If Wishes Were Horses Read online

  each bite.

  A roll top desk, chair and side table formed an office nook, and the surfaces of the furniture were stacked with books and papers, an ongoing project. She moved to it, and when she reached out to draw one of the open books to her, she brushed the mouse. The screensaver dissolved, revealing the picture on the screen, and it jerked herattention away from the content of the open book.

  The wraith-like creature depicted had fangs and very erect genitalia. Its appearance disturbed her, for though its attributes warred visibly between human and not-human, its humanity was undeniably enticing, seductive. Its red eyes burned into her. Sarah stepped around the desk to read the text of the article in which the creature’s picture was embedded.

  Incubi are the male counterpart of the succubi. A class of demon, they disguise themselves as human women or succubi, copulate with unsuspecting men, and then take the procured seed anduse it when they seduce women. An incubus is sterile, incapable of producing an ejaculation of its own seed. While overpoweringly seductive, it is said that the incubus can choose to make sexual penetration a very painful experience, emitting liquid ice into the body of the woman—

  Sarah shifted her attention to the open books and a quick skim of text and picturesrevealed the subject matter was all the same. Justin’s bold hand had underscored testimony from a seventeenth century witchcraft trial in red ink. Sarah leaned over it, her brow knitting.

  He came and lay with me, and though he had the countenance of my husband, I knew it wasnot him. However, I could not resist him, so tempting was he to my weak woman's nature… As he…pierced me, his body and face changed, and became most hideous. I screamed and struggled,and I angered it. I became filled with such coldness, a coldness like the deepest winter, and knew I should die there, frozen to death, lest I figure out some way to fight and get away. My neighbor came, and the creature vanished, but not in time to save three of my fingers and all of the toes of my right foot, which succumbed to frostbite.

  Sarah heard Justin's footsteps padding down the stairs and she turned.

  He had just gotten out of the shower. Drops of water had collected at the tips of his hair and beaded onto his broad, pale shoulders. He held a towel loosely around hiswaist, slung low on his hips, the bare gesture of modesty for a man who thought he wasalone in his home, and so had no reason to hide the brand on his lower abdomen, justabove the line of his pubic area. The raised, damaged skin formed the same mark Lorraine Messenger had deliberately tattooed in the same place on her body.

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  “I know about the connection between you and Lorraine,” Sarah said, lifting her eyes from that mark to his startled face. “So I know you're a lying bastard. What I want to know is if you're a murdering bastard as well.”

  The flash of surprise vanished into an unreadable expression that sent a searing coldness through her, comparable to what had been described in the text behind her. “Trust me, Herne,” she snarled, “now is not the time to play dark and mysterious with me. You're about two seconds from being charged with murder. As it is, I'm here to take you to Wassler for formal questioning.”

  “I didn't lie to you, Sarah,” he said, his voice harsh. “I told you there were things I couldn't tell you, because you wouldn't believe me, and other things I wouldn't tell you, because they had nothing to do with the murder.”

  “And I told you, cops have a funny way of preferring to decide for themselves what relates to a murder.” She swept a book up off the desk and flung it at his feet. It landed with the cover spread out like wings over the crushed pages. “Is this the truth I won’t believe, Herne? Some delusion from the seventeenth century to cover your ass? No more bullshit. You took a piece of the victim's hair. You told me it was while I was with you. But how do I know that wasn't a lie, that you took it off her after you killed her? You hid what she was to you. Why would you hide this stuff from me? I'm good enough to fuck but not good enough to tell the truth to?”

  “Is that what this is about? Now you want to act like we’re in a real relationship where I owe you honesty, instead of continuing your childish pretense that we’re just acting on our lust?”

  She acted before she thought. She slapped him. She could have punched him, because she packed a good left, but she chose the ultimate blow of disdain and disappointment for a woman.

  He stood still, they both did, for several silent moments that ached with things farmore potent than had been said.

  “You really think,” he said at last, between clenched teeth, “that I would come to the police chief's home after I murdered this woman, to give you any potential clues,like dirt on my feet, or unusual scratches on my skin? A police chief who saw me engaged in a similar ritual?”

  “I don't know, Justin. Murderers aren't predictable. Maybe you thought by seducing me the same night, I'd be too embarrassed or distracted to implicate you.”

  “You must think I have the confidence of a god to have gone to your home with a diabolical plan to seduce a woman I'd never even met.”

  He did. That was the problem.

  He saw it in her face and stepped forward, took her shoulders in hard hands before she could throw him off. “I know you don't believe for one second that I did this, but by thinking I did, you can build a wall against me and punish yourself for letting yourself be who you are. Why are you so damned scared of me, Sarah?”

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  “Because you want the control,” she lashed out. “Because I can't keep my head on straight around you!”

  “Sarah, you keep your head on straight during your job. You don't need to do it with me, here in this room. Ever. That's the point of a relationship. You both give up your control, you learn to trust someone else with your heart.”

  “We barely even know each other.”

