The Succubus Born of a Forbidden Desire
Nearly 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 condemn her forever. She was nineteen, with black hair reaching her waist and green eyes the men of the village avoided meeting, because a hunger burned in them that no prayer could ever extinguish.
The daughter of an exiled scholar, Adira had grown up amid 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, rather than surrender herself to a bed without fire, she fled to the ancient cemetery on the outskirts.
The crooked gravestones rose in the darkness like broken fingers. She stripped naked upon the cold grass, her pale skin gleaming beneath the moon, and spoke the name her father had taught her never to utter.
“Come to me, Belial,” she murmured, spreading her legs over a shattered slab. “Take what no one has taken. Give me eternal freedom in exchange for my body.”
The air suddenly turned cold. The 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 pits. There was no tenderness. There was only an enormous weight falling upon her, hands gripping her hips hard enough to leave marks, and a pain that drove deep enough to split her in two.
Adira screamed, and the scream became something that was not entirely pain. Each thrust tore away a little of the woman she had been. When he spilled inside her, a scorching heat rose through her belly, filled her chest, and stole her final heartbeat.
Adira’s mortal body dissolved into black smoke upon the slab. But her desire did not die: it was reborn as something else. A nameless succubus whom time would eventually call Naama, condemned to feed on the pleasure of others in order to continue existing, able to inhabit living bodies and crawl from century to century, stealing souls one by one with every orgasm she provoked.
***
Three hundred years later, Naama wandered the streets of Seville like a lascivious current of cold air. She sought young flesh, and found it in Sister Catalina, a novice at a convent on the outskirts: unblemished skin, nipples kept perpetually erect by the rough brush of her habit, and a desire buried so deeply that even she did not know it existed.
The succubus entered her body during midnight prayers. A shudder ran down Catalina’s back, and for the first time in her life she felt her own sex grow wet beneath the fabric.
That same night, in the novice’s sweet voice, Naama summoned some twenty monks from the nearby monasteries to the chapel. They arrived one after another, drawn by a promise they did not understand but could not refuse. The chapel smelled of incense and sweat, and the candles trembled as though they were breathing.
Naama undressed upon the altar.
“Kneel,” she ordered, and the voice was no longer Catalina’s. “Worship me with your mouths, and I will give you what your god denies you.”
And worship her they did. Hungry mouths traveled over her body, clumsy hands opened her thighs. She let them do it, mounted them one by one, drained them to the last drop while moaning with a pleasure that had no bottom. But every time a man emptied himself inside her, something invisible carried him away: the color fled his face, the light died in his eyes, and he collapsed onto the flagstones, transformed into a dry husk. His soul slipped free like a wisp of smoke and remained floating there, trapped, condemned to desire without a body forever.
By dawn, twenty empty habits lay in the chapel. Sated, Naama abandoned the novice’s exhausted body and continued on her way.
***
In the twelfth century, in Ávila, the succubus dressed herself in the body of a street prostitute to approach Don Tristán, a tall, weathered Templar who had returned from the Crusades scarred and reputed to be a tireless lover. Tristán had a daughter, Leonor, twenty-two years old: blond, serene, and promised to a nobleman she did not love.
Naama seduced the Templar in a tavern, whispered promises of a pleasure no confessor would forgive into his ear, and led him to a room above the stable. She rode him slowly, savoring every inch, until she left him trembling. And while he caught his breath, she planted the seed of her will in him, as one sows a curse.
“Your daughter secretly desires you,” she whispered, and the lie caught fire within him like an ember in dry straw. “Take her tonight. And you will both be mine forever.”
Possessed by a compulsion he could no longer distinguish from his own desire, Tristán entered Leonor’s bedchamber that night. And Naama’s curse had reached her as well: when she awoke and saw her father, the horror lasted barely 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 tore free together and dissolved into smoke, condemned to float entwined forever.
***
Now, on a night in late October, the succubus inhabited Nadia’s body: blond, angelic-smiled, with firm breasts swaying beneath a torn T-shirt and a sex dripping with the pleasure stolen from her victims. Valencia throbbed like a heart in heat. Nightclubs vomited music, bars overflowed with sweaty bodies, and couples sought each other beneath the streetlamps in the parks. Naama walked with her hips ablaze. This city will be my feast, she thought.
