The Succubus Born of a Forbidden Desire

Almost eighteen hundred years ago, on the outskirts of Mérida, beneath a moon stained red like an open wound in the sky, a young woman named Adira made a decision that would damn her forever. She was nineteen, with black hair to her waist and green eyes the men of the village avoided meeting head-on, because in them burned a hunger no prayer could extinguish.

The daughter of an exiled scholar, Adira had grown up among whispers of demons and forbidden spells. But she did not pray: she desired. And on the night before her wedding to an old, flabby merchant, instead of surrendering herself to a lifeless bed, she fled to the old cemetery on the outskirts.

The crooked tombstones rose in the darkness like broken fingers. She stripped naked on the cold grass, her pale skin shining beneath the moon, and uttered the name her father had taught her never to pronounce.

—Come to me, Belial —she murmured, opening her legs over a split slab—. Take what no one has taken. Give me eternal freedom in exchange for my body.

The air turned cold at once. A smell of sulfur and freshly turned earth filled the cemetery, and then he appeared: a winged shadow with skin the color of hot iron, eyes like two bottomless wells. There was no tenderness. There was the enormous weight of him dropping onto her, hands gripping her hips hard enough to leave marks, and a pain that drove in deep and split her in two.

Adira screamed, and the scream turned into something that was not quite pain. Each thrust tore a little more of the woman she had been away from her. When he spilled inside her, a searing heat rose through her belly, filled her chest, and stole her final heartbeat.

Adira’s mortal body dissolved into black smoke over the slab. But her desire did not die: it was reborn as something else. Into a nameless succubus that time would eventually call Naama, condemned to feed on others’ pleasure in order to keep existing, capable of inhabiting living bodies and crawling through century after century stealing souls, one by one, with every orgasm she provoked.

***

Three hundred years later, Naama wandered the streets of Seville like a cold, lewd current of air. She was looking for young flesh, and found it in Sister Catalina, a novice from a convent on the outskirts: unbroken skin, nipples kept constantly aroused by the rough scrape of the habit, and a buried desire so deep she did not even know it existed.

The succubus entered her body during midnight prayers. A shiver raced down Catalina’s spine, and for the first time in her life she felt her own sex wet beneath the cloth.

That same night, in the novice’s sweet voice, Naama summoned two dozen monks from nearby monasteries into the chapel. They came one after another, drawn by a promise they did not understand but could not refuse. The chapel smelled of incense and sweat, the candles trembling as if they were breathing.

Naama stripped naked on the altar.

—Kneel —she ordered, and the voice was no longer Catalina’s—. Worship me with your mouth, and I’ll give you what your god denies you.

And they worshipped her. Hungry mouths roamed her body, clumsy hands pried her thighs open. She let them, mounted them one by one, squeezed them dry to the last drop while moaning with a pleasure that had no bottom. But each time a man emptied himself inside her, something invisible carried him off: the color drained from his face, his eyes went dull, and he collapsed onto the flagstones a dry husk. His soul peeled away like a wisp of smoke and stayed hovering there, trapped, condemned to desire without a body forever.

At dawn, a score of empty habits lay in the chapel. Naama, sated, left the novice’s exhausted body and continued on her way.

***

In the twelfth century, in Ávila, the succubus took over the body of a street whore to get close to Don Tristán, a tall, weathered Templar who had returned from the Crusades with scars and a reputation as an tireless lover. Tristán had a daughter, Leonor, twenty-two years old: blonde, serene, promised to a nobleman she did not love.

Naama seduced the Templar in a tavern, whispered in his ear promises of a pleasure no confessor would ever forgive, and took him to a room above the stable. She rode him slowly, savoring every inch, until he was trembling. And while he caught his breath, she planted the seed of her will in him like someone sowing a curse.

—Your daughter secretly desires you —she murmured, and the lie took hold in him like an ember in dry straw—. Tonight, take her. And you will both be mine forever.

Driven by a compulsion he could no longer distinguish from his own desire, Tristán entered Leonor’s chamber that night. And Naama’s curse had reached her too: when she woke and saw her father, horror lasted only an instant before the same black fire clouded her judgment.

What happened between those four walls was slow and forbidden, and the two of them surrendered to it like sleepwalkers. When it was over, Naama gathered her harvest: father and daughter’s souls detached together and vanished in smoke, condemned to drift tangled together forever.

***

Now, on a night in late October, the succubus inhabited Nadia’s body: blonde, with an angelic smile, firm breasts swaying beneath a torn T-shirt, and a sex dripping with the pleasure stolen from her victims. Valencia pulsed like a heart in heat. Nightclubs vomited music, bars overflowed with sweating bodies, and in the parks couples sought each other out beneath the streetlamps. Naama walked with burning hips. This city will be my feast, she thought.

Floating invisibly behind her went two ghosts. One was Diego; the other was the real Nadia, now a translucent specter condemned to watch another woman use her body. Diego had died without ever quite knowing how, and dragged behind him a torment worse than death: he desired Nadia with all his strength and could never touch her.

