“Like a virgin,” she crooned as she touched the pale full lips with a finger, “Touched for the very first time…”
The body on the bed didn’t respond and she laughed softly. She rose from the bed, the sheet sliding off to reveal her naked form. She glided on the room’s soft rug to the window where she had a view of the towers of Hong Kong all lit up in the distance.
Bored with the view, she headed towards the bathroom and passed the mirror. Her reflection moved past, her body shifting from that of a black hag to a curvaceous woman of Asian descent. She stepped on the cold bathroom tiles.
As she did her ablutions, she felt bloated, satiated like a snake that had swallowed its prey whole. She wished she had not eaten so much, but the man on the bed had more than fulfilled her. Of course, there was no mark on him: when she fed, she did not touch her victims.
A beautiful woman, fair-skinned, blonde and model-thin in a tight-fitting aquamarine dress and stiletto shoes, coalesced from the shadows behind the bathroom door and looked around disdainfully. Her reflection in the mirror changed like snapshots: from a short, fat old woman back to the image that stood before her, switching back and forth incessantly.
“So, are you done?” the other woman said, her luscious mouth in a pout.
“Very much so,” she said with a satisfied smirk.
“Well, don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” the woman said and seeped back into the dark of the shadows.
“Sister,” she said mockingly. “Don’t be a stranger!” Then she laughed as the shadows thinned and became mundane again.
It was tempting fate, her being here in the hotel room. Her kind had always hunted alone, their victims killed sparingly so that no one would suspect their existence. Fortunately, the woman who roamed these hunting grounds – including the hotel – was her sister, one of ten among their mother’s brood.
If it weren’t for that tenuous kinship, they would have already settled the matter with the black blood spilled from their veins.
She walked out of the bathroom fully clothed and refreshed. She always cleaned herself after feeding. As she walked towards the bed, she thought of what she was, her kind that stalked the night and fed on only men. She had heard all the names that they had accumulated over centuries: succubus, the Old Hag, bangungot, – they meant the same thing.
She had once wondered why she had to feed through sex, gaining nourishment through the orgasmic act as she lay on top of her sleeping victims, though not touching them. She didn’t understand why it was all interconnected – the targeting of males, the sleeping victims – but it felt like she always needed to undergo a complicated ritual in order to feed.
She looked down at the body on the bed. Take this one: most of her kind had changed their diet since the last century, feeding on Asian males instead of Caucasians. It was the rice that they consumed, that made every meal tastier than usual. She licked her lips at the memory of the taste.
“Ah well…” she whispered. Time to go indeed. She slipped into the shadows… and halfway across the world to where a young housewife was sleeping on a bed in a small house in the suburbs of New York.
The alarm woke her up and she groaned, covering her head. She didn’t know why she felt so tired after sleeping. She had gone to bed early after dinner, in fact. And her dreams were so strange…
She resigned herself to getting up. She needed to cook breakfast for her husband and the kids before they left the house for work and school. At least one thing nice about her dreams was that she always felt like she had eaten the best meal she ever had.
(First published in allmusicjunkies here)
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