Floating invisibly behind her were 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 quite knowing how, and carried a torment worse than death: he desired Nadia with all his strength and would never be able to touch her.
“This is getting worse,” Diego muttered, his voice a hollow echo only she could hear. “If we don’t stop her, there won’t be anyone left alive in the city tomorrow.”
But as he said it, his eyes never left Naama. Every time she went into heat, a sick fascination burned inside him. If only I could touch you, Nadia. If only I could do to you what she does to everyone else…
Naama entered the Averno, an underground club where techno throbbed like a crazed pulse. She climbed onto a platform in the center of the dance floor and ripped off her T-shirt.
“Listen to me!” she shouted, her voice overpowering the music. “Tonight we fuck until sunrise!”
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, knowing mouth that drew gasps, two hands that never rested, a body that offered itself and withdrew again, driving anyone wild. Then she lay back on the platform, spread her legs, and let them take turns.
One penetrated her while another filled her mouth; they switched places, synchronized and relentless. And when the first came inside her, he suddenly went pale, staggered backward, and collapsed. His soul floated toward the ceiling, another addition to the chorus of specters already gathering above the dance floor.
Diego floated nearby, his ghostly hand moving over himself despite his inability to stop.
“We have to stop her,” he repeated, but the words sounded emptier each time. “Or this will become a cemetery.”
The real Nadia approached him, her outline trembling like smoke.
“We can’t touch her, Diego. We have no body. 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 phantom of friction, a hollow orgasm that made them cry out without voices. It was not enough. It was never enough.
***
Naama did not stop. She left the Averno behind her, strewn with inert bodies, and headed for a park, where a dozen strangers surrounded her beneath the trees. She knelt in the damp grass and took them all: mouths, hands, her body opened in every direction, two and three at a time, moving in rhythm like a single animal. With every orgasm she absorbed another life, and the air filled with moaning souls.
From there she went to a private party in a luxury hotel: twenty drunken, naked bodies that fell one after another. She dominated some, surrendered herself to others, drained them all. When she left, she had abandoned 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 reached City Hall Square, packed with people spilling out of the bars. She climbed onto the central fountain, naked, drenched, divine and terrible.
“Tonight we all fuck until we die!” she roared, and a hundred people lunged at her.
It was a tide. Bodies upon bodies, hands everywhere, her stolen name chanted amid moans. She came every few seconds, and with every orgasm she tore souls away by the handful. The sky above the square began to turn 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 across the centuries. His desire consumed him, but through the haze of pleasure something forced its way through: a memory.
The night he had died. That October night when he had locked himself away alone, thinking of Nadia, touching himself until the end. And at the instant he came, something had crossed into the world. A door. A shadow with green eyes.
“It was me,” he whispered, and certainty struck him like lightning. “My desire brought her here. My pleasure gave her flesh.” He looked at the real Nadia. “And only the same thing that summoned her can destroy her.”
“How?” she moaned. “You have no body!”
“I don’t need one. I need to enter her.”
Diego descended like a ray of extinguished light and merged with Nadia’s body, the one inhabited by the succubus, without possessing it, merely occupying the same space. He waited until a man penetrated her and, at that same instant, thrust forward. His spectral sex sank into the place where the fleshly one was, doubled, impossible.
Naama jerked 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 that did not belong to this world, and every blow scorched the succubus’s soul instead of her body.
“This began with my desire,” he gasped, “and it ends with me inside you.”
The real Nadia joined him: she merged with the body as well, drove a spectral hand into a place no one could reach, and squeezed. Naama screamed, a shriek that made the square’s windows tremble.
“I am eternal!” she shrieked.
“Not anymore,” Diego said.
And he spilled himself. His spectral orgasm erupted inside the stolen body, mingling with the stolen pleasure, burning the succubus from the center like acid. The skin Naama inhabited dissolved into black smoke, and the succubus vanished in one final scream, dragged into the void from which she should never have emerged.
Diego felt his own form go dark, dissolving 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 regained its clear blackness, and the city slowly began to breathe again.
Somewhere in the ether, two sparks remained floating together: Diego and Nadia, bodiless, hungerless, finally free of the desire that had condemned them. For the first time, they did not need to touch in order to be at peace.
