One visitor, to be precise, whose undefeated record in the week and a half since he walked into my mind has been to rob me of sleep whenever life demanded its most lucid version of me.

That’s because you’re an impostor, the mirror demon taunted me. Those women you claim to save never stood a chance once a guy starts swinging his dick your way.

Quiet, coward, I seethed back.

Oh, we’ll be quiet, won’t we, Legion? We’re here to watch your show. Shh, don’t interrupt. Pant for us, girl. Won’t you give us a preview?

I splashed water on my face. Where was Christ when I needed Him, I thought? Why is He letting me make my own decisions again? Why had I told that madman to come over?

Then I remembered: He’s right here. He’s always right here. Where else could He be, when your heart is His, Miri?

I forgot about the intrusive thoughts in the mirror as soon as I recovered myself and what I’m good at: helping people feel welcome, selecting a nice playlist, and looking stunning.

The butter-soft leggings I had on while wrapping up work and doing chores all evening could stay: comfortable, unassumingly black, and form-fitting without trying too hard. The crumpled, decade-old Dylan tee I had been lounging in as I dropped into my bedtime meditation, on the other hand? That had to go.

I slipped into a loose crop top: baggy enough to be nonchalant, short enough to suggest the rest of my figure. Perfect.

But Dylan was an inspired choice, though. I selected “Gotta Serve Somebody” to remind myself that I had work in the morning.

A knock on the door. Shit, he’s quick! How does anyone sprint all the way home, take a shower, and get back here in less than fifteen minutes?

I ran my hands down my body, took a loud, sighing breath, and went to open the door.

Simeon stood in front of me like a latter-day knight that had been rushed before London royalty: hair damp, head lowered, arms clasped behind his back, legs shaping his tall body into an A-frame, and a lightweight steel-gray cashmere longcoat with tailored lapels grazing his thighs.

God he was stunning. I felt instantly frumpy and underdressed. He didn’t move a muscle.

“May I come in?” the icon asked, his gaze fixed on the threshold marking the expanse of space between us.

I stepped aside. “Yes, please come in. It’s…lovely to see you.”

He met my eyes, his head still lowered, then all at once stirred into action. And marched directly past me into the kitchen that functioned as a foyer and dining room in the identical rectangular apartments that defined the professional renter class of my generation: bedroom, bathroom, and walk-in closet to one side, everything else in the open-space living area on the other.

He halted in front of the kitchen island, executed an about-face befitting a ritualized knighthood ceremony that was wholly out of place steps away from the site of the Boston Tea Party, and performed his pieties.

“Thank you for receiving me on such short notice. I have waited for this night every night for five nights. My relief can hardly be overstated.”

This was so awkward. Maybe that’s how it always goes in royal courts that outstay their welcome in modern-day politics? But this was my tiny 620-square-foot apartment far from the piers in the least ostentatious part of the harbor district.

“Well, welcome, I guess! I—I had no idea you lived so nearby!” I stammered as I walked over to hug him hello.

He sidestepped my approach and threw his arms up in a full white-flag surrender before I even finished raising mine.

“Allow me to forfeit the usual social graces in the manner in which I intend the inconvenience: as a mere precaution. I’m terribly grateful to be invited at all.”

“Oh, dispense with all the pomp and circumstance!” I shot back, unable to help myself. “You really have issues, you know that, Simeon?”

“I know.”

I just shook my head and gestured to the living area. “Pick any spot you like. Um, want some tea? I can put on some—”

“Perhaps I’ll imbibe someth—uh, no thank you. I will not be drinking anything at all,” he announced in his usual hemming-and-hawing as he settled shakily into the armchair by my sofa.

“That’s fine. I just thought to— can I get you— can I do anything at all to make you more comfortable?”

“I would like to know more about you,” he announced slowly, and I felt instantly less comfortable. The whole thing had the atmosphere and pacing of a hesitant peace negotiation between rivals.

“What would you like to know?”

“Your last name, for starters.”

“Well, it’s—uh—it’s—” I thought about whether I wanted him to know. I mean, he was already at my place, but having my last name felt somehow too revealing, so I trailed off.

“That’s alright, Miri. You do not have to say. You do not have to say anything you do not want to,” he explained, sighing with relief as if I’d answered him anyway.

“Why do you want to know my last name?”

“Because I failed to learn how to call on you the night we met, and it cost me dearly.” He crossed his legs and settled deeper into the armchair, brushing his hand through his hair and looking toward the Bluetooth speaker playing the last of the Dylan track.

He smirked knowingly and began mouthing the lyrics to the beat:

Well, it may be the Devil or it may be the Lord

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody

“Why are you laughing?” I asked as he chuckled to himself.

“Forgive me. It’s just, you really know how to make a man feel welcome. Great song.”

I flushed with mortification. “I didn’t mean to imply—”

“It’s perfectly fine. Appropriate, even. And I do not serve anybody.”

I went cold all over. Is he the demon in my mirror made flesh?

As if hearing my suspicions, Simeon quickly waved them away. “I am not the Devil. I am certain of that. I am not here to ravish you, either. My intentions tonight are of a more quotidian nature.”

“Then why are you here?” I felt a flash of disappointment — not that I expected anything tonight. Only, I didn’t expect to draw the lines so early.

“On Sunday, I disclosed more to you in the space of a few hours than I have to anyone of your kind for hundreds of years. I do not make a habit of being known, and I do not make a habit of befriending your — particular — kind either. And now that I have made your acquaintance, I would like things to be less…secretive between us.”

He looked me up and down and I realized I was still standing awkwardly in the middle of my living room. I crossed over to the sofa, noting the careful way he uncrossed his legs to allow me to pass unencumbered — or to avoid touching mine.

I sat down, pulling the crop top lower down my body, feeling suddenly uncomfortable in my own skin and on display in all the wrong ways. I pulled the throw over myself and made like I was cold. And I had been shivering a bit, but more from how oddly he was behaving than the temperature in the room. I had the strange sensation he was somehow connected to the self-doubts that have plagued me all my life and that had now grown more insistent whenever I looked in the mirror.

“Then you can start by explaining where you’ve been.”

“I will do as you ask,” he announced, and launched into a story that would be unbelievable if he weren’t so studiously grave in the telling of it. Not a smile. Not a casual aside. Nothing but an hour-by-hour accounting of a three-leg journey between only two destinations, multiple visits to someone called Saul who advised him on how to stay close to me while keeping his distance, and a theory of divine justice that only the most systematic of Calvinists would find merciful.

It was the kind of account I’ve heard witnesses deliver at a deposition, only I was all at once the prosecutor, the defense attorney, and the plaintiff. And the series of unfortunate events he offered by way of explanation belonged in a horror film, not on the record.

“And your God is a spiteful, bureaucratic prison warden, you know that, Miri? I’ve done you no harm, you know that as well as I do. But the sadist made the simple task of tracking you down into a transcontinental scavenger hunt, all while you fretted that I had cast you aside. I trust you believe now that I never meant to ghost you.”

“I have trouble believing any of what you’re telling me. None of it seems real.”

“Believe it, Miri. If we are to see each other again, I need you to believe it. You are not in danger; I can promise you this as much as I’ve been able to promise anyone anything in my life. The one in danger is me. And whatever is chasing me — it keeps you safe. Hell, even I vow to keep you safe. But I am not safe.” He ran his fingers through his hair again. It was like a physical tic whenever he felt uncomfortable but wasn’t actively burning.

“Not safe?”

“Not safe from you. I suffer if I approach unbidden, if I ask the wrong question, if I even attempt to make you — me — laugh.”

“When have you tried to make me laugh? You’ve seduced and frightened me. And now I have a feeling you’re…trying to tell me you want to be friends, as if I’m throwing myself at you.”

“No. No, that is not at all what you are doing. But I owe you a full accounting of what you’re playing with. You need to know. And I tried to make you laugh when I said I might imbibe something later — you know, in that goth bar, when you offered me a drink? Because, you know…” He didn’t finish the sentence.

“So, do you like…eat people?”

There was a long silence. Simeon stared at me for what felt like an hour — me squirming underneath the blanket, him remaining incomprehensibly still. His eyes, flecked with opalescence floating in deepest amber, bore into mine.

“When I left you…when I put you in that cab and stayed behind—” He made to reach for his hair again but held both his hands out in front of him and extended the fingers, palms out, as if indicating for me to back away.

“That is the cold reality of what I am. I held out as long as I had the strength to breathe you in without breaking down. I navigated your body like a bomb squad examining the wiring. I was so careful. And when I touched your head…after I found that spot inside your elbow you liked, and then you gasped like that, I thought I would explode...But then I was an inch from your lips and the agony was tearing me apart, inside out. It had to stop.”

“The feeling was mutual, Simeon.”

“Not at all, Miri. You may have been on the edge of self-control because I put you there, but I…I was aflame and nearing the very limits of consciousness itself. Beyond where even I have control,” he shook his head as if shaking off a memory.

I didn’t say a word, but in the dim recesses of my mind, I felt a chill rising at the recognition of some irreducible boundary separating man from animal — and reason from instinct.

“You see, when I touch you, and if I haven’t fed, the pain explodes, yes, barely tolerable, yes, but my hunger? It rises by exponents until the distance between decision and desperation is infinite. And when…when it gets like that? When the hunger is that intense and the frenzy descends and all my instincts are pushing me away from…from—”

He was speaking fast now, searching for the words, losing his rhythm in the searching.

“…to get away from what belongs to Christ!” he finally spat out. “When the madness commands me to feed immediately? I have to answer it. I have no choice. I would have taken down the very next mortal who passed us by unawares.” He paused. “And you would have seen.”

The horror of it finally dawned on me. And I could see it.

“I put you in that cab before I had time to take your number because the more important thing was to not allow my nature to take over. It doesn’t matter what I wanted. Had I the resources, I would have turned you face against the wall and held you there, cooling the sweat on your neck, down the arch of your back — wherever you would have allowed it — right down to your heels. Until they couldn’t keep you upright anymore. But none of it mattered, least of all your phone number. I had to not do the one involuntary thing that would have ensured you never wished to see me again.”

“I don’t know if I want to see you even now.”

I said it. I know I said it. I meant every word: I didn’t know. Because I wanted exactly the second part of what Simeon had just described, exactly as he described it, and that meant I didn’t know what I wanted.

“I know.” He waited for me to say something, but I couldn’t.

“Please, tell me if you’d prefer me to leave. I need to know, specifically, what you want, always.”

“Tell me what happened once I was gone,” I said after a time.

“You know what happened, Miri. I think you know. Don’t make me say it.” And he recoiled, powerfully, as if an insect had flown into his eyes.

“Fuck, I’ll say it. I fucking have to say it, don’t I?” he yelled in the general direction of my ceiling. “I took him down, took down the first man I found sleeping drugged out under the interstate. I took my fill for every trespass I did not take on your body, and I ran to Saul.”

We were silent. What could I say to a murder confession in my living room delivered point blank from my armchair as I sat there, staring and breathless, half aroused and mostly petrified? Should I call DHS? They’d be too busy bickering about ICE to take my ravings seriously.

And take my ravings about what seriously? An illegal who drains blood and can’t die and then sprints from Austin to Boston in one night?

I felt defeated by the weight of impossibility. There was almost something hypnotic about it: when you stray so far from the light, no one would believe you anyway. What rules even apply here? Might as well keep walking. Might as well see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

I understood then why I would fail those women: because I was failing myself most of all.

I thought about the revenants Father Thomas told me about. I thought about Simeon’s birth year, which had struck me at the club like some half-coherent yarn one dreams up in a whimsy — and weren’t we mostly flirting back then? — but which was now displaying its potency in waking life.

I wanted badly to go back to wondering if I had imagined it all.

“So everything — everything — all the things I read about in novels…it’s — it’s actually, all of it, true?” I could barely get the words out straight.

He saw the fear in my eyes and his tone changed. He took a long, sighing breath, which reminded me to breathe as well, and then we took another. Finally, he inclined his head and smiled wistfully.

“No, not everything. I can take you to breakfast, for example. In broad daylight. The better to watch you eat,” he smirked tentatively, clearly hoping I’d see the silver lining in our situation.

I did not smile back. I stared, wondering how I was allowing this killer — this supernatural, demonic entity — to sit invited inside my home, and considered what possible business I had thinking I could change him.

Or want him enough to change him so I could…could love something like him.

I wondered how it could possibly be what God intended. And why He was allowing this thing into my life at all — a life I had consecrated to saving people and seeing predators brought to justice.

And why I felt no particular pull to ask him to leave, in light of it all. It was as if I had some other, more consequential mission to accomplish. Or something that Providence wanted from me — only I could not work out what.

“Well, that’s a consolation,” I finally answered his bid for levity in a tone that had none at all.

“And, you can see me in your mirror. Would you like me to show you?”

“What the fuck?” I jumped up. “So it’s you? It was you?”

This was it! My moment to free myself and regain my sanity.

“What? No— what?”

“In the mirror. When I thought about my job tomorrow! You said you don’t even want me! That I’ll fail those women because you’re swinging your dick around!” I was screeching.

“Miri, what are you talking about?” He was on his feet now, too.

“The mirror demon! You fuck with me when I’m doubting myself! You were in Peru with me, too!” I was screaming loud enough now for the neighbors to hear, and I wondered if the knock I heard was coming from upstairs or from something I’d knocked over while backing away.

“What do you want?” I continued yelling at him. “Christ, get the hell out of my house!” I was in complete panic, standing pressed into a corner between my TV and the view onto the street, clutching the blanket as if it offered protection that the distance between us could no longer be relied on to maintain.

“Miri, I am not your demon!” Simeon exclaimed, moving toward me and then halting himself and backing behind the armchair. “I am perhaps someone’s demonic version of vengeance for my life’s inadequacies and indiscretions, but I am not your adversary. And I am not here to harm you. I’ve not seen you until tonight, I swear it! And I have never been to Peru.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“Because if I were not believable, would I have wasted five days courting disaster just to see you again? If I could talk to you through a fucking mirror — if that’s all it took to reach you — would I have done what I did?”

He started walking toward me again and I looked away. From the corner of my eye, I could see he was clutching his chest.

“Miri, don’t you get it yet? If I wished you harm, I would never have let you go at all.”

I felt the desire take me again, and I understood then how deeply into the spirit realm I had waded. If the demons I fought off in Peru with Christ at my side were stalking me again, and if this other thing was here, confessing to murder and to cradling my head at the cost of torment to himself, all while promising never to hurt me himself, all while I believed him, all while it made me want him even more…I knew I had fallen far, far from anything I ever thought I could hold firm to.

Then desire gave way to confusion, and I began to slink down to the floor in the corner, my knees failing me as they had nearly done outside the club in Austin.

Simeon was in front of me placing a cushion under my seat before I hit the ground. I didn’t even see him cross the living room or grab anything off my couch. I now had every piece of evidence in front of me that this man — this mind-invading, continent-sprinting, inhumanly fast and inhumanly motionless specter of an ancient era — was most definitely not of this world.

Not the world I thought I understood, anyway. Yet somehow, it still felt impossible to allow myself to fully internalize the realizations nipping at the corners of my awareness. Like a faith that was broken but still clung, against all reason, to a glimmer of hope.

Christ, I believe. Help my unbelief, I thought. Help me realize the danger I am in. Help me to believe You, Father, not him. Help me to ask him to leave.

Christ did not answer. Only Simeon did, sitting on his haunches in front of me, his extraordinary face hovering over mine.

“Peace, Miri. Peace. I will not harm you.”

“I’m—I’m fine,” I insisted, though my chest was heaving.

“Yes, you are fine. Let’s just stay right here. Talk to me. What is it you said earlier, sweet girl? About your work?” He was speaking to me the way I did when I sat with someone equally frightened, wide-eyed, and wishing to make herself as tiny and invisible as I probably looked now.

“Please, don’t call me girl.”

“I’m sorry—erm, sweet…Miri — is that alright by you?” he asked, his pupils dark with concern.

“The demon calls me girl.”

“Then I will call you a woman,” he replied confidently, his voice reassuring.

He took my hand then, the way I have done a thousand times in moments exactly like this one. I watched him shudder at the contact and watched him settle into it again as I wrapped my fingers around his. Both of us, it seemed, were shaking — me in my whole body, and him entirely still, with just his hand tremoring mildly until it relaxed.

“Woman is fine,” I grumbled, mostly to myself. I was picturing the women tomorrow whose future was fading at my hands as quickly as my resolve was in his.

“What did you say earlier?” he asked again, still clasping my hand, now firmly ensconced in his. It was cool, and I felt my dizziness drifting toward the touch, wanting it on my forehead, wanting to rest against his chest and escape the confusion clouding my mind. Escape the weight of responsibility pressing into my chest, making it hard to breathe.

“About the women?” he prompted again. It’s like he could hear my thoughts, but I knew I was as far away from any kind of inner peace as I had ever been. This was not contemplative prayer. This was…complicity.

“I have a big week coming up.”

“Tomorrow is Friday.”

“My job doesn’t stop for weekends.”

“Won’t you at least tell me about your job, then? It’s why I came here. I want to know something about you, and all I’ve done is frighten you and talk about myself again.”

I felt spent. Had I swooned? Was this what it was like to swoon? I didn’t care what the world would think of me anymore. Whether I was strong or a laughing stock of a woman pretending to take on everyone else’s problems when I couldn’t even solve my own. I just wanted to get my bearings.

“Okay. Will you help me stand up first? I feel kind of silly huddling here like this.”

“Certainly,” he replied and rose to his feet, taking me with him. “But please, keep a polite distance.”

How would this even work? I thought to myself. How does a long-distance relationship at close proximity work, exactly? And when the love interest in question is startlingly beautiful, by all accounts caring and protective, and obviously dangerous in a way that I should find repulsive given my profession and everything I believe in? Nothing made sense anymore.

And the consideration he showed me — the way he noticed me: it was genuinely overpowering. Intoxicating, even. No man has ever gone to such lengths, literally, as he had to pursue me. No man has ever gone to such lengths to respect my space, either. To ward off the slightest affront from a wall or a floor. It was absurd. He was absurd. And it thrilled me.

He steadied me in one hand, his other guiding me toward the couch without touching my back, as he had done on the dance floor back in Austin. He sat me down and retrieved a glass of water from the sink. “Do you have a filter? You should drink something.”

“Tap is fine.” He filled it, placed it in front of me, and sat on the opposite end of the couch — like we were fifth graders on a date and were being chaperoned.

“What do you do for work, Miri?” he continued his inquest into my background. It felt good, somehow. I was always the one asking questions, but Simeon was curious about me.

“I’m a counselor, I already told you.”

“That’s right. Whom do you counsel?” He didn’t let me evade, or let me turn around and make someone else feel more important so I could stay less visible. “Is it other women you counsel?”

“Sort of. They’re — they’re trafficking survivors.”

“Survivors.” I watched the information land as it metabolized — first in his eyes, which narrowed, then in his hands, which folded together on his knees, and finally in his chest, as he leaned forward. “And how do you counsel them, Miri?”

“Expertly,” I answered, wondering if he’d be satisfied but hoping he’d press on.

“I do not doubt it. What is it you are an expert in, as a…woman…working with women?”

“Survival. And avoiding predators.” I knew I was being cheeky now, but I wanted to see if he could take my verbal sparring as well as he managed the physical obstacles I presented. He didn’t miss a beat.

