Seraph

by James Hicks

  “But wait, John . . .”

  “I said GET OUT!”

  He woke up again. Three o’clock. John was beside himself; what kind of attack was this? This was definitely not a coincidence. John called out to God with his eyes still closed.

  “Jesus, give me peace.”

  “How about a piece of me?”

  John opened his eyes and there was Lilith straddling him as he lay in bed.

  “Lilith . . . Lilith.”

  “That’s my name don’t wear it out or I’ll make you get me a new one.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “You intrigue me. . . . I’ve never seen quite a man like you throughout the whole earth. I just want to get another look at you. . . . You’re gorgeous.”

  “So are you . . . but I know that you are a demon appearing as a woman.”

  “John, I do not appear as a woman . . . I am a woman. The first in fact.”

  “Eve was first. She was fashioned from Adam’s rib after God put him to sleep.”

  “That’s not the whole truth. Doesn’t it say that on the sixth day God made man and woman, but according to your scriptures, Eve was created from Adam’s rib?”

  “I know all about you.”

  “Oh come now, I am a product of almighty God’s hand. I, too, was made from the dust of the earth.”

  “What do you want, Lilith?”

  “I want what every woman wants . . . someone who is worthy of her submission. Do you know why Adam and I never worked? He was weak. How could I submit myself to a weak man? But you, you are far from weak. You destroyed a very powerful demon with no effort at all. You are someone I could submit to . . . rule with . . . give my all to.”

  Lilith still straddled John as she leaned forward and licked his lips and kissed him deeply. Her aroma was a lavender field, her skin was soft and toned, she had perfect breasts, and John could tell her butt was also very shapely.

  This was no amateur; Lilith invented the art of seduction and had been teaching harlots since the beginning of time. This is how you please a man, this is how you control him, this is how you look at a man you want, and this is how you look at a man you don’t want. She was the master, and in ten thousand years she could count the men on one hand who were able to resist her.

  This was John’s most important test yet. To give into her was not only to reject God’s call on his life, but to become a servant of the most powerful succubus in the known universe. John fought through his arousal and grabbed Lilith by her throat and squeezed.

  “Ooo harder, I like it rough.”

  John threw Lilith off him and she crashed into the dresser; his mirror fell from the wall and crashed around her and onto the floor. Lilith became enraged and jumped on him. They wrestled with each other for the upper hand, each choking the other.

  Most demons would revert to a menacing figure in order to intimidate their enemy, but not Lilith. This was who she was. A beauty beyond words that was just as lovely, even when she was angry.

  “You are a fool to resist me!”

  With her free hand, she dug her nails deep into John’s stomach. He winced from pain, but didn’t scream.

  “I’d be an even bigger fool to be seduced by you!”

  “You think you are so special, don’t you? I’ve seen men like you before and I have conquered them, David, Solomon, and even the great Samson. All men are weak and you will be mine!”

  “I will never be yours. I belong to Jesus and he said to the Father, ‘I did not lose a single one of those you have given me.’ You are just another demon cursed to the fires of hell, and he has also given me authority over all the power of the enemy; I will not be harmed by trampling over snakes and scorpions, but I don’t rejoice because evil spirits will obey me. No, I rejoice because my name is written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.”

  Lilith screamed and convulsed upon hearing the Word of God.

  “Now in the name of Jesus Christ, who is my savior, GO TO HELL!”

  John let go of Lilith’s neck and she grabbed her head with both hands, as if she were trying to block out the command that she must obey. She looked deep into John’s eyes.

  “This is not the end.”

  John sat up quickly and when he did, Lilith was gone. He was once again in his bedroom all alone. He couldn’t tell if what he had just experienced had really happened. He looked at his dresser and the mirror, and they were still intact. Nothing was out of place. Everything was as it was when he went to sleep. He remembered she had dug her nails into his ribs and he went to check his injury. There wasn’t a cut, but as he inspected a little closer there was blood on his hand. His body must have healed, but the blood was all the evidence he needed to realize that this attack was definitely not a dream.

