The clearing no longer felt like part of the world they knew.
The air had turned thin, almost absent, as though every breathable molecule had been greedily inhaled by the thing that now stood at its center. The enormous, broken body of the grizzly bear lay sprawled across the churned mud like a discarded prop from a nightmare play—ribs splayed open, spine twisted at an impossible angle, one massive paw still raised in a final, useless swipe. Blood had pooled beneath it in glossy black lakes that reflected the sickly violet light radiating from the Succubus.
Martin Hale's so-called Invisible Masterpiece, the carefully orchestrated vengeance that had taken years of obsession and ritual to construct, had been reduced to ruined meat in under ninety seconds.
Sheriff Harlan Miller stood perhaps fifteen feet away, boots sunk into the gore-soaked earth. His service Glock 22 trembled in both hands, the front sight jumping in tiny, helpless circles. Behind him, the four remaining deputies—men who had faced meth-lab explosions, armed fugitives, domestic barricades, and three separate bear attacks in their careers—were statues carved from shock and animal terror. Their eyes were locked on her.
She was tall—taller than any of them remembered from the few blurred phone videos that had leaked online before being scrubbed. Seven feet at least, perhaps more when she stretched her spine in that serpentine way. Crimson silk clung to her like liquid shadow, shifting colors as though woven from arterial blood and dying starlight. The great leathery wings, folded loosely behind her back, still dripped with something darker than blood. And her eyes—those endless, glowing violet wells—did not blink.
"She's feeding on their shock," Norman whispered, voice cracking on the last word. He was crouched behind a fallen pine, one hand pressed against the rough bark as though it could anchor him to reality. "You can actually see it. The weight around her… it's expanding. Tendrils. They're reaching for their hearts."
Ken, kneeling a few feet to Norman's left, nodded once without taking his eyes off her.
"I know," he said quietly. "If we don't break the feedback loop right now, their cardiovascular systems are just going to shut down. She doesn't even have to touch them. The fear will do it for her."
Courtney was already moving, low and fast, checking angles, counting rounds in her mind. She carried the same suppressed AR-15 she'd used in the barn two nights earlier, but the look on her face said she knew bullets were almost irrelevant now.
Ken made the decision in less than two heartbeats.
"Tactical stabilization first," he said, voice low but firm. "Courtney—distraction package on standby. Norman—stay low and watch her aura shifts. If she turns those wings toward us full-spread, we have maybe four seconds."
He laid his left palm flat against the leather cover of the Nyota ya Uhai.
The book responded instantly, warmth flooding up his arm like sunlight through cracked stone. But he didn't call for healing light this time. He reached deeper, searching for the older, quieter frequencies buried beneath the golden surface—the grounding rhythms, the ones meant to anchor a soul during spirit-walking or possession.
He spoke three words in a language older than the forest around them.
**"Uhai… Tulia… Msimamo."**
A slow, amber-colored wave rolled outward from his hand—not blinding, not dramatic, just a heavy, insistent pressure like the atmosphere before a thunderstorm. It washed over Sheriff Miller and the deputies in a single breath.
For perhaps three seconds the suffocating violet fog in their minds parted.
Miller blinked hard. His shoulders dropped an inch. The gun stopped shaking.
"Move!" Courtney barked, raising her rifle and sending three rapid, deliberately high shots cracking over the deputies' heads—loud enough to shatter paralysis, not close enough to wound. "Tree line! NOW! GO GO GO!"
The deputies jolted like men waking from anesthesia. They turned and ran—clumsy, stumbling, but moving.
The Succubus tilted her head.
The amber light clearly annoyed her.
It was beneath her dignity, an insect buzzing around the edges of her performance. She made a small sound—half sigh, half amused purr—and then simply vanished.
One instant she stood in the center of the clearing, wings half-spread, the next instant she was gone in a ripple of crimson and black.
"No!" Norman cried, voice rising to a panicked shout.
The screams began almost immediately.
They were not long screams.
