Incubus Moon (5 page)

An hour after breakfast, I emerged freshly showered and into the bright, warm Southern California sunshine on my way to meet with my realtor friend.

Above me, a lone, circling falcon cried out against the backdrop of the imposing San Gabriel Mountains. The remarkably clear air made every fold and crevice in them seem etched into earth and rock, the dry air laced with the delicate scent of rose and gardenia from Laura’s garden. Surely such a glorious day screamed for an open-air drive.

As luck would have it, the perfect vehicle for the task was parked in the driveway.

Yet another break with the past, I’d retired my old Jeep in favor of the sleek, new Audi convertible that sat winking back at me under the dazzling sunlight. My sole splurge with Laura’s money, there was no reason to feel guilty about purchasing it.

With my first priority of the day underway, the second would entail finding a suitable new place to live. And I knew just where to begin the search.

My cell phone roared to life through the Audi’s Bluetooth as I was pulling away from the realtor’s office and out into busy Colorado Boulevard traffic.

I glanced at the caller’s info displayed on the nav screen and was tempted to let the call go to voicemail. Instead, I held my breath and depressed the button on the console to accept it. “Hey,” I said in a lighthearted tone, hoping to avoid the storm I knew was coming.

“Seriously? You drop an adoption bomb on me. Bail on the birthday dinner my wife went to a lot of trouble to prepare for you. Then you fall off the grid for a couple of weeks.” Mark’s voice filtered through the convertible’s Bang & Olufsen speakers as smooth and bass-filled as though God was speaking to me. “Where the fuck have you been, Iverson?”

Underestimating my new car’s ability to give good phone, I lowered the volume. The entire city of Pasadena did not need to hear me getting the ass chewing of the century.

“Sorry. A lot’s been happening and—”

“Oh, peddle that to someone who doesn’t know you better,” Mark cut me off to say.

So much for the confrontation I’d been hoping to avoid.

“Whenever something bad happens, you pull the same old crap. You shut yourself off and go into your little shell of pain.”

“Mark, I—”

“I’m not finished.” Mark Gold was difficult to reason with when he got fired up. It was even more difficult to argue with him when I knew he was right. “You gotta let us in, Buddy. Chris and I aren’t here just for the good times. We were worried.
I
was worried.”

My best friend of fifteen years wasn’t an overly sentimental person, and I could already feel a lump forming low in my throat. “I really do miss you guys. And I’m genuinely sorry for pulling a Houdini. Guess I needed some time to sort things out.” Which wasn’t a lie.

“That’s what your buds are here to help you do.”

“If you really mean it,” I said, “how ‘bout you and Christie meet me in West Hollywood in an hour to help me look for an apartment?”

CHAPTER 6

I could hear the reservation in Christie’s voice on our way out of viewing the loft apartment my realtor had found for me online. “It’s…nice.”

“So’s his current place.
And
, it’s rent-free,” Mark was quick to point out. “At the very least, consider leasing out the house for a year. Then see how you feel about it.”

“Is that how long it takes to get over someone you loved betraying you?”

I didn’t mean to snap at him, but Mark couldn’t conceive of what I was going through. He and Christie grew up with a real mother and father, surrounded by siblings who adored them. He also didn’t know that my hand trembled every time I slipped the front door key into the lock, only to be greeted by dead silence once I stepped over the threshold. Nor did he realize that I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat screaming out Laura’s name. Sometimes, I thought I smelled her perfume in my room.

Lastly, what Mark failed to get was that the Monrovia house was a drowning pool of memories from which I couldn’t escape. It had to go. That, or I’d go insane from grief and resentment.

Christie reached out and pulled me into a hug on the building’s front walkway. “Let it out, baby,” she said, stroking the back of my head.

No. I refused to give into tears. I also wasn’t pulling away from her emotionally or physically the way Mark had accused me of doing earlier.
Points for me
.

In the end, I’d explained to my friends that selling the Monrovia house was a positive step toward a healthier future. Free and clear of any encumbrances, it had passed to me legally through the Iverson Family Trust and would net me north of two million dollars; money I could turn around and reinvest. There really was no bad in this scenario.

The move to West Hollywood proved another matter entirely.