  John plopped back into his bed spiritually exhausted. When his head hit the pillow, he was fast asleep. The last sight his eyes beheld was his alarm clock. Four o’clock.

  When angels and demons summon gates to travel through dimensions, it is a painless experience that they control. They know where they are going and how to get there. Spirits of the recently deceased travel through different vortexes, one for the innocent (which is a beautiful process full of peace and serenity) and another for the guilty (which is an absolutely horrid and fearful experience). However, the gate that is worse than that is strictly for the devil and his angels, and can only be activated by a child of the Most High God.

  When a child of God calls on the name of Jesus to rebuke a demon, they are sent on a devastating vortex that rips them apart at a spiritual and molecular level. Thunder and lightning live there and feed off the spirit trapped like a fly inside a Venus flytrap. Insanity, death, and fear all seem to exist in this place all at once.

  Lilith was careening into a deep orange-red vortex that pulsated with electricity and collided with the edges of the small tube that seemed to get smaller the more she free-fell. The abyss seemed bottomless. Her essence was stretched and mutilated as it finally passed through a tiny hole at the end of the portal. She landed on the dark side of hell, the part of hell that never sees the hellish sun, called the Island of Darkness. She landed disfigured, wings and bones broken, blood oozing from her entire body.

  The Island of Darkness was a place of perpetual night, hence the name. It was colder than the coldest night on the furthest planet in the solar system. There was no snowfall, just a freezing wind. The hellish sun never shone here, and the poor unfortunate souls that lay buried beneath the solid ice saw no relief from the worst hypothermia and freezer burn in the universe.

  If she did not hurry she would freeze into the surface and be lost there a very long time.

  Demons hated dropping souls here, for the chances of them getting caught in the maelstrom was extremely high. Many demons had been lost in times past, so they adopted a new way of bringing in lost souls and that was air-dropping them from more than 20,000 feet above the surface.

  Lilith’s wings were slowly being iced, but she was able to pull them from the surface before they totally froze. She struggled to walk, but she pushed on, coaxing herself forward. She was dreaming of being in her warm cave surrounded by her children. But what really drove her on was revenge. How dare that impudent human invoke the holy name of God to rebuke her! How dare he refuse her advances! She had seduced kings and a few queens, the wealthy and the poor were the same to her. Just who does he think he is? She was livid and that rage was the true motivation to get back to her cave. With each passing thought about the destruction of John, Seraph, or whatever it was he was calling himself, she gained steadier footing.

  As she trudged on, her plan was to scale the nearest mountain and find a launching point and fly the rest of the way home. Hopefully, by the time she reached it, she’d be completely healed. And even though her situation would have certainly claimed a lesser devil, she was Lilith. Crafted from the dust by God’s almighty hands themselves, albeit from filth and sediment, unlike Adam who had been made from the finest minerals and dust
that Eden had to offer, she was no less than anyone. She will make it, she will get back to her home, and she will have her revenge.

  Camilla Adams cried herself to little sleep. She prided herself on being a virgin into her late twenties. Her body was not to be shared with any and every one. She knew many men found her completely desirable, and she was proud of that fact. She dressed sexily on many occasions, but never slutty. There is a fine line and she purposefully toed it. This only helped boost her ego and made her guard her gift like a lioness protecting her cubs. To her, it was her most precious gift because of her strong moral character, and it was a gift she was saving for the man who she would marry. She was certain the man was Jonathan Michael Gabriel Summers. But after what he just told her, she felt as if she had squandered it.

  Camilla was embarrassed by the way she had been acting the past month with John, living with him like husband and wife when no vows were said before God. Her mother warned her about this kind of behavior, and she beat herself up over it. You deserve to cry these tears for acting like a whore. She was brokenhearted and felt lied to. He never loved you. And what did God think? He thinks you’re a whore too, Jezebel. Religion.