“What does survival look like, after the predator is dealt with?”

He was relentless. Did I love it? I did.

“Lots of things. Learning English, sometimes. Finding community. A job. Finding balance. That kind of thing.”

“Wonderful. Sounds like the kind of missionary work I used to do, only I taught Greek. And how do you accomplish so much for so many, if I may ask? We always struggled to feed and house the masses.” He thought for a moment. “It was a different time…the High Medieval period.”

I stared at him. It grew no easier to converse with this walking antique, no matter how consistent his story or the evidence in front of me, and no matter how fluently he navigated 21^st century problems. Which I supposed were not at all unique to my time, and he should know.

“Do get used to the improbable, Miri. It will help the getting-to-know-each-other bit go faster, so we can finally arrive at the truly astonishing part, which is how I can find you in your mind at all. But I’m beginning to work out a theory: your doubts about yourself form a telling picture.”

I started, his observation sending a thrill of exposure through my heart at being witnessed so closely. “Maybe I like getting to know people slowly,” I hedged, knowing by now he would not let it stand.

“Then we will go as slowly as my years go by. But I would like to know how you do your work all the same. We have some professional interests in common, it seems,” he offered by way of encouragement.

“Yes, networking at the local Crusader convention. Just what my Rolodex needed.”

“You jest. I was a conscientious objector, as previously established.”

“I thought that was your friend.”

“He and I…share…many things. As you were saying?”

“Fine. I run an organization called Free Harbor here in Boston. We work internationally. Started with the Red Cross, and now we work with DHS.” I surprised myself with how much detail I suddenly spilled after being denied my usual deflections. “They catch the predators. I help their victims rebuild their lives.”

“And what are you doing this weekend, since I won’t be taking you to breakfast?”

“There’s a sting operation. It’s the most precarious part of the whole process. Many survivors fight contact with law enforcement. Many of them resist our help or protect their captors. My—” I hesistated, feeling I was talking about myself and not my clients and colleagues, “my partner org is on the ground running first contact. I’m on call for everything that happens after.”

“That sounds important.”

“It is.”

“And what was the other thing?”

“What other thing?”

“The other thing the demon said. Tell me exactly, and I’ll be sure to have a word,” he winked at me from across the couch.

“That I’m failing them.”

“How are you failing them?”

“Because you’re here. Which means I can’t sleep. I can never sleep when you’re around and I have nothing even to show for it.”

“Nothing?” he asked, surprised. He reached under the blanket to expose my bare feet, the only part of me within reach throughout our coy, endless conversation about what I like to do for work that had him so committed to the details.

And then he leaned over, positioning his arms to either side of my legs, lifting the covers even higher with his teeth to expose my knees. He loosed a cool gust of wind along my shins, down my ankles, and then upwards against my arches.

The current of air passed through my toes and made them curl. Fuck.

“You bastard,” I hissed out through my teeth, dropping my head in a now-familiar gesture of defeat that made him instantly look up, alert, and then smile.

“It’s not nothing,” he chimed, pulling the blanket over my feet again and giving them a squeeze that made him wince and me sigh with frustration.

He drew up higher on the couch, the cushions sinking under his weight, arms bracketing my waist. His lapels grazed my shirt. I closed my eyes.

“Miri,” he whispered into my eyelids. I felt his breath on my lashes and my lips part. “I’ll be going now.” And then he stood up to leave.

My lids flew open. “What? Why?”

“I need you to go to work tomorrow. I’ve been here over an hour, and it’s getting well past midnight. You won’t fail those women. You won’t fail.”

He really was a bastard. “I wish you’d just stay,” I said solemnly, pulling my feet closer to me and curling up in the corner of the couch, wishing he would curl up beside me.

“Come on, let’s get you to bed. Allow me.” He extended his hand.

I felt sleepy, turned on, scared, and disappointed at how obvious and needy I was acting, but I complied and took his hand again before he had the chance to wince a third time.

He walked me to my bedroom and sat me down on the bed. Then he walked back out into the living room and returned with my glass of water. I was already lying down but sat up to take a sip and downed the whole glass.

“Good…woman,” he said, smiling at me with a mixture of pride and amusement. “To catch a predator, huh.”

I turned to face away from him. I felt tired and a little bit embarrassed. And maybe something about his breath on my toes and lashes had a sedative effect, because I felt myself starting to relax and drift off.

“Simeon, what are we doing here?” I called after him, mumbling the words so quietly into my pillow that I didn’t think he could hear as he moved toward the door.

“I don’t know yet. But I have your number now. And I’ll call. Sleep well, Miri.”

Read previous

I looked up at the self-satisfied prig through the disheveled locks glued to my eyes. It had rained across the entire eastern seaboard, and I’d be needing new clothes again. “I told you not to wait up.”

“What was I going to do — go to sleep?”

“I don’t know. Just get the sangria.”

“It’s Miri, then.”

He led me through his hallway of old tomes and curios and sat me down at the kitchen table.

“She checked out,” I announced. “Monday. While you were here prattling on about kink etiquette. I got back to her late that night and didn’t scan the mindspace because I was trying to be respectable. I staked out the hotel bar the next morning hoping to catch her on her way out to…wherever…and she was already gone. The desk clerk tried to convert in my clutches rather than hand me her home address and I couldn’t stand the pain long enough to work his naiveté to my advantage. He disclosed only her city before I had to bolt. Now all I have is Boston, a first name, and my impressive cross-country endurance. Saul. I need your people.”

“My people?”

“Your tight-lipped NSA archeologists, or whoever they are.”

“Yeah, and what do you propose they do? Check her genealogy records? You never even took a sip!”

“But they find things. You’re moonlighting as a consultant canvassing antique skeletons and I’ve a live one I’ve lost my mind trying to find!”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly.” He settled down beside me with his congenial anticoagulant. “Here, sip on this.”

“Couldn’t? Or wouldn’t?”

“Physician, heal thyself.”

“Saul, not the theology again. I’m serious. Those spooks have ways of tracing anyone. I’m surprised they haven’t placed a tap on you, frankly. You should be more careful. But you should also be more helpful!”

“I am being helpful. Walk me through the moral calculus, because I’m old and not as quick of conscience as I used to be. You would not press her mind for want of decency, but now you want to run her Social Security number? You would not shake down the poor hotel staff for want of an analgesic, but now you want to stand up a dragnet on the government’s dime? What’s the through-line?”

“That I don’t have her Social Security number.”

He rolled his eyes. “I’m not doing this tonight. You’re being glib, and you look like offal. Go take a bath before you take my mood down with you.”

I modulated the heat out of my voice. “Apologies, teacher. You’re absolutely correct. There has never been a worse mood in recorded history. But since when do you decline an opportunity to show off your skills?”

“This isn’t a run-of-the-mill OSINT operation, Simeon. This is survival we’re talking about. Yours — and mine. You think I wouldn’t burn doing it? Is Miri any less Christian in my eyes than she is in yours?” He got up, clearly uncomfortable, and started fidgeting with a knob on the dishwasher.

“Unlike you, I actually have survival instincts — and a contract to fulfill that I can’t afford to sleep on because they’re getting a little close for comfort,” he said, shaking his head and slamming the dishwasher shut. “And they’re with DARPA, not the NSA,” he added, putting away some dishes that were sitting by the sink. “You’re on your own for this one, partner.”

“I honestly thought an old ghoul such as yourself would have said we ride at dawn.”

“I have a nine a.m.”

“Fine. No matter. I’ll handle it myself. But how do I start? Will you at least tell me that?”

“First of all, whatever has you so committed to the idea she’s even here?”

“The clerk told me so.”

“The clerk told you whatever helped him keep his life. You know very well that forced confessions under duress do not yield reliable data. That’s just foxhole physics.”

“Fuck.”

“No atheists or innocents left standing. He could have said anything. And our girl could be in Kathmandu by now.”

“Probably not with layovers.”

“I’m reaching for impact, Simeon.”

“Then land the plane, Saul.”

“Look: normally, I’d say run the grid and meditate on street corners like a rishi,” he said archly, knowing this was plainly ridiculous. “But you’d be combing a city on hearsay. Does she travel for work? Does she reside in Boston now or is she summering somewhere in Europe? What do you know about your missed connection?”

“Her name and religious affiliation.”

“That doesn’t help me scope the search. Can you give me anything else? Think, Simeon. What did she tell you?”

I inventoried my estate. “Auburn, curly, and talks back. A counselor. And she helps people.”

“That’s the entire file?”

“And that we’re nothing alike because she seeks Christ first. Her words.”

“Then you might have a prayer: she’d surface near His territory. Stake the parishes. Trinity’s practically a transit hub, and Advent does a weekday evensong that draws exactly the sort of —”

“I wouldn’t make it through vespers, Saul.”

“No,” he agreed, a little too gleefully, I thought. “You wouldn’t. So we return to: a sassy, humanitarian Christian, in Boston. Congratulations, dear boy. Half the city is insolent humanities students and their anxious therapists, all of them trying to survive Harvard. You’ve narrowed it to everyone, without telling me whether she’s here at all.” He walked over, collected my empty glass, and put it in the sink.

“Is your guest room occupied?”

“No, all yours — help yourself,” he said into the sink as he rinsed my glass clean.

I went upstairs in my wet clothes that I had every intention of changing out of before a much-delayed shower. Instead, I sat on the bed — my joints buzzing with unsated hunger I forgot to manage on the interstate — and put my hands on my knees, palms open. Then I descended into the depths to look for her.

Nothing. No gardens in any direction I scanned. A city of sixty-some square miles returning a flat static of paranoias, dashed hopes, personal grievances, a handful of alarming financial foibles that might crash the Nasdaq, and the occasional marriage proposal. I surfaced near dawn and took the dullness for absence, Saul’s caveat weighing on me like a prophecy: you may be about to comb a city she’s not in.

Sangria is not a hearty meal, so I wandered out into the morning hubbub having forgotten to change. I looked like a fucking mongrel, I tell you, but I was past caring what anyone else thought. I had zero pride left, only hope: the last of a man’s dignities — and exceedingly deceitful.

Yet it conducts us pleasantly enough to our journey’s end, I mused, remembering the 1600s and the Rochefoucaulds fondly — I was in my prime with the empresses back then — and I supposed my end might not be too far off if I managed to track down my captor and work my way into that O-ring of hers…

No pang. No sweet, sweet pain. She must not be present. But we journey on.

And, you know, whatever else may be said of Boston, at least it was orderly. The Back Bay is alphabetized: Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, Fairfield, Gloucester, Hereford — some Puritan surveyor’s gift to the easily lost. And I was a ridiculous pilgrim, so I went by the letters.

The method was this. Pick a street. Stop every few blocks. Open the hands. Relax the jaw. Face the sky — or the ceiling, whatever’s above. And push out toward the periphery.

There is no dignified way down the mind. The glamour is the first thing the depths confiscate, and every fathom deeper strips another rank — until the murderer starts looking more like a monk than a monster.

And so the man who has assiduously tended his coiffure for eight centuries stands on Exeter Street looking like a mad peasant — palms out, mouth agape, staring at the clouds — while the city files past at a gingerly remove.

But she yields nothing, my Moated One, her silence a clever sheepdog. Next blast radius.

I meandered this way from A to H in my filthy clothes and learned helplessness, courting by turns arrest and curiosity. A policeman inquired whether I required assistance and I suggested he try meditation to take the edge off his occupational hazards. On Dartmouth I was mistaken for a performance artist and handed a quarter. On Fairfield, two teenagers livestreamed as I went under and pronounced that “bro is buffering.”

And everywhere, the ambient Christians, whose concern for my safety earned me the occasional lashing — and none of the kind I volunteered for. A nun at the corner of Gloucester and Marlborough assaulted me as I accidentally closed in on all ninety pounds of her — and I crossed the street with my collar up like I was dodging a publicanus. I had been deep in the drop and powerless when two women outside a church on Berkeley handed me a sandwich that smarted like a brand that I mistook for Miri.

By evening I had cleared the alphabet and started on the wharves, my morning cheerfulness giving way to despair. It was a decent enough place to stop for a repast. Ports never change: there are sailors who sing, sailors who drink, sailors who sleep where they fall — and, on the nights Saul and I used to come down to the water, sailors who die. I sated myself for old times’ sake. Ah, Amsterdam.

Then, on an absolutely nothing corner — my last-ditch attempt to test my line on the way back to Saul’s — it started to burn. Not before the kill, but after. At last.

I hadn’t even made it into theta before the fire took me. I was in alpha when it arrived like a sunrise above water — directional, graduated, and sparking against my lymph nodes — and every instinct I own said flee. I turned toward it instead and the pain escalated, and its worsening was like a benediction. Warmer. I was a compass needle springing to purpose after living its whole life in a drawer. O, Sweet Perdition, be not proud. Two blocks and my ribs were in an argument; three, and they filed for acrimonious divorce.

And then she opened.

The miles that stretched and haunted me with static cohered into a beacon, and the fire flooded my body. It felt like a homecoming into a hell they never advertise, so alluring it is. Oh, she was resplendent amid the coils of her roses and curls and winding thoughts and so, so many byways and scenic routes to explore.

My knees went to the pavement — only the third genuflection in my post-lifetime, all within a fortnight — as I took her in. But non serviam, I reminded myself.

You, she fired her first shot into my mind.

Auburn, stubborn, hair with its own agenda — and arms crossed. The file made flesh. Three days I had carried these facts and a first name across a city and continent, and here was the unabridged edition, barefoot in her own firelight and now worked up into such a fury as only the faithful can muster.

Miri— I thought, most ardently.

You! Where were you?

It was exactly like speaking in my dreams when I was a little boy, and the dreams answered — because the dreamscape was waking life and the vision real. And the dream was a nightmare in bloom.

My lady, would — would you believe me — if I said…everywhere?

I could hardly have gotten the words out if I’d been speaking them out loud. But as I merely had to think them, they flickered in my mind like phantasms in a death stupor.

No. You don’t talk yet. I waited for you! I stood there and debased myself while you — while you…debauched me — on a street corner! And then stuffed me into a cab like I’d embarrassed you. And you couldn’t even trouble yourself to ask for my number after all that — that — I don’t even know if I can call it lovebombing! After all the…fumbling about and confusing me with your empresses and agonies and — and being a — a dead man!

Well, I was both dead yet somehow also dying, I thought, but not at her. She pressed on:

After I danced with you! And don’t pretend you couldn’t have found me if you wanted to. You have resources. A man with empresses must have resources.

And I could have entered the mileage into evidence for my defense. Austin-Boston thrice over, once for wise counsel, once back down south, and once through a seaboard of nonstop rain for good measure — all in service of figuring out how to cradle her head without burning. Sixteen hours running ragged through an alphabetized grid with my jaw slack like a carp, begging to be scourged — and handed mostly sandwiches. The front desk and the near escape from her before my hunger bested me. I could have laid the whole odometer at her feet and been acquitted of indifference in one stroke.

But I managed only this:

I…can’t — not here. Not. Like this — please! Grant — your — number.

She thought a moment before thinking the actual number, and I surfaced from my trance gasping as if from underwater. I careened onto the sidewalk in front of me clutching my stomach and fighting off delirium.

I rolled over, pulled my knees up to retrieve my cellular phone with trembling hands, and dialed her at once.

“My resources,” I began as soon as she said hello — trying to catch my breath before remembering I didn’t need it, “were a conscientious objector.”

“What?”

“I wasn’t thinking about your number, Miri,” I laid it out slowly as the fire cooled. “I was counting what was left of my restraint, and I spent all of it putting you in that cab. But I’m here now.”

“Well, then you can find me in Boston.”

“I’m already here.”

A beat.

“Come over.”

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We were holed up around a conference table on the fourth floor of a building that was as forgettable as the operation needed to be: no identities public, no records found, none of the women we move traceable to their destinations. A bowl of bananas, apples, and clementines that no one ate sat in the center.

The nondescript anonymity of these rooms was a gesture of diligently curated guardianship: the whole point was that no sign out front announced what happened here. No plaque, no fanfare, and nothing a person could photograph and hand to the wrong party. The fruits were part of it, too. You offer lightweight variety at reception — enough to invite, not enough to overwhelm — so that a body starts remembering it is allowed to choose things as soon as it’s in the room.

…just like I chose to set aside my book and go with him and listen to him prattle on about baptisms and rebirths and burning and how I was the bane of his very existence — before he worshipped me in streetlight.

But here’s the thing: I could well have imagined it. I had nothing, nothing at all, to prove to myself that the night at Elysium — and what happened outside of it — actually happened. He gave no number. No last name. No object by which to know him. Was I really so certain I had been worshipped, or was it just that I hadn’t prayed and my faith was slipping?

There was only my mind’s memory, and minds lie.

The body — that was another thing.

“Yes, I gave mine,” I answered through the haze clouding my head as I mindlessly rifled through the papers in front of me. I did consent to it, I thought. I did ask for it.

Then again, could a please drawn out during a blistering heatwave while going on my fifth night of interrupted sleep be informed? Isn’t that just manipulation?

“Not yours, Miri. We already papered the partnership and it’s with the lawyers. But the HSI Task Force will need the handover framework documented. Survivors can’t very well ship off to the northeast after arriving at intake without the consent and confidentiality procedures cleared,” Callum pointed out.

“Oh, yes, I’m sorry. Free Harbor will send the proposed structure along before EOD. The team was already working out the particulars before I flew down. They’re just making sure we have translators on call.”

“Good. And Lantern will be fully present for first contact and recovery, so no concerns from the Austin side,” Callum added, throwing me a look.

Did breath count as contact? I floated out of the room and across the city to Red River Street. Had I fabricated it all? Was I any more present at that scene than I was here, now, half-awake and discussing people about to take their first steps into freedom while I sat here fantasizing about a man who might have been a monster or might have been nothing at all? Who was the real monster in the room, if not the one in a fugue state with lives at stake?

“Yes, no concerns at all,” I offered through pursed lips, returning Callum with a weary look of my own.

“Uh, can someone remind me why we’re shipping them halfway across the country?” Jeremy, the Texas AG’s office liaison, asked of no one in particular.

“Because recovery doesn’t happen in a hot zone. You live in a border state,” Alina, the Homeland Security Investigations representative, quipped, “and their corridor runs right through your jurisdiction. Haven’t you got your hands full with ICE before gunning for more casework?” She lobbed the immigration fiasco at Jeremy the way you’d name a black sheep in the family — HSI’s oldest reflex.

“I’m staying clear of your mess, personally. Just asking,” Jeremy mumbled, embarrassed at looking green after his recent promotion. I jolted awake, wide-eyed — thinking “your mess” was directed at me — and noticed that Alina didn’t miss the jab. She glared at him but let it go.

“Texas has the muscle, but Boston’s not on anybody’s route to anywhere. Not with New York nearby, so it’s a bit more peaceful,” Callum covered for him, as he does for most people he takes under his wing — even the lawyers. That’s what makes him special: he doesn’t do this work for himself, so his emotional resources appear bottomless at times — making him an easy target for extra work.

Still alert from taking the bureaucrats’ turf war personally, I felt the deeper meaning land in me like the accusation it carried: Callum was overextending himself to deflect a stranger’s embarrassment while I acted like an absentee landlord, not a guardian of real souls with real lives that had been stolen from them.

