Incursion
Chapter 5: Danny
Danny’s Thursday night was uneventful: Rapid shot, rapid shot, tracking check, rapid shot. I should have played a sorcerer; rangers never get enough to do. He didn’t really give much thought to Howard’s cockamamie demon-summoning plan, either. At least until lunchtime the next day, when Howard hadn’t come to their shared econ class and then wasn’t at their usual lunch spot.
“Steve, I’m going to ask a stupid question: If Howard had burned down the dorms by accidentally summoning a demon horde into our reality, there would be a news alert or something, right?”
Steve took a bite of his burger and contemplated the question. Dennis paused with a fry near his mouth, awaiting the answer.
“I suspect it depends on the kind of demon. Some don’t show up on cameras, I’ll bet,” Steve replied.
“Yeah, the campus police would be all, ‘Pics or it didn’t happen!’” Dennis chimed in.
Danny shrugged, signaling his general agreement with the sentiment. “Fair enough, they’re pretty useless. But he isn’t here this morning, which is a little weird, so I’m trying to decide if I should make sure nothing ate his head.”
“You still think he was actually doing some kind of summoning ritual? When you told us about it at gaming, I figured he made that up because he didn’t want to admit he was going to whack off to hentai all night.”
“Since when has Howard ever been shy about his masturbation routines?”
“Maybe it was gay hentai.”
“A lot of things about Howard could be explained by excessive compensation for latent homosexual tendencies, you know,” Dennis chimed in again.
“I love the smell of homophobia in the morning. It smells like me thinking you’re a douchebag.”
“Oh, excuse us, Mister ‘I’m bisexual so I don’t make gay jokes’. Didn’t realize you were having a not-so-fresh morning.”
“Dennis, the only way you’re ever going to have sex with anyone, male or female, is if you never open your mouth the entire time.”
“Anyway,” Steve interjected, “I’m sure Howard’s fine. He probably got into that leftover bottle of cheap vodka and hasn’t been able to get out of bed.”
Danny shrugged, but something about this still bugged him.
It bothered him enough that he called Howard right after lunch, but it went to voicemail. Texts went unanswered. Concerned, he stopped by Howard’s room a few hours later. The door was locked and there was no response when he knocked. The hall was quiet; nobody seemed to be around.
It wasn’t something he usually mentioned, but Danny had learned to pick locks years earlier, and after being cursed with a freshman year roommate who constantly locked him out of their room, he learned that the dorm door locks were only marginally more complicated than a standard bike lock—in other words, not very hard to pick at all. A few minutes later, the door opened with a satisfying click.
“Howard?” Danny called. No one answered, and the room looked like a fight had broken out—books and knickknacks knocked off the shelves, clothes thrown everywhere, and a giant crack in the floor…which stretched across some sort of weird, inked-on circle full of symbols.
Danny briefly considered calling campus security, but paused when he realized that they’d probably be more interested in how and why he was in the room than anything about the state of it.
Instead, he carefully crept inside and inspected the place. It smelled strongly of sex and…ozone? Some sort of weird, empty smell. The desk was piled with books, several of them open to demon-summoning rituals and various collections of occult symbols.
“Shit,” Danny said aloud. Howard really had summoned a demon. Did it eat him? It didn’t look like there was any blood here, but that didn’t mean anything. Maybe it was a vampire-demon, or one of those breath-stealing Asian demons. And it might still be on the loose!
Danny grabbed the books that seemed relevant and ran back to his room to try to figure out what Howard had done, and how to banish a demon that might be roaming the campus.
Had he remembered to lock the door behind him, things might have ended very differently.
“Some girl was totally touching herself in my Geoscience class. It was hilarious. She looked so shocked when the class was over and everybody was staring at her, like we couldn’t see it.”
“Dennis, tell me the truth: When you say, ’some girl in my class,’ do you really mean, ‘some girl on my iPad screen?’ Because it wouldn’t be the first time we all had to share in your porn-viewing habits.”
Steve and Dennis were now eating the gray mass the cafeteria called meatloaf, but the scene was otherwise unchanged from lunch six hours earlier when Danny came running in.