  What happened? What really happened in the two weeks she hadn’t seen him? Had he drunk from the waters of another well? Doubtful, John wasn’t that type of man, at least that’s what she thought. But why lie? If he didn’t love her and didn’t want her any more, he could just tell her. She was a big girl. She could handle it. He didn’t have to treat her like Amnon treated Tamar.

  Wait a moment, I am being so irrational. But it didn’t change the fact that her heart was scarred, and right or wrong, she felt how she felt. Forgiving John would have to come later, forgiving herself would have to come next. But first Jesus needed to forgive her. He already has, over 2,000 years ago. Relationship.

  CHAPTER 10

  Five long hell years went by. Revenge, rage and bitterness had consumed her dark heart and had given birth to murderous hatred. Murderous hatred led her to breed the most evil offspring that she could. Lilith raised her Nephilim on Kenneth’s regenerating carcass and chemaworms—a truly disgusting meal that they ate as if it were a five-star dinner. They grew big, nasty, and evil. She trained them every day and if hell rotated, she would have trained them all night too. They became sharp, extremely dangerous, and volatile. The lone planet in outer darkness revolved around the lone red dwarf star five times. Lilith evaluated her children as she prepared them for the coming assault.

  Emim was the baby but the biggest of the siblings. He towered at 8’10” and weighed 680 pounds. He was built like an offensive lineman and loved to eat. He wasn’t the smartest, but what he lacked in intelligence, he overcompensated for by being the most aggressive of the three.

  Emim loved to eat. It was his favorite thing. He loved to scavenge for his own food, even though Kenneth and the chemaworms were readily available. Kenneth was his absolute favorite. He loved the sweet taste of roasted human meat and had eaten Kenneth to the bone on more than one occasion—leaving very little, if any, for his older brother and sister. Soon they forced him to search for his own food if he was still hungry after meals. And search he did.

  The Ottocom Desert had been his feeding grounds for the past year. He’d dig up the caskets of the tortured souls and pry them open with his bare hands. He’d pull the soul from the casket and wait for it to regenerate, which took a few hours, and then he’d devour it. Soul and all.

  He was never bothered after the first set of demons crossed his path. A new pair of demons, Ghan and Taziel, had replaced Nicor and Raum on patrol and had approached the four-year-old Nephilim and was never heard from again. After about four days when Ghan and Taziel failed to report to General Deviat, he sent yet another replacement patrol. Ubriel and Qa, who were a bit sharper than their predecessors, decided not to approach whatever was out there but monitor the action from the sky.

  They hovered above and saw Emim eating a human soul, and they could hear the screams over the howling desert wind. Ubriel and Qa watched the beast, code-named him Soul Eater, and followed him back to Lilith’s cave. Afterward, they reported all that they saw to General Deviat. Deviat was shocked to learn of the hybrid walking about hell, but decided that since the creature wasn’t freeing souls but eating them, they should not interfere until he decided its fate. Deviat was surprised, however, that a Nephilim lived with Lilith. She was a known troublemaker and an outcast, but this was high treason.

  In the year that General Deviat knew of Soul Eater, he did nothing, allowing Emim to eat his fill of human flesh and souls in peace. As was his routine, Emim walked alone in the hot hellish sun, salivating about his upcoming feast. He walked until he came across someplace new where he’d begin to dig. He had never been to this area of the desert. He decided that he’d dig here and wondered what kind of savory human he’d find to satiate his ravenous hunger. He knelt and scooped massive heaps of sand with his hands rather quickly, thanks to a technique he developed. This allowed him to conserve energy while still being able to haul loads of sand. Emim would typically dig some six to nine feet to retrieve a coffin.

  Emim kept digging until he got to the eighth foot and came across something hard, but neither metal nor hollow, which was what the coffins typically were. This object was solid and thick. It matched the sand and even shared a rough sandpaper or gravel texture. Emim stomped on the object and used his massive weight to crack the surface, but when he did, it shook violently.