I made a mental note to be more present for Callum the next time we were on Webex — the studiously beige FedRAMP-approved version of Zoom — which would probably be sometime this week. I had to figure out how to get some sleep, fast.

Alina quickly changed the subject. “Who’s anonymizing the victims’ identities before the transfer?” She was serving as the department’s Victim Assistance Coordinator on the task force — and was personally responsible for ensuring all the confidentiality details were stamped before everyone could go home.

Her task force had contracted Free Harbor after our successful aftercare deployments in Ukraine and Myanmar with the Red Cross, and they wanted us at our most exacting now. This was the largest national effort to interrupt a trafficking ring in the Americas corridor since the collapse of Epstein’s network scattered his clientele underground. But they still operated, so identities had to be stripped to alphanumeric case codes because a name traveling with a file is a thread any trafficker can pull. The crosswalk lived in her office under strict need-to-know — and the handoff between Lantern and Free Harbor had to be pristine.

“They’re survivors — can we stick to the truth and not the label? And yes, we have the, uh, their numbers, and the predators are out of reach,” I stammered, wondering if mine was out of reach, too. He never even asked for my number!

“Cryptic, Miri, but I guess the project calls for it,” Callum nodded, reaching for a clementine.

“The predators are very much not out of my reach,” Alina corrected, looking at me as if I’d insulted her vocation. “Just ensure the line of sight between victim and identity runs through my office. Is that clear?”

Victims. Was I one? And whose — this man’s, who could very well have been an apparition, or my own mind’s?

“Yes, of course. That’s what I meant.”

“Well ok then,” the AG liaison huffed out, closing his binder. “Free Harbor’s got it. And no one’s beyond the reach of DHS. Good enough for me. Let’s get to work,” he decreed, recovering his earlier wobble.

Was he? Was he out of reach? I wondered silently, keeping my seat while the others stood.

“You ok?” Callum rounded the conference table to my side and leaned in. He was my counterpart in Austin and my eyes and ears handling the intake before Free Harbor would take over transfer, aftercare, counseling, and placement.

Eyes.

“Yes, fine, thanks. It’s been hot and I didn’t get a good night’s rest, but we’ve got it covered. Logistics probably in your inbox as we speak. Call me if anything. I think I’m running late for my flight,” I hurriedly excused myself, threw him a brisk hug, and gathered my belongings.

I set my bleary-eyed musings aside just long enough to take care of the essentials: pack my clothes, call a cab, sleepwalk through the airport onto my plane, and pass out from exhaustion in the middle seat all the way to Boston — where I had a date with my bed. Finally my bed.

It was mid-morning Wednesday before I was lucid enough to handle people. My unreads were a crime scene of red dots next to bolded subject lines, but the only person I had the stomach for was Father Thomas. I needed to figure out what was real. And to sort through the nagging sensation that I would never know, because three days had gone by since I last felt him on my skin and seven since I saw him in my mind, and I needed to find solid footing before the ground operation commenced on Friday.

Some demon from before the jungle ayahuasca exorcism peered through a crack in my composure as I washed my face: He never wanted you, girl. No one does, and now you’re conjuring a man craving you so madly he’s driven to self-mutilation. How deliciously desperate of you. You’ll fail those women as you’ve failed everyone else in your life.

“Christ!” I screamed into the mirror. “Get out of my head!” and the intruder dissipated — but its insinuation didn’t.

I would fail those women if I kept this up. And he hadn’t called — hadn’t even asked if he could. Stuffed me into that cab like I was the one imposing on his peace of mind. And didn’t he tell me clearly that he wanted to get as far away from me as possible?

Yes, I was quite possibly the problem. I even sealed my own fate. No mind games, I practically told him — and I had tested him, dropping into meditation the morning before my flight, just to see if he would seek me out.

He did exactly as I asked, only not as I wanted. I had told him not to meet me there, and he didn’t. Because he didn’t want to. How stupid of me to think he’d actually make an effort. Stupid to expect his kind, whatever it really was, was even awake in daylight. Stupid to sit through an interagency task force session daydreaming like a schoolgirl — as if I wasn’t assisting the most significant intervention since the Red Cross work.

I had to get to Father Thomas.

I sat in his waiting room while he closed out the Morning Office and launched at him almost before he’d cleared the door.

“I need you to tell me if I’ve lost my mind.”

Father Thomas hung his stole on the hook with unhurried precision. “Good morning, Miri.”

“I’m serious.”

“You always are. It’s your most endearing quality. Have a seat. Would you care for some tea?”

The couch in his office is old and green and has absorbed hundreds of people arriving in distress and leaving with a blessing. Pretty sure I was the first to arrive with a curse.

“The eyes,” I started. “From my meditation. The ones I called about.”

“I remember. Ceylon or are you avoiding caffeine?”

“Caffeine, Father, please—”

“Milk, sugar, or straight?”

“Straight, and I think—”

“How was your work trip, Miri?”

It was a fair question, and Father Thomas was fair to ask it. I was the one who enrolled our parish as Free Harbor’s placement partner — with the Episcopal City Mission agreeing to provide transitional housing, volunteer support, pastoral care, and crucial community anchoring after stabilization.

“It was fine, I think. Honestly, I can’t tell. I was barely in my body by the time the final coordination meeting took place.”

He smiled gently. “That’s why I’m encouraging us to sit awhile and sip some tea first,” he said, setting the teacup on the coffee table with the teabag neatly tucked into the saucer.

“Do you mind if we pray first?” I asked in a voice thinner than I intended, realizing it had been some time since I was the worshipper.

“I was worried I’d have to remind you to ask,” he said with all the warmth that his twenty years in ministry afforded him — and moved his chair closer to take my hand in his.

“Almighty God,” he began, and I followed suit, “unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets—” and I tripped over the words.

“No secrets are hid,” he prompted me. “Cleanse the thoughts…”

“Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts,” we continued together, “by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy Name; through Christ our Lord. Amen.”

“There. Now what secrets have you brought back from Austin that have you in such a hurry?”

I paused to think about what filled me with more shame: being absent for survivorship, or too present to the aching hollowness that had no place in the vestry office behind our chapel. I wanted to start with the less flagrant of the two — but the distinction had become cosmetic.

“I don’t know what’s real anymore,” I took the middle way out.

“You know exactly what’s real.”

I knew what he meant, but it wasn’t where I was going. “The problem is, I’m not doing my job well, and I’m not sure I’m doing dating the right way, either.”

“You’ve started seeing someone?”

“No, I saw someone.”

“In Austin?”

“In my mind — and in Austin.”

“You called me about the eyes — and I’m eager to hear how your contemplative reading is going. But tell me about the new development: this…gentleman in Austin—”

“No, they’re the same guy!”

“The Gospel of Mary is your guy?”

“No, the eyes in the Fourth Power are, Father, come on! I met them! The eyes were at the bar in the hotel after I stopped meditating — even stopped closing my eyes — and then a nightclub where he couldn’t dance and was falling so he breathed at me. At. Me. And then outside, it was so hot while we were walking home and he breathed—”

“Miri…breathe, child. Yourself, remember to breathe.”

“They belong to a man. Or something — I dunno — wearing one — and so beautifully, Father. Only I don’t know if it really happened, or—“

“I believe you. Something happened.”

“Of course you believe me. Only I don’t know if I believe myself. He told me he was born in 1226, for Christ’s sake!”

“Not the Lord’s name in vain again.”

“Right, sorry.”

“And 1226? Beg pardon?”

“He’s not from this century! He…waltzes!”

I knew how that sounded. I expected him to laugh and ask if I was well. But he didn’t. His face turned grave and he rose to walk over to his bookshelf, where he stood a moment before retrieving a worn copy of the Book of Common Prayer.

“He gave you the year himself? Unprompted?” he asked as he turned back.

“Yes. Well — I kept asking him what was going on and he started telling me about all his empresses in Kyoto or something.”

He narrowed his eyes at me — a woman envious of an imaginary ghoul with an impressive body count was not the average vestry meeting. But he ignored my slip.

“Miri, will you tell me exactly what happened?”

In broken half sentences and mixed metaphors about being out of my depth grasping at straws and biting off more than a devil’s bargain could chew, I told him about the dance, the touch, even his erection, and the wall — everything. I held nothing back. I was past secrets and wanted answers.

“Miri, we have to talk about something. There are accounts. Accounts of this sort of thing.” He set the book on the coffee table between us unopened, his hand flat on it as if to press his point into it, and pushed it toward me.

“What sort of thing? You have to be very specific here because I don’t know if I believe his account, either. He told me crazy things about what he was but he had the coldest, most scintillating breath and that wasn’t fucking normal.”

“Miri—”

“Shit, I’m sorry.”

“Oh, that’s more than alright, my dear. What I was going to say to you is more important right now. This is no longer about the Fourth Power or your gnostic tales. There are actual sightings.”

“You’ve seen this?”

“I’ve only read of this. It’s letters, mostly — rector to rector, passed down among the entrusted. Every old parish has a drawer like it. There’s a word they use. Revenants. The Vatican likely has a whole archive on the matter.”

“So you’re telling me you know.”

“I’m telling you the church knows.”

He opened the book then, not searching for the page — it fell open where his thumb had lived for years — and pointed at a passage. “Read me the second question. Here.”

I read it. “Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?”

“Again. Slowly. Mind the last half.”

I read it again. “…corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.”

“I don’t know what your — waltzer — is, Miri. But if your vow means anything, then you are a creature of God facing down the evil powers of this world. The church in her wisdom wrote the distinction into the first promise anyone makes at the font. Unfortunately, she then spent several centuries doing her best to erase how to do the actual facing. But we do have Ephesians 6.”

“Armor of God? Wait, that’s actually exactly it! I stood my ground! The air between us was like a shield he couldn’t penetrate. And the flaming arrows? Father, he practically ignited anytime he got too close!”

I kept the other part of the verse to myself: With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying. Because so long as I also prayed, meditation was always what kept me the most mindful and alert…

“That’s right. You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism, and marked as Christ’s own for ever. For ever, Miri.”

“So there’s a way to…”

“Yes, Miri. You were purchased long ago, and the mark does not expire. Whatever sat across from you in Austin…it can court you. But it cannot claim you.” His eyes came up over the glasses.

“But the creatures of God—”

“Can make themselves vulnerable, yes. This has been my entire ministry to you. What the seal will not do is close a door you open yourself. A covenant that overrides your own will wouldn’t be much of a covenant, now, would it?”

“That’s everything we renounce. I’d have to invite it.”

“That is why I implore you to fashion your will after the Lord’s. The entire question of your safety, dear, rests, however inconveniently for your priest,” he gestured with his palms up to indicate his powerlessness over the matter, “inside the one castle no one else but Christ should be able to breach: your own heart. Become as Him in all things. Let your heart be transformed — and your eye be single.” He carefully emphasized both words to make sure I caught his meaning.

“I know you believe me, Father. I just don’t know if I even believe myself. I could have imagined the eyes and the whole thing. I can’t verify anything that happened. It might have been a fever dream from four nights without sleep after I spooked myself, and a heat wave cooking the rest of my sanity.”

“Believe yourself, Miri. You did not imagine Christ in the jungle, either. I believed your testimony then, and I believe it now. What you see in your mind’s eye — it’s true.“

“So what do I do? What does the church do? Isn’t there a provision for…” I gestured at his shelf, the whole building, our two thousand years of saving souls, “for those among us who need help the most?”

And here Father Thomas, who I had never once seen frightened — not at protests, not at deathbeds, not at the vestry meeting where the treasurer wept when an accountant ran off with three months’ tithings — looked positively aghast.

“Miri, no. This is not your ministry.”

“The creatures of God. You had me read it out loud. The Resurrection belongs to all His creation.”

“Of God. I’m not going to say what you want me to say, which is to rule unequivocally that it is either from God or it’s from the devil, because you’d take the first as permission and the second as a professional challenge, so I’d be encouraging you either way.” He folded his hands. “Let me rather counsel humility. Because there is a chasm between the two categories, and a very under-slept parishioner in front of me who I doubt — however much I admire your ambition — is quite up to the challenge of taking on the church’s oldest adversary. If that’s what your…admirer…even is.”

I shifted in my seat at the idea that he admired me.

“Your discernment is at its weakest now, Miri — when you need it most. Do you know how I can tell?”

“Mm?” I snapped out of my reverie.

“Because you’re usually the one preaching to me about embodiment and somatic healing, but I’m the one of us reminding you to take care of yourself first. You are so dysregulated you’ve hardly even touched your tea.”

I quickly took a sip and offered him no resistance.

“Please, slow down, and take care of your body, child. St. Paul reminds us in First Corinthians that it is a temple, and ours to discipline and keep under control, for we only have it on borrowed time from the Lord Himself. He trusts you to return it in good condition. So strengthen it — and don’t go chasing ghosts from ancient vestry records. Go where you are strongest.”

“And where is that now?”

“Saving people.”

I felt a pang in my heart. He was absolutely right. There were real people in front of me, and an apparition that doesn’t even call did not hold a candle to the monumental task ahead. He’d probably just burn himself trying…

I got up to leave and thanked Father Thomas for his wise counsel and his favorite Ceylon. As I moved toward the door, he called after me.

“And Miri? What keeps you strong are the people around you, not just saving them. Seek out your community. Go be among them for a little, not buried in your paperwork. The church is the body of Christ. That is why I need yours healthy. We need you, and not only this Friday.”

The next day was long. I did my job unusually well — revived by my own guilt and incessant pangs of rejection at his never reappearing in my meditation Wednesday night before bed — and it held about ninety percent of my attention. The other ten stood at a wall in Austin having its every inch inventoried. My body kept its own liturgy of the hours: cold air from an office vent and my skin resembled a plucked chicken’s; a stranger’s cologne in the elevator — nothing like his, he didn’t seem to wear any, smelling only of a cathedral’s cool interior — and I’d flinch from exactly the wrong kind of sensorial assault.

And then — then came Thursday evening.

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^{Reader note: If you read this before July 9, the woman you knew as Sera is now Miri. Nothing in her story has changed. I’d simply been calling her by the wrong name, and why it was wrong won’t be apparent until Book 2. Hold onto “Sera,” though. It isn’t gone. It was just early.}

I left Boston with new clothes and very little patience. The syllabus, at least, felt authentically me.

And that is all hilariously trivial next to the harrowing ordeal that followed my deposition. Because here’s what the fates had in store for me — and it was only Monday.

Southbound this time, I pounded the CliffsNotes into the pavement for mnemonics. Go slow. Her lead. New ropes. Take heart. I recited it at the treeline like a novice with his first rosary. I wasn’t praying the rosary, I consoled myself. I was praying the blooms of her garden, and that was close enough to gird my devotions without courting a conversion.

Fuck I’m a depraved bastard — getting off on semantics as I do.

I took New York by rooftop. The skyline is too uncommon to take in from pedestrian perspectives.

I watched the planes coming into LaGuardia as I ran and finally descended over New Jersey only to refuel. We need not linger in New Jersey longer than to note: I stopped into an isolated BP off the interstate, tipped over the attendant, filled up, and carried on.

I reached Austin at midnight and rushed back to the hotel hoping I’d catch her still idling at the bar with literally any book. But she wasn’t, so I retired to my room and fought off the itch to run a liminal scan for theta waves. It’s not my usual frequency while shopping but it was her frequency, which raised the question: why had I descended into theta that fateful night when beta is where I do my best hunting?

Like a poet depressed that his own virtuosity does not merit the adulation he’s hounded with, I sulked by the window and lamented my grievances. I passed the small hours of the night transposing my favorite longings into lyric fragments I would never compose into song because no one would understand their real craft:

O fair femme fatale of the verboten aisles

O somnolent creature of fire in thine eyes

Grant thou thy mercy — allow but a scan

I promise to be your most orthodox fan

…

And if you please, repeat your please

I’ve tarried in Boston to anneal a new lease

That the torments might cease

…

I implore on my knees

I implode from your tease

I await my release—

…

O, enchantress, O, please!

I—

…

Have a plan!

…

Your hair have I died in; your skull have I spared

I’ll savor sweet nothings and burn at your hands

…

I’ll serenade you, I’ll cool you off, too

Only say that I’m granted the way into you

Light creative fare well clear of lechery. I even managed to wrangle the coming lash into a convincing ravishment:

O Sourpuss of firmaments

Stay thou thy scourge

And suffer thy servant

Be flogged ’til he purge

…

O Death victorious, delay not your sting

Mayhap might I perish in Miri’s O-ring?

My melancholy was interrupted by a most peculiar sensation: a pull of piercing, disemboweling pathos when I penned orthodox and thy servant. I felt as though the words were lifting off the page, implanting in my gut, and evacuating the fullness of my duplicitous wordplay clear through my loins. Not a burning at all but an excision — no less lacerating in its intensity.

I marked the lesson in my answered prayers: God is not mocked, for He is boring — and I am not His servant.

At dawn I found myself haunting the lobby to catch her on her way to work. The infernal carpet received me like an old cellmate. I took a seat with sightlines to the elevators and I waited.

The air assumed the fragrance of perfectly overroasted coffee. The suits came down with their lanyards and rolling bags. And none of them were her. Seven o’clock became eight, and eventually nine. The elevators kept chiming, each one a dirge for a funeral of dying hopes that she did not attend.

I went to the desk.

“I’m looking for a guest. Miri.”

“Last name?”

And here, my abyss opened a newly-minted trapdoor: I did not know. I have counted the singular freckle below her jaw — just the one, and I would never need another. I have metered her pulse under four distinct emotional conditions. I could paint the shadow-textured shape of her spiritual striving.

And I did not know her surname. The clerk watched me not know it, his face performing the minor municipal pity that hotel staff reserve for men who have been left.

“She’s…auburn. Curly. She had a room on—” I stopped. I did not know the floor either. I knew her brain waves but I had been so scrupulous about not knowing more than strictly necessary that I now possessed nothing.

He typed anyway. Mortals are kind at nine in the morning; the shift is too new for impatience. And I watched his eyes register something on the screen and then shutter it, the way you’d close a drawer you regret opening.

“That guest checked out. Midday yesterday.”

Monday. Noon. While I sat on a recamier in Boston being taught to GO SLOW…and she was folding her clothes? While Saul was saying she’ll let you in, she was in fact handing back her key card. The chronology had the same flavor of pain as the vivisection, only it was in my heart.

“Could you furnish me with her home address? We’re…acquainted.”

“Sir, I’m sorry,” he pursed his lips, shaking his head. “That’s not something I’m at liberty to disclose.”

“I understand.” Straightaway, I felt this vivisected heart grow very cold. It’s not the taste of disappointment, but rather like something that you might call adrenaline.

And I knew what I would do next.

I froze in place, and I want to describe the kind of stillness I contain. You are familiar, I am sure, with the affected stillness of your beloved parlor panther preparing to pounce upon a much-abused toy? Their fast-twitch muscles a loaded spring holding paralysis under tension for mere seconds? This artful trick of their biology is but an echo of the motionlessness that visits my vasculature before the hunt. A perfected still, in heat, at absolute zero. The primordial predation.

“Thank you.” I pronounced it slowly, a model of calm — the second word an octave lower than the first. “My colleague may have left a bag with your luggage service. Might we check the back?”