They were sharp, choked-off inhalations followed by the heavy, wet thud of bodies collapsing into mud.
She moved among them like a dancer selecting partners at a ball.
A graceful brush of fingertips against a deputy's forehead—his eyes rolled white and he dropped without another sound.
A soft whisper into another man's ear—his knees buckled, mouth opening in a silent gasp as something vital was simply… removed.
Deputy Higgins, the big ex-Marine who had once carried a two-hundred-pound suspect down a ravine on his back, crumpled like wet paper when she laid one clawed hand lightly against the side of his neck.
Deputy Vance—Harlan Miller's oldest friend, the man who had stood as best man at his wedding—reached for his radio, fingers shaking. She leaned in close, lips almost brushing his earlobe, and whispered something no one else could hear. Vance's face went slack with sudden, obscene bliss. Then he fell forward, already desiccating, skin tightening over bone.
Sheriff Miller was the last one standing.
He saw it all.
He saw Higgins fall. Saw Vance collapse with that sick, ecstatic smile frozen on his face. Saw the others become empty husks in less time than it took to draw breath.
Something primal snapped inside him.
"YOU MONSTER!" he roared, voice raw and enormous.
His left hand dropped to his tactical vest, fingers closing around the cold metal sphere of a fragmentation grenade—a last-ditch tool he had carried for fifteen years and prayed he would never need.
He yanked the pin.
He threw.
The grenade arced through the violet-lit air and landed at her feet with a dull thump.
**BOOM.**
The explosion was viciously loud in the confined clearing. A fireball swallowed the center of the space, hurling mud, shredded meat, and burning pine needles in every direction. The shockwave slapped Ken, Courtney, and Norman backward several steps.
Ken raised an arm to shield his face from flying debris.
"Did he—?" he started.
Norman's voice was barely audible over the ringing in their ears.
"No. She's not there anymore."
A heartbeat later, the smoke parted.
She stood directly behind Sheriff Miller.
She had not been touched by the blast. Not a thread of her crimson silk was singed. She looked almost bored.
Miller still held the rifle in both hands, barrel pointed at nothing. His chest heaved. Sweat and mud streaked his face.
The Succubus stepped forward until her breasts nearly brushed his back. One obsidian claw traced the line of his jaw from behind. Then she leaned down—slowly, intimately—and pressed her lips close to his ear.
"Such beautiful fire," she murmured.
The words weren't spoken so much as poured directly into his mind. They bypassed language centers and sank into the oldest parts of the limbic system.
"Why spend it on death, little lawman? Why not give it to someone who can make it burn forever?"
Miller's shoulders sagged.
His grip on the rifle loosened, then tightened again—but not in defiance. In readiness to obey.
His eyes—once sharp hazel, the eyes of a man who had spent thirty years enforcing law in a hard county—clouded over with a dull, dreamy violet.
"I…" His voice sounded distant, mechanical. "I serve."
The Succubus smiled.
It was not a human smile. It was a blade wrapped in velvet.
She lifted her gaze and looked straight at Ken, Courtney, and Norman where they crouched at the edge of the clearing.
"Now, my pet," she said sweetly, "fetch."
Miller pivoted with parade-ground precision. The rifle came up. The red dot of his optic settled on Ken's chest.
Courtney reacted first.
"New plan!" she shouted. "Ken—NOW!"
She was already ripping a grey aluminum canister from her belt—an improvised smoke grenade she had assembled from scavenged fire-suppression powder, sugar, and potassium nitrate during the long night in the barn.
She pulled the pin and lobbed it underhand toward the center of the clearing.
At the same moment Ken slammed his palm against the Nyota ya Uhai again.
This time he didn't speak an incantation. He simply poured raw intent into the book—amplification, acceleration, chemical fury.
The moment the canister hit the ground and began hissing, Ken forced a violent pulse of Uhai energy straight into the sparking fuse.
The reaction was instantaneous and apocalyptic.
