Authors:
Cody Goodfellow,
Silvia Moreno-Garcia,
Jennifer Brozek,
Ahimsa Kerp,
Carrie Cuinn,
Gabrielle Harbowy,
Don Pizarro,
Madison Woods,
Richard Baron,
Juan Miguel Marin,
Maria Mitchell,
Mae Empson,
Nathan Crowder,
KV Taylor,
Andrew Scearce,
Constella Espj,
Leon J. West,
Travis King,
Steven J. Searce,
Clint Collins,
Matthew Marovich,
Gary Mark Bernstein,
Kirsten Brown,
Kenneth Hite,
Justin Everett
tentacles that transfixed her spine until the armored body was suffused with an excited lava-lamp glow. With a hiss like the gutting of a fish, the armor split open.
A flurry of velvety fronds like the venomous petals of a sea anemone erupted from the phantom to enfold and impale Shirley. She rolled and wriggled on a bed of avid, adept tongues, moaning with delight at their electric touch, reveling in the trails of rainbow saliva etched from her neck to the cleft of her groin.
While it held her suspended in the air, Shirley’s devil braided its tentacles together into a luridly glowing scorpion stinger that throbbed and swelled and coiled to strike.
Marc threw the kill-switch. He would have been surprised if it actually worked. The resonator was recycling power or drawing it directly from the hidden reality they had tapped into. He shuddered with rage and frustrated lust. This thing was no alien to Shirley, being something that had attached itself to her, fueled her dangerous behavior and fed off her, for most of her life. But now, she could touch it as it had touched her. She had used him to make it possible for her to seduce her own lust.
He moved slowly out from behind the console, watching the teeming alien predators, but they seemed to have retreated for fear of Shirley’s demon lover.
There was no shutting it off, no reasoning with her to make it stop. But there, forgotten on the arm of the chair, was her gun.
Shirley opened her mouth to fellate a probing anemone-tongue, eliciting a piercing blast of strobing light from the incubus. The strange lightning poured out of her, illuminating her nervous system like overloaded Xmas lights, silhouetting her skeleton and seeming to dissolve her flesh in an acid bath of light. Marc shielded his eyes, but still saw her through the thin curtain of his transparent fingers. He saw her thrust herself onto the quivering stinger, and could not look away as her glowing plasma body engulfed it down to the root.
Somehow, his fingers found the pistol. He couldn’t risk hitting Shirley. He turned and tried to shoot the tuning array, but the bullets only burst the clouds of jellyfish and pinged harmlessly off the screaming tuning forks.
“This is what you wanted, wasn’t it, baby?” She purred and gyrated on the phantom parasite’s monstrous organ. He could see the impossibly large thing quivering and thrashing inside of her, trying to match her violent rhythm. Ethereal clouds of vapor streamed off its glowing shell. “All those things you made me do, you didn’t just want to watch and feed off the heat, did you?”
Marc reached up to pull her away, but the incubus swept him aside with a thorny limb that shredded his forearm to the bone.
“You wanted this… wanted to touch me… have me… but you never thought it would kill you, did you?”
With an agonized cry, she flexed herself against the engorged stinger and wrung it dry. Her orgasm was a wrenching seizure that tore through her in waves, splaying her lovely limbs out as if she’d been electrocuted.
Her demon lover spasmed in her embrace and seemed almost to melt with the explosive force of its own release. Its armor was riven by cracks of ultraviolet light, and waves of iridescent energy spilled out of it seemed to flow down its shrinking stinger and up Shirley’s neon spine, into the brain of its erstwhile host.
With a contemptuous sweep of her hand, she ripped away the shriveled spinal taps and kicked away from her spent lover. She hit the floor and gracefully danced away from the impact, but then swooned into the chair.
Shirley’s parasite drifted across the room like a flaccid helium balloon until a swarm of lampreys descended upon it, feasting on its helpless, sex-shocked flesh like remorae devouring the remains of a shark’s breakfast.
Abruptly, finally, the deep violet light and the unholy hum cut out with an anticlimactic pop. The gray void dissolved into an ugly pre-dawn industrial