“Guys! I was right! Howard totally summoned a demon and I think it ate him! But I know how to stop it!”
“Dan, we don’t LARP on campus. That’s been the rule ever since Erik almost got arrested for trying to break into the steam tunnels.”
“I’m not making this up! His room is in shambles! It looks like something crazy happened in there.”
“It always looks like that.”
“No, it was worse than usual. He had a broken summoning circle! Look, I need your help. We need to comb the campus and look for any other signs of this demon. According to the book, demons can’t touch things made of silver and they can’t cross lines of salt. So I want to you grab saltshakers,” he brandished the one from the table for emphasis, “and block doorways to see if anyone can’t use them.”
“Look, if you want to make a Youtube video of us doing stupid shit, I’m all for it, but I don’t think this will actually get hits.”
“Dammit, Steve, stop being a dumbass! This is really important!”
“Yeah, fine, whatever. You’ll owe us one. Gimmie the salt.”
Danny spent the evening sitting in the courtyard, looking up online demon resources on his phone and watching the four doors into Lerner Hall, each of which had a thick line of salt poured across the threshold. No one seemed to react or care as they came or went.
Steve called a few hours later. “Dan, you can lay off the demon hunt. Howard’s fine.” His voice sounded oddly flat.
“What? What happened? Did you find him?”
“Yes. He went to the health center with a migraine. He’s fine now.”
“But what about his room? And did you tell him we were worried?”
“Everything’s fine. No reason to worry.”
But Danny was worried. He called Dennis. “Where are you?”
“I’m up in my room, watching the doors of the language center where I put all your salt. And I’m researching demons.”
“That’s La Blue Girl I hear in the background, isn’t it?”
“…no.” The background noise abruptly cut off.
“Listen, something weird is going on. Steve says he saw Howard and that he was at the health center, but it doesn’t add up. I’m going to go talk to him in person. You keep watching those doors.”
“Sure.”
“ONLY the doors. Leave the porn off!”
“Aw, man!”
But Steve was nowhere to be found—not that evening, and not the next morning when Danny arrived at Dennis’ room and found him asleep at his computer.
“I’m going to guess that you didn’t spot anything.”
“Hunh? Oh. Dan. You woke me up, man.”
“And you didn’t keep watch.”
“Sure I did. I figured I’m not actually good at paying attention, so I rigged up my webcam with a program that zooms in on motion. So I’ve got the entire night captured.”
“…that was uncharacteristically brilliant. Let’s take a look.”
They mostly fast-forwarded through several hours of people entering and leaving the building, then security coming by to check the doors, with light remaining only in the media center, which was open all night. It looked like there was someone there, a boy who would occasionally pass by the windows. For the next two hours, the camera would occasionally zoom in on that window when the boy inside walked around. Then something zoomed by, and the light went out.
“Wait, go back. What was that?”
They watched the clip again in slow motion: The boy’s body was slammed against the window, partially wrapped in something black, then pulled upwards, then the lights went out.
“Holy shit. That’s it! That’s our demon! Come on, we have to get over there!”
“And what, get eaten?”
“I’m totally prepared. Come on!”
The media lab was already cordoned off, not by the campus police, but by the real police. Danny and Dennis snuck in to get a look at the scene, which a CSI team was investigating. Chairs and desks were broken and flung about, several lighting fixtures had shattered on the ground, computers were trashed, and Steve’s battered and bloody body lay on the floor.
“STEVE?! Holy shit! It’s Steve!”
A detective pulled them aside. “You know this guy?”
Dennis ran into the hallway and vomited on the floor. Danny, slightly more composed, did his best not to look at the body. “Yeah, that’s my friend Steve. Is he…?”
“Yeah, he is. I’m sorry, kid.”
“What happened to him?”
“We’re not really sure. Best guess is that he was looking at porn on these computers, and a bunch of guys with baseball bats came in to wreck the place and caught him with his pants down.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. Look, since you knew the guy, would you mind answering a few questions for us until we can get ahold of his parents?”
