Chapter 1: Meet Your Hunter
On a hazy Sunday evening in 1802, according to the Gregorian calendar, as the relentless winter rains lashed against the grey stone streets of the city, the Saint Jude Church was shrouded in a heavy, incense-laden mist. The young priest’s sermon, urging the congregation to maintain their resolve against the sins of the flesh, had the exact opposite effect on his audience, which consisted mostly of weary farmers’ wives. These women, exhausted by their daily lives—and especially by their husbands—found themselves unable to resist the fantasy of a sinful night with young Father Thomas. Seeing him sweat while straining his voice, they couldn’t help but fantasize that it was they who had driven him to such a fever.
Father Thomas read from the pulpit with a trembling voice: “The devil, your adversary, prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour...” (1 Peter 5:8). The hysteria of the congregation seemed to have infected him as well. Even as he preached about self-control, he felt he could no longer suppress the strange, restless sensations stirring within him.
No matter how handsome the young priest was, he was not the true architect of the lust-filled atmosphere hanging in the air that night. Sidra, who had slipped through the massive oak doors shortly after the sermon began, watched her handiwork with delight. At that moment, she was merely a part of the shadows. As a succubus, Sidra could have easily fed in a place brimming with sexual energy, like a brothel. Yet, after an existence spanning over three hundred years, she preferred the chase of more challenging and entertaining experiences. She had also realized that the more arduous the target, the more potent her replenishment felt afterward. Though she enjoyed the small atmosphere she had curated, it was not enough for her to feed. She needed to be one-on-one with her prey to fully savor his life force. With this in mind, she lowered the hood of her heavy, jet-black wool cloak, let her raven-black hair spill over her shoulders, and fixed her gaze upon the pulpit. When their eyes met, Father Thomas’s voice caught in his throat, and he froze. The congregation mistook his silence for fear, but what Thomas felt was the gates of hell swinging open with the scent of jasmine.
Sidra could hear the pounding of her prey’s heart from across the room. She smiled faintly and, without waiting for the sermon to end, rose and moved toward the wooden confessional tucked into a dim corner of the church. As she entered the narrow, airless darkness of the booth, the rustle of her cloak ceased. After the sermon ended and the crowd dispersed, she heard heavy footsteps approaching the adjacent compartment and the priest sitting down, breathless. “Confess,” the priest’s voice commanded. His tone was no longer the authoritative one from the pulpit. “God is listening.”
“Perhaps tonight, you should be the one to confess, Father,” Sidra whispered. Her voice was as smooth as the friction of velvet. Thomas was preparing to explain that this was not how things worked when the words, “I carry such a desire in my soul that prayers are not enough to quiet it,” escaped his lips. His entire body felt as if it were burning, an unstoppable craving rising within him.
Sensing her prey’s escalating pulse, Sidra gently pushed the small slide separating the wooden partitions with her fingertips. The sacred barrier between them was now open. Sidra let her cloak slip from her shoulders. Beneath it, her thin, midnight-black dress clung to her body like a second skin. The booth was so narrow that when Sidra moved into the adjacent compartment and sat on the priest’s lap, she felt him gasping for air as if drowning. She wrapped her arms around his neck; her black curls shrouded his face like a veil. As their lips met, she moved her legs to either side of him and began to sway with a slow, rhythmic motion. She could feel his life force flowing into her. Once she decided she had fed enough, she allowed the priest’s eyelids to flutter shut in a sweet, languid haze.
As Father Thomas’s body went limp like a puppet, the young woman gently brushed a lock of hair from his forehead. Sidra had not forced him; the most poisonous talent carried in the ancient blood of a succubus was the ability to find and bring to the surface the most shameful desires hidden in the darkest corner of a soul—things the owner would never dare admit to themselves. Sidra had merely awakened the savage hunger that Thomas had been suppressing for years under his holy vows and heavy vestments, granting him the dark permission he secretly craved. People often mistook succubi for hunters; yet, they were merely mirrors, whispering for humans to feed the beast within. In the midst of that holy silence, Thomas had been dying to lose himself in this sin; Sidra had simply encouraged this craving and gifted him the ruin he had imagined. “If a few years of his life were lost in return, so what?” she thought to herself, a cruel, crooked smile playing on her lips. “After all, he sacrificed his soul not for nothing, but for a moment of true pleasure. A fair trade,” Sidra reflected. “A moment of eternity squeezed into a short life is far more valuable than a long, empty existence.”
A few minutes later, Sidra slipped silently from the shadows of the booth. She wrapped her cloak tightly around her shoulders and pulled her hood up to conceal her face. She left behind a restless man who assumed the experience had been a sinful dream and who would, upon waking, likely inflict hundreds of lashes of penance upon himself. On her way out, she stopped before the massive mirror in the dim church corridor to look at herself.
Sidra gazed at the red eyes in her reflection that betrayed her recent feeding, and she tried to tuck her wild, unruly hair back into her hood. A haughty, twisted smile appeared on her lips. After smoothing her attire, she glided through the church’s heavy oak doors and vanished into the night, blending into the pouring rain outside.
Inspo for Sidra
