Memoirs of an Incubus: Part One

No matter where you go or what kind of times you live in, the one thing that nearly every human being, whether you’re talking about men or women, young or old, has in common is desire. Desire of the physical and sexual sort of course but on a deeper level the desire to be cared about and loved, and it's that desire that feeds me. Who am I you might be wondering? Well you can call me Remy, it’s not the name I was born with but it's what everyone calls me so you might as well too. I’m what’s been called an Incubus, or a sex demon if you’re feeling particularly racist, and that desire is my life.


I’ve been called evil in the past, mostly by miserable assholes that want everyone else to be as miserable as them, but I don’t let it phase me, and you shouldn’t either. Trust me, my “victims” if you really want to call them that never go through any kind of pain, I hate violence and avoid it unless it’s absolutely necessary. In fact, they get to experience absolute bliss in the arms of the lover they always wanted while I get to feed on that wonderful life energy they won’t need anymore before they pass away like they’re falling asleep. Isn’t that how everybody wants to go? I’m doing a public service if you ask me.


Anyways I digress. My life isn’t all fun and games. Dead bodies, even of those that died happily tend to make people upset, and upset people ask questions, the kind of questions that make living in one place pretty difficult, so I move around a lot. The nomadic lifestyle has its perks, one of which is seeing far off and exotic places, and on the night my life changed forever, I was in one such exotic place, Ambia, The City in the Clouds.


Or more specifically, I was in some lowbrow club on the lower levels of the massive airships’s Engine Quarter, where the working class citizens of Ambia toiled long hours for shitty wages maintaining the City’s intricate propulsion systems so the whole damn thing didn’t plommet down to the ground below at the behest of wealthy politicians and a bloated, corrupt clergy. It was the kind of place where poverty and discontent walked hand in hand, where people felt trapped and hopeless, drinking away their stress and sorrow while they silently prayed that something, anything, would come along to make their lives worth living. In other words, it was the perfect place for me.


I had walked in and just sat down as I usually did, ordered a drink, and listened to the pulsating beats of the music around me while I waited for someone to talk to me. Someone always did. Now at this point you might be asking yourself what a sex demon looks like, since I always got somebody’s attention pretty much wherever I went and I wish I could tell you but to be honest I’m not entirely sure. Some legends will tell you that an Incubus is a shape-shifter, but this isn’t really true. People see in me what they desire, either sexually or emotionally, and everybody is different. Most everyone sees a man when they look at me, though that isn’t always the case. I once had a guy compliment my tits, that had been an interesting night. Aside from that, everything about me varies depending on who’s looking at me. Some people think I’m tall with red hair, others think I’m short and stocky with thick blond hair, there really isn’t any consistency, and I’ve never seen anything when I look in the mirror, just a blank space where a person should be. I guess it just comes with the territory.


On this particular night I was first approached by a plain looking man who spoke to me nervously and quietly, like he was doing something wrong merely by striking up a conversation. I was a bit surprised when he mentioned a wife, since by his slightly effeminate manner of speech and the fact that he kept stealing glances at my crotch throughout our converstion it seemed pretty clear he was a homosexual, but that kind of thing was fairly common in Ambia since the ruling clergy looked at intimate relations between men less than favourably. I didn't really mind. I have no particular preferences with humans when it comes to gender, a man's life force is just as nourishing as a woman's and variety is the slice of life. We talked for about an hour before he worked up the courage to ask if I wanted to go home with him, and I put on my most convincing excited face before I agreed.


We left the club and walked out onto the dimly lit street. The open sky wasn’t visible from the depths of the Engine Quarter, just the massive gears and serpentine metal supports that made up the skeleton of the city above. The only sources of light down here were the neon lights of the bars, clubs, brothels, and the Engine Core at the center of the Quarter.


It’s a reactor of sorts as far as I know, though I’m not a scientist or any other kind of egghead so don’t quote me on that. It stands towering above all the other structures in the Quarter and has a pale blue light at the top of that sort of looks like a miniature sun, though I think it’s much prettier than the real thing. I found myself staring at it absentmindedly as I paced down the crowded street past an assortment of rough looking types.