“Sure, yeah, of course.” Danny briefly stared into the distance. Steve must have found the demon that got Howard, which compelled him to call Danny and try to get him to give up looking. But even if Steve couldn’t talk to them, he still kept researching, so it came back and killed him. This thing had some kind of mind-control powers, and was obviously not interested in taking prisoners. This was going to be really dangerous.
Police Detective Proto ended up questioning them for several hours: Who did Steve hang out with? Did he do drugs? Was he involved in any criminal activities? When did they last see him? Danny was as honest as he could be without mentioning the demon stuff, which meant he couldn’t tell them why they had come to look in the media lab that morning. Finally, with a warning not to leave the campus, he and Dennis were sent on their way.
“Now what? This is some seriously fucked-up shit, man.”
“Well, the salt didn’t keep the demon out of the language building, so we should probably forget about that. I’ve got a silver-plated picture frame that’s big enough to hit something with—we should both take a piece of it. Then we’re going to check Twitter, check the campus police reports, and find everything weird that’s happened on this campus in the past couple of days, and figure out where that demon is.”
“Then what?”
“Then we’re going to smash it back to Hell for what it did to our friends.”
Several hours later, Danny was increasingly frantic as he picked the lock on Dennis’ door. They had spent the afternoon checking out the sites of several noise complaints, and then late-breaking rumor about a gangbang in the locker room, but the gym doors had much better locks than the door rooms. Dennis had a crazy idea about hacking the GPS signal from Steve’s phone, so Danny went to re-check the books again. When Dennis didn’t respond to his texts, Danny rushed over.
The room was empty, but it didn’t look like there had been a struggle. That weird smell from Howard’s room was there, though. Danny almost freaked out, but then realized that the webcam was on, and pointing into the room.
The video began with Dennis’ face close to the camera. He said in a fast, harsh whisper, “Danny, I’m sure you’ll see this. Someone claiming to be Howard just knocked at the door, but his voice is totally wrong. I’m going to hit him with the silver, but in case it doesn’t work, you’ll know what happened. And if it does work, we are so totally going to be famous.”
The camera turned to follow Dennis as he opened the door, revealing someone who looked very much like Howard but with jet-black eyes, followed by a blond woman wearing sunglasses.
The audio rumbled as Howard’s mouth moved, but there weren’t any clear words.
Dennis backed up into the room, and Howard and the girl followed him and shut the door. Howard said something else unclear. Dennis wobbled, tried to swing the piece of picture frame, and dropped it on the floor. The girl took off her sunglasses, revealing her eyes to be the same smooth, shiny black as Howard’s.
There was a pause. The girl seemed to say something, and Howard stepped back out of frame.
Then suddenly a dozen black tentacles burst out of the girl’s body, tearing her clothes and lashing at Dennis. Dennis stood frozen for a moment as they started to wrap around his arms and legs, then remembered he was supposed to fight back and struggled uselessly against them. Several of the tentacles sprouted sharp tips and cut away Dennis’ clothes, while others firmly held his wrists, ankles and neck and finally pulled him into a spread-eagled position, held a few inches off the ground. The girl walked up to him, and started teasing his skin with one inhumanly-sharp fingernail.
Dennis moaned.
The girl leaned in, ran her finger up to Dennis’ ear, then Danny could see a long, smooth black tongue emerge from her mouth. It was impossible to miss the fact that Dennis’ cock was rock hard at attention—this was probably all of his hentai fantasies come true.
The girl knelt in front of Dennis, smirked, and ran the fingernail along the length of his dick. Dennis spasmed and came instantly, spraying his load all over the girl’s face and tits.
She didn’t stop, though. Dennis stayed hard, and the girl again started teasing his cock, this time with flicks of her monstrous tongue. Dennis stared glassy-eyed as the girl licked and stroked him, then took his cock into her mouth, slowly at first, and then with rapidly deepening strokes. Dennis came a second time, though with much less fanfare, shooting down the girl’s throat.
