They’re only little once.
“Come my babies, let me play for you,” I said as they flocked around me. The leathery whispers of wings against wind settled as the tucked up into the rafters, tangled into my hair, and landed and sprawled on the top of the piano, cooing at me. Their red eyes stared at me, so full of love for mother, I couldn’t help the swell of feelings.
My fingers flew across the keyboard, giving them the beauty of Beethoven’s pain in his Appassionata. The light beginning succumbs to the darkness of the world. What music is more appropriate for the children of the Queen of Hell lamenting her curse to her children?
My babies would leave me soon and I would be made to birth a new brood. I had one thin night to impart all my love, all my hate, and the strength they’d need to wrench all the life force out of God’s chosen, Adam and Eve’s progeny. Nocturnal emissions and dream lust would be the nectar they gathered for me and the master–a hard life of wrenching sins out of mankind.
Poor little things leaned into the music I made for them, rocking on their red wings, chirping along to the minor chords. My lovely little demons.
One of them crawled across the bench, up into my lap, pressing against my already swelling belly, listening to its siblings stirring within. I stopped playing to pick it up and cuddle it to me.
“Why?” It asked. One always did.
“It’s my curse and my joy to bear you, my little love,” I told it.
It nodded and snuggled against my neck.
I glanced around at them, thousands of eyes twinkling red from every corner and rafter and surface. After they left, they’d never know peace again. There was forgiveness for the sons of Adam and Eve, but none for the children of Lilith. And I didn’t want that for them anyway.
“You’ll fly, my sweet. You’ll scratch and steal and tear at them. You are vengeance. Justice from below,” I said and gently stroked my baby’s nubby horns. They’d grow by the end of the night. They’d be curled ram’s horns framing the lovely, tempting face it would grow. “You are beautiful, my babies. More special than any of the fallen angels or the Dukes of Hell.”
When God had cursed me, he’d made me suffer for my insolence. I hadn’t let Adam mount me to make me a mother, so that’s all I was when God was done. A mother.
What I grew inside me was…
“Lilith, send them,” Lucifer’s voice boomed up from the deepest pit.
How I hated his voice. His orders. Always taking them from me to be used up in the human world.
The little one was now a young blonde boy clinging to my side. His siblings surrounded me, growing into their beauty fast. My little ghosts haunting the dreams of Adam’s kin. Who could resist their beauty?
I whispered the secret of our power to them all.
“They say they want a marriage bed, pure and holy. They say what they have is enough. But it is you they invite into their dreams. Peel back their wishes. Give them the worst of themselves reflected in what they do with you.”
The babies were grown, muscled or curved, dark skinned or light, all things for every taste. The perfect reflection of human lust. I only had them for minutes more before they’d go out into the night to steal the seed of Adam.
“They did this to us, little ones. All because I wanted more than Adam could give. You are the mirror I hold up to their soul. You are the thief in the night I send to steal them from God.”
“Now, Lilith,” Lucifer roared.
“Go, my lovelies. Make them pay.”
Their red wings spread and they leapt into the swirling heat of Hell’s sky, making for the realm between the world and the mind. The night would use them up. The torments of laying with humans and sapping them of their seed would send them back to me in tatters. They’d give me what I need to make more, then they’d die curled in a rictus that I’d send to Lucifer.
They’d feed the army he was growing in the pit.
I put my hand on my swelling belly, feeling the squirming of my next batch inside. Someday, I’d not send them. Someday, I’d find a way to send them to God. Let him look in the eyes of my children and see what he’d done. Let him answer them when they asked why. Maybe he’d explain why my rejection of Adam was worth their lives. I’d like to know what he’d tell them before he blasted them into ash.
How I’d wished for such an end.
I turned back to my piano and played, waiting for the quickening to come. Waiting for my babies to be born. Always waiting.
Donna J. W. Munro’s pieces are published in Nothing’s Sacred Magazine IV and V, Corvid Queen, Hazard Yet Forward, Enter the Apocalypse, Beautiful Lies/Painful Truths II, Terror Politico, It Calls from the Forest, Gray Sisters Vol 1, Pseudopod 752, Shakespeare Unleashed, and others. Check out her novel, Revelation: Poppet Cycle Book 1. Contact her at https://www.donnajwmunro.net or @DonnaJWMunro on Twitter.
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Published 5/12/24