He plainly did not want to check the back and plainly wanted me to leave. Humans can sense things, too. Some preternatural wisdom in him lifted its head but his discipline overrode it, as discipline does — hospitality is a harness, too — and reluctantly requested the proper credentials.

“Do you have a bag check stub?”

I did not, but I threw a glamour his way. He swallowed and smiled curtly. “Right this way, sir.”

He led me past the brass cart into the dim room of orphaned suitcases.

As soon as we were in, I slammed the door behind us and clocked the look of alarm that disfigured his face.

“Do you follow Jesus?” I barked.

He blinked. “What?”

“Christ! Are you baptized? Churched? Covered in any way? It matters procedurally.” The sourpuss trained me to check the tax code before I sin.

“N-no?”

Green light. Inside of a second, I gripped his lapels in one hand and his chin in the other, lifted him to the tips of his oxfords, and unsheathed my incisors.

His knees went limp and his toes lost their footing.

I helped him to another inch in the air, the oxfords and lower body thrashing furiously, his hands pulling against my wrists, while his chest and upper torso remained perfectly still in my immobilizing grip. “I require Miri’s address.”

The lash took my spine straight away — WHY THE LASH? He’s not Christian!

“B-B-Boston.”

Boston?! What the fuck?

“Where in B-Boston?” The stutter was mine. I did not mock. The pain grew more insistent.

“I—I couldn’t say—”

“Couldn’t say what, friend?” The bile rose in my throat.

“Thh-th—the address. For the— for the p-p-privacy of our guests! My manager would—”

“Then call the manager,” I sounded out in my most politely educational tone through the mounting torment — and underlined my point by licking my teeth.

He grinned at that like an idiot. His next words came out high-pitched with enthusiasm. “I—I could become one!”

“We don’t want you.” Fucking fang-loving pervert. I hadn’t run back here to make more vampires but to trace humans — one human!

“But I could be one if you like!”

Bloody groupie. “Get me the address and I’ll consider your afterlife.” I was up to my eyeballs in pain — except not figuratively — and freshly out of fucks to give for his weird fixations.

The clerk was keening now. “A Christian! I could be Christian! I can believe! If that’s—if that would…do I get to live if—?”

Ah, that. The absurdity of his bargain outranked the absurdity of what I thought was a fang fetish, and it snapped my very last frayed nerve.

But I was out of time. I couldn’t bear it anymore. I rooted myself to the parquet in the luggage room — my incisors still out and my feet on fire and a hanged man offering to ransom Christ to a monster — and I could do no more.

“I don’t believe it works like that,” I hissed and released the sorry creature, who crumpled to the floor in front of me and scampered into a corner like an overgrown mouse.

I turned, hunched over a suitcase to regain my footing as the fire died down, and retrieved three hundred dollars from my lapel pocket that I threw in his direction before storming out.

Twice now I had fled the scene with partial information. The first, when I hurriedly packed a woman into a cab knowing only her name and not how to call her. The second right then, back at the hotel, capitulating to a mixture of anguish, folly, and quite literally existential angst at his bid for conversion at the point of a fang.

Was I forever consigned to incompetence? I could have shaken down the manager and anyone else in their employ to extract my quarry. But I could not stand the pain. Centuries of hunting, and one woman had reduced me to an imbecile who cannot conclude a simple interview.

She must be despondent by now, wondering why I abandoned her in flagrante exspiro. Why I kept her awake for four nights and hadn’t even bothered to ask for her number.

If he wanted to, he would. Isn’t that what you all think?

Add to that, I had a new mystery on my hands: why was this atheist pick-me handing out hellfire while neither wretch on either interstate hassled me in the hunt? What the hell is the mechanism of your design, you divine demoniac?! And how the fuck do I install god-mode without tipping my king?

And Boston.

You have got to be kidding me.

Had she been in one of the planes flying over the New York skyline as I sped her way after running an ultramarathon in precisely the opposite direction the night before?

It would be impossible to fully convey the sense of bitterness and foreboding I felt gathering around me and walling me in. Utter hopelessness, knowing I had been outmaneuvered. Knowing I would always be outmaneuvered. Knowing that my head was a room in His and I had nowhere to make my bed to hide from His sadistic, relentless pursuit.

But Saul. Saul scours provenance archives for coffins to crack. He could scour the yellow pages — or whatever modern-day equivalent his NatSec buddies deployed to canvass for targets.

There was hope.

I shot Saul a text: “Back sometime tonight. Don’t wait up. More later.”

Yes, I was thoroughly, thoroughly spent — and I would gladly spend what was left and keep spending it on her, and be fully spent by her — but the charade must go on.

Saul answered moments later: “Is it still a woman?”

I turned around and did the only thing I felt proficient in anymore: I ran.

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^{Reader note: If you read this before July 9, the woman you knew as Sera is now Miri. Nothing in her story has changed. I’d simply been calling her by the wrong name, and why it was wrong won’t be apparent until Book 2. Hold onto “Sera,” though. It isn’t gone. It was just early.}

“How was dinner last night?” I asked, walking the stacks of his entryway library.

“The usual charade. They eat, I pretend to. I extract it all later, curdled in platelets I’d prefer to retain, if it were all the same. But the more notable extraction is informational,” he said, arranging some papers in his escritoire before closing the lid.

“Look here. MIT is funding an off-the-books study under the auspices of privileged pathogen recovery for their latest NatSec gimmick to sequence nuclear DNA off antique reliquaries,” he explained, handing me the brief. Little point enforcing non-disclosure between scientists and sanguinarians; we wouldn’t run to the presses anyway.

“What do they want you for? You’re a glorified lawyer.”

“Not for the fine print! They’re keen to have me scour the provenance archives to divine which coffins are worth cracking. Perfectly ghoulish affair — and barely licit. The paleogenomicists never disappoint in the letter if not the spirit.”

“Intriguing.” I had by now taken a seat on the recamier near the window, catching the rays of sunlight streaming in through the glass and warming my cramping joints.

“Obscene to trouble the dead overmuch — provided death has at last succeeded in them — and they had the good sense to stay so. And ravishingly otiose besides, I might add, while their real specimen sits among them playing at dinner. Anyway. Is this what you came to ask me about?”

I leaned back on the recamier and looked up at the ceiling. He walked over to hand me a glass of thin red liquid laced with aerated plasma — a breakfast sangria if you will — and settled into the chair opposite me, crossing his legs. This had the blocking of a therapy session. I suppose I asked for this.

“You ever get dinged for crimes you didn’t commit?”

He slow-blinked at me as if I’d asked whether all roads lead to Rome. But it was an honest question. He’s weirdly evasive about his past.

“This isn’t about me.”

“Okay,” I sighed out my weariness, loosed the research abstract onto the floor, and kicked my feet up on the lounger. “My troubles began when I was scanning the aisles in a hotel. Packaged goods would have been fine — I don’t resent the jaded. Organic optimism would have been better. But this was root-to-table stuff, Saul. The woman was—”

“Metaphors are my métier, brother, not yours. Give it to me straight.”

“She’s a goddamned Christian, Saul!”

Suddenly, he found the ceiling as noteworthy as I did.

“And what do we do with root vegetables, dear boy?”

“We let them grow.”

“And what did Simeon do instead?”

“This part’s not about me, Saul! Why was she even visible? More to the point, why was she pulling me in? I’ve known the rules for cen-tu-ries,” I sounded it out, “and respected the players. The fucking gameboard’s cracked, my guy. Or He’s finally cracked. Something’s not right.”

“Have I sheltered you so tenderly, brother, that you’ve been stalking under the impression that any of this is right?”

That’s the thing with Saul. He knows exactly what he is but refuses to accept the justice in it. My bitterness had long ago fizzled away into indifference. But his bitterness? It made him self-righteous. Exacting. And doggedly investigative of an answer that I knew would never arrive.

And so he ensconced himself among Boston’s punctilious elite, patronized by old families who wanted their libraries kept as if he needed the money — hiding behind a profession requiring no faces to names but rather tomes to be entrusted, and surfacing every so often to redirect a brilliant research effort away from the sunlight.

But his investigations often yielded other answers that proved useful to our kind, and that was why I was here. For the mechanics, not the metaphysics.

So I produced it. The exact mechanics. It was dark. I was ambling about. She was meditating. The light. The press of mental contact. The agony. The nerve. My nerves. Skull to sole incineration.

“So you lived to tell the tale.”

“By a hair on my head, Saul. Just barely.”

“And then you went back.”

“You of all people should understand the want for thoroughness.”

“This isn’t thorough. It’s reckless,” he said as if scolding a fudged lab result. “You put your hand on the stove and kept it there. The pain is not the finding, Simeon. The pain is the least interesting thing in this file. But you knew that. Continue.”

I continued. I gave him Texas properly, the rates, the location of each lash, the location of a limb—

“You might spare me that detail.”

“It’s instructive.”

“Gratuitous. I have limbs, too. And skip the tariff.”

“The tariff is the evidence—”

“The tariff is jurisprudence. The evidence is what you did and said. Go where there’s smoke.”

Saul is an attorney from the turn of the millennium. Not your millennium — not even the one when I was made — but that millennium. The one so eerie with holiness humans stopped counting down to it and started counting the minutes since. He was around then. A Roman citizen obsessed with every arcana he could get his hands on. He never told me what had his britches in a bunch so tight that he kept his formative years fastidiously vague. But when he heard about my turning in Kyoto, he ran to me. Ran to me clear from San Clemente to Fushimi Inari.

Probably a woman. No one runs like that for novelties. But again, he wouldn’t say. We forged our friendship one transaction at a time. I was the only christened creature other than him turned sacrificial lamb to the wrong god. He was the only fiend other than me who had been a practicing congregant. And so we helped each other — he supplied knowledge and I supplied…kinship, I suppose, of a sort.

We became brothers, but he was just as often fatherly, and a dungeon compatriot even more so. A tangled kinkship, I admit, but there’s no one squeamish enough among us to keep adopted genealogies from slouching toward Gomorrah. Whatever fits the scene. And we had similar tastes — especially as the centuries wore on and we kept upping the ante to keep ourselves from growing repetitive.

But our shared baptism was always a foil for him, I am sure of it — a fencing partner for some grander plan. The way he observed my discipline, the way he taught me to discipline others…it always felt like he was running a dress rehearsal. What Christ had to do with it, I never could work out. A woman, then.

“What’s in this sangria?”

“Agreement.”

“So much less jammy than the hospice stuff.”

“The kink scene in Boston has its advantages. Let’s return to the matter at hand.”

“So the hands were a real nuisance…” And I recounted how my hand fell on her accidentally to steady myself in the hotel — how it fell again on the dance floor because her hair made me weak.

“Strict liability.”

“I knew you’d say that. But it doesn’t cut both ways. Her hands on me? Clear passage. Her hair in my face? Open borders. Her please while getting pinned? I’m practically naturalized.”

“She let you pin her? That was fast.”

“With my breath. That’s the fascinating part. I couldn’t move her an inch on the dance floor — I had to keep a vigil of five away from her body or the tax collector came. But I guided her with breath and we managed beautifully, so long as I made no contact. And then later, outside the club, I was nigh on embalming her with it against a wall — had her near begging for my inadvertent execution.”

“Breath boasts an interesting pedigree in the lands you invaded.”

“You do me too much credit. I wasn’t breathing her to life. I was breathing her just this side of the little death. It wasn’t innocent. It just wasn’t cruel — not in the usual way, at least. I was fucking dying of need, you must understand.”

“It clearly wasn’t need you were dying of, or you’d have heeded your nature and walked away, which certainly has my attention. Dangerous territory, and you’re wired to survive. You’re an animal, and animals don’t kill themselves. That’s what humans do.”

How I wished that were true. I behaved more like a lovesick man around her than a monster, ardently courting death to end the immolation — preferring it, even, over simply skulking away to safety.

“Well, that’s just it. I did need to feed — needed it desperately. And that wouldn’t be possible with her. I can’t even conceive of what that blood would do to me. It would be ghastly.”

“I can scarcely imagine,” he said flatly.

“So how did the want of her manage to override my very nature? I’ve never required tazing to keep away from the flock. And here I was being prodded like a lab rat, and somehow managed to refuse being caged. How does that figure?”

“Tell me about the wall.”

“It was my pièce de résistance, Saul, I’ve gotta tell you. You would have been proud.”

“Did she ask for it?”

“No, I discerned it,” I said, cocking my head, conflicting feelings welling up in me — equal parts swagger, shame, and arousal.

“You mean you circumnavigated into it.”

“By way of nuclear fission, I remind you.”

“Then I’m not proud. What were her words, exactly? What did she offer?”

“She offered me the privilege of taking her home,” I shrugged. “She was tired — and wanted rest and privacy.”

“And you?”

“I respected the game. Stayed out of her mind. That’s what I mean: I discerned it, I did not smuggle it out of her. She wanted me, Saul!”

“She offered terms. You pushed your own agenda.”

“I did — a little. I know. And it cost me. But when she whispered please? When she looked at me like that? I knew I made the right call. The angels agreed,” I hastily added.

“Then note the aberrations. She gives an inch, you take a mile, you suffer. She gives an inch, you take it at face value, you live to die another day. Titrate your advances. Better still, why not simply let her lead?”

“I did. I would. I’d let her string me up on a St. Andrew’s Cross and white-knuckle my hands into fists until they bleed. I’m not greedy. The point is, how is any of this even possible?”

“Sometimes the faithful come with strings attached, and we pull on them. There is precedent. My own testimony, for example. Faithful to the law, Christian by the grace of God. But I made mistakes, surely chief among sinners. And were not you yourself grafted in dragging your feet before you were…drafted?”

“Granted.”

“We’re a lineage, you and I. Are you planning to expand it with — what’s the good lady’s name?”

“Miri.” He scribbled something at the sound of her name — more strokes than four letters warranted — but I continued: “And no, not even a little bit. Fuck that. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. What were you writing there?”

He lifted his head from the page, his gaze arriving later. “Miri, eh. Miri. I am…invested in two quite contrary theories about your plight. Which do you want, then, Simeon? To learn how to get closer to her, or to understand why He appears to be getting closer to you? I’m rather more bedeviled by the latter. I’ve a…personal stake in it. But you’re the one who ran here so it’s your call.”

Saul had never made a vampire. Not one I know of, anyway. But maybe he had one in mind. A congregant, dared I wonder? His personal stake was never on the table, though, so I didn’t bother.

“How much time do you have?”

He chuckled at that. “For you, brother, all the time in the world.”

“The truth is I suspect the answer to the second mystery is entangled with the first. I wouldn’t want to get closer to her — it shouldn’t even be possible for me to want such things — if it weren’t for some perverse trick the Man is playing.”

I could tell he liked where this was going. “And you like perverse.”

“Sustained.” Prude is just an intellectual kink for this fiend of rigs and gallows. “So teach me how to touch her — I’m not here for takings — and I’ll bring the booty back for bibliography.”

“You just promised me takings, sweet boy.”

“Just knowledge, freely given.”

“Sustained. Now tell me what you said. Your words exactly, for they may acquit or convict in equal measure.”

Like I said, Saul is insufferable when he’s at his best. “I made some jokes. The usual slapstick. It would be my pleasure to offer a proper introduction. Imbibe something later. The mortals love that kind of thing. She never bought it, and heaven never liked it. Lashed twice. Even when I simply thought a wayward thing, lashes almost every time.”

“She’s not mortal. She can see through you. That is why you failed.”

I spat out my agreeable sangria. “You have your life expectancies mixed up, you convoluted geezer.”

“Mind your tongue, young menace. I mean it exactly as I say it. It’s right there in their testament: this is not her life but Christ that lives in her. You think you’re playing with your food. Drawing out a fawn response at the tip of your silver tongue. Hubris. He’s not intimidated.”

“Well if He wants boring, then I can talk to her boring. But then answer me this: if her mind is off-limits to me, why is He in mine? What court reads the defendant’s thoughts and calls itself just?”

“Premeditation is statute. And whosoever looketh is gospel. But He isn’t reading your mind in any codicil.”

“The lashes arrive mid-thought, Saul.”

“Because your mind isn’t a room he’s peering into from beyond. Your mind is a room in His. He’s the substrate. You keep imagining a surveillance apparatus — an auditor at a desk, riffling your files. There’s no desk. You are inside the medium. The burning isn’t prying eyes; it’s doors slamming shut because they’re not for you to walk through. You don’t accuse the stove of spying when it burns your hand, child. You’ve merely learned where the stove is.”

“Then how can I brook agreement with a stove? Because the thing respects treaties! It was negotiating with me — most ardently! And I have never in eight centuries met a church that negotiates with antichrists.”

“You just haven’t sat in enough churches.”

“And you have?”

“It’s been a while. But I keep a finger on the pulse.” He circled the page absent-mindedly with his finger, though his mind isn’t given to absence. “What did you mean by almost?”

“Almost?”

“Earlier, you said lashes almost every time you thought to looketh lustfully.”

“No, that’s your flourish, Saul.”

“Indulge me.”

I rolled my eyes. “I looked not lustfully but from lack — genuine lack. I spent four nights scanning for mindfulness, leaving me little time to attend to my needs, and I was ravenous by the time her scent hit me. It was a fleeting notion: whisking her off to a glacier to have my fill.”

“Why a glacier?”

“Why not a glacier? My eyes were burning so much I couldn’t see straight. And every word from her mouth seemed to come out with glacial pacing. I must have put the two together. Drink her on an iceberg: cool the conflagration and hasten her screams.”

“So you dissociated?” He was scribbling again.

“Of course I dissociated. You would be out of body, too, in that much agony.” A frown flashed across Saul’s face that meant I either wounded his pride by insulting his stamina, or embarrassed myself with my lack thereof.

“It was pure fantasy, Saul. I was never serious. Patagonia is altogether too far a walk when I could hardly stand. And there’d be the Darién Gap to consider—”

“What precisely were you feeling? Pain scale — 0 out of 10, and show me where.”

He was furiously decorating the dossier on my demolition now.

“Eleventy thousand, Saul. I don’t know. But no new pain came. I was still standing there nursing the same…headache.”

He finished scribbling, pointedly dotted the page like he’d proved a theorem, and looked up all smug and victorious.

“What? Think you merit a medal for your medical diagnosis?”

“Poetic.”

“What? Perfidy in Patagonia? My artfully alluring alliteration? Or the understatement of a lifetime?”

“Your logos.”

“What?”

“Creativity, Simeon. I’ve seen yours on display. You’re peacocking at me now while I’m here laboring to draw you a map for your morbid merriment and mischief-making. See? I can do it, too, almost with the best of them, but I need no reward. Your imagination — even mine, though I am the least among us begging justification for such trifling excesses! Why do you suppose you have imagination in spades? God doesn’t ding us for our creativity — we’re literally made of it. And since you never meant to act on it, no premeditation and no bill.”

“I never meant to act on imbibing something later, either.”

“Ah, but you did, didn’t you, my boy.”

I said nothing.

“Even imbibing her was not entirely out of the realm of possibility given sufficient motivation. Patagonia, however? That alibi was bulletproof. Even in your delirium you are characteristically operatic. What matters is whether your staging can plausibly be operationalized against the dramatis personae in contravention of their will. You had far more pressing priorities: stand and keep your dignity, not take the scenic route for the plot. The lark was merely spectacle, not a viable plan. Our strengths are sometimes perfected in our weaknesses.”

