The Succubus In My Closet

Chapter 9: The Beginning Of Trouble

Erick froze, his brow furrowing. A defensive irritation flared in his chest. “Pearl, come on. Are you... are you jealous? Look, I know this dynamic is weird, but you knew from the start why I performed the summon. I feel like Vanessa is something real… and I don’t want to lose this.”

“This is not jealousy!” Pearl cried, her voice rising from the seductive whisper for the first time. Tears swelled at the corners of her eyes. “Master, look at me! Smell the air!”

She grabbed Erick’s wrists, pulling him close. Her skin was ice-cold.

“Her… her soul does not carry the scent of ordinary people,” Pearl stammered, her chest heaving. “Beneath her perfume she smells of consecrated steel and fire! She is a Purger!”

The word hung heavily in the bedroom, foreign and sharp.

“A Purger?” Erick repeated, his skepticism warring with the genuine terror that radiated from the succubus. “What are you talking about?”

“They are the executioners in this world,” Pearl explained, her voice cracking with dread. “Their sole purpose is to purge my kind. Do you understand? If she finds me...”

She looked up at him, still holding on to his wrists like she would drown if she didn’t.

“She did not meet you by chance! She is hunting me!”

***

The rain beat a steady rhythm against the windshield of a plateless black sedan. Vanessa Evinns sat in the driver’s seat. The playful, flirtatious department manager had completely vanished. In her place was someone colder, someone lethal.

She tapped an earpiece nestled in her left ear.

“Report, agent Evinns,” a deep, gravelly voice crackled through the channel. “Did you confirm the anomaly?”

Vanessa closed her eyes, exhaling a slow, measured breath.

Her mind flashed back to the dinner table, to the faint, almost imperceptible trace of Nether-musk lingering beneath the floorboards, to the microscopic violet fiber she had spotted clinging to the hem of Erick’s couch, and to the subtle aura of demonic vitality radiating off his skin.

She was twenty-eight years old, and she had been recruited into the Order when she was barely eleven, torn from an orphanage and forged into a living weapon. Purgers were ritually baptized in celestial mercury to make their minds entirely immune to demonic charms, illusions, and succubi pheromones.

This meant one terrifying truth: her feelings for Erick were not a byproduct of some magic ritual. She had felt his clumsy, endearing honesty; she had seen the quiet, scarred loneliness in his eyes that mirrored the hollow void inside her own chest. For the first time in her life, she had found someone who made her world just a little bit less cold.

“Agent Evinns?” the handler’s voice barked with rising impatience. “Is there a Nether-spawn tied to the target?”

Vanessa gripped the steering wheel, her knuckles turning bone-white.

“Negative, Warden,” Vanessa lied, her voice betraying not a single tremor. “Target shows elevated spiritual frequency, but no physical entity was detected on the premises. Requesting forty-eight hours of extended surveillance before we authorize a tactical breach.”

A long, tense pause crackled over the radio wire.

“You have twenty-four hours, Evinns,” the Warden replied. “If that frequency spikes again, we storm the building with a full containment squad. Do not let sentiment compromise the Accord.”

The line went dead. Vanessa closed her eyes and exhaled.

“What have you gotten yourself into, Erick?” she whispered into the dark.

***

The heavy silence inside Apartment 304 felt cold enough to crack glass. Erick stood by the closet, his hands jammed into his pockets to hide how much they were shaking.

“A Purger,” Erick repeated under his breath, pacing the space between the closet and the bed. “Pearl, listen to yourself. Vanessa is an assistant regional director for a logistics firm. She’s scary sometimes, yes, but… it just doesn’t make sense.”

Pearl lifted her head, her brow creased with desperation. “I know you don’t believe me. I’d never encountered one before today, but there are a few of my kin who have been fortunate enough to return to the Nethers alive. They speak of the Purgers. And they say you sense them when they come close. When she walked past the threshold, I could feel her threat even from afar. Her presence was suffocating me and burning me from within.”

Erick stopped pacing, dragging both hands over his face. He let out a long, ragged exhale.

Part of him – the rational, cynical data archivist who had lived an ordinary life for thirty-five years – screamed that Pearl was exaggerating. Succubi were creatures of passion and possessiveness. Was it not possible that Pearl, having spent every evening wrapped in his warmth and feeding on his life essence, was simply reacting with territorial jealousy? Was she fabricating an elaborate ghost story to keep him from falling for a human woman?

Or...

Erick froze as his memory rewound the evening with agonizing clarity.

He remembered the subtle way Vanessa’s hazel eyes had flicked toward the ceiling corners the second she crossed his threshold. He remembered how her fingers had lightly trailed along the molding of the hallway door frame, almost as if feeling for something. He remembered her sudden, pointed comment about the scent of exotic lilies and burnt sugar – details no casual dinner guest would latch onto with such surgical precision.

And why had she transferred to his branch in the first place? A woman with her credentials, poise, and commanding presence could have run an entire division in Chicago or New York. Why take a middle-management desk job in an unglamorous regional archive not long after Erick bonded with Pearl?

A knot twisted uncomfortably in Erick’s stomach.

“If she’s what you say she is,” Erick said slowly, his voice dropping into a tense whisper, “and she knows you’re here... why didn’t she pull a weapon? Why didn’t she kick the closet door off its hinges and execute you on the spot?”