"Put the gun down and go home, Irish," the Dutchman said. "I've been watching you play all night. You're as easy to read as a book. It's obvious when you're trying to bluff."

He stared right into Nic's eyes.

"You're bluffing."

Nic continued to fall into the big black hole roiling away beneath him. What the fuck did he do now? He hadn't seriously considered shooting anyone. He didn't think he'd have to. He thought pointing the gun at them would be enough to scare them into giving him his money. What now?

He lowered the gun. The asshole was right. He couldn't shoot him. What would that achieve? Any money he ran off with would be lost when the police caught him. Then he'd spend the rest of his life behind bars.

"Go home, Irish," the Dutchman said contemptuously before turning back to the table.

Sheepishly, broken, Nic retreated out through the fire exit.

He said nothing on the taxi ride back to the hotel. The succubus sat next to him on the back seat. He felt the disapproval radiating out from her.

What else could he have done? The Dutchman had called his bluff. Shooting him wouldn't have achieved anything. Fuck. Why did Lady Luck always have to fuck him in the ass?

No. The Dutchman was right. It wasn't luck. It was him. He was just another shmuck loser.

The succubus pounced on him as soon as they walked through the door into the room. This took Nic by surprise. She hadn't said a word during the drive home and he didn't think she was in the mood for sexy stuff.

Neither was Nic, to be honest. All he wanted to do was sit in the dark and lick his wounds, maybe with the help of a strong bottle of spirits.

The succubus had other plans. She pushed him back onto the bed, climbed on top and started to fiddle with his belt.

"I don't think I'm in the mood," Nic said.

The succubus looked up and bared her long fangs in an animalistic hiss.

Nic recoiled. What had gotten into her?

She ripped open his trousers and exposed his genitals. Claw-tipped fingers tickled up and down his flaccid cock. There was a crackle of warm energy and Nic was erect with a suddenness that made him gasp in shock.

The succubus was fully naked. Nic wasn't sure how that had happened. She'd been wearing a figure-hugging, lime-green dress mere moments ago. She straddled Nic and the plush labia of her sex parted like lips about to accept a tasty morsel.

A growing feeling of disquiet-an atavistic sense of danger-rose in Nic. It warned him entering her this time would not give him the same pleasant sensations as before. He tried to rise up from the bed.

The succubus snarled displeasure in his face. She planted a claw-tipped hand on his chest and shoved him back down. Her other hand enfolded his erection and steered it beneath her. She lowered her hips and-in one smooth motion-engulfed the whole of Nic's cock.

His sense of disquiet had been correct to be concerned. It was not the pleasant sensation he'd experienced before. Her pussy was tight-too tight. And muscular-far too muscular. That was before he even got to the heat. It felt like fires raged within her.

Nic was a long-lapsed catholic, but right there and then all his childhood terrors flowed back into him. It wasn't a cute little girl with a knockout body and Halloween-costume horns, but a devil riding him. An actual devil. She used one hand to pin him to the bed while the other groped and squeezed one of her overripe breasts. Her pussy squeezed him as well. A little too hard.

"You're recharging, right?" Nic said.

"Better than that," she replied with a smile that chilled Nic's blood. Her voice tailed off in a sibilant hiss like steam escaping a hellish engine.

"You're being a little rough," he said, still praying his fears were wrong and this was just another of her sex games.

The succubus paused her rapid up-and-down thrusts and settled in Nic's lap.

Oh good, she'd realised she was- Nngh!

Needle-sharp teeth sprang out of the walls of her vagina and impaled his member. The pain was intense but also weirdly ephemeral, as if it was the spectral impressions of teeth. The part of him they'd impaled also felt weirdly ephemeral-less part of his flesh and something... else.

"The fuck!" he protested.

The room darkened around Nic. He caught a whiff of something unpleasant-burnt meat. He thought he heard far-off voices carried to him on a burning wind.

Black lips curled up in a cruel smile, the succubus shushed him with a finger on his lips.

