Chapter 1: The Succubus and the Screaming Virgin
The air in Ethan Miller’s dorm room tasted like regret and microwaved pizza. It was a Tuesday night, and his calculus textbook lay open on his lap, a fortress of incomprehensible symbols against the yawning void of his social life. A half-eaten protein bar, its wrapper glistening with condensation, sat on the edge of his desk next to a tower of annotated philosophy texts. The only light came from a cheap desk lamp, its bulb humming a weak, yellow note that made the shadows in the corners seem to shift and pool.
He was trying to focus on a derivative. He really was.
A sound like tearing silk, but deeper, wetter, echoed from the center of the room.
Ethan flinched, his pencil skating across the page. He looked up.
The space between his bed and mini-fridge was no longer empty. It was filling with a smoke that wasn’t smoke—it was the color of a bruise, purple and black, and it swirled with impossible viscosity. It smelled of ozone, cheap perfume, and something faintly coppery, like old pennies.
His brain, excellent at parsing Kant and dismal at processing real-world anomalies, stuttered. Faulty wiring, it suggested. Hallucination from sleep deprivation.
Then the smoke condensed, collapsed in on itself, and she was there.
She stood unsteadily on his grey carpet, as if landing on a pitching ship. She was wearing what could only be described as a catastrophic amount of black lace. Straps and satin crisscrossed a form that was undeniably, seismically female. Her hair was a riot of coppery red, tumbling over pale shoulders. Her eyes, wide and bright as new leaves, blinked in the lamplight.
She looked around, her expression one of profound confusion, taking in the pizza boxes, the World of Warcraft poster, the socks.
Ethan made a small, choked sound, like a stepped-on gerbil.
Her gaze landed on him. The confusion melted, replaced by a focus so intense it felt physical. She smiled. It was a beautiful smile, if a little wobbly at the edges.
“Mortal,” she said, her voice a husky ripple in the quiet room. She took a step forward, a clawed hand—actual, sharp, black-taloned claws—reaching out for dramatic emphasis. It snagged on the spine of his calculus book, which tumbled to the floor with a thud.
She glanced at the fallen book, then back at him, her smile turning sheepish for a fraction of a second before settling back into seduction mode. She cleared her throat.
“I have come,” she purred, trying again, “for your soul. Or, you know. At least your virginity. Whichever is more… accessible.”
Ethan’s system, flooded with adrenaline he didn’t know he possessed, chose flight. Unfortunately, his body was still in a seated position on the bed. He launched himself backward, feet tangling in his sheets, and crashed to the floor in a heap of limbs and panic.
“Holy shit!” he screamed, his voice cracking. “Holy shit, holy shit!”
Scrambling backward, his hand slapped against his desk. His fingers closed around the only thing that felt remotely like a weapon: the half-eaten, slightly soggy protein bar. Without thinking, he hurled it.
It flew in a slow, tragic arc. It did not smite her with holy light. It simply pegged her squarely in the center of her chest with a soft, damp thwap, leaving a smudge of chocolatey oat residue on the black lace.
She looked down. She picked the bar off her lingerie, holding it between claw-tips. She sniffed it. Her perfect nose wrinkled.
“What,” she asked, her seductive tone utterly evaporated, “is this?”
“It’s a ZoneBar!” Ethan yelped from behind the bed, peeking over the mattress. “Fiber! It’s got fiber!”
“It’s… sticky.” She dropped it on the floor with a look of mild disgust. The failed attempt at attack seemed to break the tension, leaving only a surreal, breathless absurdity. She slumped, the grand posture deflating. “This isn’t going how it’s supposed to.”
“How what is supposed?” Ethan’s voice was a high-pitched whisper. “What are you?”
“I am Lilith,” she said, drawing herself up again, trying to reclaim the moment. “A succubus. A harvestress of vital essences. A bringer of… of…” She trailed off, her green eyes scanning the room again, landing on his open laptop where a half-written essay on neoclassical economics glowed. “Do you only have one chair?”
“What? Yes. I mean, no. I have that one.” He pointed a trembling finger at the desk chair.
