Lilith's Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life - Hardcover

Strieber, Whitley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 074345152X ISBN 13: 9780743451529

Publisher: Atria, 2002

Synopsis

An ancient vampire, beautiful beyond words, a vulnerable young man drawn to her by a power beyond his understanding, two desperate parents searching across the world for the son they love -- these are the riveting, unexpected elements of Whitley Strieber's extraordinary new novel. Lilith, the ages-old mother of the dying race of vampires, has been forced to come out of her cave deep in the Egyptian desert in search of food -- human blood. But she knows nothing about the modern world. She can't drive a car, rent a room, turn on a TV. She struggles to New York, penniless, vulnerable, and starving, protected only by her beauty and her power to capture men with desire...especially certain very special men. The instant she sees young Ian Ward, she knows that he is part vampire himself. She knows that Ian, if he ever tastes human blood, will belong to her forever. And she needs him desperately, to help her survive and live in this harsh new world of jets and credit cards and guns. She sets out on a campaign of seduction -- as sensuous as it is terrifying -- to touch human blood to Ian's lips, which will then become for him a drug a thousand times more addictive than heroin. Ian's father, Paul Ward, part vampire turned expert and obsessive hunter of vampires, knows that if the blood transforms Ian, Paul will have to kill his own son. The titanic conflict between father and son and seductress, hunter and hunted and huntress, comes to its surprise conclusion in the secret chambers beneath the great pyramids, where the hidden truths of all human history are stored. From its beginning in the dark back alleys of Cairo to its totally unexpected ending, Lilith's Dream draws the reader down seductive new paths of discovery, into places where no novel has ever before. With Lilith's Dream Whitley Strieber has created a vampire so original and a story so newthat he has virtually invented a new genre.

About this title

About the Author:

Whitley Strieber is the #1 bestselling author of The Hunger, The Wolfen, Communion, Transformation, and Confirmation, and the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller The Coming Global Superstorm. The Last Vampire has just been sold to Sony Pictures for a major motion picture.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter Four: The Blood Eagle

Lilith awoke in the man's arms, feeling the delicious tickle of his hand running up and down her thigh. At once she was glad, she was grateful...and she was lonely. His attentions had drawn her to enter what she thought of as her life's dream, which had been unfolding as long as she could remember, of an afternoon in a place of perfect joy.

In this part of the dream she is leaving. To do this, she steps beneath a plum tree covered with blossoms, into its fragrant, bee-humming bower. As she leaves, a man lays his fingers on her cheek and touches her tears. He says, "Only an hour." His strong, sweet voice, when she hears it in her dream, makes her glow with the vanishing light of longing.

She'd heard it just now, "Only an hour." It had become for her the watchword of the eons, this enormous hour.

"You are my passionflower," the man breathed into her ear in his own poetry, his slippery, jaunty Arabic.

Instantly, there came a silent riposte, You are my dinner. She gazed at him, thinking that they did not have such complex faces in the long-ago. "Ibrahim," she breathed, "love me." And he did, oh, he really did. His eyes bulged, and his lips hung slack as he pumped away at her. But he also tried to pleasure her, speeding up, slowing down, watching to gauge it in her eyes. And he did see it, because it was there. He was giving her pleasure, enough pleasure to make her feel a most unaccustomed feeling, which was regret.

She had come to feel a certain tenderness toward him. He sang, he told her stories of his youth among the camels, he bragged to her about his little possessions, his auto, his timepiece, the black "business suit" he kept in a bag. "I am a businessman. In Cairo, I am respected. I must wear such a suit."

She felt him swell within her, saw his eyes flicker as he experienced the little death of coitus. Then he sank down upon her, and she enjoyed his weight. Her pleasure in him was not physical. It was, and this was a surprising truth, a pleasure of the heart.

He rolled off, breathing hard. "Oh," he said, "oh, my. Was it so good for you?" It could not feel for him as it would with a human woman, but he said nothing, so neither did she. She turned to him and kissed the edge of his beard.

In recent years, she had taken less of an interest in the prey species. At home when she fed, she had come to prefer that they bring it to her wrapped in linen and so trussed that it could not even struggle. She would see only the neck, taste only blood drawn from carefully cleaned skin.

She did not want to experience Ibrahim in such a detached and sterile manner. She wanted to take him in the old way, with loving gentleness, even a sweet touch of regret. That was the way to eat, with respect.

But even so, look at his dark and shining eyes. He was so pleased with her, so grateful. Perhaps, as hungry as she was, she could delay a little more. If she began to lose too much strength, she could always just reach over and do him. It only took a moment.

She lay her fingers along his carotid. "Boomboom," she said, "boomboom."

"What do you feel?"

"Your blood."

He threw himself on his back and began to laugh silently, his beard bobbing, his face twisted with pleasure that was also pain. "I am not a good Muslim," he said. "I am not a good Egyptian."

"You keep saying that. What would a good Muslim do?"

"Not fornicate. And a good Egyptian would not consort with a djin and bring misfortune on himself and all his family."

"You think me a demon?"

He scoffed. "I know it." Then, suddenly, he rose. She went up, too. They sat face to face, naked, in the smoky light of the one old lamp that lit the caravan. "Your skin is not like ours," he said. He reached out and touched her hand. She looked down at his fingers, then up to his face. In it, she saw a dangerous wonder.

"If I am a djin -- "

"I did not know that such things could be."

