Favorite Pants

"Have you ever noticed that pants are like leg jackets?"

Miles was awake immediately.  He remembered that voice.  He opened his eyes to see the woman with silvery hair, slipping into his favorite pair of jeans.  She didn't see mto have any trouble, even though she was pulling them over her own pants.

"Lilith."  Miles said.  Lilith looked up at him, gave small wave.  "Always an... experience to see you.  I'm going to need those."  Ignoring him, she buttoned the jeans, and waved her hands in a very 'ta-da' fashion.  They fell from her waist as soon as she let them go.

"Oh my.  I forgot how fat you are."  She said.  As usual, there was no malice whatsoever in her tone, just genuine innocence.  It was difficult to be angry at her.  "You must have actually gotten fatter since i last saw you."  Difficult, but not impossible.

"I think i got my low metabolism from my father's side.  But you demons wouldn't know much about family, would you?"  Miles gestured for her to turn around, and when she did, he walked to the closet and started getting dressed.

The insult seemed to go completely over Lilith's head.  "Actually I got to know my mother very well.  She tried to eat me when I was six months old."

"Oh?"

"But don't worry, she didn't."

"I can see that."

"But she tried."

"You can turn around now."

Fully dressed, Miles looked outside his hotel room window.  He looked out over the hyperactive city below, casting a forlorn look at the slums just a little ways off.  "It's a shame people don't see the plight the slum-dwellers are in.  Society just turns the other way because of what the church is feeding them."  He shook his head, turning back to Lilith.  "Why were you here, again?"

"Oh!  Right!  I'd just finished helping in the school, when some people in pretty robes came to the south end.  They were really pretty.  The robes, I mean.  The men in them were mean and wrinkly, like you."  Miles decided to let that pass.  "But anyway, they told me to tell you something about execution and divine judgement or something.  And the one with the prettiest robe- it was a red and velvety with lower-case 'T's on it- he talked for a while about purging the unclean, from the inside out."  Miles wasn't sure what to say.  He knew when news of him preaching in the slums got out, he'd probably be excommunicated, but... execution?  That seemed a little extreme.

"Was that it?"  Miles said, choosing his next words carefully.  "Did they say or do anything else important?"

"Um.... oh!  This one guy came by afterwards.  He wasn't in a robe, but he had this shining book in his hand, and started sprinkling this shiny stuff on the ground."  Enoch.  He was still against the church.  "We talked, well I talked, he didn't say anything.  Like, ever.  And he disappeared in a flash of light when I asked what his favorite color was.  Is light a color?"

Miles cast about the room, grabbing the ring off his nightstand and slipping it onto his finger.  He shouldn't need anything else.  "Lilith, people are coming to kill me."

"Oh no."

"Then they'll try to destroy everything on the south end."

"That's mean."

"I need you to get me to the slums as fast as possible.  Think you can do that?"  She gave a thumbs up, which looked all the less dignified with his pants still around her ankles.  She walked out of his pants and to the window and sat on the sill, her legs dangling outside.  The back of her shirt erupted, the fabric tearing, and two leathery wings sprouted from her back.  Miles had always wondered how many shirts she'd ruined doing that, and how someone from the slums was able to buy new ones.  She extended her hand back to him, and he took it.

She launched herself from the window, flying at an unnatural speed toward the slums.  Miles looked down at the city sweeping beneath them, and screamed in fright.

"Sorry I'm going so slow."  Lilith apologized, her voice relaxed against the turbulent wind rolling around them.  "I'm not used to carrying something so heavy."