  The sand rumbled and caved in at certain places and moved in other places. There was clearly something inside the sand, and Emim figured it was a serpent of some kind. He stumbled backward away from the commotion, and then suddenly, out shot a mother giant chemaworm.

  Her name was Chema Maw. She was sand-colored with a hooded, pointed head that made it easier for her to travel under the sands like a spear through the air. Chema didn’t have teeth but had no use for them; she swallowed her victims whole, and the deadly acid in her digestive system killed her prey within a few hours. She screeched and shrieked over eighty feet into the air before sliding back into the sand. Emim was unsure of what to do as the enormous Maw circled him while he stood there. Suddenly it stopped.

  Out came the worm from a distance of about twenty feet away, and it launched right at Emim and dove deep into the sand, taking the young Nephilim with her. Emim rode on the tip of her head and held on for dear life until she shot back into the air. He lost his grip on the 100-foot-long worm and fell from more than sixty feet onto the sand. The worm’s forward momentum carried her into the depths of the sand.

  Emim tried to regain his poise and prepare for another assault, which he knew was coming but didn’t know from where. Once again Chema Maw blasted through the sand, but Emim lost his balance and fell to the ground while trying to avoid being carried into the air again. However, he quickly rose to his feet and jumped on the worm’s tail, but as Chema Maw began to nose-dive deep into the sands, her tail flipped the giant more than a mile into the air. Her strength was truly immense.

  He stabilized himself as he free-fell back to the Ottocom Desert, but Chema Maw shot out from the sands like an anti-air missile. Preparing to devour her prey whole, she opened her gullet. Emim dove to increase his terminal velocity, and they collided in midair. Emim was in the belly of the beast with no apparent way out. He had a few hours before the acid would begin to have its effect on him.

  Chema Maw slinked back into her hole, satisfied in the demise of her prey. But before Chema Maw could savor her victory, she rose back to the surface and began dry heaving onto the deep orangey dunes. The only thing that came out was a little blood but no giant. She tried to spew out Emim, but after a few minutes she passed out. She lay there incapacitated and eventually the impression of Emim’s hand and foot could be seen on her giant belly.

  Suddenly a small wound appeared on the belly, and it gradually got bigger, piece by piece, until Emim began ripping open the giant chemaworm. Emim fell forward and
landed on his hands and knees, trying to catch his breath. He was covered in blood and guts, and had bits and pieces of worm flesh in his mouth.

  When he had gathered enough strength, he stood and looked at the worm once more. He put his hand deep into the body of the giant chemaworm. Feeling his way around, he finally smiled, as if he had found what he was looking for and pulled it out. He held it at the handle and kept pulling until it was out. It was a six-foot-long hammer covered in blood and entrails.

  The long staff of the hammer weighed close to eighteen pounds, and the hammerhead weighed twenty-three pounds. It was a powerful and heavy hammer that once belonged to a warrior demon that had obviously fallen victim to the once mighty worm. Emim took it and began his long journey home. His only regret was that he didn’t have a bigger stomach to devour the rest of the fallen Maw.

  General Deviat bided his time for a whole year until it was the perfect opportunity to strike. Information traveled well in the underbelly of hell, and rumor was that Anzu was waiting for an opportunity to bring Lilith down. Anzu was not a patient demon, but he had no choice. He was but one demon and didn’t have the cachet to demand an audience with Lord Satan. Only generals or very old, wise, and terrible demons could request such a petition and have it granted. And since he was neither, there was no way he could make a case against Lilith without certain proof—proof that was nearly impossible to come by.

  When General Deviat got wind of Anzu’s ambition, he met with him in his private chambers in the city of Sheol.

  “General, you do me a great honor by stepping foot in my humble home.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Anzu bowed low and the general sat in Anzu’s personal chair. Deviat’s two personal bodyguards took the other seats, leaving Anzu no other place to sit.

  “Sir, would you and your servants like something to drink?”