LILITH (DEMONOLOGY I)

I

Jordan was the first to go.

Strange disappearances were occurring all over the country, months before Jordan disappeared. All of the victims were 16-18, my age. They started in the California Bay Area, and inched their way across the country. The strange phenomenon was unheard of before. Eventually, it had reached the small town of Cameron, North Carolina.

We weren't concerned about it here. The kidnappings were mostly occurring in large cities, such as Chicago and Las Vegas. Cameron wasn't even a city. It was a small town within a slightly larger Moore County. Not many people were of importance here, aside from the legendary Hardy Boyz and the other wrestlers in OMEGA. So when Jordan went missing we were all shocked.

But that shock soon dissolved. People began to care less about Jordan Hayes, and more about their own teenage sons. Schools lost more than half of their students, and the majority of workplaces in town went understaffed.

My dad was shaken up by it, but a little more than others. I understood, though. I was all he had. After my mother died during my birth, it was just me and him living in a small house in the woodlands. What was even more sad about it, however, was the fact that only my dad remembered her. No one in town seemed to have ever met her. Whenever I asked about her, my dad just went quiet and stared. He would be affected for days, talking to no one. The only acknowledgement I would get from him was a small nod whenever I left for school. He wasn't the best dad, but he made do with what he had, and I appreciated him for it.

"Am I really going to stay inside until this whole situation rolls over, if it ever does?" I asked him. It had been two days, and the farthest I had traveled outside was five yards from the house to gather wood. I had no phone, so there was no way for me to communicate with anyone but my dad.

"Unless you want your face to end up on a milk carton," my dad replied, barely looking at me over his newspaper. "You're gonna stay here. Jordan got taken after school got out. If whoever took him was brave enough to do it in broad daylight, they'll have no problem taking someone in the middle of the woods."

"But they will have a problem taking someone who's trained in Krav Maga."

"You don't know that, Finn," my dad said sternly. "It could be one person taking all these kids, and it could be a lot of them. Going out there blindly is a death wish." He sat back in his chair and continued to read the paper. Annoyed, I got out of the ratty armchair that sat in our living room and headed upstairs to my bedroom.

We only had two TVs in the house. One was downstairs, and the other was in my bedroom. My dad really only watched it to see the news, and he thought that anything else on TV was "absolute garbage." Well, he's clearly never watched Supernatural, because that show is the shit.

I switched on the TV and turned to Fuse, it was the best music network on air, since MTV had become a crappy reality network. Fuse was doing a tribute to the 1900's. I grabbed my Gibson Les Paul Classic and tried to play along. With no internet, the only way for me to learn riffs was by ear or by printing them out at the library. The only songs I had learned by heart were Iron Man and Smoke on the Water. I knew the basics to a lot of other songs though. When Highway to Hell came on, I clumsily riffed along with Angus Young. More and more classics played, and more and more my dad yelled for me to "Turn that racket down!"

I wasn't really big on music as a kid, as I would just listen to what came on the radio of my dad's truck. But one day I found the Les Paul in our garage and asked my dad if it was his. He said no, it was my mom's, and he had never even considered playing. He let me keep it, and bought me some extra equipment. That was six years ago. Ever since then, I've been slowly learning how to play. I didn't even know all of the notes on the fretboard until three years after I first started playing. It was the only thing I knew about my mom, she played guitar. If I couldn't know her personally, I could at least learn about her through her hobbies. In fact, the only time my dad really told me about my mom was when I showed him the guitar. I got lucky, I guess.