Zoey Rogue.
(Incubatti #1).
by Lizzy Ford.
Chapter One: Zoey.
Wrong place, wrong time. As usual. Chrissy couldn't help the thought or the sob that accompanied it. She stumbled and staggered through the darkness, her hands outstretched in case she hit a wall. She smashed her shin into what felt like a metal block and fell hard to the ground.
Pain radiated through her leg, and she clutched it, unable to help the new tears that squeezed from her eyes. She barely contained a cry of pain. If she screamed, they might find her, the three men whose own journey through the dark house sounded as painful as her own, if their shouts were any indication. Her leg hurt so badly, she didn't think she could stand.
"Flashlights, candles, anything!" one of them shouted.
She heard him rummaging far too close to her.
"Find that fucking girl! We've already lost two safe houses this fucking week!" Another shouted from the direction she had come.
She pushed herself to her feet. Her shin throbbed. Limping, Chrissy continued in her search for a window or a door or some way to escape. She had never been any place so dark before; she saw nothing. The carpet beneath her bare feet silenced her footsteps. Her favorite dress was ruined torn by her pursuers in their attempt to rape her and her expensive high heels lost somewhere within the two-story house.
If someone told her that her entire life could change in the course of a few minutes, she never would've believed it. A mere twenty minutes before, she had entered the house in search of a party. It wasn't the first time she wandered into a frat house on a Friday night. It looked like a typical college fraternity from the outside: a boxy, restored, early twenty-first century two-story home with Greek letters hung on the facade. While located farther away from campus than normal, it wasn't so far as to cause suspicion. She arrived late to the party just fifteen minutes earlier, although it felt like a lifetime to find the front door unlocked.
Somewhere in the house, a girl had been screaming. Already buzzing from too much alcohol, Chrissy hadn't stopped to wonder why and entered, searching for the partygoers. From there, things went horribly wrong. Hearing the screaming girl was one thing; seeing why she screamed was another. There were a dozen college-aged men in the house, and two had been holding her down while a third did unspeakable things to her.
Chrissy had backed away, her alcoholic high plummeting with the adrenaline that filled her. She tried to run, but three of them caught her. She fought them; it was useless. They ripped her clothes off and forced her to the ground.
And then, the lights went off. The entire house turned dark. Somehow, she broke away and ran. Disoriented, she hoped she was headed to the front door, but she never imagined it was so far away.
Resting against a wall, Chrissy listened for the sounds of her pursuers. The screaming stopped soon after the lights went out. Her breathing was so loud, she thought for sure those after her would hear it. Aware of how close one of them was, she began inching away in a painful limp, through the doorway into what she hoped was the living room she crossed through earlier.
The light from street lamps outlined the front door, and her hope surged. She smacked the coffee table, and this time, she did cry out.
"Found her!" one of them called.
Chrissy bolted to the door as fast as she could on her damaged shin. A few feet before she reached it, someone tackled her. She gave a frustrated yell and clawed at him, desperate to reach the door a few feet away.
"I don't need light to fuck you," the man on top of her snarled then shouted to the others, "Living room!"
He pinned her hands above her head and tore off her underwear. She began to cry, unable to shake him.
"You do need your head, though," a female's voice answered him from the darkness. "Lights, Ginny."
The next few seconds passed as if she were in a dream or a nightmare. The sudden flood of lights blinded her. Someone dressed like a shadow moved with inhuman speed across the room. A flash of steel, the sound of a knife slicing through meat, a gurgle.
Her eyes adjusted just as the man on top of her slumped to the side. Warmth covered her arm. She looked down, disoriented, then clambered out from under the rest of his body. Her attacker's body was on one side of her, his head on the other.
"Stay right here," the woman in black told her.
Too shocked to register much more than the dead man who had tried to rape her seconds before, Chrissy sat in a daze, unable to move if she wanted. Her rescuer wore a black, military-style uniform with night-vision goggles perched on her forehead. She was of average height, toned and shapely, her bronze curls in a bun on top of her head and her blue eyes sparkling. She was armed with two long knives and a smile that made her round face appear cherubic, sweet. She saluted with one of the knives and darted further into the house.
