Paul Michael lay in his bed in the dark. He had fallen asleep thinking about Lilith. She had run off after tugging on his hair like that, and he hadn’t been able to speak to her anymore.
“Come in,” he said aloud in his sleep. He was known to say things in his sleep and even to get up and walk around sometimes. Once his mother had found him naked at the foot of her bed, staring at her in a way that she said turned her blood to blue ice. So she gave him the pendant with the archangels and started locking her bedroom door at night.
He felt a pressure on his chest and opened his eyes with a gasp.
Lilith was squatting on his chest, balanced on her feet on the bed with her elbows on her knees and her hands cupping her chin. He realized he had never seen her skin under all the clothes. It was so white that it glowed a pale blue. She had a long neck, long, graceful arms, and a delicately formed collarbone that looked like a bird in flight. Her black eyes were staring hungrily at him, and her teeth were bared. She shifted her weight and drummed lightly on his Adam’s apple with her long fingernails. She bent over him and swayed so that her shiny black hair caressed his face.
It was hard for Paul Michael to breathe. He struggled to move, but she had him pinned. His hands grabbed at her legs—the flesh of her calves was cold and covered with small bumps. He ran his fingers down and felt her feet on either side of his torso. They were even colder and had a rubbery texture. What felt like webbing connected the toes.
“What are you?” Paul Michael asked. It was as if she had come down from outer space (maybe from Trellibrium?) to rescue him. He was still having trouble breathing, but he was not afraid. He was suddenly hard, and all his extremities tingled. He felt—what was it he felt? He felt lucky. He felt chosen.
“What do you like best?” Lilith said. “Queen? Beautiful Maiden? Storm Demon? Wind Demon? Succubus? You tell me.”
“You are a goddess,” he whispered, and she leaned over and pressed her teeth against the vein along the side of his neck, leaned in hard and sweet until the skin ripped and a bead of blood burst forth.
A vampire? Paul Michael thought. But not like the ones in the books all the girls in his school carried around like bibles.
“I’m just going to have a little this time,” she told him. “And you’ll have just a little too. Then we’ll do it again.” She paused and wiped the blood from her mouth. “Maybe at Kirk’s party this weekend?”
Paul Michael closed his eyes. When he woke the next morning, there were a few black feathers in his bed and blood on the sheets and on his mouth.