A wall of thick, choking grey smoke erupted outward in a perfect hemisphere. It wasn't ordinary smoke; it carried strange, metallic weight. It swallowed light. It muffled sound. Most importantly, it scrambled the preternatural senses the Succubus relied on to track prey.
For the first time since she had manifested, she actually hesitated.
"Run!" Ken yelled. "Black Briar thicket—go!"
They bolted.
Courtney led, dodging between trees with the muscle memory of someone who had trained for exactly this kind of retreat. Norman followed, stumbling but refusing to fall. Ken brought up the rear, book clutched against his chest, glancing back every few strides.
Behind them, they heard the heavy, deliberate tread of Sheriff Miller's boots pursuing through the smoke.
And beneath that—faint but unmistakable—the Succubus's laughter.
It was sweet. Patient. Certain.
Norman tripped over a rotted pine log near the edge of the grizzly's corpse. His knee slammed into the mud. His right hand shot out to catch himself—and brushed against cold metal hidden inside a hollowed stump.
He froze.
Even through the panic he could feel it: Martin's psychic residue, sharp and bitter like burnt copper.
"Wait!" he hissed, clawing at the rotten wood. "Wait—there's something here!"
He dragged out a small, rusted iron box, no bigger than a paperback novel. The lock had already been broken.
Courtney spun back. "We don't have time—"
"I can feel him on it," Norman insisted. "Martin. This is his."
Ken skidded to a stop beside them. He looked at the box, then at the woods behind them. The violet glow was already cutting through the dispersing smoke.
"Take it," he said. "We move. Now."
Norman shoved the box inside his jacket.
They plunged deeper into the forest.
The Black Briar thicket was exactly what the name implied: a nightmare of interlocking, thorn-covered vines that tore at clothes and skin. Courtney had spent the previous afternoon quietly "editing" several paths through it—cutting just enough to create hidden routes only they would know.
They used every one.
They ran until lungs burned and leg muscles screamed. Finally, after what felt like hours but was probably less than twelve minutes, they slid down a muddy embankment and ducked behind a curtain of ivy that poured over the mouth of a limestone crevice.
Inside was a narrow, natural cave—barely six feet wide, maybe twenty deep. A thin stream of water trickled down the back wall, feeding a small pool. The air smelled of wet stone and moss.
They collapsed against the walls, gasping.
Outside, the rhythmic crunch of Sheriff Miller's boots passed by—slow, methodical, searching. Somewhere higher up in the canopy came that terrible, musical laugh again.
"We're safe," Ken panted after a long minute. "For now."
Norman's hands shook as he pulled the iron box from his jacket. The rusted lid squealed as he opened it.
Inside, protected by a layer of oilcloth, lay a single sheet of parchment.
The edges were charred black. The center was still legible—ancient script in faded iron-gall ink, interspersed with geometric sigils and Swahili annotations written in Martin Hale's tight, furious hand.
The missing page.
The Key.
Courtney let out a humorless laugh.
"Our luck is still absolute garbage," she said, popping the magazine from her rifle to check it. "Sheriff's a zombie thrall. Every deputy is dead. A literal demon queen is hunting us through the woods. And we're hiding in a hole behind a waterfall of poison ivy."
She slammed the magazine home.
"But hey," she added, "at least we have the magic homework page now."
Ken stared at the parchment for a long moment.
Then he looked up at his friends.
The frightened, out-of-his-depth New Yorker was gone. What looked back at them was something harder. Something that had finally accepted the weight of command.
"We have the Key," he said quietly. "She thinks she's already won. She has the Sheriff. She has the bodies. She thinks we're just frightened animals running out of places to hide."
He folded the page carefully and slipped it inside the Nyota ya Uhai, where it belonged.
"She doesn't know we have the one thing that can force her back through the door she came through."
Courtney's lips curved into a tired, dangerous smile.
"So what's the play, Captain?"
Ken turned his gaze toward the narrow slit of night visible through the ivy curtain. Far away, violet light still pulsed between the trees like distant lightning.
"We stop running," he said.
"We finish the ritual."
"And we take our town back."