I still said nothing. The surgical precision of the moral calculus was staggering. I’d be hopping around en pointe to toe this line.

“So you see, Simeon, Logos, not lechery. You don’t have to be boring. Just not realistic.”

Logos, not lechery, I filed away in my mind.

“Look, here’s the size of it, in my estimation,” Saul pressed on. “You are being taught. For what, would that I knew. So take heart, my good man, and submit to the initiation.” His eyes sparkled with the implications, the old devil.

“Take heart, huh.”

“Yes! Oh, learn to take some pleasure in it, Simeon! You want the injustice of the rates acknowledged: strict liability, an accident billed like a crime. Poor, unfortunate soul, arriving on my doorstep, pouting like a brat in a harness. But look what you stand to gain. You know full well the servant who doesn’t know still gets flogged; the one who knows just gets it harder. You’re simply learning ropes you never played in before.”

He let that one sit, knowing it should lift my spirit. And it did.

“You came here raving about knowing the rules and respecting the players. But you struck your own defense the entire deposition. You know next to nothing of what is now expected of you. I’m not being cruel, old boy. I’m reading your transcript back to you.”

I was beginning to see where he was going, and I can’t say I didn’t like a well-devised predicament — if I could manage the pain. In this, at least, I had experience. “So what are my options?”

“There is only one: have patience. Know only that this isn’t impossible. You and I are proof enough of that. You are being taught, and I would dearly love to know what in hell or heaven for.”

“This is a hard teaching. Hear what you’re saying: you want a Christian in a dungeon. Fat chance she’d ever go for it, honestly, you scripture-spitting scoundrel.”

“You can keep it upstairs.”

“Since when does heaven condescend—?”

“Since always, Simeon.”

“Yes, but to suffer its stock at the stockade? She’s a believer — and what you’re prescribing…it’s indecent.” My lips twitched at the image.

“I’ve not been able to puzzle this one out any more than you have. I don’t know why they come with strings attached. But I can tell what you’re being taught, and it’s the body’s consent architecture. We’ve been through enough seminars on this at every kink convention west of the Atlantic. You’ve even taught a few. Only to turn around and harvest their trust in your mastery,” he was standing now, gripping the back of his chair as he leaned into his speech, “systematically dismantling your students’ every boundary in subspace — to my insistent and everliving consternation, I might add! The boundary between life and death being the chief among them!”

He turned and walked over to the decanter to refill his glass before continuing. “For this I’ve scolded you endlessly and will continue to.” Back still toward me, I could see he was shaking his head. “Reprehensible,” he added.

Then, glancing in my direction while still facing the wall in front of us, he concluded his extemporaneous preening nearly in a murmur: “Try very much not to do that here, for my sake, will you?”

“I couldn’t if I tried, O Exalted Hypocrite, so you may stand down. It looks like heaven has the watch.”

“Then take your own medicine and keep it down this time,” he shot back, returning to my side and making sure I caught his emphasis before taking a heaping gulp of the liquid. “Go slow. It’s just a new discipline. For one so terminally bored, you should be loving the thrill of newer territory. She’ll let you in. Else something’s staging an invasion, which would be notable in itself. So do not allow yourself to be asleep at a wheel this consequential. And if He’s letting you in Himself, bring plenty of oil. For if it’s that, then I’d powerfully like to know when — why — He does. Are you staying the night?”

“Absolutely not.” I set the glass on the side table and straightened my jeans. “But I’ll take a change of clothes.”

He got up to fetch a new outfit. I waited, wide-eyed in front of the parlor mirror. Yes, I can see myself. Picture the awkwardness standing up a sub in front of a mirror to admire my handiwork, only for the poor thing to discover there’s no one else there.

Saul returned, handed the clothes over silently, and placed a hand on my shoulder. “Slow.”

I changed and I was gone.

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^{Reader note: If you read this before July 9, the woman you knew as Sera is now Miri. Nothing in her story has changed. I’d simply been calling her by the wrong name, and why it was wrong won’t be apparent until Book 2. Hold onto “Sera,” though. It isn’t gone. It was just early.}

I dropped the nameless wretch in the same alleyway in which I found him. I hated it — his stench, my need — but I had to eat and the city now had two fewer mouths to feed: the one homeless and the other a fiend.

Both thanks to my empress in Kyoto. And the fiend who made her. And the one prior, ad infinitum, all the way back to the garden whence we rose.

So you could say Austin was now a little less hungry and that much the wealthier for it. Hail Satan and all that.

You could not say the same about me. Because I wasn’t done. Not even close. But it wasn’t blood I was after now.

I had skulked off to the nearby I-35 underpass as soon as the tremors passed. I had two men to find: one to be my dinner, the other probably at dinner, entertaining some oblivious latter-day noblemen among Boston’s Brahmins with his literary acumen and taste for the overwrought.

Oh, he was insufferable, my encyclopedic best friend.

But this was no conversation for the telephone. I typed a hurried SMS to Saul:

“Coming by. Urgent. Expect me by morning.”

I sent it, pocketed the telephone, and walked out of the lamplight.

The way we move, we do not advertise. Your films portray us as bats, as shadows, as gentlemen disintegrating into mist. That’s our own press, all of it, planted centuries ago for misdirection.

We move like you do. Just faster. You can’t see us but don’t discount the stray gust as wind. Not so and not always.

I went up the darker side of Lady Bird Lake due east, then north along the Appalachian spine, arriving in Boston via the Berkshires by morning.

Deer scattered ahead of me all night. I am to them as weather — and you’ve so much more in common with deer than with me. Except Miri. She is like me — a puzzle that I was about to make Saul’s problem.

I did the math somewhere over the Colorado and hated it afresh: some poor fellow died tonight so that I could see a man about a girl. Pathetic.

The deer bolt without knowing from what. Near the Sabine, one took her fawn across a firebreak to get away from my gust and slammed into the side of a highway wall, and I thought of — no. I filed the thought. Miles to go before I never sleep.

And we tire like you do. Only slower.

This running is not effortless. The body I was given is an engineering miracle of diabolical proportions, but the miracle is engineering, not sorcery. Speed is paid for in the same coin as everything else: flora run on chlorophyll, you run on hemoglobin, I run on…yours. The circle of life.

Another thing your hemoglobin supplies us: the capacity to deliberate. We go mad when we’re starved, you get hangry — perhaps not so dissimilar after all. The point is we need energy to think clearly, and this effort was harder still than crossing half of America to sort out my feelings.

Saul would want everything if he meant to be helpful. I passed the time assembling his encyclopedia of my transgressions to work out how to dodge the celestial IRS, ordering the evidence as I ran, one item per state.

Texas. Item, liability. My original sin. Touching her mind. Not on purpose, mind you. I was merely strolling for victims when she hit me with the light of a thousand suns and I was reduced to my knees. So whose fault was that, exactly?

Perhaps I’m being unfair. Hers was a mind covered in the blood of Christ. So it wasn’t her mind — not exactly — I’ll grant her that. But by what sadistic machinery was I even allowed near it? I knew the rules of the game and I respected the players: keep away from the holy and keep your life, such as it is. But the game glitched, and it was somehow my bug to fix? Why am I footing the architect’s bill?

And while we’re at it: item, liability. I inched closer but it wasn’t even real inches. It was mental inches. Monopoly money. I just wanted to see what I was “looking” at behind her blazing inferno — if detecting electrochemical signals can even be considered looking — and she transferred the fire directly into my nerves instead. As if I physically took a scalpel and picked apart her prefrontal cortex. Thanks for that.

Two items already, and I wasn’t even out of Texas.

That’s fine — everything is bigger here.

As I crossed over into Louisiana, I thought of how I commanded her to stay in her seat. So: item, liability. I used my most extravagantly domineering register — the one generally reliable with the ladies. And it worked predictably well on Miri: she complied. But the fire arrived regardless! So, a command is still billed as a liability even when the transaction clears. I mean, she still had agency! No one forced her to obey. It was basically a request with more personality. What’s the crime in that?

And the voice I had used on women to great success for centuries immediately cost me a lash to the jaw in the 21st. That’s two for Louisiana. I might run out of states at this rate. Detour, maybe?

And then her hair hit my nose. Her hair. I had wanted to make my grave in that hair, sure — but I hadn’t yet committed to the bit. The sillage undid my hand anyway. I gave it no consent to fall. It merely did. And the fire cared not for who shot first. Strict liability. How very Roman. Saul will love that one.

And this is the one that most offends propriety. The small of her back. I was leading a dance, for fuck’s sake. You understand what that is to a man who learned women in ballrooms: not the hip, nothing so crude. The small of the back is the diplomat of touches! The hand must steer and never presume. I aimed it — and five inches off her back the air ignited. Court etiquette billed as a mugging.

If I can’t even steer, then fine — take the wheel! She could have placed my hand there herself for free!

Four for Louisiana. Well, it was a pretty big purchase.

Mississippi. Item, liability. Mere thoughts appear to be fair game — a discovery I found particularly perverse coming from a God who so enjoys congratulating himself on not leaning too hard on people’s understanding. He can watch my actions — fine. But are not my private ideas at the very least my own? I was lashed twice for simply wondering about getting inside her again. I meant her mind — do we draw no distinctions? And if her mind is off-limits, then why are you in mine, infernal celestial auditor?

Saul will demand the exact wording of my musings: maybe there’s the rub. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, because here’s Alabama. Item, liability. The mere thought of the gates, her garden, the frameworks for my schemes, and the electricity that lit up my nerves instantly reminded me how palliative fluorescent lighting can be by comparison. But we already noted the system has no mental privacy policy.

Georgia. Item, liability. My flair for wordplay and double entendre is the one part of my identity I still claim as my own. It affords me my rare amusement. It’s art. It’s craft. It’s evangelism so seductive I was marked for missionary work by my church precisely for my way with words. And this ledger would have me speak as a simpleton to Miri if I’m to have her. When she offered drinks, I counter-offered to “imbibe something later” and the invoice arrived on schedule. Somewhere in the celestial revenue service there appears to be an auditor assigned to enforcing tedium. How on brand.

Tennessee. Item, liability, and this item confounded me with its sheer injustice. Catching her head before it struck brick cost the same as striking her would have. I paid it twice to spare her skull and let her believe I was her personal AC unit when I was, in point of fact, fully ablaze while cooling her collarbones.

Fuck it. I can’t resent her for it. File under: expenditures, voluntary. But how the fuck does this system work? Is being good not enough for you, Father? Thou shalt not kill, but neither shalt thou prevent a damsel’s head from bruising? And they say the other guy is the father of lies.

Virginia, filed late because it happened earlier and I badly wanted to forget it: the hotel lobby. Everything in the hotel lobby. I merely caught a whiff and the spike hit my sternum. What, was I not allowed in public spaces anymore?

And the horrific beige carpet! A color devised almost scientifically to be forgettable. Except of course not in my version of damnation. Because in my existence, even precisely calibrated banality harbors liquid fire.

Oh, and one graze of her shoulder just to steady myself cooked my palm to the wrist. I hadn’t even meant to touch her, let alone harm her. I was nauseous, swooning, and steadied myself by instinct. She just happened to be in the way. I don’t know your tax code, auditor!

Ignorance of the law still gets billed under strict liability. Another one for my favorite pedant.

I’m going to need bigger states!

West Virginia. Item, liability. Shame would be more accurate in the final accounting. Because she said no. Space, sleep, do not invade. She had been clear. I stepped right over it — stepped in front of her explicitly delineated boundaries, and the invoice emptied me to the joints. But it was worth it. She would corroborate my story.

My wretchedness thus catalogued, I set out to reward myself with my redeeming qualities.

Maryland. Item, credit. Early in the evening I entertained a fantasy involving a glacier and was billed nothing: I had dismissed it myself before it ripened. Is there a grace period between navel gazing and intent?

Pennsylvania. Item, credit. Her hands. She took mine and drove a nail into my palm to make her point, but the meter did not run. Her ass, too. On the dance floor. Nothing but my dick lit up. Whatever she initiates arrives untaxed. I verified this at length. Four times, I think. I intend to continue verifying it at every available station. For bookkeeping.

New York. Item, credit. Welcome, once negotiated, discounts the rate. I led her through a dance by breath alone and paid pennies for what should have bankrupted me.

So the tariff respects treaties. The tariff, I began to suspect, wants treaties. I do not know what to do with a heaven that prefers negotiation to prohibition. Handing that one over to Saul to decipher, because I haven’t met a church that negotiates with antichrists.

And her single word. Her please. The toll evaporated so completely I smiled in relief. The auditor distinguishes desire from compliance. What church does that?

I focused so hard on her please that New Jersey passed unaccounted. Some states are penance in themselves.

Connecticut. Item, credit, and I’m proud of this one: When I had most needed to feed, I pinned a woman against a wall and took nothing, though I wanted everything and was fairly starved for anything. Cooled nearly every available inch of her. Stayed well clear of the spicier ones. But committed no crime. I was richly rewarded in the act — for as long as I was able to maintain it. (We need not linger on the I-35 underpass.)

I reached Massachusetts before first light. The two columns had by now resolved into a pattern legible even to a creature avoiding notice. Every charge has a taking clause. Every credit records a gift. But the lines get blurry.

I arrived at his door on Mount Vernon Street at full daybreak. The prohibition on sunlight? Another psyop. The devil knows why anyone would believe a story that hides his most beautiful creation from the light of day. We are made to be seen. It’s you that should be hiding.

The door flew open before I even knocked. Naturally, he had sensed my approach.

“You ran.”

“I did.”

“It’s a woman, then.”

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^{Reader note: If you read this before July 9, the woman you knew as Sera is now Miri. Nothing in her story has changed. I’d simply been calling her by the wrong name, and why it was wrong won’t be apparent until Book 2. Hold onto “Sera,” though. It isn’t gone. It was just early.}

Well, if he doesn’t sleep, then I wouldn’t either.

Of course I wanted to sleep. My eyes were heavy with it but my mind was a waking fever dream. I was the reporter, reporting on myself to an audience of…me. About things I was not ready to disclose. Not to myself, not to anyone — certainly not him — and he had promised to honor the privacy of my mind, right?

One channel, full of static, broadcast a pitched debate between my faith and my fractured understanding, as their arguments — my arguments — devolved into something dangerously close to self-loathing. Another channel, lower down, clearer, televised a relay race of sensations running laps between my heart, my nipples, and my pussy.

I wondered if he was watching my broadcast, despite myself. Despite his words.

Something devious in me hoped he was.

How could I sleep now? Convicted. Confused. And so close to c—. I couldn’t bring myself to finish the word.

I lay in the hotel bed with the covers pulled up and the lights off and the air conditioner on blast as I turned over every second of the evening like a woman possessed, which, given the occasion, was less a simile than a statement of fact.

His face when his hands wouldn’t close on my hips. The panic in those unnatural, opalescent eyes. The outrage. Like a king discovering his army won’t march.

And the sound he’d made when I pressed against him on the dance floor. That low, involuntary wreckage of interior composure that no cavalcade of centuries had managed to civilize.

And the wall.

I had been pushed against walls once or twice in my life. Men get a certain look in their eyes when the negotiation is over and what comes next is for the woman to survive. I curated a small inventory of emotional tools for such survivings.

But the look in his eyes when he pushed me against the wall of that building off Red River Street was nothing like that.

Those strange, foreign eyes held reverence. A reverence that made the foreign and unnatural feel loving and familiar.

I’d seen that look somewhere before. In the jungle? In the awareness that eclipsed my periphery and distanced my demons?

Not in the eyes of mortals and the men who take, but in eyes that give. Eyes that hold eternities while doubts and lifetimes fall away.

I dared not linger on the comparison. Christ is love, the most natural thing. Eternal, yes. Immortal, yes. But this? This was about as far from natural as my fractured reason could still conjure.

And even when his eyes flashed by turns with anger, then passion, then fear, I knew even these were contained — and reverence was their container. I was terrified. Or exhilarated? I don’t know.

My pulse was pounding as I lay there, remembering his reassurances. I began to chant them aloud in the room, barely above a whisper. They matched the rhythm of my heart. Nothing to fear. Not tonight.

The way he cradled my head against the coarse brick. This, too, felt reverent. Caring. His hand slipped through my hair as he lifted it to place both palms against the wall above us. The gentle tug of his fingers through my curls coaxed a ghost of sensation from the sensitive skin at the back of my skull. It prickled even now at the memory.

His arms framed my face. I gazed up at him and he at me, the linen of his shirt pulled taut as his shoulder blades flared, his ribcage widening to encompass my vision until I felt how tenuous and contingent my next few moments had become: the unyielding brick behind me and this statuesque, immovable — and yet so often trembling! — presence pinning me in place.

I had been afraid to touch him and afraid to push him away. I had nowhere to go and thought I should come up with someplace to be, and quickly, but I only wanted to stay right there.

And I was back there now. In my mind. In the broadcast. In the relay race. No debate, no accusations, no self-loathing. Just overwhelming heat. Was he watching my replay?

His face a finger’s width above mine. A welcome, now familiar chill coming off his lips. That chill that had moved my hips on the dance floor. The chill that moved me between that wall and him, sending shivers down my body, piercing the humid, stifling air around us. A chill that moved me even now.

Where did he want me next? Show me. Breathe me.

Slowly, very deliberately, his hands began trailing the wall to either side of me. Trailing down. Where was he going?

He began to lower himself. Never breaking eye contact. Never looking anywhere except my eyes.

Fuck, it was hot. The night, the weather, and whatever this was.

What are you doing? my eyes must have been asking.

He reached the level of my skirt and my heart stopped.

He settled on his haunches. I was incredulous. He was kneeling in front of me! I felt the sweat on my body like an intruder against the cold thrill of desire that coursed through me at the sight.

Eyes still locked, holding mine. Then he blinked and slowly turned his gaze downward. Where? What was happening?

I watched in slow motion as his eyes reopened and his gaze fell on the inside of my left knee.

He leaned forward then and brought his mouth to within an inch of my skin. What?

And then…he exhaled.

His breath on my knee was an explosion of cool. I don’t know why I expected different. I had thought, if anything, that whatever lived this deep inside a man that it forced him to suffer, to shudder, and finally to kneel might be uncontrolled…feverish. That it would match the intensity in his eyes and the tightness pooling in my belly.

Instead, his breath was calming and focused. Like it had been when he led our dance. And it was so very welcome. The way marble floors and spacious interiors feel in summer.

I felt…safe. Even as my body tightened. Even as my awareness narrowed on that single point of contact between my knee and his breath.

The cool moved up over my knee. The muscles in my thigh responded, sending a new wave of tension upwards through my core. His mouth followed the strain of my muscles, still never touching me, however much I now found myself wanting him to.

An inch up my thigh, he exhaled again. The cool melted across the skin of my upper thigh, terminating in a small involuntary whimper that escaped my lips, the sound transforming the reverence, or pain — or was it longing that painted his face? — into the faintest of smiles.

The tremors traveling up my legs had now settled between them, and Simeon followed my body’s subtle invitations. He breathed over my hipbone. The gap between my camisole and skirt allowed his exhalation to slip beneath my clothes — and my fingers gripped the brick behind me to reinforce my faltering stance.

