Chat with a Demon. Daughter of the Dawn. Natalie Yacobson

it not?”

      “You’re human.”

      Nikita felt a slight shock. Was the word human a sort of insult? Like, you’re not of the angelic kind. You don’t understand me.

      “So what if I am only human?” He got angry.

      “There’s a lot that people don’t understand.”

      “So tell me! What was going on in the temples your fans destroyed? Why did Lucifer rebel? And, after all, what exorbitant ambition drives movie stars to trade their bodies to get to the top of show business Olympus through the beds of their directors and producers?”

      The last question was an insult. The chat broke off instantly. Nikita waited for a complaint to be made to a moderator and to be temporarily blocked. Nervous girls complained even about a compliment if it came from a different user than the one they wanted to chat with. Athenais didn’t complain. She did the meaner thing – she cut off communication with him for the rest of the night. That turned out to be the worst punishment. Nikita had become accustomed to communicating with her as a kind of drug.

      Athenais would appear after midnight, like a fairy tale genie released from a bottle, and entertain him with tales half the night like Scheherazade. But now the chat room was empty and boring. The annoying girls that Nikita used to chat with from nothing to do had long since forgotten about him. Too carried away by the movie star, he lost all his girlfriends.

      All that was left was to be amused by movies starring Athenais. Nikita clicked the link again. The familiar video file popped up on the credits. Nikita was taken aback when he noticed that both the director and the screenwriter of the film were Athenais herself. He seemed to have insulted her for nothing.

      In the Horror Genre

      Athenais had to wait an unbearably long time, but eventually she returned to chatting.

      “Are you bored without me too?” Nikita teased her.

      “I’m not bored at all. I’m in a really depressing place.”

      “Are you making another movie there?”

      “Movies aren’t the most important thing in my life right now, so I started going out to chat.”

      “Are you looking for friends or one friend?”

      “I’ve already found one so far.”

      Nikita felt involuntary joy. Responses from Athenais were coming very quickly. That meant she was really communicating with him alone. If she had been distracted by someone else, the answers would have come very slowly.

      “I’m looking for a girl, not just a girlfriend to chat with.”

      “I know.”

      “So what do you say? Do I even get one date?”

      “We’ll see in time.”

      Athenais’ answer wasn’t particularly encouraging, but it’s a good start. She doesn’t say no right away.

      “Are you available?”

      “It is not really.”

      “You mean you’re married? Or engaged? Or have a boyfriend…”

      “That’s what you mean.”

      “What were you thinking?” Nikita couldn’t understand her. When a woman is asked if she is available, it means that they want to ask her to marry her. The words “free” or “not free” are synonymous with married – not married. Slaves and serfdom do not exist now. In what other sense could Athenais have understood the word “free”? Her mentality can’t really be shaped from the era of the pharaohs, when slavery was in vogue.

      “There’s one place I can’t leave yet,” Athenais typed. “It makes me feel not completely free.”

      “So do you have some kind of contract?”

      A star can only be kept in a particular shooting location by some kind of contract that can’t be terminated without paying a hefty penalty.

      “Did your friends help you to make a career in film? Or do you really edit films with your own hands?”

      “I prefer to do everything myself.”

      “And you do everything yourself?”

      “I am guided by the principle: if you want to do something well, do it yourself.”

      The phrase flashed through his mind again: “how you fell from heaven, Dennitsa, son of the dawn, to become the king of the cinema and the earth.

      Stop! This is some kind of modernization of a biblical saying. Nikita frowned. He felt as if someone’s black claw was writing this phrase in red paint right on the keyboard.

      “Do you like horror movies?” The question came out of nowhere.

      Nikita didn’t even know what to answer. He decided to come clean.

      “When I was a kid, I loved them.”

      “Why did you love them?”

      “I don’t even know.”

      “Do you like to tickle your nerves? Do you like to be scared?”

      “It was sometimes.”

      “Does the horror genre help you get through a storm of thrills?”

      “Like that?”

      “Would you like to be in a horror movie yourself?”

      “Not as a victim.”

      “What part?”

      “I don’t know. I prefer to watch. I liked your movie a lot, too.”

      “Would you like to be inside it?

      “Yeah, I guess so.”

      “Would you like to join the legions of demons fighting against the Almighty?”

      “I don’t know… maybe… yes!”

      “Aren’t you afraid of being burned alive so that you can gain immortality later?”

      The eerie questions poured out of a leaky sack. Athenais was testing her partner’s strength. Nikita almost gave up. Each line is one scarier than the next, the mouse moves like a wind-up. This is no longer a chat room, but a duel. Who will drive who crazy first?

      There was definitely someone in the room behind Nikita’s back. Someone’s claws were scraping the linoleum. The sound was quiet, but unpleasant.

      Nikita didn’t risk turning around, though a low growl could be heard behind him. His nerves gave out.

      “Let’s not discuss horror movies anymore,” he asked his chat companion.

      “Don’t tell me you’re more attracted to magazines with lecherous pictures than to classic horror,” Athenais said.

      Nikita had a few pornographic magazines lying around, but how would she know that? You can’t look into his desk drawers through the chat room and check what’s in them.

      While Nikita was thinking about what to answer, Athenais had already received the next question:

      “Which is safer: pornography or horror movies?”

      “Pornography molests,” Nikita typed diplomatically.

      “And horror movies can make you go crazy,” Athenais parried.

      “They are not mystical ones, thrillers about maniacs. For some reason, they’ve started calling them horror movies in modern distribution, even though the genre is more of a criminal one. There are no ghosts, no vampires, no demons, just violence and carnage. These films used to be called thrillers. They could make you sick. And beautiful demons are romance. Like Lermontov’s poem of the same name.

      “Called