Chapter 1: The Convenience Store Stalker
The digital clock on the register clicked over to 2:17 AM. Owen stared at it, his eyes blurring. The fluorescent lights overhead buzzed a flat, endless note that drilled into the back of his skull. He yawned, a jaw-cracking gape that made his ears pop.
He leaned his elbows on the counter, the laminate cool and sticky under his skin. The store was empty. It was always empty at this hour, just him and the rows of junk food and the big humming coolers. He smelled the stale pretzels, the chemical cherry of the air freshener plugged into the wall, and something else. Something sweet and sharp underneath it all, like flowers left in a hot car. He sniffed, shrugged, and went back to staring at the clock.
Outside, beyond the grimy window plastered with faded ads for energy drinks, a shape shifted in the deep shadow between two streetlights.
Lilith pressed closer, her chitinous body clicking softly against the brick. Her compound eyes, vast and reflective, captured every detail of the scene inside. The slump of Owen’s shoulders. The way he scratched at his temple, his fingers clumsy. The slow, steady pulse in the soft hollow of his throat. Her antennae trembled, sampling the air. His scent, amplified a thousand times by her senses, flooded her: laundry soap, sleep, the salty tang of human skin, and a unique, quiet pheromone signature that spoke to her on a cellular level. Hers.
A soft, chittering sigh escaped her, a sound like polished stones rubbing together. She folded her iridescent wings tighter, a shiver of longing running through her segmented body. He was so beautiful in his simplicity. So perfectly, tragically vulnerable. The thought of anything else touching him—another human, a germ, a stray draft of cold air—made her mandibles flex, a sharp clicking in the darkness she quickly stifled.
She watched him fumble with a plastic bag, trying to open it with his fingernails. He failed, then just stood there holding it, a look of profound confusion on his soft features. Lilith’s heart—a complex, multi-chambered organ—thrummed with affection. My king, she thought, the concept radiating through her hive-mind, meant for him alone, though he could not hear it. You need not struggle. I will open all things for you. I will chew through the walls of this world to get to you.
Owin gave up on the bag, tossing it under the counter. He picked up his phone, thumbed the screen on, then off. The light from it washed over his face, making him look pale and tired.
The bell over the door jangled, sudden and brutal in the silence.
Owen jumped, fumbling the phone. It clattered on the counter. A man stumbled in, reeking of cheap beer and sour sweat. He was big, with a thick neck and eyes that darted around the store before landing on Owen.
“Cigarettes,” the man slurred, planting his hands on the counter. “The red ones.”
“Uh,” Owen said. He turned slowly, scanning the wall of tobacco products. He pointed a hesitant finger. “Those ones?”
“The red pack, I said. Jesus, you blind?”
“Okay. Okay, red.” Owen reached up, his fingers brushing several packs before he pulled down the correct one. He slid them across the counter. “That’ll be, um… fourteen seventy-five.”
The drunk man dug in his pocket, pulled out a crumpled ten and a fistful of change. He dumped it. Coins skittered everywhere. “There. Keep it.”
Owen stared at the mess. “I… I gotta count it.”
“It’s all there, you idiot.”
Outside, Lilith went perfectly still. A new scent hit her sensory palps: aggression, toxicity, a threat-pheromone aimed at her mate. Her obsidian eyes narrowed. The delicate gold flecks in her exoskeleton seemed to glow in the low light. One of her spindly, graceful limbs twitched, a needle-sharp point extending from a digit.
Owen began painstakingly picking up the coins, one by one, stacking them in little piles of twenty-five cents. The drunk man watched, his impatience curdling into something darker.
“Hurry up, fuck’s sake.”
“Just… almost…” Owen murmured, his tongue poking out in concentration. He lost count, frowned, started again.
The man reached across the counter suddenly and grabbed Owen’s wrist. His grip was tight, meaty. “Just give me the damn smokes.”
Owen’s eyes went wide with surprise, not fear. He didn’t understand the threat, only the inconvenience. “Hey, let go. I’m counting.”
Lilith saw the hand on her king’s wrist.
The world dissolved into a singular, burning point of violation.
There was no conscious decision. One moment she was in the shadows. The next, the door was shuddering on its hinges, not from being opened, but from the force of her body passing the other way. She didn’t touch it. She moved through the space above it, a blur of glossy purple-black and a whisper of crystalline wings.
The drunk man had a second to sense a draft, a shift in the air pressure, a smell of crushed roses and engine heat. He started to turn.
Lilith landed behind him, her weight not making a sound. One elegant, razor-tipped limb hooked around his throat, not cutting, just pulling him back. Another limb, precise as a surgeon’s tool, tapped the nerve cluster at the base of his skull. His grip on Owen went slack. His eyes rolled up. He dropped to the linoleum like a sack of laundry, out cold before he hit the ground.
Owen blinked. He looked at the man on the floor. He looked at the space where the man had been standing, now occupied by… nothing he could comprehend.
He saw a shimmer, like heat haze, in the shape of something tall and impossibly curved. He smelled that sweet, venomous perfume, so strong now it made his nose itch. For a fraction of a second, he thought he saw two vast, dark lenses reflecting his own dumbfounded face, and above them, the delicate, quivering silhouette of antennae.
Then it was gone. Just a trick of the buzzing fluorescent light. Just his tired eyes.
“Huh,” Owen said to the empty store. He looked down at the unconscious drunk. “Guess he was really tired.”
He stepped carefully around the body, finished counting the change—it was seventy-five cents short—and took the difference from the “Take a Penny” dish. He placed the cigarettes next to the man’s hand, thinking he might want them when he woke up. Then he went back to his spot behind the counter, glancing at the clock.
2:23 AM.
The rest of his shift passed without incident. At 6 AM, his replacement, a bored teenager, shuffled in. Owen didn’t mention the man on the floor, who had begun to snore loudly in aisle three. He just handed over the keys and left.
The morning air was cold and gray. He shoved his hands in his pockets and walked towards his apartment, his shoes scuffing on the pavement. He didn’t notice the elegant, deep grooves scored in the brickwork by the store’s entrance, nor the single, iridescent beetle of a species never catalogued by science crawling up a lamppost, watching him go.
He was thinking about cereal, and whether he had any milk.
Above him, skimming just beneath the low cloud cover with a sound like rustling silk, Lilith followed. Her mind was a storm of possessive joy. She had touched his world. She had intervened. The barrier was thinning. Soon, the careful observation would end. The courtship rituals of his kind were obscure, frustratingly slow. Perhaps it was time to introduce her own.
She landed silently on the tar-paper roof of his apartment building, folding her wings with a soft, chittering click. She would wait here, as she did every day, guarding his sleep. But today, a new resolve solidified within her. The patience of a queen was vast, but not infinite.
Today, she would begin to weave his first royal garment from the strongest silk in her arsenal. Tonight, she would leave it for him, a gift outside his door. A soft, grey scarf. Impervious to blade or acid, warm as a summer night, and steeped in pheromones so potent, so specifically keyed to him, that soon he would dream of nothing but the hive.
It was, she decided, a reasonable next step.