Laura’s ghost renewed its assault on me within the first week, forcing me back onto the emotional rollercoaster between missing her and hating her decision to keep my adoption a secret. This led me back to that unforgettable day at Joy’s, and to the entity’s insistence that I seek out my real mother. That she alone could unite me with my true nature.

Which was what, exactly? Being a Child of Lilith? Being an incubus?

Unfortunately, there were no Iverson family members to talk to about any of this. My supposed father, Joshua (a man who could have easily passed for my black-haired twin), was an only child, as was his father, and my paternal grandparents had died years before I was born. With the exception of Laura’s family in Italy, who hadn’t returned any of my calls or emails, I was alone in this.

So I did the easiest thing I could think of at this late hour. I fired up my laptop and set out to do exactly what the entity at Joy’s had demanded of me. I wondered if that entity knew that, according to
Google
, there were over four million web results for the word
Incubus
.

It was going to be a long night.

At the bottom of the first page of hits I was able to narrow my search criteria to rule out the Nineties rock band of the same name, not to mention some truly awful B-movies, which now left me with a cool one point five million possibilities.

It was going to be a very long night, indeed.

After some cursory web trolling, I learned that incubi had quite the reputation with the church fathers and folklorists of yore, along with having their way with many a fair maiden.

The following was what I uncovered with just a few more clicks:

Incubus (demon):

In Western Medieval legend, an
incubus
(plural
incubi
) is a demon in male form that crouches upon the chests of sleeping women to engage in sexual intercourse with them. They are believed to do this in order to spawn other incubi. The demon drains vital energy from these female victims in order to sustain itself, and some sources indicate that it may be identified by having an unnaturally large and cold penis (for female demon counterpart, see
succubus
).

Seriously?
Nevertheless, I went ahead and clicked on the link.

Succubus (demon):

Succubus
(plural
succubi or succubae
), a demon taking the form of a woman who seduces men in dreams in order to engage in sexual intercourse. In contemporary mythology, a succubus may or may not appear in dream form and is often depicted as highly attractive (for male demon counterpart, see
incubus
).

The succubus draws energy from men to sustain herself, often until the victim becomes exhausted or dies. (see also
Lilith
and
the Lilin
)

The
Malleus Maleficarum
informs that a succubus collects semen from the men with whom she copulates, which incubi then use to impregnate human women, thus explaining how demons might sire children. Children so begotten were believed to be more susceptible to supernatural influences, or would themselves become demons.

There were tons of additional stories, some of which recounted everything from fallen angels with an insatiable lust for women to psychic vampires, from dream demons that could induce hypnagogic paralysis in order to play naughty games with their victims to (and my personal favorite) alien abductions!

The left side of my brain was begging me to call bullshit on everything I’d just read.

These were nothing more than fictions, ridiculous fabrications undoubtedly dreamed up by some repressed Jesuit from the Dark Ages who felt dirty for wanting to stick his pious pecker into everything that moved. So he invented sex demons to absolve him of his guilt and shame.

An incubus was no more real than leprechauns or unicorns were.

And yet, I couldn’t help recalling that circle of twelve dream women. Their beautiful and haunting faces certainly fit the succubi bill. Moreover, the entity at Joy’s had referred to me as a
Child of Lilith
. A demon might surely possess unique healing abilities. The gash in my palm from that broken shard of mirror had healed in under two days, and left no scar to boot.

It also stood to reason that, of all creatures, a sex demon would crave the one thing I had my entire adult life, and even more so since my thirtieth birthday—sex, and lots of it.

What I didn’t get (and there was a hell of a lot going on that I didn’t) was how my revved up libido factored sex with another man into the equation. Up to this point, and barring a one-night-stand with the hunky Texan, my sex life had been uncomplicatedly heterosexual. I was not into men. Period.

Then why had I found the experience so incredibly satisfying and liberating? That is, until his Dr. Jekyll’s alter ego decided to come out and play.

In the end, trying to wrap my head around hot, unbridled sex with another man for the first time in my life was the least of my troubles. I wanted my old life back. The one in which Laura was still alive and my real mother. The one that wasn’t filled with constant heartbreak and the bitterness of betrayal. And lastly, I wanted a return to a life in which the word
incubus
held no meaning for me.

Who was I kidding? That life was gone forever.