  He caught her chin in his hand so she had to look up at him, meet his steady, intense gaze. “Yes, we do, Sarah. That's what frightens you. You were with a man for ten years and during that whole time you didn’t feel an inkling of the intimacy with him that you feel just standing in my shop and exchanging a glance with me across twenty feet. That was his loss, and I won't mourn it, because I want you. I want to find out if our fate is forever, or just a short time of paradise, but you won’t deny there’s more here than sex, because I won't allow you to lie to me.”

  “But you lied to me. You said what you knew was not relevant,” she said bitterly, wresting away. “You being the father of Lorraine Messenger's child, you taking that child away from the mother, that seems awfully damned relevant.”

  He turned away, and that gauntness to his face became a haggard weariness. “She was not her mother,” he said. “She bore her, but she never wanted her. Even when she came here three months ago, it was for me, not for our daughter. She was attracted to power, which she perceived that I had. I chose to deepen my practice in the Wiccan path when I lost my Lori. It had the answers my heart needed to heal, and I found it called to a place deep within me. When someone discovers the right spiritual path for themselves, they feel as if they have found a home for their soul. I found mine there.”

  He rubbed a hand over his face. “If you'll let me get over to the computer, I'll show you more. I don't suppose you'd allow me to put on some clothes?”

  “Talk first, get decent later. Trust me, your manly body isn't going to overwhelm me.”

  He gave her an arch look and stalked past her. She tensed as he slid against herbody in the small space. Despite her words, the closeness of the area made her stomachmuscles tighten and tremble with emotions. He stopped there before her, and she madeherself look up into his face, close enough for a kiss. The heat of his body, that almost supernatural warmth that both attracted and enveloped her, did both now, and made the pain almost unbearable.

  “Stop whatever the hell it is you're doing to me,” she snapped, “and show me the goddamned information.”

  “I'm not trying to do anything, Sarah,”
he said, and his dark eyes showed a pain she wanted to ignore. “The truth is the truth, whether it’s the truth about Lorraine and me, or the truth about you and me.”

  He turned before she could shoot her denial at him, and sat in the chair in front of the computer. The towel parted, showing an expanse of thigh up almost to his hip. Thesight of that part of his flesh disturbed her even more than his bare chest and back, still

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  damp from his shower. It was somehow more intimate, that length of leg so close to his cock. Knowing that body had been hers to enjoy, had pleasured her. Knowing she wanted it still, and the man within it.

  Step back, Sarah. Not physically. There was no room for that behind the desk. Her admonishment was for her jumbled emotions. She had to take a deep breath and establish some space in her overwrought mind to listen to him objectively. She could not leap to assumptions about his guilt simply because she was so afraid he was. No more than she could assume he was innocent because she desperately wanted him to be.

  She very deliberately slid a hip onto the desk, crossed her arms. Herne nodded, as if he had been waiting for this physical cue that he had her attention.

  “An incubus is a demon,” he said, gesturing to the image on the computer screen. “Prior to Christianity's influence, a demon was simply a term for an otherworldly being. It could have been good or evil, a guide, teacher, or even an angel, as easily as it couldhave been a manifestation of darkness. It might even be good-bad neutral. An incubus's specialty is seducing women and impregnating them with the semen of human males, whether for good or bad purposes, it's hard to say. They obtain the semen by shifting…”

  “I read that part.”

  “Eight years ago, I had the most vivid sexual experience of my life.” A bitter smile touched his lips. “Until recently, I didn't think it could be matched. I dreamed of a

  woman, and in that dream, I made love to her. I expected to wake up a mess, like a teenager having a wet dream. It was obvious I had had an orgasm, but there was no semen, no fluids upon me except what I would expect if I had ejaculated into a woman's body.” His tone became flat. “On my stomach was this brand. It hurt like hell. I could still smell the burning flesh. I saw a doctor about it, but he was helpless to explain the phenomenon.”

  The light from the desk lamp etched out his struggle to speak of the demons of his past. In this case, Sarah realized the description was literal, at least in Herne’s mind. The jury was still out for her, but her hair was standing on her arms in an uncomfortable

  way.

  “Nine months later, I got a call from a hospital in North Carolina. They had a pregnant woman there, a drug addict. In the pain of her labor and the delirium of her withdrawal, she screamed out my name as the father of the child, as well as the town in which I lived. The hospital found me.

  “I’m curious, so I go and see the woman. Her face is the face of my dream, only unravaged by the drugs, as she might have been before she got hooked, and without the overwhelming seductive power of the being of my dream. I’m shaken enough by the similarity that I submit to a DNA test. The baby is ours.”

  Sarah sucked in a breath. Justin leaned back in the chair, splaying his knees, and stared at the screen and the image there, a macabre cartoon.

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  “I looked at this wreck of a woman, who had nothing but contempt for me and those around me. She did not know me, nor I her. Yet when I first came into her room, I saw she had some of the same sense of bewildering recognition of me as I did of her. I told the hospital I wanted to take custody of the child, for they had called social services in and refused to relinquish the child to her.”

