“DON’T TOUCH ME!” I screamed at them, the thought of Reed’s words still hanging in my mind. They both jumped back a step when I exploded, and I held my hands out to put them at arm’s length.
“I don’t get it; I see no cause of death.” Dr. Sessions’ words felt like an indictment of me.
“I killed him,” I said into the silence that filled the room. “I killed him with my touch…”
Ariadne and Dr. Perugini exchanged a look. “If you say so,” Dr. Perugini said with an air of patronization. She reached for me again, Ariadne a step behind her. “I need you to sit down and relax…”
Old Man Winter took two long strides from where he stood at the side of Wolfe’s body and landed a long arm on the shoulders of Dr. Perugini and Ariadne. “Don’t…” he mumbled in quiet warning, “…touch her.”
They both looked at him in surprise, but Perugini’s turned to annoyance. “She’s injured. I need to get her back to the Directorate and treat her wounds.”
Old Man Winter did not budge. “She’ll be fine. Do not touch her without heavy gloves.” His gaze fell over me again, and he turned back to where the agents stood around the body of Wolfe.
“Or what?” Perugini spat at him. “She’s hurt, she’s delusional, Erich! She’s just been through a ridiculous level of trauma – you can’t possibly think she killed this maniac by touching him.” She looked after him, and he hesitated, and the chill of the cold air from the window filled the room, swirling around him as though it were embracing a very old friend. “Erich?” she asked again, note of disbelief filling her voice. “You don’t actually believe her?”
He stared down at Wolfe for a long moment before he answered. “Certainly I believe her,” he replied. His cold blue eyes swept back to Dr. Perugini, then to Ariadne, finally coming to rest on me. “It is as she said. She touched him, and he likely screamed and begged for his life, and she killed him with her hands. With her touch.”
I felt a chill unrelated to the broken window as my eyes followed Old Man Winter’s down to the corpse of Wolfe, the scariest maniac I’d ever heard of, dead, helpless, on the floor – the way I’d made him. I looked back up and the biting fear ate at me, doubts, horror, still swirling in my brain, which was rocketing at a mile a second. “What…am…I?” I croaked out at him.
“What am I?” I asked again, stronger this time. He did not answer me, instead turning away after gesturing at Wolfe’s body as he swept up the stairs. Dr. Perugini reached for my elbow and I brushed her off, knocking her aside.
“WHAT AM I?” I howled at him as he retreated.
A voice, deathly familiar, prickled at the back of my mind, instilling a sense of calm that came from deep inside, an answer to a question that was asked and answered somewhere in the depths of me.
Soul eater , it said in a raspy, whispering voice.
Succubus.
Twenty-five
“You’re what would be known in mythology as a succubus,” Dr. Sessions said in a voice pitched with excitement. We were back at the Directorate hours later. I had let Ariadne and Dr. Perugini coax me upstairs and into a waiting car after my question was answered from within. Although I was familiar with the myth of succubi, I knew that the answer hadn’t come from me. And that left another question that I was sure I could answer, but didn’t want to.
After a visit to the medical unit to make sure I was all right, Ariadne had asked me to see Dr. Sessions. I’d agreed. So there I sat, clad once more in a long sleeved turtleneck, jeans, and with a pair of heavy mittens they’d rummaged for me, on his examination table, him keeping an arm’s length away while he talked.
“I thought that succubi…uh…” I blushed as I thought about having to ask the doctor the question that was on my mind. Ariadne and Dr. Perugini were both in the lab as well, hovering in the background. Perugini, in particular, looked as though she was ready to level Dr. Sessions, staring at him from across the room through half-slitted eyes. “…slept with men in order to steal their souls.”
Dr. Sessions smiled, which at the present moment didn’t creep me out as much as it might have a week ago. “No. Well,” he rescinded, “you could, I suppose, but all that’s necessary is the touch of your skin. You touch someone with your bare hands, or your face – anything involving flesh to flesh contact, and they’ll start to feel the effects of your power.”
“Mom knew,” I said in a low whisper. “That’s why she had rule #4.”
“Excuse me?” Sessions looked at me.
“My mom,” I explained. “She had a rule that I wasn’t allowed to wander around the house without being fully dressed, down to having on gloves at all times. I assumed that it was because we had to be ready to run at a moment’s notice.”
“Yes, your mother likely knew,” he agreed, turning back to some printouts of the data he’d accumulated on me through our testing. “She was probably the source of your power; I suspect she was a succubus as well. It’s very rare, of course; most of our data on succubi is apocryphal – in fact, there’s only one in our records known to be alive.” He chirruped with a twitter of excitement. “Well, three now, I suppose, counting you and your mother.”
“How…do I kill someone by touching them?” I asked, still in disbelief.
“Looking for a scientific explanation?” He shrugged, still an air of whimsical amusement, as though he were so excited by the prospect of a new subject for study that he failed to realize that I might be feeling something other than what he was. “I can’t explain it without studying the effect in more detail. Of course, we brought Wolfe’s body back for study—” he pointed to a white sheet on a nearby table, covering a monstrous corpse—“which should be just a wealth of information. Since this is the first chance anyone’s had to study a confirmed victim of a succubus, it’s really a pioneering step…”
Victim. His words drifted past me after that, and as he kept talking, I thought about Wolfe as a victim. Wolfe had never been a victim of anything in his life until I came along. He made victims; he wasn’t one. Until now.
Now he was my first.
“…so I’ll be studying him. Of course there are tests I’ll be wanting to run on you as time goes by, and hopefully we can get to the bottom of the root physiological causes of your power.” Sessions clapped his hands together and looked at me with unsuppressed glee. “It’s very exciting, isn’t it?”
I cast a look back at Wolfe, still hidden under the sheet. “Thrilling.”
It is thrilling, isn’t it…
I ignored the voice in my head and turned back to Dr. Sessions. “A question about succubi…aren’t they supposed to drain the souls of their victims?”
He entertained a high, giggly laugh. “Yes, according to anecdotes, incubi – the male counterpart of your type of meta – and succubi steal the souls of their victims, but of course they also are reported to do it through sexual contact, which is not what happened in this case.” He pushed his glasses up on his nose, suddenly disheveled. “Right?”
A wave of revulsion passed over me. “I grabbed him around the throat, Doc.”
“Oh, okay, that’s what I thought.” He recovered and shifted back to glee. “I think it doubtful you ‘stole his soul’,” Sessions said with a scornful laugh. “Bear in mind that also in the mythological descriptions is the idea that a succubus or incubus comes to their victim in their dreams, which is,” he said with another giggle, “absolutely preposterous.”
I stared back at him. “Right.”
“I think you can see the myth and reality when it comes to meta-humans is somewhat divergent.” He smiled. “Any other questions? Very good, then. Well, you get back to recovering under Dr. Perugini’s able ministrations and I’ll give you a call as soon as I have anything of interest to report.”