Covered in her attacker's blood with a shin that was surely broken, Chrissy just stared after her, shaking.
Zoey left the young woman and darted towards the sounds of fighting, where her best friend Vikki was probably lopping off heads. She almost smashed into another of the men as she barreled through the kitchen. This one had blood on his hands, which meant there was at least one more victim in the house. The second victim was probably a college-aged girl like the one Zoey rescued. Although the woman in the living room had been stripped naked, she was otherwise unhurt, aside from a limp.
She got off lucky.
"I've got five!" Vikki's breathless voice came across the communications piece in Zoey's ear. "Ten bucks says I finish them off before you get here!"
One of the two other members of her team Team R present for the raid, Vikki was Zoey's main competition every time they went out. The third member, Ginny, monitored the operation from the van parked across the street.
"You're on. Be there in a few." Zoey answered. She blocked a strike from her opponent. "That the best you can do, asshole?"
Zoey felt the sex magic in the air that the creature before her was trying to use to manipulate her. It made her blood move faster, and she drew it into herself. Instead of influencing her, it was like a drug, one that left her intoxicated and able to use as a weapon against him.
He had a kitchen knife in one hand and lunged at her. She pushed him back with his own magic then slashed twice with her pewter daggers. He slid to the floor without a sound.
Her phone vibrated. She glanced down and saw the phone number of her boyfriend flash across the screen. She hesitated. He tried calling twice before their op tonight; maybe something was wrong. She answered and continued through the house, seeking out more of the rapist bastards known as Cambions. Born to human mothers and Incubus fathers, Cambions existed for one purpose: to gather sex magic by any means necessary. Sex energy was a drug to them, one that made them frenzied with the need to collect it.
"Hey, Eric," she said.
"Hi. I'm guessing you forgot the list?"
Zoey paused mid-step, wracking her brain for what list she was supposed to remember.
"You said you were going grocery shopping after studying. Kinda hard without the list," he said, laughing.
"Oh. Um, I, uh got caught up with stuff." Shit! Where had she told him she was studying this night?
Zoey heard sounds from the basement. The door was open, the lights on. She smelled something ... bad. Familiar. Something that told her they were going to need more body bags than she had in the van.
"Basement," she said into the microphone.
"Got it," Vikki responded via the earpiece in her right ear the one connected to their communications devices for the operation.
"You got caught up in the basement?" Eric's voice came through the other earpiece.
"Oh, no. I mean, we, uh, found something intriguing in the basement of the library, and I was in such a hurry to get here, I forgot the list," she managed.
Before she was able to charge down the stairs, an armed Cambion leapt out of the doorway. Zoey ducked a blow.
"You sound out of breath." Eric sounded both puzzled and frustrated. "Is studying at the library a full contact sport now?"
"Sometimes -"
Block "- when you're reading -"
Jab "- about the Mayans."
Slash.
The Cambion dropped. Able to overhear what Zoey said through her microphone, the two other members of Team R were laughing into one ear, almost drowning out Eric's words.
"I thought the library closed at seven."
Zoey glanced at her watch. It was nine.
"Well, not when Vikki is sleeping with the night watchman."
"That girl gets around."
"Yeah." She bent over to make sure the Cambion was dead.
"So the Mayans took precedence over groceries," he said then waited for her to laugh at the corny joke, like she usually did.
"Hmmm," she replied, attention elsewhere.
"Anyway, I'm at the store now," Eric continued. "I can't read your writing about ice cream. I want to get it right."
Zoey felt like shit every time she lied to him about what she was doing, especially when he was sweet enough to call before buying the wrong kind of ice cream. She sighed then straightened and trotted down the stairwell to the basement.
"I'm sorry I forgot, Eric. I just got a little...oh, Jesus this is bad." Even knowing what she was going to find, she still almost gagged at the scent of decomposing bodies. She covered her mouth with her hand.
"What?" he asked, confusion in his voice.
"I gotta go."
"Just real quick tell me what flavor."
"French vanilla." She hung up.
Eric was not happy. But at the moment Zoey was more concerned about the mess in front of her. It looked like the Cambions were using this safe house for weeks; the bodies of almost two dozen women were decaying in the basement. Some were buried under mounds of dirt, others stacked like old newspapers.
