«Let go», it said. «You know me. You know what I can do.»

  Did her? Maybe. She'd rather not ask herself. Its voice, or whatever it passed for a voice, was warm and sensual, wrapping her like a blanket in a cold winter night. She could embrace it and let herself go into its warmth, accept it and be lost in it. She could, but she wasn't going to. It didn't matter what had happened in the dreams she still didn't remember clearly, things were different when she was awake. There was only one thing she had inherited from her mother, and she had never been as happy about that. Seduction charms didn't work on her, maybe because she came from one herself.

  Her mother – she had seen her only once in her life, and in spite of the outcome of that meeting she still couldn't think about her in any other way – was part of the ancient and devious fairy people. A people with no males. To reproduce, fairies didn't have much choice, and their best method was embracing simple humans, too weak-blooded to pollute their own lineage. Sometimes that happened on mutual consent. More often, as in her case, a fairy had a short-lived crush for a human male and ensnared him with her arts to obtain what she wanted. In both cases, those unions wouldn't last long, and almost often gave birth to a new life. And when a fairy gave birth that way, only two things could happen. Usually she bore a fairy, a female of course. Rarely a male was born, completely human, which was left with his male parent with no remorse or regret. Amanda was the third chance. The impossible one.

  «Don't touch me!» she roared, in fury, as she pushed the incubus away, placing her hands against its chest. Caught off-guard, the creature fell backwards, and she seized the moment to point her wand and hit it again, and again, and again. She hoped that, even though her first bolt had proved completely useless, a barrage could at least succeed in dazzling it. It wiped away her hopes with a smile.

  «It could have been pleasurable», it said, a slight sarcasm in its no-voice. «You made your choice.»

  Its body seemed to melt, as if it was suddenly becoming liquid. The wave that started moving towards her, tough, wasn't liquid at all, but crawling, made up by an apparently endless number of spiders.

  Did incubi have such powers? As far as she could remember, they shouldn't. Their ability to change their features was supposed to be fairly limited. Shapechanging wasn't one of their gifts, and splitting into more creatures should have been completely out of the equation.

  What she was seeing had to be some kind of illusion. She did her best to convince herself of that, to no good. Real or illusionary, spiders scared her to death. Was it the way it had killed Parker, having him face his deepest fears? She didn't know, and right then she didn't want to, she just wanted to be elsewhere.

  Although she knew it was useless, she hit several times with her wand the river of arachnids moving towards her, until nothing more happened and she realized she was out of charges.

  The spiders started to climb her shoes, going up her legs in spite of her frantic attempts to sweep them away. In a moment she was completely covered by a pulsating dark mass, unable even to scream, for fear that the creatures could crawl into her mouth.

  Then a thunder-like sound could be heard, and suddenly the spiders were no more.

  Amanda and the incubus turned simultaneously towards the noise. Something heavy had hit one of the windows facing the road, while the howl of the wind, so far just a distant background noise, could now be heard clearly. The hurricane was approaching.

  Amanda knew there were only a few things that could break the grip of an incubus on its victims. Seeing the object of your desire perform a sex change in front of you seemed to be one of those, and the spiders must have been the finishing touch. The magician had regained enough of his self control to decide and react in the only way he could, by shaping the power the other controllers were broadcasting, and call the hurricane to him, instead of keeping it at large from the building as he had been doing so far. It was just a temporary distraction – the incubus had already reshaped itself in its female features, and the dazed expression was back on its victim's face – but anyway it had broken the illusion and given Amanda a chance.

  She seized it for a desperate measure, afraid it would be useless but hoping it wouldn't. She ripped off from her neck the amulet Kate had given her, and threw it against the incubus. Exceeding her best hopes, the dream catcher proved faithful to its very name. As soon as it touched it, the incubus dissolved into a puff of mist, which then seemed to be sucked into the crossed strings of the amulet and disappear into it, forever imprisoned, or maybe sent back to the places it belong to, from which it should have never been summoned.

  EPILOGUE

  The damages made by the hurricane were large. Its victims, fortunately, just a few. Police had done its best to inform the people of what was going to happen – as soon as it had been clear that there was no chance to stop it – and to help those who couldn't find a safe harbor in time.

  The count of those few included Thomas Marsten, first victim as well as prime cause of it all.

  It seemed that the safety measures used by Weather Control weren't good enough to detect the influence an incubus could exert on a living being. After all, considering how long ago the last incubus had been summoned from the land of dreams, that lack could almost be understood. It wouldn't be if they didn't promptly improved the systems to prevent anything like that to happen again.

  For what concerned Parker, Amanda decided not to deny the official theory of his natural death. If he were guilty, he had paid more than enough. If he weren't, there were no reason to throw mud on his memory hinting he could have been.

  Then there was the hugest question: what was it that the incubus wanted so much as to do all that? Shim didn't want to tell her, and since he had saved her life, almost losing his in the attempt, she hadn't insisted.

  But she was sure she would find out.

  Sooner or later.

  THE AUTHOR

  Carmelo Massimo Tidona, employee, writer and translator in his spare time, has been reading and writing since as long as he can remember. Some of his short stories have been published in various anthologies.

  For 0111edizioni Carmelo Massimo Tidona published:

  “Trittico Oscuro”, collection of urban fantasy tales (2009, Italian).

  “Riflessi d’Ombra”, urban fantasy novel (2009, Italian)

  Follow the author on Facebook

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  EPILOGUE

 

 

  Quelli di ZEd, Nocturnal (episode n. 1)

 

 

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