She walked over—her walk was a bit clumsy, as if she wasn’t quite used to the heels she wasn’t actually wearing—and sat in it. She ran a claw along the edge of the desk, leaving a fine scratch in the laminate. “My manifestation is imperfect. This is my first time. On this plane, I mean.”
“Your first time?”
“Materializing. It’s harder than it looks.” She sighed, a surprisingly human sound. “The whispers said you’d be… ripe. Open to corruption. You’re a virgin, right?”
Ethan felt his face ignite. “That’s—I don’t—that’s a wildly invasive question!”
“So, yes,” Lilith concluded, nodding to herself. “Good. That’s the prerequisite. Virgin soul, untapped life force. Very potent.” She leaned forward, her eyes glowing with a faint, inner light. “I’m supposed to seduce you. It should be easy. You’re all… hormonal and lonely.”
“I’m not lonely! I have… academic focus!”
“Right.” She didn’t sound convinced. She stood up, pacing the small room. Her presence seemed to warp the light, making the shadows from the lamp stretch and curl toward her. “Okay. Let’s try this. I’m going to exude an aura of irresistible allure.”
She closed her eyes, her brow furrowing in concentration. The air grew warmer, thicker. A scent, like jasmine and burning sugar, filled Ethan’s nostrils. He felt a pull, a magnetic, dizzying attraction that started in his gut and buzzed up his spine. It was powerful, primal.
And then his fire alarm, triggered by the sudden change in particulate matter or perhaps infernal energies, let out a sharp, intermittent beep.
Lilith’s eyes flew open. The aura snapped off like a switched light. The beep continued, ear-splitting in the small space.
“What is that wretched sound?” she shouted over the noise.
“It’s—you set off the smoke alarm!”
“I am not smoke!” she yelled, indignant. She jumped, batting at the plastic device on the ceiling with her claws. She missed. She jumped again, this time snagging it. With a screech of tearing plastic, she ripped the entire unit from the ceiling. Wires sparked. The beeping died with a final, choked chirp.
She stood there, panting slightly, holding the shattered alarm in her hand. Tiny plastic shards drifted down onto the carpet.
Silence rushed back in, heavier than before.
Ethan stared. He was no longer hiding behind the bed. He was kneeling beside it, frozen in pure, unadulterated shock. This wasn’t a demon. This was a catastrophe.
Lilith looked at the wreckage in her hand, then at Ethan’s pale, horrified face. Her own expression faltered. The fierce succubus mask slipped, revealing something younger, more uncertain. Almost lost.
“I… I’m ruining it, aren’t I?” she said, her voice small.
Before Ethan could form a sentence—a denial, an agreement, a plea for her to please, God, just leave—she made a decision. Her green eyes hardened with a new, desperate resolve.
“No more mistakes,” she whispered, more to herself than to him.
She dropped the alarm shards. She raised both hands, claws facing him. Her form seemed to darken, drinking in the weak light from the lamp. The playful, confused energy was gone, replaced by a sharp, gathering pressure. The room grew cold.
“Forget seduction,” Lilith said, her voice layered with a new, echoing resonance. “I’ll just take it.”
A visible pulse, like heat haze twisted into a wave, erupted from her palms. It wasn’t aimed at him. It washed over the room, over everything.
The effect was instant and terrifying.
The stale pizza on his desk quivered, then sprouted a pair of tiny, cheesy wings and took flight, buzzing lazily toward the ceiling. The letters on his open textbook bled off the page, swirling in the air like angry black flies before dissolving. His ergonomic desk chair let out a low groan and began to slowly, purposefully, inch toward him on its casters, as if alive.
Ethan watched, his mind blank with terror, as his world softly, silently, began to unravel.
Lilith watched too, her fierce concentration melting into dawning horror. “Oh,” she breathed. “No. That’s… that’s not what I meant to do at all.”
The chair picked up speed.
The chair picked up speed. Its smooth, silent approach was somehow worse than if it had charged.
Ethan scrambled backwards, his socks slipping on the textbook he’d dropped earlier. He kicked out, his heel connecting with the chair’s base. It stopped, wobbled, and then the backrest tilted forward, leaning toward him with a creak of faux leather that sounded like a hungry sigh.