Near vomiting from the scent, Zoey couldn't help the sorrow that descended over her. Cambions targeted girls her age around twenty-one. Unlike her, each one of the girls in the basement probably had a family that missed them and a boyfriend they didn't have to lie to every day about who they were.
"Why do you always say I'm the one sleeping around?" Vikki complained over their radio.
"Because you always do," Zoey retorted. "We're gonna need about twenty more body bags than planned and a morgue crew."
"Mayans, Z, really?" Ginny asked, amused. "I'll put in the order."
"That means the bosses will find out," Vikki grumbled. "We're in enough trouble as it is going on unauthorized missions."
"We saved someone from the fucking Cambions," Zoey said. Unable to stand the smell, she returned to the main floor. "You'd think Heidi would be more concerned about that instead of not scheduling two missions at once."
"Two girls," Vikki said. "Though this one needs a doctor fast."
"Got it," Ginny said. Stationed in the van to monitor things in case all hell broke loose, Ginny was also in charge of contacting their headquarters, the police or providing back-up support as needed.
"What's a Cambion?"
Zoey spun. She'd forgotten the girl in the living room. Her gaze swept over her. The girl managed to wrap herself in a blanket, probably the one from the couch. Her right shin was swollen and black.
"You're gonna need some ice for that." Zoey went to the fridge and opened it. There was nothing but beer in the fridge. She yanked open the freezer to find frozen bags of vegetables.
"Rally at the van," Ginny directed.
"Roger," Zoey said into the microphone. She grabbed two bags of vegetables. "Anyway, Cambions are, um, these beastly half-human males born to human mothers and Incubus fathers," Zoey explained. "They kill girls our age to collect sex energy to sustain themselves and then give the extra to their evil Incubus overlords. If you ever have a chance to cut open a Cambion, you'll find these little things that look like batteries, where the extra energy is stored."
The girl stared at her for a long moment. "Oh."
"My job is to track and kill them, before they rape girls like you and then shove you in the basement to rot," Zoey finished.
The girl's gaze went to the open door of the basement. She grew even paler.
"That sounds good," she said. She was weaving on her feet, a sign she was about to pass out.
"You should sit down," Zoey advised. "We're almost done here, then we'll call an ambulance for you. We'll ice your shin in the meantime." She lifted the bags.
The young woman nodded. Limping bad, she returned to the living room and sat down on the couch, clearly in shock by her dazed expression. Zoey trailed her in and lifted her injured leg to the coffee table. Placing a bag of frozen vegetables on the swollen shin, Zoey set the other within reach.
"Just in case it takes the EMTs more than a few minutes to get here, okay?"
"Okay," the woman repeated.
"Were you invited here or just decided to drop by?" Zoey asked, interested in discovering where the Cambions might be recruiting their victims.
"I'm not sure," the woman replied. "I mean, I wasn't invited. I was at a party down the street and walking to my car. Something just...pulled me."
"That feeling was the Cambions using their sex magic to lure you in. If you ever, ever, ever feel that again, you run the other way fast," Zoey said. "You got that?"
The woman nodded, tears in her eyes again. "I don't want to lose more shoes."
"Yeah, that's kind of a minor issue," Zoey said, unable to stop her laugh at the shocked woman's words. "I mean, I normally find these bastards at clubs. If you want to talk about being upset over shoes try kicking someone in the chest with a four-inch heel. The heel snaps off every freakin' time. I go through like, two pairs of shoes a week. I buy in bulk now."
The woman didn't seem to know what to do and then smiled. Zoey's gaze lingered. She shook her head and rose, feeling bad for her, but happy she was alive.
Wiping off her weapons, Zoey's thoughts went to Eric. She was going to need a really, really good plan to make this up to him. It was so hard leading a double life; she almost understood why she was the only one she knew who tried. She may have been born a Halfling in a society that consisted of evil and death, but she chose to try to be normal.
"Z, you owe me ten!" Vikki said cheerfully. "You never win bets."
"Dammit! I'll keep trying, though!" Zoey said. "How many did you kill?"
"Seven. You?"