—This is getting worse —Diego murmured, his voice a hollow echo only she could hear—. If we don’t stop her, tomorrow there won’t be anyone left alive in the city.

But as he said it, his eyes never left Naama. Every time she went into rut, a sickening perversity burned him from within. If I could touch you, Nadia. If I could do to you what she does to everyone else…

Naama entered the Averno, an underground den where techno throbbed like a mad pulse. She climbed onto a platform in the center of the dance floor and yanked her T-shirt off.

—Listen to me! —she shouted, and her voice rose above the music—. Tonight we fuck until the sun comes up!

The crowd roared. Five men climbed up first, already hard, drawn by an aura they could not name. Naama knelt among them and began: a slow, wise mouth that tore out gasps, two hands that never rested, a body that offered itself and pulled back just to drive anyone insane. Then she stretched out on the platform, spread her legs, and let them take turns.

One penetrated her while another filled her mouth; they switched places, synchronized, without pause. And when the first came inside her, he went pale at once, stepped back, and collapsed. His soul floated out toward the ceiling, one more in the chorus of specters already gathering above the dance floor.

Diego floated nearby, his phantom hand moving over himself without his being able to stop it.

—We have to stop her —he repeated, but the line sounded emptier every time—. Or this will be a cemetery.

The real Nadia drifted closer to him, her outline trembling like smoke.

—We can’t touch her, Diego. We don’t have bodies. Only… this.

They brushed against each other. Their translucent forms passed through one another, and for an instant there was an echo of pleasure, a ghost of friction, a hollow orgasm that made them cry out soundlessly. It wasn’t enough. It was never enough.

***

Naama did not stop. She left the Averno leaving a trail of lifeless bodies behind her and headed to a park, where a dozen strangers surrounded her beneath the trees. She knelt on the wet grass and took them all: mouths, hands, her body open in every direction, two and three at a time, in rhythm like a single animal. With every orgasm she absorbed one more life, and the air filled with moaning souls.

From there she went on to a private party in a luxury hotel: twenty drunk, naked bodies that fell one after another. She dominated some, gave herself to others, wrung them all dry. When she left, she had behind a room full of warm corpses and a swarm of new specters.

Valencia was no longer a city. It was a single throbbing body, and Naama was the queen fucking it to death.

At last she arrived at Plaza del Ayuntamiento, packed with people spilling out of the bars. She climbed onto the central fountain, naked, soaked, divine and terrible.

—Tonight we all fuck ourselves to death! —she roared, and a hundred people threw themselves at her.

It was a tide. Bodies over bodies, hands everywhere, her stolen name chanted amid moans. She came every few seconds, and with each orgasm she tore souls away in handfuls. The sky above the square began to stain red, just like the moon over Mérida eighteen hundred years before.

***

Diego floated above the fountain, surrounded by the thousands of specters the succubus had harvested over the centuries. His desire was consuming him, but through the mist of pleasure something broke through: a memory.

The night he had died. That October night when he had locked himself away alone, thinking of Nadia, touching himself to the end. And in the instant he came, something had crossed over into the world. A doorway. A shadow with green eyes.

—It was me —he whispered, and the certainty struck him like lightning—. My desire brought her. My pleasure gave her flesh. —He looked at the real Nadia—. And only what invoked her can destroy her.

—How? —she moaned—. You don’t have a body!

—I don’t need one. I need to get inside her.

Diego descended like a ray of dimmed light and superimposed himself over the body the succubus inhabited, not possessing it, only occupying the same space. He waited for a man to penetrate her and, at the very same instant, pushed. His spectral cock sank where the flesh one did, doubled, impossible.

Naama snapped upright.

—What…? —For the first time in eighteen hundred years, there was fear in her voice—. Diego! Get out of me!

But he no longer stopped. He thrust with a fury not of this world, and each удар burned the succubus’s soul instead of her body.

—This started with my desire —he panted—. And it ends with me inside you.

The real Nadia joined in: she superimposed herself too, sank a spectral hand where no one could reach and squeezed. Naama screamed, a howl that made the windows of the square tremble.

—I am eternal! —she shrieked.

—Not anymore —said Diego.

And he came. His spectral orgasm exploded inside the stolen body, mingling with the pleasure of others, burning the succubus from the center out like acid. The skin Naama inhabited dissolved into black smoke, and the succubus vanished in a final scream, dragged back into the void from which she should never have emerged.

Diego felt his own form go dark, unraveling into light.

—I did it —he whispered—. Nadia… I did it.

Above the square, the stolen souls returned to their bodies. The specters dissolved one by one. The sky recovered its clean blackness and the city, little by little, began breathing again.

Somewhere in the ether, two sparks remained floating together: Diego and Nadia, without bodies, without hunger, finally free of the desire that had damned them. For the first time, they did not need to touch to be at peace.