"You're a loser," she said. "You try to tell yourself it's bad luck, but you know the truth-it's you."

"No, no," Nic protested.

The darkness was deepening and expanding, as if the room had been washed in stygian ink. Those far-off voices sounded closer. They sounded like screams.

The succubus's breath came out in erotic pants as she rose up and down on top of him, fucking him. Her ass slapped against him with each bounce and with each bounce he felt a pressure rising in his balls. This was a different feeling than the usual pleasant precursor to ejaculation, and one that filled him with terror.

"And now you realise that..."

The succubus increased the intensity of her fucking. Her swollen breasts bobbed and swayed with the motions of her body. The ephemeral fangs within her body caught on that ephemeral part of Nic. He felt weird inside, like some inner elastic lining was detaching from his body.

"...you're mine to claim."

Nic tried to protest, to plead, but all that emerged was a strangled sound-part terror, part uncontrolled bliss.

The succubus's head tipped up. Her wings, blacker even than the dark fugue surrounding them, extended behind her. She rose up and came down in a final stroke. Her vagina clenched; the fangs gripped.

Nic couldn't hold back. His hips bucked and his cock erupted inside her. The succubus's vaginal teeth gripped the torn remnants of his soul and reeled that out of him along with his semen. Nic was dead and cooling even as the succubus drew the last dregs of cum out of his body. Murmuring contentedly, she lay down on top of his corpse, her black wings covering both of them like silk sheets.

She lay like that for a while, basking in the aftermath. Then she cast her mind out amongst the sparkling constellation of souls moving around her.

She picked up the stone tablet and traced long fingers over the grotesque image carved into the surface.

Who would be the lucky one to receive it next?

Her mind slipped from star to sparkling star, looking for imperfections, seeking flaws.

Oh yes. You.

The High-School Sweetheart Removal Agency Everyone knows how the story goes.

Boy meets Girl. Boy makes fun of Girl. Girl calls Boy a jerk.

They get older.

Boy falls in love with Girl. Girl falls in love with Boy. They don't tell each other because they're terrified of the other laughing in their face.

They get older.

Boy asks out other girls. Sometimes they say yes, sometimes no. Mostly he's more relieved when they say no.

Girl dates another boy, discovers he's a giant douchebag.

Boy wonders if his future is going to be a life of watching late-night porn with only cold pizza and a box of tissues for company.

Girl wonders if she might be better off asking out other girls.

Then it happens. God, Cupid, the noodly appendage of the Great Invisible Flying Spaghetti Monster, or even just plain chance intervenes and pushes them together long enough for them to realize the truth: They're high-school sweethearts-two souls destined to come together and be joined for all eternity. It's fated in the stars.

Boy kisses Girl. Girl kisses Boy.

They live happily ever after.

Credits roll.

The end.

Only it never is...

Eight years later...

"I wish she was dead," Court McCann muttered morosely into his beer.

"Come on, you don't really mean that," Jimmy Morrison, his best bud, said.

"Yes I do," McCann grumbled. "I wish the frozen shit from an airplane toilet would fall out of the sky and land right on her head. I wish it would smash her so far into the ground I wouldn't even need to pay for a funeral."

He didn't, not really. He just wished his life had walked down a different path. One less... bland.

It was past ten. He was sitting at a corner table with Jimmy down at the Cat's Eye Bar. His wife was over at Lucinda's for one of their social gatherings.

"I never would have believed it," Jimmy said. "Everyone back at high school thought you two were the item. Christ, we all thought the pair of you would still be staring lovingly into each other's eyes right into your nineties. True love... just like the movies."

"Hollywood is full of shit," McCann said.

"What happened? You caught her playing Hide the Hot Dog with the gardener?" Jimmy, being a best bud, tried to inject some levity.

Jimmy was his best bud, his little buddy. That's what he'd been to McCann all through high school-little buddy. Jimmy had always been a little shorter than McCann, a little less athletic, a little less good-lucking-a natural sidekick, McCann's wing man.