Simeon noticed my balance straining but did not stop. He continued his onslaught against the season’s excesses over my lower belly, and here he opened his mouth wider before breathing out with more force. The air came heavier now; I sensed more of him against the soft of my flesh through the weave of my skirt. The sensation wrapped its cooling satin around my hips as if my clothes were imaginary and his breath the only fabric covering me against the city night.

My toes lifted. His attention followed. The stream of air from his lips coiled around my waist and up my torso, cocooning me in a private climate that turned the Texas heat into a seaside breeze. I shuddered again as his breeze lifted the silk of my shirt away from my chest. I felt momentarily exposed — almost naked — as the gust of air rushed against my breasts. The silk settled back on my nipples, and this, too, sent a wave of sensation through my body. Did he know? Did he notice? Did he intend this?

But as the cooling unction shimmered up my sternum, I noticed that Simeon hadn’t moved. He remained kneeling at the level of my belly. He had been wisping currents of his supernatural climate across my body as if to guard it from the oppressive night — without ever hovering where we had not yet negotiated his welcome.

I had a strange and intriguing thought that this was what it might feel like to be anointed with the very rarest of distillates. An ancient pneuma that had aged over centuries to decant onto a skin that was very ready indeed to offer terms.

Simeon looked up at me from below. He smiled and my eyes fluttered as he held my gaze. I must have been holding my breath as he spent his, because I inhaled so deeply at that smile, it felt like the first time all night I’d remembered that I’m the only one of us who actually requires air.

We stayed like this a beat until he noticed my right hand gripping the wall behind me for balance. He broke our gaze to lean over and attend to it, sending a kiss of air against my fingers. They released their desperate hold on the wall, so I pressed my ass into the brick to remain standing.

His breeze found the sensitive skin on the inside of my wrist and I let out a sound between a whimper and a cry. I saw his brows furrow then. His eyes tore away from my wrist to burrow back into mine, questioning. I shook my head. I meant don’t stop but he must have thought don’t because he cocked his head as if to ask again. So I uttered the first thing I could think of:

“Please.”

He smiled and looked down again, shifting his weight to find my left hand, which was now picking up the slack in my posture while the other hung listless and cool against the summer night. He breathed here, too, and my hand gripped the brick, but just barely, fingers trembling, arm shaking. I heard a chuckle as he moved up my forearm, finding the tenderness inside my elbow — the next willing recipient of his attentions.

When he exhaled, the thin skin there received him like a cooling flame, a contradiction of sensations that made my breath catch in my throat. This was my spot, one of many non-obvious secret passages my body had for heightening pleasure without straining propriety. A weakness and a shibboleth.

I gasped. My head — hanging low, watching his genuflection with awe and disbelief — fell back.

He was up in an instant! Before I could even see it, before I could even register his movement, his hand caught my head once more — cupping it before it made contact with the wall for the second time tonight. It happened inside half a second. Impossible.

The supernatural proof that I had nothing to fear — not from the wall, not from him.

Standing above me now, he stared directly into me, one hand holding my head, the other hovering just over my collarbone. His eyes narrowed. His lips parted. My legs, I think, did too.

He moved his hand to the wall above me, the other still cradling me, and bent his head in a way that looked disturbingly like he was finally preparing to lunge for my throat. I should have been scared, but I didn’t move an inch. I was safe — I would not die by his hand — and I was prepared to stake my pleasure on that safety. If only for now, only for tonight, for however long this anointing lasted.

He moved into me with devastating purpose, mouth open, but only his breath claimed my throat. He traveled this way along my collarbone to my shoulder, bending all the while over me like a predator scenting his prey.

Nothing to fear, I reminded myself. But something to want — yes, this I wanted. I wanted it closer — him closer. On my neck. On my lips. Come to me.

As if hearing my thoughts, his current returned to my neck. I felt it drape like a curtain of cool velvet down my nape, between my shoulder blades, along my spine. It chilled the beads of sweat gathering there into pinpricks of ice and I yelped in delight, the sudden contrast forcing me to arch my back. Away from the wall. Toward him.

A moment of alarm flashed across his face. His eyes widened. He stepped back and all the air of Austin rushed into the space where he had been. All the air except his, on skin he had made ready for anything but its absence.

I felt so hollow I almost panicked. He caught it before I could protest and, brushing his hand through his hair in visible consternation, he advanced on me again, closing the space between us in a rebellious fury. His palms slapped — hard — against the wall on either side of me. His body left barely an inch of armor between him and whatever perilous, otherworldly fire constantly threatened to engulf him in anguish and me in craving and grief. But he fought it — or else that inch of armor was enough to hold the pyre at bay — because his lips were already at my neck, torturously close to a touch that never arrived as he blew circles against my earlobe, against the skin beneath it, and into the hair that billowed against my neck, adding to his sensorial assault.

He breathed into my ears — first one, then the other — and the cool entered the canal inside my head like words, forming a resonance I understood as my own yes, yes, yes.

He blew along my jaw and I tilted my head upwards, lifting my toes higher to give him more access. He moved to my mouth and the cool from his barely-there lips against mine nearly undid me. His near-contact, his self-control!

God! I was losing mine. My eyes fell shut and I swam in my own darkness with a most acute awareness that his eyes were still open, still drinking every minute response of my pliant body.

I knew my lips were shaking, and I knew he noticed it, because his exhalation on them made them freeze in place. He blew on my lower lip and it fell open. I thought I’d finally taste him so I stood terribly still, as if any movement might distract him — might make him change his mind.

But he made no attempt to kiss me. Instead, it was the gentle ministrations of his marble breath that made me catch mine. I was trying not to move and yet my whole body was quaking. The shivers caught in my lips and he kept breathing them still. They shot down my throat to my belly, and settled deep inside me. A white hot kind of cool. Camphorous. And very, very assertive.

I do not know how long we stood there. Time had taken on an abstract, theoretical quality. I was drunk. I was out of my senses.

But then, sometime in the liquid and distant future, I felt him straighten. The all-consuming now in which I had been floating rudely collapsed into the reality around me.

My eyes shot open. A street. A wall.

In the hotel room, too, my eyes shot open. I remembered it with a stinging pain in my heart.

How he stepped back. How his hands never touched me except to cradle my head during his campaign of liberation from the too-hot Austin night.

His mouth never pressed into mine. But his breath anointed and primed every available inch, and I was ready for anything he would have asked of me.

The swelling pain I felt now: was it privation or gratitude I was feeling? It was so confusing. So dizzyingly strange.

As I stood there — as I lay here — I thought of how he looked to the street around us. How he had looked away. Away from me.

A cab pulled up to the corner. He waved it down. I watched his movements, bereft of whatever it was that I had been waiting for.

To the driver, Simeon said, “She’s up the street past Lavaca.”

And then he turned to me. “Sleep well, Miri,” and it landed like a blow.

I straightened out my posture, my skirt, my self-esteem. “Will I see you tomorrow?” I asked before I could stop myself from nearly begging.

“I do not know. There is something I have to take care of.”

“I don’t understand,” my mouth betrayed again.

“Please, go,” he implored, but I had already started toward the cab before he finished speaking.

I climbed into the back and looked up at him through the window. “Simeon—” I tried again.

“I am sorry. I will not be able to—” he seemed in search of words. It reminded me of how he paused before the word meditation in the bar four hours ago when he could not quite commit to what he meant.

“— to be near you. For a little while,” he finished, then closed the cab door.

We pulled away from the curb. I watched him through the rear window. He stood leaning in the same place his breath had held me pinned. I saw now that he was shaking all over, the carefully orchestrated control from mere moments ago slipping out in ripples across his entire form.

But he never took his eyes off me. Not until the cab turned the corner and we could not see each other anymore.

Remembering it now, I pulled the covers off me and sat up on the edge of the bed.

The cool from the AC blasted onto my body and it felt like his breath on my skin again. I could still feel where his breath had arced over my breasts, my nipples rising and tenting the silk of my tank top.

They rose again now. I could hear my affirmation where his breath brushed against my ear. The yes inside my head. And now, I was also in possession of a cavernous hollowness in the place that he had passed over and that had been waiting for his anointing.

I had not prayed. Not today. Not tonight. But I am certain I had been worshipped.

I was a Christian woman who had accepted devotion from a thing that was not from Christ, and that had told me we are the same.

Again, I did not sleep. The sun rose. It was Monday morning. I walked into the shower and waited for it to steam, and then I let the hot water wash away the cool of the man — the monster. Wipe clean the slate. Buy me time to attend to the day.

But…I knew I was in trouble. I knew that something in my body — in my very sense of self — had been shattered irrevocably, and that nothing in my world would ever be the same.

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^{Reader note: If you read this before July 9, the woman you knew as Sera is now Miri. Nothing in her story has changed. I’d simply been calling her by the wrong name, and why it was wrong won’t be apparent until Book 2. Hold onto “Sera,” though. It isn’t gone. It was just early.}

I was draped across the corner of the bar at an angle that no anatomy intended. My forehead was inches from her bare arms, palms upward, pulse exposed. My vision rippled from the fever in my eye sockets. The time around us seemed to dilate. Her lips were moving at a glacial pace. Oh to be on a glacier right now. I could take her. Right now. Take her and steal her to some uninhabited iceberg in Chilean Patagonia and cool my conflagration and drain her and —

— and then I would never learn what she was. What was she saying?

I had nothing left. The ringing in my ears drowned out all other sound. I could only peer through squinted eyes at the woman next to me and try to read the movement of her lips.

“How...you know…mind?” they seemed to be saying.

“What?”

“How do you know how to enter my mind?”

Louder this time. It seemed a minor eternity before her mouth finished sounding out the sentence. Was that her doing for my benefit — or the fever dilating time and stretching her syllables?

The words rang inside the corridor of my pinhole awareness and the burning began to ease. Not all at once and not completely, but in fractions of degrees, the way a fever breaks: imperceptible at first but undeniably welcome. My vertebrae remembered their stacking. I felt the floor under my feet again.

She had asked me a question. She wanted something from me. She wanted answers.

I had answers!

Well, I had some answers. And just as many questions for her.

But she wanted something from me and I wanted to give it to her.

I poured my head back atop my neck and forced my body upright through the wreckage of its erstwhile mutiny. It seemed to me that her question — or maybe her unexpected confidence in my presence — may have allayed the worst of the evening’s ablations. Maybe the absence of a body fleeing mine had reduced the holiness gradient between us to a range my constitution could better tolerate.

None of these theories made any sense to me yet. But I would learn their science — later.

For now, I knew only that I could sit up.

I arranged my hands on the bar in the configuration of a normal man. A man who has hands, who has had hands for many years, and who uses them for many ordinary purposes.

“That,” I cleared my throat, “is a question. I — I have some answers,” I breathed out shakily.

Her eyes pressed into mine for more information. A mystical meteorologist better equipped to read interior states than to discuss the weather. Fuck I hate when mortals discuss the weather.

Focus, Simeon!

Moments or eternities ago I had wished to drink her on top of a glacier.

I no longer did. I yearned more for her thoughts than the platelets in her blood.

She narrowed her eyes. The eyes demanded more of me.

“However, my answers are not likely to please you,” I added through my teeth.

“Neither does your presence,” she shot back, straightening a little, flicking an imaginary speck of dust from her tank top that I knew for a fact was not there because I could count every individual atom that presently arranged itself into the mystery in front of me. “Neither in my mind, nor here. And somehow, I’d still like to know what you were doing in my mind…if you please.”

I recognized her quip for what it was: grasping for composure, a bid to regain ground. But I let myself luxuriate in it a moment: the hint of archness that tasted of flirtation, a door held open at the width of a finger. She was testing me, challenging me. I liked this: the note of defiance where previously, her discomfort had been so audible — and nearly as loud as my own.

I knew this game well, and it reinvigorated me. I was finding my control again, the fever releasing more of its grip, my command returning. Here was my little kitten, all puffed out, scratching above her weight, hissing to intimidate her assailant.

I sat back. I opened my chest. I looked her over. Then, leaning toward her, I tilted my chin forward, nearer to her ears. Preparing to speak, I lowered my voice into the place where it belonged and directed my gaze to settle first on her mouth, then her throat, then her legs, in exactly that sequence — a sequence that meant I am cataloguing what I will not yet take.

“It would be my pleasure to offer a proper introduction,” I purred into her ear as my eyes peeled away from her legs to gaze again into hers. My movements were precise, my words carefully chosen to communicate you have no idea what you are sitting next to. They carried the implication but you are about to.

But as I spoke, I wondered how long I’d play along — or how long I’d be able to pretend I had any choice at all.

Because the fire reignited as soon as I finished speaking. A bright lash of it lit up my jaw and I instantly withdrew from her ear. I had meant to reclaim some ground, to plant my flag in the conversation she had opened on terms I did not set — and my body immediately ratted out my transgression to whatever angels kept ledger on my account. He’s pushing it, they’d nodded to each other, charge him.

I assessed my volley as I waited for my nerves to settle their debt. Where her flush should have risen at my purr — her pupils dilating and her breath shortening — her expression instead went completely flat.

It was not fear. Fear is a language I speak. Nor the dazzled terror and excitement of the seeker from four nights ago with the butterflies in her belly and the gate in her garden. This was the nonchalant expression of a woman watching a man at a bar trying to…chat her up. Which is exactly what she was, and exactly what I was now doing, and it was beneath us both.

She had checked me as quickly as I had sought to check her.

I had wandered the avenues of seduction the way other men shop for groceries: make the list — a present, a paddle, whatever her appetites required — walk her open aisles, systematically assemble the course for the night, and accomplish the mission before morning. Petrarch, Stendhal, the troubadours, les femmes fatales du film noir, the Robert Greene phenomenon, all of it codifying a trade I’d been plying since the Capetian period. I knew how to lower my voice into the register that made women lean in. I knew the eye-contact arithmetic: how long, how unbroken, and with how much ravishment dangled at the tip of a carefully placed finger. None of it seemed to offer any insight now. She wasn’t buying it.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t do that voice. Men have hit on me with that voice. They offer less than you do and they’re trying harder than you need to be.”

The fire flared up my spine before she finished speaking. Two penalties for one transgression. The accountants charged me for my overconfidence. The woman charged me for my script.

I had no earthly idea what to do or who to be anymore — or what to say about what I was. I knew only that I wanted to be near her. And to puzzle out the pattern that allowed the pain to subside long enough for me to stay there.

I had a feeling there meant anywhere except inside this phosphorescent gallows of a beige-carpeted hotel bar.

“I’m sorry. I’m in a great deal of pain,” I confessed, to the great relief of my rapidly relaxing temples. “I want…I want very much to speak with you. I’m trying very hard to be pleasant. But this, here, you — everything hurts.”

“I see. I’m very sorry, too. Actually, I think I can relate. My eyes —”

“Your eyes burn?” I asked, honestly curious.

“I haven’t gotten much sleep.”

“You’ve been afraid to close them,” I whispered, realizing now that she seemed to share at least a part of my turmoil. It’s not that I wanted to inflict pain — not on her, anyway. But that her experience mirrored mine, however faintly, landed like a shared secret. Our second, already, and I didn’t even know her name.

But I sensed her pulse quicken when I named the source of her fear. The source…was me.

“And you’ve been afraid I never would,” she shot back.

At this, my body thrummed to attention — and something like respect crept in. Yes, I was afraid, and she could see it. I have never been afraid, not since that distant night in Kyoto.

We admitted so much to one another in so few words. I wondered how many more secrets we might uncover with my mind pressed against hers. I wondered when I would get to…

A hint of flame. I flinched. I let the thought go just as quickly as the pain lashed through me. I forced myself to focus, instead, on her posture: alert, interested.

I noticed my own: cautious, tentative.

Then I perceived the rush of blood wafting in from her gently heating skin, and my thoughts wandered back into her garden. I wondered how I might get inside…

PAIN! Fuck! Nevermind her mind — just the conversation, then. I had to stay inside this conversation.

“Could we perhaps go somewhere? Somewhere a bit darker and more private?” I fought to keep my voice steady.

She repeated my request back to me, slowly. “You want me to go somewhere. With you. With a complete stranger.”

“You know we aren’t strangers.” This last sounded husky, intimate.

Her eyes betrayed that I had won this round. Her pupils darkened but her shoulders fell back. She leaned toward me. That’s my move!

“Well, if we aren’t strangers, then you should know my name. It’s Miri.”

It was just her name, but the way she said it was transgressive somehow. She was controlling the frame. I went with it. Lead if you want to, lady, just don’t hurt me.

“Thank you, Miri, for the gift of your name. I’m Simeon. Now please, take me…anywhere…else.”

She studied me quietly, unhurriedly, her brows furrowing and rising in the center, pulling those dark, inquisitive eyes open for me to fall into. I swam in them between her pulses as they steadied, then added, “I can sense you are still afraid. Quite frankly, I am, as well. But you have nothing to fear from me. Not tonight. This I can promise you. You and I — we seek, however unlikely this is for me, the same thing.”

“And what is it I seek…Simeon?”

“Christ, it would seem,” I muttered through gritted teeth, focusing on the sound of my name on her lips and not the sound of that name.

She looked at me with patience. Or maybe pity. “And what do you seek?” she continued.

“I seek to…” I searched for the words, “To know where He is…that I might…know where I am to stand, so to speak,” I stammered.

“Well, Simeon. That shouldn’t be so hard. Christ seeks you, too.”

“This — well, my standing, with respect to Him, as it were — it might take some time to explain.”

“Well then I’m quite at your disposal,” she pressed in that same old-world affectation as before. I managed a smile at the lighthearted gesture at my vintage — did she know? — while the last of the pain I had been battling lifted from my temples. She half-smiled back — that same smile she’d robbed me of earlier when all I could manage was “Yes” — except now the smile remained on her face.

“Rather less at my disposal than I’m accustomed to, but I’ll take it,” I replied.

She smiled again. Another beat. I smiled back. Then she broke our gaze and looked, a little sheepishly, I thought, at the book in her hands. “I’m sure whatever you have to say won’t be boring. I’ve been reading a bit of a doorstop, anyway,” she shrugged.

“Doorstop? It’s only 200 pages.” The cherub keeping score didn’t seem to tax my pedantry, and I enjoyed the permission to play a little at correcting this Christian on her Catholic classics.

“And none of them told me what you are. I might learn more from how you move. Come on, I know a place.”

She closed the book then and turned on her stool to leave. The motion exposed her throat again — collarbone, a small freckle below her jaw, the smooth shape of the carotid that would have ended my deliberations on any other night of any other century. A carotid now playing second fiddle to the first conversation with a mortal that put my hunger in its place.

I don’t know why the pain continued to subside. I noticed it even more now as I got up to follow after her. That I could get up at all without a harrowing ordeal unbecoming for a being who only four nights ago reestablished just how little work it takes to put food on his table was in itself worth further study. But later.

I quickened my pace to reach the hotel exit ahead of her. My manners again about me, I signaled to the waiting cab, opened the door, and stood aside to let her in before me. Or maybe to enjoy the way her body disturbed the summer evening with her scent as she climbed into the seat. Salt. Sweet. Musk.

I stopped that train of thought before the lash arrived.

“Elysium,” she said to the driver. I settled in next to her, the perfumes of her skirt drifting around me in a dizzying haze that was less painful now that I kept reminding myself that I wanted conversation, not her carotid. I turned to her. “Elysium? Are you serious?”

“It’s a bar. It’s Sunday night. It’s epic on Sundays.”