  He reached out, rubbed at the side of the keyboard with his thumb, an absent gesture, a distraction for the emotions Sarah felt vibrating off of him. She saw his throat work as he swallowed. “When they let me hold her for the first time, and Lori looked at me, I knew we were bound. It was a miracle she came out healthy, that Lorraine didn’t lose her or abort her before labor. Perhaps it was the circumstances of her birth that provided her some type of protection, I don’t know. Lorraine couldn't sign her over to me fast enough, was delighted I was willing to take her. She was so out of her head and confused by the whole situation. I was just as confused. She disappeared from the hospital the next day.”

  “You called the baby Lori.”

  He nodded. “I didn’t know anything about Lorraine Messenger except she was a disaster, but I wanted to give the child the safest gift from her birth mother I could give her.

  “I researched the brand, and that's where I found this.” He scrolled down and she was looking at the same symbol in bold grey, red and black graphics as it had been tattooed on Lorraine's skin and burned into Justin’s.

  “If you go into the works of the monks of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, they did a detailed chronology and hierarchy of the angels and demons. This was in there. It also came up several times in testimony at witch trials. I uncovered another reference to it in a story written in the nineteenth century, a nickel pulp fiction by a cowboy in Colorado. Almost the exact story as mine. The dream, waking up with the brand. Three years later, he’s in Colorado and meets an unmarried Indian maiden with the same mark, and her face is the one from his dream. She has a tattoo like his brand, that she felt compelled to have one of the tribe stencil on her in the same spot. She has a boy who looks so much like the cowboy, there’s no doubt it has to be his son.”

  Justin scrolled down as he spoke, so Sarah’s attention covered the same detail information he was referencing. “This,” he pointed to a smaller photo of the horned and fanged caricature at the top, “was the rendering of the monks, their belief of his true form. To most of his victims he appears with the face of a person they know, or as an attractive, seductive stranger that they might later discover or meet.

  “The Indian woman and cowboy married and lived happily ever after in the fictional account. The woman in the witch trial was exonerated for succumbing to the influence of the Devil, but her husband cast her and her child out of his home and she was expelled from the community. There are reports she joined her sister in Virginia and became a shopkeeper, her son a respected attorney. And you know my story, and Lorraine’s.”

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  “But why would it do this? What purpose—”

  “I expect it’s simply a random, unhappy spirit.” Justin lifted a shoulder. “There’s a theory that, just the same way we long to connect to or possess the powers of supernatural beings, so, too, do those beings sometimes wish to connect with or possess characteristics of our mortality. This may be a way to do it.”

  Sarah chewed on the inside of her cheek, studied the screen. “Say I believe any of this, and that’s a big ‘if’. Did you find any evidence of it actually killing someone in the way Lorraine was killed?”

  “Six times in this century.” He confirmed her fears, flipping to another screen where she saw various news articles that had been downloaded from library archive files. He maintained his silence as she quickly read through the data he had compiled. Different parts of the world, always at least ten or fifteen years apart, sometimes much longer.

  “He’s been around for awhile,” Justin said. “He doesn’t always kill, and there’s no indication of why he does, just that he has a short fuse and a lot of power. He’s killed four women, two men. The only clue is in that seventeenth century account. As far as I can tell, she’s the only one who ever survived him when he got angry. And she’s the only one who ever recorded seeing him as an image similar to the rendering of the monks.”

  “You’ve been researching this for some time,” she said, realizing the impact of that even as her gaze swept the stacks of files on his desk, the books on paranormal phenomena on his shelves.

  “Since it happened to me, over eight years ago. It shocked the hell out of me, the day you took me to the murder site.
Seeing Lorraine dead was terrible, but not unexpected. It was hard to see the body, though. To remember… ” He moved the mouse to keep the monitor from switching to the screensaver.

  “What shocked you, then?” Sarah prompted him.

  “That she was trying to call it. It never occurred to me that she ever had the cognizance to recognize the incubus was more than a bad trip, but apparently she did. She was Wiccan. In her lucid moments, few and far between though they may have been, she put it together.” Justin’s mouth thinned, the lips pressed hard together. “She was near bottom when she came to see me several months ago. Maybe she thought if she could get pregnant by it again, I would give her money.” He swiveled in the chair, looked up at Sarah, “Or maybe she just wanted to feel that good again for a few minutes. But as I said, this demon’s got a short fuse. I suspect he doesn’t care for being called or ordered about.”

  “Or,” she responded, “maybe he saw it as a mercy killing, she was so far gone.”

  Justin leaned forward, rubbed a hand over his face. “I’ll go with you to Eric’s office, Sarah, but I’m not going to tell him all this. If you want to do it, fine, but you can see now that there’s nothing the police can do to stop this thing, even if you all believed me.”

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  “What will kill it?”

  “You can’t kill a demon. It’s pure energy. You can neutralize it, bind it, lock it into a contained space in the universe. The coven can do that, but to do it we’d have to find him and close in around him before he knew we were coming, and this guy has no pattern as to whom he chooses initially for his victim. He shows up whenever, wherever.”

  He rose out of the chair so his back was to her, and stepped back out of the desk

  space.

  “I’ll go get dressed.”