Across the room, the winged pizza slice made a lazy loop-de-loop before dive-bombing his laundry hamper. A single, sad pepperoni detached and stuck to the wall.
“Make it stop!” Ethan yelped, pressing himself against the bedframe.
“I don’t know how!” Lilith wailed, her hands still raised as if she were trying to physically pull the energy back. The faint, echoing resonance in her voice was gone, replaced by pure panic. “It’s supposed to be a directed beam! A focused siphon! This is… this is leakage!”
“You’re leaking demon magic into my dorm room?”
“It’s not demonic, it’s… primordial! And I’m new!” she shot back, defensively. She clenched her fists, squeezing her eyes shut. “Come back. Come back, come back, come back.”
A faint ripple passed through the air. The chair shuddered and went still. The pizza slice lost its wings and plopped, dead and greasy, into a pile of dirty t-shirts. The letters that had bled from his textbook were just… gone.
The silence returned, thick and unnatural. The only sound was the ragged, synchronized sound of their breathing.
Ethan stared at the now-innocent chair. He looked at the succubus, who was staring at her own claws as if they’d betrayed her.
A low, terrible gurgle echoed through the room.
Ethan flinched, thinking it was another magical malfunction. But it came from Lilith. She clasped a hand over her stomach, her face twisting.
“Was that… your stomach?” he asked, the absurdity cutting through his terror.
“I’m hungry,” she moaned, the word dripping with a misery that seemed to dwarf her earlier dramatics. “I’m so, so hungry. You have no idea. It’s like… a hole. A cold, empty hole right in the center of everything I am.”
She sank down, not onto the chair, but onto the floor right where she stood. Her legs folded beneath her, a collapse of lace and long limbs. She wrapped her arms around herself.
“They said it would be simple,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “They said ‘Find a mortal, a lonely one, and take what you need.’ They made it sound like picking an apple. No one said the apple would scream and throw breakfast food. No one said the apple’s room would fight back.”
A single, perfect tear welled in the corner of her brilliant green eye. It traced a path down her cheek, cutting a clean line through the air of otherworldly allure. It dripped onto the knee of her… whatever that lingerie was supposed to be.
“I practiced my smile in a reflection for two days,” she hiccuped. “I thought the claws were a nice touch. Menacing but elegant.”
Another tear fell. Then another. A small, broken sound escaped her lips.
“And now I’ve broken your ceiling fire thing, and I’ve animated your snacks, and I’m so hungry it feels like I’m dissolving, and I can’t even do the one thing I was made for!” The last word rose into a wail.
She buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook. The sobs were messy, human, and utterly undignified. They were the sobs of a twenty-year-old who’d just bombed her first final exam, not an immortal harvestress of souls.
Ethan Miller, a virgin philosophy major with a now-haunted desk chair, watched a demon cry on his carpet.
All the panic, the cosmic dread, the fear of having his life force siphoned away… it all seeped out of him, leaving behind a hollow, bewildered pity. He was still terrified. But this? This was just sad.
He slowly, carefully, got to his feet. The chair didn’t move. He took a hesitant step toward her.
“Um,” he said. His voice was soft. “What… what do you eat?”
“Vitality,” she wept into her hands, her voice muffled. “Passion. The burning, messy, beautiful energy of a mortal soul. Preferably accessed through… through…”
“Right. That.” Ethan’s ears burned. He looked around his room, at the ruins of a normal Tuesday night. The sparking wires from the ceiling, the grease stain on the wall. The protein bar, still lying where she’d dropped it.
He took another step. He knelt down, not close enough to touch, but close enough that he was no longer shouting across the room.
“And you’re… starving?”
Lilith lifted her head. Her eyes were rimmed with red, her mascara—did succubi wear mascara?—slightly smudged. She looked unbearably young. “It’s my first feeding. I manifested with nothing. I’m running on empty. I thought you’d be… an easy meal.” She said it with such profound embarrassment that Ethan almost felt insulted on his own behalf.
“Sorry to be so… digestively challenging.”