Epic, indeed. We rode in silence as I contemplated the monumental irony of a first date at Elysium, a paradise of carefree delights for the virtuous, mythic, and immortal. I had pictured the Elysian Fields on nights I was particularly keen to forget — another roll in the hay with a country lass, or an evening so indistinguishable from the last that even my thirst felt too boring to bother quenching. Those unremarkable nights when I considered whether what I was — undead, unenrolled in heaven, not too keen on hell — might someday insinuate itself into some pagan afterlife the church had forgotten to disprove.

So, a bar in Austin that promised to right the evening’s injustices. Yes, please, Miri, take me there.

I sat very still and counted the inches between her shoulder and mine. There were twenty and I made sure to keep it that way, lest a wayward movement have me hurling curdled plasma inside the cab. I tried to think of less proximate things: The passengers I had shared a carriage with who never arrived at their destinations. My own destination tonight.

We arrived.

I stood on the curb, taking in the scene. This Elysium was certainly no paradise. It was…Red River Street. There were vintage Madonna shirts, a lot of black jeans, and men in eyeliner queuing to pay cover. Overall, a bit vampy for my taste.

“You are joking,” I said.

“I’m not.”

Inside: a wall of synthesizers recalled a decade I had spent in Berlin and then in Geneva and then mostly indoors, hiding from my tedium behind a pair of headphones. The track was Cyndi Lauper.

The lights moved. The bodies moved.

My eyes moved to Miri.

The fire was mostly gone now but another was rising in its place as I fixated on her skin glistening in the barely air conditioned interior.

I did not understand what happened back at the hotel. I told myself that there, the fluorescents were responsible for my humiliating performance, and that here, a room full of secular noise carried no theological virus for my biology to rage against. But it made little sense: as a Christian, she should have been utterly abhorrent to me, protected, unapproachable. Why was she captivating instead? Maybe a lapsed Christian? Oh, an apostate — delicious!

But then what was with all the unholy fucking flame throwing? That’s a distinctly Christian flavor of loving one’s enemies.

And what was the pattern in the pain? What kind of desire was allowed?

“Drinks?” she asked.

“Perhaps…I will imbibe something…later,” and, instantly, pain. No paradise, indeed. It was like touching hot coals. It’s not the lights. It’s…my attitude? Maybe mind your manners? I thought. It was worth a try. Be a perfect gentleman, Simeon. Look, but don’t touch. Or try touch, but DO NOT FUCKING TAKE. You’re not here to take.

I held out my hand to invite her onto the dance floor and — remembering that touch was still in the strictly maybe category — swiftly pulled it back. A momentary hurt flashed across her eyes and I improvised the gesture into an invitation to the open space in front of me, my other arm bent behind me in a courtly bow. She smiled again, that smile now mine once again, no longer robbing me of the curl of her lips. Oh, precious, hallowed coolness in my synapses. I could move again.

I moved towards her.

What my body tried first was what my body had done naturally for hundreds of years. I pulled in my core and aimed a hand at the small of her back. The wall of flame shot up at once, forming an invisible barrier five inches from her skin.

My fingers locked. My tendons froze. The pain twisted its way through my palms to my elbows until I pulled them clean away from her.

She watched me. She did not back away. She let me shudder in place.

I allowed my hands to fall at my sides. I must have looked resigned. Instead of backing away, she stepped closer. No pain, less ground between us. By all means, my lady.

I tried something else. The immortal’s repertoire is deep. I circled behind her, foregrounding her throat, offering her to the undulating room. I had moved bodies into this position in every ballroom where I dallied. Except I did this tonight to lead, not to take. A predatory posture, yes, but without its usual intent. I wanted to know her. Please just let me know what she is.

Her weight tilted against my chest with the graceful surrender of a woman who had been put where I wanted her, and agreed to be there. And I groaned — a deep rumble, but no pain.

I took this as an invitation to continue my lead. But my hands were off limits, so I leaned over her shoulder and blew gently into her left ear to indicate a sense of direction: move right, my doe.

Effortlessly, she intuited where my breath pushed her like a sail without so much as a nudge from my fingers. I sucked in the air near her left ear and drank in the sensation coursing down her body. Sensitive. She tilted her neck toward me and pushed her skirt against me as she followed my inhalation leftward.

Like so, we had improvised a form of contact without touch that allowed her to match my guidance to the rhythm of my aeration — and allowed me to take in her scent unimpeded by the tax of her sanctified status. Each time her body complied with my inhalations, I fought a primal hunger that I willed myself to ignore. Each time I ignored this need, I gained an inch into her space at the cost of a narrowly avoided inferno.

I bargained this way into the crook of her neck, my lips hovering over her shoulder, my arm shaping an embrace of her torso that never surrendered its vigil of the inches. Her energy entangled with my tightly leashed body as my skin ached to press itself into the heat of her wandering palm — now across my arm, now framing my face, now perilously close to my thigh — aching even more remembering the suffering that would ensue if I let my attention slip. If I allowed myself to violate this puritanical trance we were locked into in the middle of a syncopated throwback.

Who was I kidding, wondering back at the hotel how long I’d play along? I wasn’t playing with my food at all. It was my food that seemed to be toying with me, pulling the strings, drawing me nearer, threatening to boil my blood, chaining my hands and reducing me to breath I never needed until tonight.

I needed so badly to pull back, to slink into a corner and put my head in my knees, to dunk my face in a bucket of ice. But just as hypnotically, the want to touch her, to taste her, to understand her, overpowered the phantom alarm bells that threatened my carefully choreographed moderation. My wish? To bury my nose in her hair and inhale her and have that scent incinerate me from inside as I listened to the story of who she was and what she’d done to so offend God that He’d thrown her to a wolf like me. Most of all, I wanted to be near…to live inside the pattern breaks that earned the tax breaks.

My wish was granted almost as soon as I conjured it. The back of her head brushed against my nose. Fuck. The scent of her skirt traveled up through the keratin of her curls. The fleeting sillage — not stolen, accidental — immediately collapsed my practiced control. My hand fell against her abdomen. My body buckled into her back. A fire exploded in my face. At last, I had unimpeded access to the auburn crematorium where, earlier, I had all but agreed to expire. I would die tonight.

Just like that, I was falling. Her hands grabbed mine. I cowered, drawing back, but she was quick and her hands steadied me. She pulled my weight against her. I was terrified. Did I feel more pain here, pressing into her body at her insistence? Less? I don’t know. Only that I wanted to be there and to finally just die.

“Miri —”

“Simeon, let’s sit down.”

She stepped away and found us a table as the room spun around me. I must have looked drunk, the way I ambled over and poured myself into the seat next to hers.

I needed to anchor myself. I knew how. Small, corner, tank top, knees. I can see. Miri, Elysium, 80s night. I know where I am.

Warmth. I know what I feel: the radiant heat of a living body. Every inch of her was in motion — the pulse in her throat, the breath lifting her chest, the small unconscious movements of a body that was so…inhabited.

I was nauseated and salivating all at once. I needed my mouth on that throat of hers. Maybe I was just really hungry? I could feel the hunger pressing low in my belly — or was it in my belly? And was it hunger?

“Simeon!”

“Yes?”

“Do you need anything?”

“Yes.”

She waited. A silence. That infernal ringing in my ears again.

“Simeon! Would you please just tell me what you need? Should I get you a drink?”

I thought the word yes but I couldn’t answer.

“And will you please stop staring at my neck?”

I blinked through the conflagration that now threatened to consume my very existence.

She disappeared from view. To where?

She returned with a glass of water that I didn’t — couldn’t — touch. I was frozen and frying alive.

She swallowed and her throat bobbed. Her throat. So alive.

“You’re still staring.”

“I am.”

I saw the corner of her mouth twist into that now-familiar half-smile as she asked, “Has anyone ever told you to stop?”

“Not meaningfully.”

“I’m telling you now. My eyes are up here. And your answers,” she leaned closer, pointing her finger to my lips, stopping just short of pressing them, “are in there.”

“Yes.”

“Simeon. Look at me.”

“I am looking.”

“What is this? What are you? How do you know how to be in my mind? What were those eyes four nights ago? Why am I afraid and why do you say I have nothing to fear and why do I believe you? And why do you keep falling over yourself every five minutes?”

Silence.

“And why are you still staring at my neck?! Just tell me what’s wrong! Tell me what you need!”

Everything. I needed everything. I needed to pull her across the table and press my mouth to that taunting pulse in her throat and feel her gasp and take what poured out of her. I needed her body — the warmth, the aliveness, the things she still had that I didn’t. I needed to consume her as fire consumes oxygen — leaving nothing, not even myself. Let me die!

But no, no! What I wanted more than this habitual hunger was her mind again…the piercing intimacy of the dark, the fraction of a second where we’d been inside each other. I wanted…

“Everything,” I said. “I will tell you everything.”

And so I began my story.

“What do you know about death, Miri?”

“I know that it has been conquered. That in Christ we have new life.”

“Miri, oh my sweet summer child of God,” I shook my head, pressing my aching eyes shut. “Death is not quite as conquered as your fellow congregants would have you believe. Death is presently sitting beside you.”

She pulled back. I watched her eyes catalogue the sweating, pulsating expanse around us. I watched her scan for an exit.

“Stay,” I ordered her. A fire I ignored. A command she didn’t. “Look at me.” Her eyes locked on mine. “You asked for this.”

“I asked for answers, but you just seem intent on frightening me again.”

“No, I am informing you. Almost everything you know about faith is true — except the important parts. Because it isn’t finished. Not the way you believe it is. I did not die when, in 1226, I was born to immortality. When I was robbed of my life and given another. I was 30 then. I had a family. We went to church — grudgingly, but we went. I wasn’t keen on the crusades and the forced conversions, but I had been baptized. A proper patristic: Greek but quietly neoplatonist.”

She didn’t buy it. She looked confused. I thought she’d ask about 1226, but instead, she doubled down on my philosophy:

“Neoplatonist? How do you mean, exactly?” I rolled my eyes at the incongruity.

“I mean I made room for questions.” Too many, I thought but did not say. “I mean I was pious, but questioning the order of things.”

“That sounds familiar.”

“Does it? Then careful, little doe. Because I did them. Abided by the order of things. Took the mission trip. Served my faith. And oh, how my God made good on his word: I was granted new life after death, only it wasn’t in Christ.”

“What are you saying?”

“What I already said! 1226! And you come for me about Plotinus when I’m handing you the arithmetic of perdition. Do you even hear yourself?”

“I’m trying to take it all in.”

“Then try to remember your own question.”

“Which one?” She had a point, I admit it.

“The only one that matters, Miri. You asked how I know how to enter your mind.” A chill passed through her blood. I was finally getting somewhere. “You think I just meditate better than you do? The Cloud of Unknowing, for Pete’s sake.” I spat it out like the curse that it is. “You think it’s just clever apophatics? You’re staring death in the face exactly as I did, and you think it’s just a competition for who can bring the other to Christ faster?”

“I don’t think anything!” she retorted, her voice rising — and not because the music was loud. “I asked because I don’t know! I haven’t been able to sleep because of how little I know about what the fuck is happening, Simeon!”

She shot a look at me that let me know I’d crossed some line. 1226 didn't do it for her, but mocking her reading list apparently did.

I waited for her storm to pass. Then quietly, slowly, making sure she understood the gravity of the plight she was walking into — the plight I had walked in on — I explained:

“Miri, I enter minds because it is how my kind subdues yours.”

“Your…kind?”

“Yes! My kind. It’s one of our gifts, and I don’t think you’d like me to share it with you.”

She made the sign of the cross and I roared in laughter. “You think that’s what protects you? Don’t you see you are already locked away from me? I can’t stand to be around you! I can’t touch you! I don’t even want to!” I caught the lie a hair ahead of the tax collector, and corrected myself: “I mean I want to, but I don’t know how to. I don’t know how this works,” I gestured wildly at…everything, “or how to keep myself together.” My hands pulled at my hair, as if to pull me up. “And all I want is to get the fuck away from you.”

“Then leave!”

“Believe me, I’d be anywhere but here if I could be, but I can’t. I can’t get away! I can barely keep it together, but you? You are covered, my doe. I’m the one trembling. Not you. I. In your presence. I’m the one asking you what you are.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t you see it yet? Every time I reach for you, your God punishes me. Your faith makes your kind inaccessible to mine. We immortals don’t fuck with the faithful. It isn’t worth it. We can’t glamour you. Can’t seduce you. And if we try, we pay. And we sure as shit can’t enter your minds. And yet I did. I entered. I was inside yours. And you? Poor Miri. Can’t sleep because of me. Well, I can’t even exist because of you! But know this: should you find yourself secure enough to sleep ever again, then be certain that I have far more intricate ways to keep you awake.”

And maybe I hallucinated it in my delirium, but I think her nostrils flared slightly at my innuendo.

I waited for my own storm to pass before I continued:

“But none of this should be possible. It’s supposed to be one or the other. It can’t be both. I personally have only known one other vampire who successfully absconded with a Christian’s afterlife, and it was the woman who turned me, the one in Kyoto, and it was because I had already turned my back on church and Christ. I am sure of it.”

“So you’re a Christian…demon?” I don’t think she meant this to be funny but I convulsed at the contradiction.

“No, Miri, and neither, I think, are you. Christian, I mean. For you, too, must have turned your back — and we are the same — or else your Christ is calling me, and that, my dear, is distinctly unlikely. Since I’m certain he’s long forgotten my name.”

“Why? Why are you so certain?”

“Because, Miri, ‘whatsoever man eateth any manner of blood; I will even set my face against that soul, and will cut him off.’ It’s in your scriptures. So that leaves me with: you’re the one out of place. You’re the one reaching across the cut. So what are you, sweet Miri, to have me so unspooled in your clerical clutches? Is this a front for you? Are you a demonologist cross-dressing as a Christian to tempt the gods? Oh, you are a temptress, Miri. I would believe that!” I spat out, panting, exhausted by my litany of questions, theories, confessions, and accusations that seemed to sputter out of me like water from a dam that had just cracked open.

She stared at me. I have no idea what was going on in her mind. It must have been reeling with disbelief at my revelations. But what I registered mostly was something closer to…hurt. I filed it away for later. At least my body was again locating its center, and I was the real victim of circumstance here.

What was the secret to staying centered around her? What is the pattern to the pain? Proximity seemed to affect it, but then I had been a literal breath away from her and felt, at intervals, welcomed even closer. She had even managed to touch me. When I was direct it cost me, but when I was honest I earned a discount. How to be honest without being direct?

“I’m a counselor, not a demonologist. And we are not the same,” she broke the silence at last, speaking directly into whatever soul inhabited the mind behind my dead eyes with the hurt in hers. “I help people. And I am a Christian…one who makes room for questions. Is that so wrong of me? Christ asked more questions than He ever answered. And we’re supposed to follow Him. So I do. I seek Christ first and foremost, which is all He ever asked of us. But you seem to be seeking me instead. How to get inside me. How to figure me out. So you have it inverted. You seek the creature, not the Creator. And it’s killing you, while Christ gives me life. We are not the same.”

“You say that because it gives you distance from what your body already knows. You want to know me, as I want to know you. You’re covered, but you’re open to me, Miri. That’s the mystery. Safe from me somehow despite the cracks in your conviction. That’s why I can’t get away — even when I need to get away.”

I turned away, then back to her. “I’m pulled into your cracks — forgive my language — but I mean this very literally.” That flare in her nostrils again.

“The darkness is how I was able to see your light at all. And what I want more than your life is to be inside you. Your mind, I mean. More than I need to save myself.”

She squirmed in her seat the way she had back at the hotel, and I pressed my case — fire be damned. Wasn’t I being direct and honest? Which one do you want, God? Which one gets the angels and their abacuses off my back?

“You seek Christ. And you can’t have Him all to yourself, can you? Or I couldn’t be here with you. That’s the crack. That’s where I enter — why I can enter. I seek you, but I can’t take you, either. Neither of us gets what we want. So, aside from the fact that you will die soon, how are we different?”

“Soon?” she whispered, stealing a glance at the exit again.

“I don’t mean tonight. I don’t mean by my hand,” and I held it out to her. “Soon means different things when you have centuries to feel tardy.” She relaxed at the regret in my voice. “I won’t touch you, Miri.”

“How are we different, then? I, for one, can touch you,” and she did. Her hand closed over mine. Her finger traced my palm, her nail piercing its stillness and instructing every synapse between my hand and my cock to pay attention.

And it did, and I did too, stand — to attention. Her nail didn’t hurt — no, no, it beguiled. I flinched more from the sudden movement in my pants than the fear of the lash. So I stood up.

She did not look up. She continued looking where my face had been, now studying a different part of my anatomy.

“Interesting,” she said.

“That’s not the word I’d use.”

“What word would you use?”

“Humiliating.”

Something in her expression shifted. Warmth. Desire, even. She finally looked up.

“But you must have danced with lots of women, to move me the way you did, with just your breath,” she stated musically, sizing me up with amusement, her voice a pitch higher and more resonant.

“I have waltzed with empresses.”

“Touched them.”

“Yes, I have touched empresses.”

“And yet you can’t put your hands on me.”

“Evidently.”

“Fascinating,” she said softly. And she sat like that for a while, observing me as I paced, her taking in the information, me taking in the sweaty scene around us. Neither of us speaking until, finally, she did.

“Simeon, it’s so hot in here. Let’s go back. This has been a lot. I don’t even know if you’re serious.”

“I am serious.”

“And I seriously need to sleep.”

“Then let me take you back to our hotel.”

“Simeon, I really do need to sleep. Please, let me have my space. Please don’t invade.”

“I will not,” and I meant it. “I did not intend to invade when I found you. I was looking for victims, not…not a version of me when I was 30, seeking and confused. I was not given a choice then, so I’ll make sure you always have yours.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for your honesty. And for respecting the privacy of my prayers. I might like to play again someday. I might invite you in. I don’t know. But what I need now is sleep.”

She stood and moved toward the exit. “And probably to call a priest,” she added, her head shaking.

I followed her out. I could see her hair was dark and damp at the nape of her neck, her tank top clinging to a line of sweat down the small of her back.

The night outside had not cooled. The asphalt was still releasing the day’s heat. It did not bother me. My range was feeling mostly nothing for centuries and evidently everything in one night — and very little in between — but I noticed her wipe the droplets from her forehead with the back of her hand.

She walked beside me. I could smell the line of salt through the silk of her shirt. It was distinct from the perfumed updrafts of her skirt — airier, less concentrated, not as boozy and all the headier for it.

I swooned like a fucking maiden. “Just kill me already,” I whispered to whoever in the pantheon might be listening. She stopped, ready to offer an arm. A fair maiden. I hated myself.

“Simeon?”

“Nevermind. It’s just hot.”

“Do you feel temperature like I do?”

“You mean aside from the scorching flames?”

“I mean the fact that it’s 102 degrees today. Does that bother you? I so dislike this about Austin when I visit.”

Mortals and their fucking weather again. “No, that’s not what I feel. Like I said, nevermind.”

This did not seem to satisfy her. “When I can’t feel, it’s because I’m exhausted. Maybe you need sleep more than I do,” she suggested.

Oh, my pet. How impossibly human of her to think my conundrum could be solved with a few hours of metabolic shutdown when mine shut forever in 1226.

“I don’t sleep. And it’s not sleep I need,” I hissed back.