Drug-dealers, jaded looking hookers and their pimps, criminals looking to disappear into the crowd, and a few sorry sons of bitches that just didn’t have a roof to put over their heads with this guy who’s name I can't recall and half-heartedly listened to as he spoke to me. I wasn’t trying to be rude, I was just really off my game that night in light of some weird shit that had been going on in my life not long before that, but I’ll cover that later.


Anyway we walked west from the club I think, passed a couple intersections while he talked my ear off about this and that, the usual stuff mostly, his shitty job crunching numbers for a boss he hated up in the Cloud Quarter where all the fat cats of Ambia lived the literal high life among the clouds, his deteriorating relationship with his wife who was getting more and more suspicious about his preferences, and the deep hole of debt he was in financially. I nodded and responded with a reassuring word when it was necessary, but my mind just wasn’t all there. When we finally did get back to his place I was a bit surprised by how nice it was.


Most folks that lived in the Engine Quarter could barely afford a run-down one bedroom apartment but this guy’s house was pretty posh, had a voice activated steel gate and everything. Beyond that was a modest driveway that led to a small yet upscale looking two-story house, the interior of which was painstakingly decorated to look like the inside of a house you’d see in the Cloud Quarter, clean and tidy with a few paintings on the walls that were probably very skilled forgeries of some paintings done by a handful of Ambia’s famous artists.


We barely got through the door before he pushed me up against a wall and started planting awkward, sloppy kisses on my neck and lower jaw while I more or less just went through the motions. I’m not one to kiss and tell so I won’t go into the raunchy details, but what I will say is that he surrendered his soul sooner than most. The whole ordeal took maybe 15 minutes.


His soul tasted bittersweet, almost like blueberries, which didn't come as much of a surprise, the really lonely ones always did.


After I'd eaten my fill, I pushed the freshly made dead man off my chest where he had been laying and made my way out of the house and back onto the street, trying not to be too conspicuous as I did.


I wasn't too worried about being noticed since I was pretty much positive that no one would ever be able to give an accurate description of me, but my Dad always used to tell me you could never be too careful, and before you ask, yes I had a father like just like anybody else and sure he was a black hearted bastard with a taste for dark sorcery and wanton cruelty, but he had smart shit to say every now and again.


I glanced at my watch after I made it back onto the crowded, trash filled street which read 10:45pm. Since the night was still young and I was still a bit hungry I made my way over to The Thirst, a dilapidated old building that I'm told used to be a pretty upscale resort of some kind back when the Engine Quarter was still the kind of place where respectable types came to spend their money.


Nowadays however it was just another seedy nightclub, though it was the closest thing you could get down here to a classy establishment.


I went there fairly often against my better judgement. I had a rule not to pick up too many people from the same place, since that would make it fairly obvious to any body who might be investigating my particular career where I liked to hang out, but there was just something about the place that made me keep coming back.


Maybe it was the ambiance, maybe it was the surprisingly good food and cheap liquor, or maybe it was Mel, that good natured if slightly jaded woman that stood behind the bar who always poured and mixed my drinks just right, and could always make me laugh when I was having a bad night.


That night she had a look that was somewhere between deeply concerned, and disappointed on her face as I made my way up to the bar counter. When she spoke to me, She had the tone of a mother questioning a child that had been up to no good.


" What the Hell have you been doing Remy?"


I did my best to sound both surprised and indignant with my response.


" What the Hell are you talking about Mel? I ain't done anything to anybody and whoever says otherwise is a damn liar!"


She didn’t believe me, but instead of pressing me further, she let out an exasperated sigh and said


“ That girl’s been back in here asking about you, and Justicars have been in here asking about her.”


I didn’t think it was possible to fit so much bad news into a single sentence like that. If you don’t know what a Justicar is you should count yourself lucky, because that means you’ve probably never met one. In theory, they’re supposed to be the black armored keepers of law and order in Ambia but in reality they are better described as mentally unhinged sociopaths with severe inferiority complexes and high end plasma weapons.


I’ve done a pretty good job of avoiding them so far, but hearing that they’ve been poking around my favorite club is more than a little unnerving, and the girl... well, the girl is complicated.


I think her name’s Tina or something close to that. Definitely starts with a T. I met her here at the Thirst a few months ago when I first got to Ambia. I remember that she had this fish out of water look on her face when I spotted her from where I sat at the bar, like she'd never been in a nightclub before.


