Kisses from Hell

was the consensus. She did her best, but he was just strange. Maybe he inherited it from his father, the neighbors speculated. There were rumors that he was a Satan-worshipping speed freak who had left Paul Michael’s mother while she was pregnant. He was probably in jail somewhere, everyone said. And his demon seed would grow up to be just like him, probably. The poor mom, they said.

Paul Michael trudged down the sizzling road to the school. The days were long and hot, and he spent them dreaming of the planet Trellibrium. Now he was dreaming about Lilith, too. Maybe he would see her later.

At lunch, Paul Michael sat pretending to write about Trellibrium in his notebook, but he was actually watching Lilith. She sat cross-legged under one of the few jacaranda trees that had been transplanted onto the campus, wearing—in spite of the heat—a black turtleneck tunic, leggings, and boots and playing her guitar. She looked as cool as if the temperature was thirty degrees lower than it was. Her dark hair fell over her face so that Paul Michael could only really see her small, fierce chin, her movie-star lips, and a bit of her high, pale cheek. Her fingers, with their chewed-on, chipped-black-polish nails, were long on the guitar strings, and Paul Michael imagined them touching him. He had washed his hair carefully and applied deodorant for the first time in a few weeks. He was even wearing a fresh T-shirt.

Carter and Kirk walked past him, and Carter spat on the ground near Paul Michael’s shoe. A little spittle flew and sparked white on the scuffed brown leather.

“Lookin’ good, man. You actually took a shower,” Carter said.

Kirk snorted. “I don’t smell him.”

“Got a girlfriend or something?”

Paul Michael scribbled furiously in his book, just nonsense words in tiny, unreadable script. In Trillibrium the princess Namalie Galamara had fallen prey to the evil Pharmatrons.

Carter and Kirk wouldn’t leave. They were smaller than he was, but Paul Michael knew they could smash his face if they wanted. He forced himself to look up and saw Lilith watching him. Almost imperceptibly, she nodded her head. Had he imagined it? His heart jolted blood through his veins.

Was she?

Yes.

Lilith was standing. She took her guitar off and left it on the grass. She put on her black sun hat and dark glasses. She was coming over. Carter and Kirk looked at each other, laughed nervously. Lilith kept stepping along in that precarious way on her black suede boots. She stood in front of the boys. Carter and Kirk moved back away from her. She ran her fingers across Paul Michael’s scalp, took the long strands in her hand and gently pulled so that his neck fell back and he looked up at her. His eyes were blue with pinprick pupils, and hers were very dark, ravenous.

Carnivorous, Paul Michael thought. She has carnivorous eyes. Black moons.

In Trellibrium, Norser prepared to rescue Namalie.

I’m coming for you, Lilith said. Soon. Then she added, You don’t have to be afraid.

He hadn’t really heard her voice, but he knew what she had telepathically communicated, the way Namalie “spoke” to Norser. Paul Michael felt the transplanted grass under his fingertips, tugged at the blades the way Lilith tugged at his hair.

Eventually the grass would die too. It wasn’t supposed to be here either.

Succubus

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.

Geek

He decided to go to the party, even though it was at Kirk’s. Paul Michael needed to see Lilith. And after the other night he felt different, braver and more intuitive. Had she done this to him? Could vampires do that? He tried to recall what he had read about them in comic books and seen in horror films. He thought so….

The party was at a ranch house with a pool where kids splashed in a haze of aqua blue light. Paul Michael got beer from the keg and looked around for Lilith. He saw only Carter and Kirk.

“Look who crashed the festivities!” Kirk said.

“He’s probably looking for his girlfriend,” said Carter, and Kirk sniggered. “Fat ass really cleaned up his act. I even think he’s losing some of that paunch.” Carter smacked Paul Michael in the gut with the back of his hand, and Paul Michael bent over as the pain flashed through him. He had lost weight. He had hardly been able to eat since Lilith had come to his room, but he didn’t feel hungry or weak at all. If anything, he had felt stronger until Carter slammed him like that. That strength was because of her, Paul Michael was sure, vampire or no.

He wished for a second for the archangels on the pendant his mother had given him, but they hadn’t really helped in the past. The only thing that had helped was Lilith. Maybe she had bitten him like a vampire, but she was the closest thing to an angel he’d ever come across, inside his mind or out.

She was standing outside the sliding glass door by the pool, and lozenges and trails of blue light trembled over her skin. All she wore was a thin black satin dress that looked more like a slip, and she had her boots on. He