Finally, the girl stood up, and a new tentacle emerged from her crotch, this one distinctly phallic in appearance. Dennis apparently still had enough presence of mind to look alarmed, but the girl said something and he started looking excited instead. Which quickly turned to panting and moaning as the tentacle slid around him and thrust itself into his asshole.
Danny watched the video, deeply disturbed but unable to turn away as his friend was sodomized by the girl’s tentacle-penis, and clearly enjoyed every minute of it. Dennis came a final time, screaming out something unintelligible and flopping over limply, supported only by the tentacles binding his body. Then the tentacles retracted into the girl’s body and Dennis fell to the floor. Howard walked back into the frame, lifted up Dennis with surprising ease, and carried him out. The girl took a sweatshirt from Dennis’ floor, put it on, and also left.
Danny contemplated what he’d seen—obviously, the girl was the demon Howard had summoned. She was a succubus of some kind, preying on men and controlling them. She obviously had some kind of power related to her eyes, and there was something weird about her voice, too. He’d need to plan accordingly.
By the time Sunday morning came around, Danny was ready. He’d gotten barely any sleep, but he’d learned everything Howard’s books had about succubi and what to do about them, and he’d hunted up a pair of mirrored sunglasses and industrial-strength earplugs. If he could capture the demon, he had the instructions and materials for a plan to banish it.
Capturing the demon was the tricky part of the plan, but the books had a solution for that, too: Succubi could only prey on men. Women should be immune to their powers. (He vaguely wondered how that affected lesbians or gay men. Or bisexuals: Would he be immune to an Incubus that preyed on women, or just vulnerable to both?) He texted his ex-girlfriend Jill, and a few other women he was friendly with around campus, and set up a meeting in Jill’s room to show the video—proof of what was happening—and plan a strategy for dealing with it. All they would need would be some pepper spray (to incapacitate the boys under her power), some net-bags from the gym (to tie her up), and a space for the banishment circle (which Danny had started setting up in his room). Obviously, something would go wrong, but now that he knew what was really happening, he could be prepared for any eventuality.
Danny knocked on Jill’s door. A voice called for him to come in, and as the door was unlocked, he did. Merri, Stacy and Leigh were sitting on the bed, while Jill was engrossed with something on her computer.
“You said this was important, but it better really be something to get me out of bed this early on a Sunday, Dan,” said Merri, vaguely trying to get her bed-head under control.
“You’re not going to believe this, but it’s seriously important. One person has already died, and I have the killer on tape, here. And nothing I’m going to show you is edited or photoshopped in any way.”
Leigh quipped, “With a lead-in like that, who can say no?”
Danny pulled out his iPad and played the video from Dennis’ webcam. The three girls watched in fascination as the demon-girl raped Dennis and Howard stood idly by. When it finished, Danny said, “We’re also pretty sure this thing killed Steve on Friday night, in the media lab in the language building. It’s a succubus, a demon that feeds on men sexually. And we need to catch it and send it back where it came from. I asked you for help because you’re immune to it, being women. Will you help me?”
There was a pause as Merri, Stacy and Leigh looked at each other, nodded, and almost in unison said that they would.
“Jill, what about you? You’ve been quiet this whole time. What’s on your mind?”
I THINK YOU’VE MADE A MISTAKE.
“Wh…what?”
I THINK YOU HAVE FUNDAMENTALLY MISUNDERSTOOD THE SITUATION. BUT IT WOULDN’T BE THE FIRST TIME.
“I…shit! You’re the demon! Because succubi can shape-shift! You kidnapped Jill and took her place here!” Danny suddenly couldn’t believe his luck. “Merri! You girls are immune to her powers! Grab the nets from my bag and tie her up!”
Danny dove for his bag, pulled out the earplugs and flung the bag itself up to Stacy, who caught it easily. As he jammed the earplugs into his ears he looked at “Jill,” who stood by smirking, with her eerily black eyes. “You really miscalculated this one, demon! Get her!”
Merri, Stacy and Leigh didn’t get up.
THANK YOU FOR DOING AS I ASKED EARLIER. YOU WILL BE REWARDED.
The three girls smiled happily. Leigh giggled.