She wasn't the prettiest girl I'd ever seen, but she was most certainly not ugly either. Her brown hair was about shoulder length, and her soft blue eyes had a strange way of holding your attention. She looked like she took care of herself, far too much so for her to have been from the Engine Quarter, and she carried herself like she came from money.


Perhaps out of curiosity, or perhaps out of sheer boredom, I approached her rather than waiting for her to approach me.


We hit it off pretty well and got to talking for what must have been hours. I don't remember the details clearly but she told me her father was some kind of big shot up in the Cloud Quarter and that she hated his fucking guts. According to her he was an oppressive piece of shit that tried to control every aspect of her life from what kind of studies she was allowed to pursue to what kind of clothes she was allowed to wear, and that she had come down to the very bowels of Ambia to escape from him, if only for a little while.


Having had first hand experience with terrible fathers myself, I found that pretty easy to relate to and shared with her some things I had hated about my own father without giving away too much about myself.


She seemed really taken with me by the end of our conversation, which wasn't unusual, but what was unusual was that I almost felt bad about what I knew would happen to her later that night, and that wasn't very much like me at all.


We left the club an hour or two before dawn. I remember her clutching my arm tenderly as we walked through the dark streets toward the shabby hotel room I was renting under a false name at the time. Up to this point, this had been a routine night for me, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary from picking someone up at a club at the beginning of the night, to the sex back at the hotel room with the intent of satisfying what some have called my “unholy appetites” at the end of the night.


What had been unusual, or rather what should not have been possible was that I had been unable to devour her soul during our intimate encounter. She survived the entire process seemingly unscathed, in fact she didn't even seem to notice my attempts to leech her life force. It was almost like she radiated some kind of power that nullified my own.


That had never happened even once before. In my several centuries of existence I'd never met anyone that was immune to my powers like she seemed to be, and it fucking terrified me.


Not really knowing what else to do, I left the room as soon as she fell asleep and haven't seen her since. I had hoped that once she got over her hurt feelings she would return to the Cloud Quarter and get on with her life in a place where I would never have to see her again, but it seemed that she was much more tenacious than I thought she would be.


Over the past few months, I've heard through the grapevine that she'd been going to almost every night club in the Engine Quarter searching for me, and bringing the Justicars down here after her by the sound of it for some reason.


The whole thing was turning into a huge fucking mess. That kind of attention on my feeding grounds made life very hard for me, and I didn't like that one bit.


I sat there thinking about what rotten fucking luck I'd had in this city, and trying to think of a way out of it for a few minutes before Mel's expectant and irritated voice brought me back to reality.


"Well? What do you got to say about all this shit Remy? I can't have the law coming in here every other night looking for one of your little spurned sweethearts! It's killing my business!"


" She's not a "spurned sweetheart" Mel. This shit is just a big misunderstanding."


I said defensively.


"Well then why don't you explain that to her next time you see her."


" I'm not really trying to run into her again"


"Well, it's too late for that."


She replied with a smirk as she gestured to something behind me. My heart sank even before I heard that familiar voice call out to me.


"Remy!"


I turned around on the bar stool to see that same girl with the soft blue eyes from months earlier pushing almost desperately through the crowd to reach me and I cringed a little inside.


I turned back around and tried to make myself as small as possible while Mel giggled at my expense.


"You're a cold-hearted bitch Mel."


I groaned.


"And you're a sleazy shit stain."


She shot back. I didn't really have a comeback for that. Instead I just let out a deep sigh and turned around just in time to come face to face with Tina or whatever her name was, prepared to break her heart a for second time and get on with my night.


She looked absolutely ecstatic to see me. Which made what I was going to say all the more awkward.


"Remy! I've been looking for you forever! We need to talk.."


"Listen.. Tina." I started


"Tanya" she corrected looking slightly perplexed by my mistake.


"Tanya… that was a one time thing. I don't want to hurt your feelings but I'm not really looking to get deeply involved with someone right now.."


"No Remy, you don't understand we need to talk about something serious..."


"Well we're talking right now, say what you need to."


" I'd rather talk about this in private, I think I'm being followed and what I have to say can't reach the wrong ears."