A wet, half-choked laugh escaped her. It was followed by another sob. “It’s not you. It’s me. I’m a failure. A defective succubus. They’ll probably dissolve me back into the ether. Or reassign me to, I don’t know, haunting a toaster.”
Ethan sat back on his heels. The thrumming fear was now a distant buzz. In its place was a dawning, surreal reality. There was a crying, hungry, incompetent succubus on his floor. He had a philosophy paper due in nine hours. This was his life now.
He looked at her trembling form, then at his mini-fridge.
“I don’t have any… soul energy,” he said slowly. “But I have a leftover chicken sandwich from the dining hall. It’s probably kinda soggy. And the energy drink.” He gestured weakly to the crumpled can on his nightstand. “It has… taurine. That’s kind of a vitality, right?”
Lilith stared at him, her tears slowing. She looked from his anxious face to the mini-fridge, her expression one of utter, profound confusion.
“You’re offering me… your mortal food?”
“I’m offering you a sandwich,” Ethan corrected, standing up. “Because you’re crying on my floor. And even if you were trying to damn me to hell or whatever, nobody should be that hungry.”
He walked to the fridge, the air still buzzing with the ghost of her magic and the salt of her tears. He pulled out the wax-paper-wrapped sandwich, holding it out toward her like a peace offering to a very strange, very dangerous god.
Lilith looked at the sandwich. She looked at his face. Her hungry, empty core gave another wrenching gurgle.
She reached out a clawed hand, hesitantly, and took it.
She reached out a clawed hand, hesitantly, and took it. The claws looked absurd against the wax paper, like using a scalpel to open a lunchbox. She stared at the sandwich, then back at Ethan, as if waiting for a trick.
“It’s just chicken salad,” he said, his voice thin. “Probably too much mayo.”
Carefully, she peeled back the paper. She held the sandwich between her thumb and forefinger, studied its layered interior, and took a small, experimental bite. She chewed. Her eyebrows, a shade darker than her fiery hair, lifted.
She took another bite. Then another, larger this time.
Ethan watched, transfixed, as the terrifying succubus sat cross-legged on his carpet and devoured his leftover dining hall sandwich. She ate with a startling, voracious focus, but also a strange delicacy, like someone unaccustomed to the mechanics of eating. A tiny glob of mayonnaise clung to the corner of her mouth. She didn’t seem to notice.
The last bite disappeared. She licked her fingers, one by one, her sharp black claws glistening. Then she looked at the empty wax paper, her expression softening into something close to wonder.
“It’s… dense,” she said finally, her voice quieter now, the otherworldly resonance faded. “Heavy. Like a little weight just dropped into the hollow part.” She placed a hand over her stomach. “It’s not the same. Not warmth. Not life. But it’s… something. A placeholder.”
She looked up at Ethan, who was still standing rigidly by the mini-fridge. “Thank you,” she said. The words were simple, sincere. The act of saying them seemed to change her posture, the set of her shoulders relaxing from their predatory arch into something more human. The glow in her eyes had dimmed to a natural, if startling, shade of green.
Ethan let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “You’re welcome.” He shuffled his feet. “So, you don’t… eat food, normally?”
“I don’t normally have a normally,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. The gesture was oddly childlike. “I’ve been me for about… three of your weeks. The whispers told me what I needed, not what to do when I couldn’t get it.” She picked at the lace on her thigh. “This get-up was their idea, too. ‘Standard issue temptation wear,’ they said. It’s drafty.”
A half-hysterical laugh bubbled in Ethan’s chest. He clamped it down. “The whispers?”
“The voices in the… the place before here. The guidelines.” She shrugged, a fluid, elegant motion that was still somehow awkward. “They’re not very detailed. Mostly just urges. Hunger. Directive. Smile, tilt head, promise pleasure, consume.” She recited it like a bad job description. “They didn’t cover sandwiches. Or fire alarms.”
Ethan slowly sank onto the edge of his bed, putting a few feet of carpet between them. The immediate threat seemed to have passed, replaced by a bizarre, quiet domesticity. A demon was complaining about her uniform in his dorm room. “What happens now?” he asked.