"It would have been better if she had fucked the gardener," McCann said. "Then I wouldn't have to feel so guilty about not loving her anymore."

"It sparked out, huh," Jimmy said.

"Yeah, that's about right," McCann said. "You know how it was. Back then me and Sharon sparked so bright it was like we had our own personal sun to keep us warm. Then it fades, until one morning you wake up and realize it's not there anymore. Worse, you can't even remember if it was ever there in the first place."

"I hear ya," Jimmy said. "Only took four years for mine to fizzle out. Although it was none too bright to begin with, if you wanna know the truth."

"I thought having Alvin would help... rekindle it, you know. Now it's worse. Now I'm trapped. What kind of asshole runs out on his wife and young son. He's a great kid too. I love him but I'm scared I'll end up blaming him and resenting him for making me feel like I'm caged. I don't want to be one of those asshole dads that knocks their kids around because life didn't turn out the way they hoped."

Both men supped their beer in melancholy silence. McCann lowered his voice and leaned forwards. He didn't want any of the old coots eavesdropping on this little nugget of shit.

"We haven't had sex since last November," he whispered. "I haven't asked for it and she hasn't seemed too bothered about it going away. I feel like Kevin Spacey in American Beauty-whacking off in the shower is the fucking high point of the day."

Jimmy shook his head in sympathetic disgust.

"You can't go on like that. It ain't natural. Tell her how you feel. File for divorce."

"I can't do that," McCann said. "I'll lose everything... Alvin, and I'll still have to stump up alimony. You know how it is: It's a man's world... until he dumps his wife."

"Too right, bro," Jimmy said. "Unless you know the right people." This was added as an afterthought and Jimmy stared down into his beer as if he hoped McCann hadn't heard it.

McCann had. He thought about his little buddy. Except now, eight years later, Jimmy was the one with the fast car, the nice house, the blingy outfits, the better-paid job. Jimmy was the one everyone saw about town with a different hot babe on his arm every night. He wasn't the sidekick anymore; he was the main man.

"How did you get rid of Cindy?" McCann asked him. "You hooked up with her about the same time as me."

Jimmy became strangely evasive. He looked at the TV, sideways to another group sitting at the next table, down at his beer. Anywhere but at McCann."

"What's the secret?" McCann asked.

Jimmy looked like a hunted thing. As if he saw watching eyes everywhere.

"You've had too much," he said. "You'll think differently in the morning."

"Like fuck will I," McCann said. "It's dead and ashes. See that badass motherfucker over there in the cowboy boots and leather jacket? If that badass motherfucker was a hitman I'd walk over there, right now, and offer him twenty thou to put a bullet in her head."

Jimmy looked uncomfortable. He kept looking around the bar. Finally, one side won out in whatever internal conflict had afflicted him and he took out his wallet. Behind his last credit card was a business card. It was rumpled and dog-eared, as if it had been buried in the back of his wallet and left there for some time. He passed it to McCann.

The design on the front was of a broken heart, but with ropes tied around one half as if it was being hauled away. Written on the back in an elegant font was the legend, The High-School Sweetheart Removal Agency.

"I used them when things between Cindy and me weren't going so well," Jimmy said. "No accusations, no messy divorce, no lawyers... just a clean break and a fresh start."

There was a number on the back of the card. McCann was tapping it into his mobile phone when Jimmy reached over to put his hand over McCann's.

"Wait until the morning," Jimmy said. "Give yourself a chance to think things over."

Gone was the easygoing playboy buddy. Jimmy looked like a man trying to sell state secrets and terrified government agents would pounce on him at any moment.

"If you feel anything, anything, for Sharon and Alvin you'll put that card at the back of a drawer and never look at it again."

McCann waited until the next day. He waited long enough for her to tell him that same stupid anecdote about the minister that hadn't been funny the first ten times he'd heard it. He waited until she left the house to go to her church social and then pulled the card out of his pocket and rang the number on the back.

The woman on the other end had the sexiest voice McCann had ever heard. Like black chocolate dipped in honey and lying in a cradle of crushed velvet.