She said in a deathly serious tone


I feel like I should say at this point that it's very hard to creep out an Incubus, but I was starting to get creepy vibes from this whole situation nevertheless and I was mentally calculating my escape route when a bright bolt of white hot plasma ripped through my left shoulder and sent me tumbling to the floor.


A sharp piercing scream rang out over the club music and I saw people scrambling in every direction to get away from the source of the shot.


It had been at least a few decades since the last time somebody had tried to murder me, so I was really out of practice when it came to processing pain, and holy shit did that plasma hurt. The wound had cauterized on it’s own almost instantly, which was the only up side of getting shot with modern weapons these days.


Excruciating pain filled my senses and time seemed to slow around me as adrenaline kicked in and I became hyper aware of everything happening around me. I was in a very literal sense seeing red. My eyes had turned from their typical color into the deep red glow of a demon in the throes of rage, and my face contorted into something terrifying and only vaguely human, at least I think it did. The look of sheer shock and abject terror that spread across Tanya’s face as she stared at me writhing in agony on the ground told me that whatever I looked like to her was not not normal.


I stayed low to the ground and crawled across the floor with the kind of unnatural speed and grace one would see in a spider as I ducked and weaved through the crowd of people trying to escape the club. I spotted the first of my enemies standing over by one of the loudspeakers that pumped music into the club. He was a tall guy in a dark jacket with a hood pulled across his face. In his right hand he brandished a sleek looking black handgun with a brightly glowing energy cell where the magazine should have been.


I’d seen guns like that down here before. It was the kind of compact plasma weapon that was incredibly popular with the drug dealers and professional killers of the Engine Quarter. Since it seemed pretty clear that he wasn’t here to sell me drugs it was pretty obvious to me which one of those groups he belonged to.


The DJ who had been playing the clubs music had run out the front door as soon as the first shot had been fired leaving the music machines unattended, and as I got close enough to pounce on my attacker, the next song that had been queued up to play rang out over the loudspeakers, the fast paced techno beats and sad, heartbroken lyrics of a remixed version of Deadmau 5’s Raise your Weapon acting as the soundtrack to our battle.


“ Ripping my heart was so easy, so easy”


A soft, feminene voice sang as I lunged up from the floor at the hooded killer in a frenzy, my hands transforming from typical human hands into long serrated black claws. He saw me at the last second and tried to fire off another shot of plasma. But I knocked the gun out of his hand and sent it clattering to the floor before I grabbed his left shoulder, sinking my claws into his flesh as I did, and pushed the claws of my right hand into the soft skin under his chin and up into his skull. He twitched and thrashed around in my grip as he died, and I was slightly disgusted by the wet, slick feeling of the blood and brains on my claws as I retracted them.


As the dead man fell to the floor I made a mental note to wash my hands before I left the club just in time to spot another hooded man who could have been a carbon copy of the first one, right down to the sleek black pistol standing by the entrance let out a shriek of surprise before firing a volley of bright plasma bolts at me and giving me no choice but to jump behind an overturned table nearby for cover.


“ Launch your assault now, take it easy”


Thinking quickly I ripped off a leg of the table and threw it at the second assailant hoping to impale him with it.


I wasn't that lucky, though it did manage to hit him square in the face. He yelped in pain and I could hear the sound of his nose breaking as he tumbled backwards. I took the opportunity to leap over the table as fast as I was able, which was in fact pretty damn fast, I doubt anybody watching the fight would have been able to follow my movements with their naked eyes but again I digress.


I was on the man before he had a chance to react and I used my claws to stick him like a pin cushion as many times as could before something hard and blunt struck my temple and filled my vision with white spots.


"Raise your weapon, Raise your weapon."


Depending on how you looked at it, those particular lyrics of the song were either very well timed, or timed very poorly because when my vision cleared up enough for me to see who hit me I was greeted by the sight of yet another hooded hit man, though this one only vaguely resembled the other two.


He was at least two or three feet taller than the others and his muscles were fucking massive. They bulged through his jacket., it was not at all an exaggeration to say that he looked like a leather wrapped rhino on steroids.



In his hands he held what looked like a length of metal pipe, and I didn't really have a lot of time to reflect on how unprofessional it was for a professional killer to be using a fucking metal pipe before he raised it back over his head and swung at me again.