Lilith stretched her legs out in front of her, examining her own feet. “I don’t know. The hunger is… quieter. Dulled. It’s not gone. It’s just… shouting from another room.” She looked at him, her head tilted. “You’re not scared anymore.”
“I’m terrified,” Ethan corrected softly. “But it’s competing with extreme confusion. And a little pity.”
She didn’t seem offended. She nodded, as if that made perfect sense. “I would pity me too. I’m a terrible demon.” She sighed, a long, weary sound. “Maybe I should just… go. Try someone else. Someone less….”
“Awkward?”
“Kind,” she said. The word hung in the air between them, charged and strange.
Ethan’s heart did a slow, hard thump against his ribs. She wasn’t a monster. She was a disaster. A beautiful, catastrophic, lonely disaster who didn’t know how to be what she was supposed to be. The same thought, voiced from the other side of a chasm.
Before he could stop himself, he heard his own voice say, “You could stay.”
Her green eyes locked onto his, wide with surprise. “What?”
“Just… for a bit. Until you figure it out. Or the sandwich wears off.” He gestured vaguely around the room. “I mean, you sort of live here now. You redecorated the ceiling.”
She followed his gaze upward to the dangling wires and cracked plaster. A small, genuine smile touched her lips. It wasn’t seductive. It was crooked, a little shy. “I did, didn’t I?”
The smile faded as quickly as it came. “I can’t stay. Not really. This form… it takes energy to hold. Energy I don’t have. Without feeding properly, I’ll eventually just… fade. Dissipate back to where I came from.” She said it without self-pity, a simple statement of fact. “The sandwich bought me time. Not much.”
Ethan stared at her. The thought of her just winking out of existence—this confusing, clumsy, lace-clad entity—felt suddenly, profoundly wrong. More wrong than her trying to seduce him. That was just dangerous. This was a waste.
“So you need… vitality. Passion. Soul energy.” The words tasted ridiculous in his mouth. “And you can only get it through….”
“The traditional succubus method, yes.” She looked at her claws. “Or so I’m told. Maybe I’m doing that wrong, too. Maybe there’s a manual I missed.”
“What if…” Ethan’s mind raced, tripping over philosophy texts and half-remembered fantasy novels. “What if it doesn’t have to be that? What if passion isn’t just… one thing? What if it’s music? Or… or anger? Or the focus you have when you’re trying to understand something really hard?”
Lilith blinked. “The whispers never mentioned that.”
“The whispers sound like idiots.”
Another smile, bigger this time. It lit up her face, made her look her apparent age. “They really are.”
A comfortable silence settled, fragile as glass. The hum of the mini-fridge was the loudest sound in the room. Ethan realized the creeping, supernatural cold was gone. The air just felt like night in a badly insulated dorm.
“Okay,” he said, the decision solidifying as he spoke. “Stay. Tonight. We’ll… figure something out. A non-damning solution.”
“Why?” The question was plain, curious.
“Because throwing a protein bar at you was rude,” he said. “And because nobody should have to face existential dissolution alone.”
Lilith looked at him for a long moment, her expression unreadable. Then she nodded slowly. “Okay,” she whispered.
She shifted, drawing her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. The daunting, otherworldly creature was gone, replaced by a tired-looking young woman in impractical underwear, sitting on a dirty carpet. The sharp lines of her seemed to blur, just a little, at the edges.
Ethan stood up, moving slowly so as not to startle her. He walked to his closet, pulled out a worn, grey hoodie from a pile on the floor. It smelled like fabric softener and him. He held it out.
“Here. For the draft.”
She took it, her fingers brushing his. Her skin was warm. She pulled the bulky fabric on over her lace. It drowned her, the sleeves hanging past her fingertips. She snuggled into it, bringing the collar to her nose and taking a subtle breath.
“It’s soft,” she said.
Ethan turned off the desk lamp, plunging the room into the deep blue gloom of the digital clock and the streetlight bleeding through the blinds. He lay back on his bed, staring at the shadow of his ruined ceiling.
From the floor, her voice came, small in the dark. “Ethan?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s taurine?”
He smiled into the darkness. “I have no idea.”