BETRAYED
The door opened wide as soonas I stepped onto the stoop. Drake greeted me with soft eyes and a concerned tilt to his mouth. As he ushered me through the door, I chastised myself for involving him in my drama once again. He was a human, and one who thought he was in love with me. The very last thing I should be doing is turning up on his doorstep in the middle of the night with a sob story I can't even convey to him. It was only going to make things worse, like a temporary band aid that would eventually need to be ripped off for the wound to heal properly.
“I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t be here. Things are such a mess right now and I don’t have many friends I feel safe with.” I sat my bag by the door and turned to face him. “I can still count on you as my friend, right?”
Drake raised his hand from his side. Clasped in his palm was a club that closely resembled the ones I’d seen police carry on TV. I didn’t have time to react as he smashed it into the side of my skull. It was the second time I’d been hit within a short amount of time, and my body crumpled to the ground instantly.
It was the smells that woke me. There was water somewhere in the background. Dank, dirty water that had been sitting for some time. There were droplets dripping from somewhere, echoing as they connected with a growing puddle. Extending my hands, I felt the cold concrete of the surrounding floor. My body was freezing, stripped of the clothes I’d arrived in.
There was no light. Not even a pinprick. I opened my eyes as wide as I could to try to focus on anything, but there was nothing. Tight rope bound my wrists, the same rope bit into my ankles painfully.
“Drake?” I called out. My voice echoed in the empty space. I must have been in a basement or a cellar of some sort. Fear crept into the corners of my mind. Scooting backward, I found the edge of the wall and clung to it, as if it would protect me from whatever lurked beyond me in the darkness.
“Drake? Why have you done this to me?” No response from my captor. “I’ll do whatever you say. Just please, let me go.”
A door opened and closed from somewhere, but I couldn’t zero in on where the sound originated from. My ears were betraying me in the open space.
“Is that you, Drake? Are you here?” I turned my pheromones on overdrive to try to coax him out. If he was within a hundred feet of me, he would be feeling very uncomfortable right now.
Someone chuckled in the black nothingness of the room. “I’m here, Dahlia, but that’s not going to work on me. It never has.”
Yellow light illuminated the space from a bare lightbulb swinging from the ceiling. Drake held the dirty string in his hand, a grin spreading across his face. I fought with my eyes to adjust to the sudden light, but it hurt. Paired with the multiple blunt force traumas that I’d just sustained; I was rocking quite the headache.
The ropes made it hard, but I opened my legs and bared myself to him. “Come to me Drake. Let me feel you slide inside of me. I promise it’ll be better than any other time you’ve ever touched me. All you have to do is untie the ropes.” I lifted my hips, arched my back, and forced my breasts forward as best I could with the constraints. Drake put his hand to his chin and watched me, but he didn’t move forward. My attempts were falling. How was that possible?
“You didn’t hear anything I said, did you?” he asked.
“Don’t you want to fuck me?” I asked.
He licked his lips. “Oh, I do, but I don’t have to. I feel what you’re doing. The air is alive with your heat, your sex. I can smell you, taste you on the tip of my tongue. But I’m not going to take you. Not right now, anyway. You can stop wasting your efforts.”
Something wasn’t right. Any normal man would be slack jawed and drooling at this point with the amount of heat I was throwing. They would be my slave for as long as I held them with my power, but Drake wasn’t affected at all. In fact, he was smiling slightly and gazing down at me as if I was doing the cutest thing.
“What are you?” I asked without really thinking about the words coming out of my mouth. “You can’t be human.”
“Should I play the game and ask you the same thing?” He squatted, placing his hands on his thighs. “I guess I’m winning this round. I already know you’re a Succubus. I tried to tell you I knew that last time you were naked with me, but you didn’t seem like you were ready to talk about it, so I let it go. I knew I would revisit the subject later, so I wasn’t in a hurry.”
I sucked in a breath. I should have followed my instincts when I heard him utter those words. They hadn’t set right with me then, and they sure as fuck didn’t sit well with me now. I closed my legs and tucked them in close to my chest. My pheromones dissipated as quickly as I had turned them on. No sense in wasting my energy if it wasn’t going to do anything for me.
“There,” he said. “Now we can talk like adults, since you’re not trying to seduce me any longer. Doesn’t that make you tired?”
“What are you?” I repeated my question from before with a harder tone in my voice. I needed answers, and I needed them now.
“I’m a little like you, and a little like them.”
“Them?” I asked perplexed.
“Humans,” he responded. His eyes fixed on me, and I tried to identify what I saw inside. How had I misread him for so long?
“What does that mean? How can you be a little of this and a little of that? You’re either one or the other. A cat can’t also be part dog. That’s ridiculous.” I shivered, the cold from the floor creeping into my bones. “Tell me what you are, Drake. I’m tired of the games. We could have just had a discussion over coffee like normal people. You didn’t have to hit me and tie me up down here. What are you so afraid of?”
“You have others claiming to be your mates.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” I wanted to scream. I wanted to throw things. Most of all, I wanted to hit him in the mouth. I’d never hit anyone in my life, but I was very interested in trying my hand at it.
Drake plopped his butt on the floor and sighed. “I suppose I should start at the beginning. I said I’m a little like you and a little like them because that was an accurate way of putting it. My mother was a Succubus. My father was a human, so I guess that makes me a hybrid.”
“That’s not possible,” I interrupted. “Our genetics aren’t the same. We can’t breed with humans. It would be like a human having a baby with a chimpanzee. Our body chemistry just doesn’t line up.”
“And yet, here I am.” He touched his fists to his chest.
“How can that be?” I asked quietly.
“The humans kidnapped my mother. She wasn’t careful when she chose to feed. This was back in 1890 or so, and she didn’t have any others of her kind around to teach her how to feed correctly. The town knew what she was. Women hated her, and the men sought her out. She ran a whorehouse on the edge of the small city where she lived, and she made more money doing that than most people are able to make today. But word about her spread.” Drake paused and looked at me as if waiting for a response.