"One word and it's over."


I rolled out the way of the incoming blow and sliced out a chunk of the hooded behemoth's ankle as I rolled behind him.

I think I managed to cut his Achilles tendon because he fell over onto the floor gripping his ankle as he groaned in pain. I got a bit over confident after that, and tried to leap on top of the man and rip him to shreds like I had my previous attacker.


" Ripping through like a missile”


He flipped onto his back and caught me with both hands just before the impact and rolled the both of us over again so I was pinned under him while he started pummeling me with his huge fists. As blow after blow hit my face and I felt some of my teeth dislodge I decided that without a doubt this was the worst night I’d had in years, maybe even centuries. I tried to shield my face with my claws, but he hit way too hard and too fast than somebody his size should have been able to and I couldn’t do much about it. I started to see stars and black spots everywhere as the conscious world seemed to slip away from me.


"Ripping through my heart"


A deafening bang rang out from somewhere above me and the punches stopped almost as quickly as they had began. Warm blood and viscera spilled all over my face and I choked back the urge to vomit as I looked up to see half of my attackers head completely blown off.


"Raise your weapon, Raise your weapon, and it's over."


Spitting some broken teeth out of my mouth, I used all the strength I had left to push the giant corpse off me as the music died down and the club fell silent.


I wondered what the fuck had just happened for maybe a moment before I looked over in the direction the sound had come from to see Mel standing nearby with an annoyed look on her face and a fucking smoking sawed-off shotgun of all things in her hands. I didn't think they still made those anymore since this was my first time seeing one in like forty years.


I let out a relieved sigh and made another mental note to give Mel a tip next time I bought a drink here.


" Mel, have I ever told you you're an angel?" I exclaimed with a grin.


"Take your little girlfriend and get the fuck out of my club before the law gets here."


She replied dismissively before she walked back behind the bar swearing under her breath as she went.


I had completely forgotten about Tanya. I looked around the now deserted night club as the dim red and purple rave lights flashed on and off, making it really difficult to see much of anything clearly.


I caught movement from under a table out of the corner of my eye and walked over to investigate. Surely enough, crouched and hiding beneath the table was Tanya. She nearly jumped out of her skin when I leaned down to talk to her.


" You can come out now, the bad guys are all very dead."


She came out from under the table slowly and cautiously with her eyes closed. She didn't keep them closed though, and when she did open them and saw the mutilated thugs on the floor she vomited all over the floor almost immedaitely.


"First time seeing dead people?"


I asked her in a tone that may have been a bit too casual given the circumstances.


She gave me a disgusted look before she vomited again and took a few minutes to catch her breath before she finally spoke.


"What the fuck… who...what are you?"


She asked between labored breaths.


"I'm kinda complicated babe. I don't have the time to give details but believe me when I say I'm a very very bad man and you don't want to get mixed up with me. I need to get out of here before the Justicars show up, so this'll probably be the last time we see each other, have a nice life, better luck with your next man."


I said flippantly as I turned to leave without another thought. I figured that seeing the guy you've been chasing sprout claws and turn a few guys into mince meat would be enough to scare away any woman and I wouldn't have to say anymore. Little did I know she more to say to me, and what she had to say would turn my world upside down.


"Remy wait!"


She yelled as she ran after me and I turned back to reply to her with clear agitation.


"Look babe, do I have to spell this out for you? I'm a demon, like a literal demon straight from the pits of Hell, not exactly the type you can bring home to momma and papa, so why don't you do us both a favor and find somebody else to sleep with?"


Bewilderment and disgust spread across her face before it was quickly replaced by indignant anger and she started yelling at me


" You sleazy, egotistical piece of shit! You think I've been looking all over this shit hole town for you because I want to sleep with you again?"


Now I was genuinely confused. I couldn't fathom what else she could have wanted.


"Well… yeah" I said kind of sheepishly


She scoffed at my response


“Don’t flatter yourself. I’d never let you touch me again after what you did.”


“ Alright, then what the fuck do you want?” I shot back.


“ I needed to tell you something.”


“What? What could you possibly need to tell me that you’d go through all this trouble…”



“ I’m pregnant.” she said.


Life was never the same after that.