Danny’s mind kicked into high gear. Her powers worked on women? This was no ordinary succubus. But he had the earplugs in. As long as he couldn’t hear her, she couldn’t use her compelling voice on him, so he could still try to get the bag back and tie her up.
Wait.
He heard her thank the girls. Through the earplugs.
…
Fuck.
I THINK YOU SHOULD STAY THERE FOR A MOMENT WHILE WE PREPARE FOR A FRIEND TO JOIN US.
Danny struggled, but it was like all of the motivation to move had left his body. “Jill” walked over to him, lifted him to standing one-handed, and started pulling off his clothes, either tearing them or slicing them with a razor-sharp fingernail. Finally, he stood naked and paralyzed, as the three girls sat on the bed and chittered appreciatively.
“I’m not going to give in to you, you know. I’m not like Dennis. I’m going to resist.”
OF COURSE YOU ARE.
Jill walked back to the bed, put her hand on Leigh’s cheek and guided her up into a passionate kiss. As if on cue, Merri and Stacy also started making out, their hands roaming over each other’s bodies. Though he knew the whole thing was a demon’s trick, Danny couldn’t help but get hard.
YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND THE MASTER AT ALL, DANIEL. BUT YOU WILL.
Danny felt a finger running down his naked back.
THE MASTER KNOWS WHAT YOU WANT.
Jill slid her hand down the front of Leigh’s jeans. Leigh moaned, her eyes rolling back.
THE MASTER GIVES YOU WHAT YOU WANT.
The fingers touching Danny’s back slid down his sides, over his hips and down his legs, then back up along the curve of his buttocks. Merri and Stacy rolled onto the bed, their eyes on Leigh, who was bucking on Jill’s fingers.
AND YOU GIVE TO THE MASTER.
Leigh let out a scream as she came, a patch of wetness forming on her jeans. Jill pulled her hand out and walked back to Danny.
TAKE…AND GIVE.
Danny’s eyes glazed over as Jill slid her fingers, still sticky with Leigh’s juices, under his nose and along his lips.
GIVE…
Then suddenly there was a hand wrapped around his dick, and he was impossibly hard, and terribly sensitive, and whoever’s hand it was, they knew just how to touch him, and he was coming and coming and something was wrong, so wrong…
AND TAKE.
Jill grabbed his face turned his head, and he saw Dennis behind him, and it was Dennis’ hand wrapped around his cock, and his eyes were that same cold, empty black as Jill’s.
And there was something hard and slick touching Danny’s ass. Jill grabbed him by the hair, still shoving her Leigh-soaked fingers in his face, and bent him over, forcing his legs and asscheeks to spread. The three girls were all watching from the bed, fascinated, happy, giggling. And something…no, it was Dennis, it was clearly Dennis’ cock…was pressing into his ass. It felt impossibly large, he felt impossibly full, but the member pressed in nonetheless until he could feel a pair of balls slap against his ass.
This was impossible…Dennis wasn’t into guys; he’d never have gone for Danny. And Jill was so vanilla when they were dating, he could never tell her about wanting humiliation. This was every fantasy he’d ever had, rolled into something terrifying but so fulfilling. It couldn’t be happening. But his cock felt so hard and so full and he was going to come again soon and everyone was watching and laughing as Jill bent him over and Dennis was pounding his ass and it felt so good…
GIVE…AND TAKE.
Danny came again, sparks exploding behind his eyes. He felt something, deep inside him—the cock in his ass pulsed, and suddenly there was a feeling of burning heat and freezing cold, all at the same time. Something was moving inside of him…growing, expanding, filling him…tiny tendrils of darkness seemed to splinter off of it and spread out through his body, lighting every nerve on fire.
He slid off Dennis’ cock and fell on the floor, writhing in ecstasy as the blackness inside of him nestled into his brain and devoured pieces of his soul. When his eyes opened again, they were jet-black, smooth and featureless.
Danny realized how wrong he had been, but he belonged to the Master now. Danny’s body looked up at Jill and Dennis, and at the Master’s behest they took to converting the three women sitting on the bed. There was much to be done to prepare for tomorrow.