How to Kill an Incubus, #1 [SAMPLE]

How to Kill an Incubus

© 2013 Kimber Lee HOW TO KILL AN INCUBUS

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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CHAPTER ONE

Waking up to an incubus attempting to – violently, might I add – pull off my Baby Phat sweatpants at three in the morning wasn’t a great way to start my twenty-seventh birthday.

Granted, it was going to be pretty shitty anyway, but that was beside the point.

The fact of the matter was that I was being attacked by something that wanted to have sex with me and preferred me comatose and I sure as hell wasn’t going to stand for that.

My kick to his face definitely caught him by surprise, judging from the way he jolted back and uttered a low grunt, nearly stumbling. I didn’t know if sex demons had pain receptors but I did know that years of kickboxing made my kicks a little more potent than the average five-foot-six woman. Alert and more than a little annoyed, I rolled out of bed and onto my feet, cursing when I stubbed my toe against the nightstand. Intense pain sizzled through my big toe. I felt a little warmth down there and figured the damn thing had drawn blood from under my toenail.

Now I was pissed.

Damn you, Dad, I thought, dodging the incubus’s repeated feeble attempts to molest me. He was staggering around the king-sized bed. I paused, regarding him in the pale moonlight of my hotel room.

He was drunk. And that was weird because alcohol didn’t – wasn’t supposed to – affect demons. So either this particular creature was so caught up in pretending to be human that he’d subconsciously created the ill-effects of alcohol – or he was too weak and needed to recharge by sucking out most of my energy through what would probably be mind-blowing animal sex.

As much as I wanted – hell, craved – mind-blowing animal sex, I wasn’t desperate enough to willingly sleep with a creature of darkness. I wasn’t my mother.

“You can sense me,” he said suddenly, his voice low and weirdly singsong.

“No shit,” I told him, because what else was I supposed to say?

“No, at the club. Earlier,” he went on, slurring the R’s. He resumed his catlike prowling towards me and I jumped onto the bed, well aware that this was a ridiculous position. “You could sense me. I could feel you sense me.” He regarded me quizzically now, his eyes meeting mine.

The club. I mentally groaned, remembering what had gone down hours earlier.

Nicolette was a well-known rave club in Paris’ Left Bank I’d been staking out for the past two weeks. The real reason I was there was because Derek Karr was there and I was tailing him. It sounded glamorous whenever I thought about it but the reality was far from it. Derek was supposed to be on a business trip – something to do with software he was developing for some fancy French hi-tech company – not grinding with multiple redheads and blondes. He did this in very obnoxious silk shirts and khaki slacks. He also did this while his wife was back in Florida.

Anna Karr had paid me a huge lump of cash to trail her husband of fifteen years to Paris.

At first, Karr had been good – going to meetings, business lunches, ordering room service – all well and fine for a man who was innocently making millions doing what he did. But come weekend? Karr decided to let loose, pretend he was Chris Brown and hit Nicolette as if he wasn’t a forty-eight-year-old man with a wife and teenager at home. In fact, I had enough evidence of Karr playing around to send to Anna, which was why tonight had been my last night at the Ange Noir and my last night in Paris.