”

  Niles shook his head. “Nothing to write home about. MO looks the same as this, though. Crime scene techs got nothing. No DNA. Nada.”

  “Where did that one happen?”

  “In a hotel not run by one of us,” said Niles. “Getting into the place files was child’s play for the Ferrets, but didn’t produce much of anything. Boston cops wrote it off as some random thing even though it’s still officially an open investigation. But we can read the writing on the wall; they’ve got nothing and they know it.”

  “Security camera footage?”

  Niles eyed me. “If there was anything, I’d tell you. We asked all the same questions, my friend. BPD had a ghost killer who took out one of our own, some suburban cop. We couldn’t run it down without risking exposure, so we back-burnered it.” He gestured over his shoulder. “This, though…this is on our turf and we can take our time poring over the scene and hopefully find something.”

  “Think we will?”

  Niles grinned. “Nope. You?”

  I shook my head. “Not with something like this. This isn’t a random killer. Not some closet maniac. This is different.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “It feels…I don’t know…almost staged, I guess. It wasn’t done in the moment; it was carefully planned and executed.”

  Niles eyed me. “You’ve seen the walls in there covered in blood, right? You think that was planned?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, but designed to make us think the opposite. Whoever did this took care on a level I haven’t seen in a while. They wanted us to think the killer was crazy. But they’re not. I mean, they might well be, but the act itself was calculated. Precise.”

  “And you haven’t even seen the body yet,” said Niles.

  “I don’t need to,” I said quietly.

  Niles paused and then nodded. “Well, you’re absolutely right about the precision. Most of the organs were removed with the care of a highly-trained surgeon. Textbook stuff, I’m told.”

  “Organ removal?”

  “Yeah,” said Niles. “And before you say it, this isn’t the work of the Ripper. We both know he’s dead. And gone. Thank god.”

  “Copy cat?”

  “It’s always possible, I suppose,” said Niles. “But to what end? To get at me? I don’t have that many enemies.”

  I chuckled. “That you know of. In this business, the enemies come out of the woodwork. Even from places where you’d never expect to find them. Trouble is, they seem to find you when you least expect it.”

  “I’d rather not work with that hypothesis, frankly,” said Niles. “The last time the pressure of it nearly did me in.”

  “I can’t rule it out yet,” I said. “But I hear you.”

  “If it’s a thread you’ve got to follow, then do it. But try to rule it out as soon as you can. My constitution is fragile in that regard.”

  “You’re stronger than you think, old buddy.”

  Niles smiled at me. “You know what I mean.”

  I watched him walk back inside the hotel room. The Ripper had done a number on him. I’d wondered a few times since then if Niles still carried that pain. I knew now that he did. If I could do anything to put his mind at ease, I would.

  Back in the hotel room, I squatted down and pulled the sheet back from the corpse. His name had been Richie Amalfi. He was a high power attorn
ey for a high profile law firm in a high-rise office building in the Financial District. Richie had a wife and three kids, a mansion in Wellesley and a summer home on Nantucket. He drove a Mercedes SUV to work each day and by all accounts had the sort of life a lot of people dream about. It was the sort of life that would have killed my soul, but there you go. We all had a role to play in life and Richie played his well, apparently.

  The question was: what sort of role had Richie played in this shit?

  I took a long look at the shell of his body. His heart was gone. So were his lungs. Gall bladder, spleen, even the coils of intestines and stomach were missing. That’s an awful lot of junk to carry out of a hotel room and I had to imagine that they would require some sort of special bag to haul away.

  To what end?

  I’d dealt with organ harvesters before and I didn’t relish the idea of doing so again.

  I stood and patted Niles on the shoulder as I walked by. “I’ll do some asking around downstairs and see where the thing takes me.”

  “I hope you had better luck than I did,” said Niles.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “The front desk brain trust is especially lucid today.”

  I smirked and grabbed the elevator back down to the lobby. The hotel was a boutique luxury number with Rothko prints on the walls and subdued lighting to make you feel like you were A list material. It worked. Instrumental music with a lounge beat slipped out of unseen speakers and flitted through the air as I walked over to the front desk.

  He was about thirty and looked like he’d had a spectacular day already, judging by the constant stream of sighs coming out of him as he stared at a computer screen and angrily tapped at the keys.

  “My chicken fingers were cold.”

  His head shot up. “What?”

  “My chicken fingers. Room service. Totally cold. Frozen, in fact. It was very distressful. I’m worried I might need a safe zone.”

  One eyebrow shifted as he took me in. I was wearing a merino wool black turtleneck under the long wool overcoat with a brilliant red cashmere scarf, black jeans, and black leather boots. I looked pretty damned good, if I do say so myself.