Hire an Incubus

16.

'What?'  Lisa nearly choked on air.

'I know it's shocking to hear but the reason why so many people are in this room is because we all worked on the task force of bringing him in here. As you may have noticed on your way in, this place isn't exactly small. That's because it's also a holding area for dangerous supernaturals, and he is on the list Lisa.'

Grace sat down and next Alma spoke from beside Lisa.

'It's true. There's obviously a lot of things he did not tell you. As Grace mentioned, there was a task force a couple of years ago to bring him in after the ordeal with Hire an Incubus, and I was head of that task force.'

'What happened?' Lisa asked, she had a feeling that she was about to be shocked. Achilles had never once mentioned anything about Hercules, why would he feel that it was unimportant enough to leave out? With the brevity that these people were speaking with, something big had obviously gone down, one of those things being murder.

'Well, years ago as you know, Achilles got a human woman pregnant. This was against his contract as human and incubi offspring are yet to be completely researched, we don't know if it's safe.'

'Well...that sounds a little speciest don't you think?'

Alma raised her eyebrows. 'Lisa, we're not against the idea because we think there's something immoral about it, we're against it because we simply don't know the chemistry of something like that. We know that Achilles is a result of human incubi reproduction and look how he turned out. We think it's something in their DNA that hard wires them like that. There's a line that gets crossed when a human and an incubus have a child, you're mixing our regular humanness with something that is fundamentally a demon.'

Grace shot her a look and Lisa refrained from speaking further. Alma took a deep breath and continued;

'Anyway, as I was saying, when that happened, Hire an Incubus obviously had to reprimand him, and he attacked him, then they called us and we brought him in. It was not an easy task, he was insane with rage, truly everything you would expect a demon to be at its core I suppose.'

'Well obviously he was mad, Damian probably tried to kill him!'

Alma sighed. 'I don't think you understand Lisa. We had to have a task force of armed men just to bring him in. When we finally did get him in, we had to isolate him for two weeks before we could even speak to him, and in that time we learned some very interesting and troubling information through surveillance.'

Alma opened up her laptop and switched on an overhead projector where a thumbnail for a video was now displayed. In the thumbnail was a man, presumably Achilles, standing in what looked like a cell.

Alma pressed a button and the footage began to play. What Lisa saw next unsettled her. It was Achilles and he was pacing furiously around the cell. She could hear choppy audio of what sounded like another language, or something inhuman being spoken. Halfway through the video, he stopped and without a moment's notice launched himself at the camera, snarling. The most troubling part of it was how red his eyes were.

Alma paused the video. 'Let me draw your attention to this Lisa, his eyes, I'm sure you've seen them before in this state, no?'

Lisa nodded slowly.

'Well, take a long hard look at this Lisa, because this is the real Achilles.'

'I don't understand what you mean.'

'Two weeks he stayed like that Lisa, for two weeks his eyes were red, no changes, no composure in his behaviour, just pure unfiltered chaos, but then, after two weeks, something changed. It was like some calm had settled over him and his eyes changed back to grey.'