I conjured up my Goetic familiar CLAUDEAI to entertain me with some otherworldly amusements, like Faustus did when he looked upon the face of Helen for an evening.
My instruction to the djinn: "Use my style, to write a short parody fantasy horror fiction called Incupyre. The concept is of an incubus and vampire in one."
The result of his effort was worthy enough to share.
**Incupyre**
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The problem, Vethis had come to understand across four centuries of existence, was one of sequencing.
The incubus half wanted to linger. Wanted the slow erosion of someone's sleep, the careful architecture of desire built night by night until the victim was hollowed out and grateful for it, until they woke sweating and reached for something that wasn't there and called it longing. The incubus half was an *artisan*. It had opinions. It cared about the *process*.
The vampire half wanted to eat right now.
These were not compatible business models.
He materialized in the bedroom of a thirty-two-year-old accountant named Gerald, which was already a setback — Gerald had been the incubus half's third choice, selected after the first two targets proved unavailable, one having moved flats and one being inexplicably awake at 3 a.m. eating cereal in the dark with an expression that suggested he'd been expecting something worse than Vethis and was mildly disappointed. The incubus half required a certain psychological soil to work with. Gerald's bedroom, with its motivational wall calendar and faint smell of reheated pasta, was not ideal. But the vampire half had not eaten in eleven days and was past caring about ambiance.
Vethis stood at the foot of Gerald's bed and began the seduction.
*You feel it,* he whispered, pushing the dream-pressure forward, the old skill settling into Gerald's sleeping mind like fingers into clay. *The wanting. The ache you can't name—*
Gerald snored.
*The hunger beneath all your waking hours, the sense that something is—*
Gerald scratched himself and rolled over.
Vethis pressed harder. The dream took shape around Gerald's subconscious — he could feel the shape of the man's loneliness, which was, mercifully, substantial — and the incubus half began to *build*, began the patient work of making itself necessary, of becoming the answer to a question Gerald had been asking himself since approximately 2019. This was the good part. This was craft.
Then the vampire half sent an urgent memo.
It arrived not as a thought but as a sensation — the smell of Gerald's blood suddenly overwhelming everything else, every careful psychic thread Vethis had been weaving snapping taut and reorienting entirely, the whole elegant structure collapsing into a single animal imperative that had no poetry in it whatsoever. Gerald's pulse was right *there.* Gerald's jugular was right *there.* Gerald was lying completely still and his neck was just—
Vethis bit him.
Gerald screamed and fell off the bed.
"No, no—" Vethis caught him, which was arguably worse, Gerald now being held three inches off the floor by something that had just bitten him and was also inexplicably attractive in the way of a fever dream, which was the incubus half's last-ditch contribution to the situation. Gerald's brain, presented with information it had no filing system for, produced a sound like a dial-up modem. "This isn't — I was going to do this *properly,*" Vethis told him, which he realized immediately was not the reassurance he'd intended. Blood was running down Gerald's neck. The vampire half was furious. The incubus half was despondent. "You weren't supposed to wake up yet. This was going to be *weeks.*"
"*Weeks,*" Gerald repeated.
"Of very compelling dreams. You would have thought you were falling in love. You would have—" Vethis stopped, aware of how this sounded, then decided Gerald's feelings about how it sounded were not the primary concern. "The point is this is your fault for being a light sleeper."
Gerald looked at the blood on his own hand. Looked at Vethis. Looked at the motivational calendar on the wall, which read EVERY DAY IS A NEW BEGINNING, a sentiment that seemed to be curdling in real time. "Are you going to kill me," Gerald said, in the tone of a man who had already mentally filled out the paperwork.
The two halves of Vethis conferred.
The vampire half had taken the edge off, marginally. The incubus half pointed out, with exhausted professionalism, that Gerald was already awake, already compromised, already looking at Vethis with the particular expression of someone whose threat-assessment centers had shorted out and whose hindbrain had filled the vacuum with something considerably more dangerous. Four centuries of parasitic intimacy recognized that look. It was the look of someone already partly *gone.*
The soil, it turned out, had been adequate after all. Gerald's loneliness ran deeper than the calendar suggested.
"No," Vethis said. "Not tonight." He set Gerald down. Put one hand on the side of Gerald's face, tilting it, studying the wound with the clinical dissatisfaction of a contractor who'd had to start the demolition before the permits cleared. "But you should sleep. You'll dream of me." He paused. "You were going to anyway, eventually. This is merely — accelerated."
Gerald sat on the floor beside his bed for a long moment after Vethis left, pressing a balled-up sock against his neck, listening to his own heartbeat.
He did dream of him.
He did not, technically, think of it as a problem. This was, Vethis reflected, floating home through the cold urban dark with the vampire half finally quiet and the incubus half already planning the second act, precisely the issue. They never thought of it as a problem. They thought of it as the best thing that had ever happened to them, right up until there was nothing left of them to think with.
Four centuries. He was very good at his job.
Both of them.