" -- you should run for help."

"But your...eyes...I am enchanted."

She did not think that his enchantment was centered on her eyes. "It's dangerous, is it not, to love a djin?"

"It is not something I thought was possible, because there are no djin. But your body is so cold, and you have the name of a great djin."

"Lilith..."

"The first wife of Adam. She divorced him and spawned a race of demons."

"Adam..." How that name resonated! She had always loved it, had kept it deep in her heart. Adam, a name from her dreams. She repeated it, "Adam..."

"But I am only Ibrahim. Can you ever say 'Ibrahim' with such love?"

She lay back in their ragged sheets, indolent in the lazy light. "I wonder sometimes if ever I knew an Adam. It's a name that's just on the tip of my tongue."

"If you are Lilith the demoness, then perhaps the memory has gotten like that because it is so old. Nobody knows what it would be like to be that old."

She knew how she appeared to them. Cocking an eyebrow, she asked, "Do you imagine that I am old?"

"'Love is from before the light began, When light is over, love shall be...'"

"That's lovely."

"A foolish Arab wrote it. 'To lighten my darkness, I look for the red crescent of her lips, And if that comes not, I look for the blue crescent of the sword of death.'"

She found this suddenly quite interesting. "You would die for me?"

He nodded, his face mock-solemn.

It made her laugh, and at first he laughed, too, but then became silent. Late into the night, she lay beside him and felt him watching her. She pretended to sleep, and in her false sleep she falsely sighed his name.

Each morning, a boy-child brought dates and milky tea. At noon, Ibrahim went to a tent with the other men, and in the evening servants even more bedraggled than he was came and set up a table beneath some trees, and she and he would sit together. He would eat and watch her, his eyes shining with desire. He observed that she never ate, but asked no explanation.

Now, as she lay beside him for what must be the fourth night, she thought perhaps the time had come to eat. Gravity was controlling her more and more. She was sluggish.

She went up on one arm. There he lay, his face slightly sweated, his form motionless but for the slight rising and falling of the chest. She ran a finger through the curly, graying hair. He stirred a little. His eyes seemed unfocused, as if he was at large in his inner life.

What might he be looking for within himself -- the images of his wives, perhaps? Not likely. When he wept, as he sometimes did, he claimed that he was missing them. "But I have been captured by you, my demoness. I cannot leave."

She gazed at the flame of the lantern. He had trimmed its wick in the afternoon, and it was very steady tonight. It was run, he had said, by the same oil that ran the unhorsed wagon.

His genital organ glowed faintly pink. It was fully engorged with blood. Without speaking, she mounted him and put him in her. Let him have a last run.

The muscles in the edges of his face tightened, making it seem to extend, gleaming, into the lantern light. He had said that he did not like her to do this. It wasn't seemly, he said, for the woman to go boldly on the man. So perhaps, this time, he would want to do violence to her afterward. There was a part of her that enjoyed the illusion of helplessness at the hands of a human being. In her inner world, she would imagine being captured by them, and bound so that she could not move. The idea of being carried by them, of suffering pain from their hands with no ability to prevent it, of being ravished by the hurrying little thrusts of the males -- these thoughts would amuse her -- as indeed, they amused her now.

Tears came into his eyes. But then he expended himself, and sank back. She dismounted him. He made an expression with his face, drawing his lips back across his teeth. Then he sucked in air, hissing like an uneasy snake. "I must pray," he said.

She laid a hand on his breast. "Not now."

"Yes, now. The hour is late. If the others see that I do not pray -- "

"You don't believe any of it."

"But I cannot take the risk of being thought impious. You cannot imagine what they would do, and I don't want to. Already, they have seen that I pray only once in the day. And they see that a djin is here with me. If I do not pray, they will kill us both, I sense it."

"Who is your god? Amon-ra?"

His eyes, subtly clouded, looked upon her with curiosity. But he said nothing.

All of this prayer of his, she wondered, where had it come from? They still had their precious "beliefs," the humans, that were not grounded in fact. Did they not notice the silence of their gods? Well, Ibrahim did. He prayed only for show. She wanted to be impressed with her Ibrahim, but no, not now. Now, things must change. She put aside sentiment.

"Should I pray?" she asked. "Will they think ill of us if I do not?"

"They will think ill of us if you come out of the caravan but to draw and wash and get supplies. If a woman prays or does not pray, what does it matter?"

She found some dates that he had, and fed him one. As he took it between his lips, his eyes closed. "I am seeing you like the star of heaven," he said. He sat up on the side of the bed. "But, you know, where are you from? You came out of the desert. Can it be that demons are real? Is that why you have taken me from my family?"

She laid her lips on his neck. He muttered something -- a prayer, she supposed, to his silent god. When her tongue penetrated the skin, he made a small, internal sound of surprise. She felt intake of breath, then the beginnings of speech in his throat.

She clenched the powerful muscle that encased her stomach, doing it so tightly that a bit of digestive fluid issued from her nose and ran busily down her jaw, hot and swift. Then the muscle unwound, opening her gut with hydraulic smoothness, the suction swooping his blood from his veins. The poetess Ashtar had called it "that movement beneath all others."

He made a long, babbling utterance of mixed confusion and fear, high with question, higher with complaint. Then his tongue began sputtering in his mouth, and his heels drummed the sodden b...

About this edition

• Publisher: Atria
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 074345152X
• ISBN 13: 9780743451529
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336