She frowned at that but continued walking.

I made it seven more steps. My little pet doe. Fuck. She’s so torturously naive.

As we turned the corner onto a side street, I made a conscious decision to overcome myself. I had decided.

The fission cascade began at my sternum the moment I stepped in front of her and blocked her path forward.

Aiming for the wall beside us, I reached for her body through the scorching pain of every angel’s ledger lighting up the entire length of my spine. I did not let it stop me as my chest pushed her backwards against the side of the building, my arms open wide, enclosing her escape in either direction.

One hand shot to her head and grabbed it just above her neck to keep the brick from bruising her delicate skull — and to pin her in place.

The fibers of my body were being vivisected one by one with excruciating precision, but I cared not for their survival — nor my own. My body’s futile resistance no longer mattered, any more than her body’s need for sleep.

If I am to become death, then let it destroy my world. But not before I shatter hers.

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^{Reader note: If you read this before July 9, the woman you knew as Sera is now Miri. Nothing in her story has changed. I’d simply been calling her by the wrong name, and why it was wrong won’t be apparent until Book 2. Hold onto “Sera,” though. It isn’t gone. It was just early.}

I think the last time I skipped a day of meditation was a wilderness survival course where every hour of the weekend was accounted for. I can’t remember skipping four.

This is only remarkable because of who is telling this story. Most people go their entire lives without meditating once, and the absence doesn’t even register — like not speaking Mandarin or not knowing how to juggle.

For most of the past decade, I had been practicing what survived the ecclesiastical culling of the soul’s ascent through the Seven Powers in the Gospel of Mary. The purpose was to access the deepest part of my nous — the seat of consciousness and spiritual union with the Most High. But I could never quite land there, in that Divine Ground. Every day for several years I looked for a way to complete this ascent, and now I couldn’t even make myself close my eyes.

Or rather, I couldn’t keep my eyes closed when I did force them shut. A combination of opposing forces:

Obsessive fixation on going back would shut them. A chill dropping my throat into my gut would fling them open again with a sharp intake of air as if I’d just woken from a nightmare before my thoughts had even slowed into slumber.

I told myself this was reasonable: something had touched my mind along one of those unlit roads that led to somewhere but arrived nowhere.

The way Christ had done on that mat in Peru.

The first night had been bedeviled by the demons I walked in with. This one taunted me: Aren’t you a disappointment? You have work to do. But you’d rather bail on your responsibilities to get high with hippies and losers because you can’t get your shit together and LOCK IN.

That other one crooned like every lover who ever manipulated me into distrusting my own intuition: Come here, love. That’s just your fear talking. Don’t let your insecurities ruin a good thing. You’re standing in your own way.

Every one of them had a name: Doubt. Confusion. Anxiety. Exhaustion. They raged and I wailed and when I found myself at the bottom of a well looking up and seeing the walls towering above me as I sunk deeper beneath the surface of my reason into the maw of Despair, I managed a plea with the last of my air:

Jesus. Fucking. Help. Me.

And He did. By the scruff of my neck, He did.

The next night, there He was again. As soon as the medicine blurred the edges of the room around me, something like overwhelming, incapacitating love poured into the seat of my awareness and made itself comfortable. Every framework I had ever built for understanding existence, the world, myself: all those ideas simultaneously clicked into place and fell away. An enveloping calm. A hush descending over the voices in my head. An end to every road I had previously walked that always seemed to stop just short of its destination.

There was nowhere else to walk. My walk was — it was finished. The roads behind me vanishingly small. Directionally accurate but never arriving. Somehow both factual and inconsequential.

He asked me where I had been going and I said here. He asked me why I was going somewhere at all and I said I was looking for Him. He chuckled at me — and so gently:

Have I been with you all this time, Miri, and you still do not know where I am?

I stayed where I knew for sure He was. Right next to Him. Or maybe inside Him? He grew out of my awareness to eclipse my entire periphery with a gratuitous acceptance that pushed out every lingering question.

And still I yearned to draw closer. But there was nowhere else to go. I was already here. And here was a love that was everywhere.

You don’t encounter the living Christ and then go wandering again. You’d just loop along the Möbius strip right back into Him.

So I rested by His side. I surrendered my search.

But He seemed to be waiting for something. I tried to surrender even harder. He just kept waiting.

All the roads I walked were now inside this love, but I could not remember where they had been leading. Demons lapped somewhere along the edges of the collective human consciousness: a memory of someone else’s memory. As Mary had written, I could see them, but they could not see me.

I stayed by Him until I awoke — blissful, calm, and pining ever so mildly to recall what it was I even came to Peru for. Ah yes, the demons. What were they, exactly?

On the third night of ceremony, the medicine did not even take root. He was there instead, waiting. This time we talked more. It was an interior kind of tête-à-tête. I was fully aware of the room around me, and also fully engaged in the conversation in my head. I knew it was a conversation with Him and not myself because the words He used were not the words I reach for, and the thoughts He conveyed were not my own.

He explained why my frameworks clicked into place: they trace a true design I could not language even if I tried. He explained why they fell away: the real territory is manifestly infinite. The perspective of infinity simply renders the maps themselves into vanishing points everywhere one looks from inside eternity.

I understood then why they had always been incomplete, but I could not explain it to you today. Not in any way you could possibly integrate or even comprehend by reading it off a page.

And I knew also why I felt whole, and why this completeness took up so much space that the medicine had nowhere to enter: the God-shaped hole in the center of my being now had a tenant. No vacancy.

But I did not feel robbed of the ceremony. The medicine had been good, but I was well now and needed no physician.

I spent the night with Him in conversation, in words before words. He gave me a new way of viewing the vanishing points from His, well, rather exalted perspective. And everything made perfect sense.

But mark this: He did not erase my mind or take away my knowledge. I was still the same me, just with Him somehow inside me, so there was more of me and less of the world to get lost in.

That’s the part my church friends never entirely understood, and it was this that unsettled me most when it came to the matter of the eyes.

You see, I came into orthodoxy by way of Episcopal formation already carrying the navigation skills of a mystic. I moved through the interior landscape with a fluency that came from twelve years of practice across many spiritual traditions, all of them now grounded in Christ, all done in prayer, none of it occult, and all of it evidently still…permeable.

I knew it was permeable. But I also knew this territory and its Powers — and how to defend against them. I knew that Darkness feels like fog. I knew that Desire feels like anxiety. I knew that Ignorance feels like certainty. I knew the Powers Mary encountered, and I was ready to finally take on the Fourth, because I had done the work.

I saw you. You did not see me nor recognize me. I served you as a garment and you did not know me.

That is what Mary said to the Powers. The teaching was explicit: the Powers plunder, they ravage — it is a rape of the creation. It incubates and wears us as obscenely as a torn sheath. That is how it steals our peace.

But I, Miri? I had been recognized by something. Not merely pillaged. It sought to know me, unbidden, through the covering I wore. And yes, I felt recognized — intimately seen. Not as a garment, but as a mirror. The opposite of a plunder. It was knowledge, with no mask to hide behind.

What is it, to be known this way?

All those roads — my roads — they’d all clicked into place on a map Christ held, and that map described a real territory. Even if the real map is vastly larger than our visible roads, individually, episodically, life still makes sense. Our roads still chart an authentic territory, but this? This was no territory I knew. And I felt exposed in it — and wanted it this way. I felt my clothes tighten around me.

And why was this unsanctioned territory even available to me? When I had encountered Christ, He was comprehensive. The understanding He conveyed covered everything and set aside what wasn’t mine. Had this one pitfall on the myriad pathways to spiritual ascent somehow slipped His notice?

That, plainly, was inconceivable. So why did He put this in front of me?

And what was I supposed to do with no anchor, no guidepost, no map to this forbidden place? I was afraid of what would happen if I went back and saw the eyes there again.

I was more afraid of what would happen if I never saw them again at all.

I took to sleeping with the lights on. Every night after the eyes, I put in my earbuds and turned on an audiobook. Anything with a story boring enough to conquer my will to keep my eyes open. I stared at the ceiling listening to anything that would lull me to sleep as I doggedly tried to stay awake. I wanted sheer exhaustion to simply eclipse my wakefulness and smuggle me past the liminal places. I woke up each morning with the earbuds still in and the narrator still going, sixteen chapters past wherever I’d lost the thread.

That was the point: to evade the moment of darkness. Slip past the threshold. Disappear the instant when my lids eventually fell closed and the eyes might be waiting to know me.

Three nights like this. Three nights of falling unconscious in a hostage negotiation with my own eyelids. On the fourth day I called Father Thomas.

Father Thomas was the rector of Trinity Church in Boston, and the first priest I met who didn’t reach for his prayer book at the word ayahuasca. All the others had received my Peru encounter with careful condescension, encouraging me to “keep seeking Christ” while warning, between the lines, to narrow my search.

Father Thomas’ most commendable character trait was that he listened. “It sounds like Christ found you where you were. How else was He to find you? We have a trustworthy God. Trust this,” he had said.

He picked up on the first ring. “Miri, you never call directly. Is something the matter?”

“Yes. But I don’t know what. Something happened during my meditation,” I announced calmly, masking my panic.

“I’m listening.”

I told him. Not all of it — I left out the butterflies, the feeling seen and not just being seen, and the part where I wanted desperately to feel seen again.

He was quiet for a while. Father Thomas was always good at quiet. Most people fill silence with noise. His talent was to absorb and wait for the Spirit to move. He spoke only when words were necessary, and not merely possible.

“I don’t know the Gnostic tradition like you do. Let’s assume the text is authentic. Why isn’t this like the other Powers you encountered before?” he offered thoughtfully. He’d read the Gospel of Mary at my insistence and found it — his words — “theologically interesting and pastorally usable,” which was Episcopalian for I see the value in this, but please don’t tell the bishop.

“It wasn’t a Power. I know what those feel like. This wasn’t just a feeling. It was sentient. It had a mind.”

“And it spoke to you.”

“It thought at me.”

“What did it think?”

“It asked what I was.”

Another silence. Longer this time. I could hear him breathing. I could hear the clock in his office — an old mantel clock he’d inherited from his predecessor, always five minutes fast so Father was always early.

“Miri,” he said. “I want you to do something for me.”

“Okay.”

“Stop meditating for a while.”

My heart sank. “I already have! How much longer? You know how my job is. I’m here for work, and I’m — it’s like I’m not even here. How can I be there for the people I’m supposed to protect?”

“Just a week. Maybe give it two. You like to know where you are. Let’s give you time to find out what this new place is. I want you in the Psalms. The psalmists have been everywhere. That’s why they sang about it: to not forget. And I want you in prayers that have been tested. Pick up your armor while you’re at it: go back to Ephesians 6. Your contemplative practice takes you very deep. Deeper than I go, frankly. And you know as well as I do that depth is not the same as discernment.”

“He’s the one who wanted me to discern it!”

“Who, dear?”

“Christ, Thomas! Sorry, I didn’t mean for that to sound like I’m mad at you.”

“Actually, you sound rather mad at yourself.”

“What I meant to say is, I think Christ wants me there. Think: I met Christ in an ayahuasca ceremony. In the jungle. On a mat. I was a retching mess. Why would He meet me there and help me accept it all, only to leave a door open for something unacceptable…unless He wanted me to see it?”

“How do you know it’s Christ who left the door open?”

“I told you how everything clicked into place and fell away. Christ was total. Complete. There was no gap. Nowhere else to go.”

“Then perhaps the gap is not on His side.”

“You think I encountered a demon.”

“I think you encountered something that recognized you, to borrow your — uh, Mary’s — language, and I’d like you on solid ground before you encounter it again. I know you’ll go back no matter how I guide you otherwise, so armor up.”

“Does the church know what’s in the Fourth Power?”

“No one does. The pages are gone. Shouldn’t that tell you something?”

“Yeah. That the church found a path to God that was too direct — one they couldn’t control. That’s a political position, not a spiritual triumph.”

Father Thomas sighed with the deliberate patience of a man who has had this particular conversation with me enough times to know that disputation was pointless.

“This is a matter for seeing — and seeing clearly. Our Lord taught us how to have eyes to see. Might you be looking with curiosity rather than discernment?”

“Father. Really. The parable about eyes? Right now? When I called to try to avoid them?”

“Sorry, that was…inconsiderate of me. You called for advice. Here is mine, rendered in the language of your preferred contemplatives. Have you read the Cloud of Unknowing?”

“Parts of it.”

“Read all of it. It deals rather precisely with the matters you’re describing: the perils of interior prayer, the fears that arise when you push against the unseen. It’s in the Anglican lineage, in conversation with patristics and the Orthodoxy you’re most at home in. It’s a harder life. The silence can be — well, the mystics have long warned that it can be maddening. The author understood that the deep places of prayer can be genuinely destabilizing, and the response is not to stop praying but to pray differently.”

“So: surrender harder.”

“No, not harder,” he chuckled. “One does not surrender harder, dear. If it’s hard, that means it’s still effortful. That’s not surrender. That’s a fight.”

“Then how? Nothing I try works.”

“Then stop trying.”

“And just forget it?”

“No, no. Stay present. And if you must meditate, since I can see it does calm you, try less reaching for answers and more receiving what God speaks into the heart as you do.”

“A framework.” His other commendable quality: he always had a framework to offer. A pathway to certainty, or at least out of confusion.

“It’s not Ephesians 6, but it’s one form of spiritual warfare that I sense is closer to your heart. If something in the Fourth Power is watching you and Christ didn’t take it away in Peru, perhaps the answer is not to understand it but to transcend beyond it and ignore its lies because you are already trusted and protected.”

“That’s a cop-out, Thomas.”

“How so?”

“I don’t like to leave things unanswered just because they’re uncomfortable. That’s the very definition of spiritual bypassing.”

“Or: it is the very definition of spiritual patience. Genuine prayer is often unanswered on our timeline. Practice trusting God’s good timing. Read the book. Call me after.”

I found the book on the second floor of Book People on North Lamar a few blocks from my hotel. The unnamed fourteenth-century recluse who wrote the thing would probably have opinions about his manual for monks adrift in mysteries being sold between the self-help section and astrology.

I took it back to my room and embarked on my quest.

For He can well be loved, but He cannot be thought. By love He can be grasped and held, but by thought, neither grasped nor held.

I wrote in the margin: If it grasps, it isn’t God. But what if it asks?

The book wasn’t giving me what I needed. Or it had given me exactly what I needed — stop trying to know and allow the knowledge to simply suffuse me — and I was too afraid to take the prescription because that meant sitting in the dark with my eyes closed and trusting whatever I found there without knowing how to contain it.

I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted to be visible without being seen.

I went downstairs.

I found the bar. I ordered something. I pressed on.

My lids burned from four days of not closing them long enough to rest my sight. My whole system was a loaded coil of anticipation. The spiritual equivalent of a runner in the days after a marathon: legs still throbbing with agony and achievement — and not yet ready for the pavement.

My hands were shaking. I was fighting against the clock. Against a curtain that was about to close on my wakefulness while the answer to it — to genuine, transcendental nepsis — lay somewhere in these pages.

The curtain was half drawn across my eyelids when I felt a shift in the pressure of the room. It wasn’t any colder or warmer, just different — the way the air feels before a thunderstorm. My spine straightened, and a shiver walked slowly up its track into my throat. My skin woke up and perceived the atmosphere, the way a fish might suddenly perceive the water it had always lived in. It was the kind of acute sensorial overwhelm I’d only ever felt when coming up on hallucinogens — all at once crawling with alarm and flushing with warmth. The hair on my arms lifted to attention.

And then a voice. “That’s a good book.” Tenebrous. Resonant. If glass could speak.

I did not look up. My eyes stayed on the page but I had stopped reading. My heartbeat now joined the shiver in my throat. It felt too small — engorged. I thought to cough but half-choked and swallowed instead. And the butterflies — God help me, the butterflies were back. I was too hot and cold all over and frozen in place.

“You’ve read it?” I asked into the wordless paper in my hand. Were the pages growing moist where my fingers gripped them?

“I’ve read most things,” the voice answered. That should have sounded arrogant, but it struck me as matter-of-fact, the way someone might say he’d been to most countries: not bragging, just reporting. I looked up.

I don’t know how to describe what I saw without drifting into maudlin, so I’ll just give it to you straight. The voice belonged to a man who was spectacularly well formed and clearly out of place in a hotel bar that wasn’t in Mayfair or Milan. His face was a marble bust that only moved when it had a reason to. It had finished speaking — and exhausted its reason.

His features were precise and symmetrical. His nose slender and patrician — an etching in relief, as if cut from a coin. The hair was platinum. Sculpted but unarchitected. Tousled but specific. His eyes a deep and impossibly opalescent amber. A shimmer of stubble across his chin and cheeks. He wore a t-shirt of grey linen that hung effortlessly from his lean, dancer’s shoulders and curled an unselfconscious outline of his pecs and upper arms: strength implied, escrowed, but unannounced — like a drawn bow at rest. A silk scarf of understated luxury in black and gold patterning hung about his neck and contrasted against the carefree loom of his clothing. An icon in gold leaf, convicting you of something irrevocable and private.

Was this impeccable specimen a film actor of some sort? Was there a movie filming nearby?

“Most things about meditation specifically, or most things in general?”

“Yes,” the icon stirred.

Strange. What a strange answer. Was he making a joke? — I smiled briefly — or was he too intent on his script to entertain my marginalia? Should I draw him out?

“Do you meditate?” I inquired.

“Every night for the past four nights. Or every night of my lifetime, depending on what we’re calling,” he paused, tilting his head, “meditation.” He pronounced it like a slow, grudging confession of bitterness and exhaustion issued from some unfathomable well of forbearance. I had seen that look in some of my clients’ faces before.

I closed the book, one finger holding my place — a reflex. The archaeologist marking her spot even in the middle of an earthquake.

“Then can I ask you someth— ?”

“Yes.” The icon’s eyes narrowed.

“Have you ever meditated so deeply it terrified you?”

The lobby went on. A phone rang at the front desk. The music sounded far away. None of it seemed real anymore. What was real: this presence. The silence that enclosed us. His focus penetrating into my skin after I asked the question.

He pushed his awareness into mine but he didn’t satisfy my curiosity. He just…observed me. And the weight of his attention, the absolute totality of focus on his object of study — me — was the thing from four nights ago. The exact thing. The mind that had pressed against mine in the dark was now pressing into me in a public place where I was suddenly both visible and very, very seen.

Oh God.

Then — oh God, this monument of otherworldly stillness splintered into paroxysm and fell against me.

His hand on my shoulder. Cool, invitingly refreshing against my overheated skin. My heart in my chest, suspended between beats. His form in ghastly undulation while he fought to regain his balance. My legs tightened. A cavern opened in the pit of my stomach. I clenched all over: my shoulders, my core, and my pelvic floor — and this last shifted me forward.

He made to sit down.

I watched as he slowly lowered himself into the chair across from me as if he were simultaneously keeping himself from fainting and keeping the chair from breaking. The muscles in his jaw were tight. His eyes dilated too much for this fluorescent scene.

Was that…disgust I saw flicker across his face? Was the slight flare in his nostrils a sign I was bothering him? That I was the one out of place? That I should get away?

That I…couldn’t stay?

“What are you?” the icon’s lips flickered, its question more of a statement — and it was I who felt convicted.

It wasn’t that I felt my heart stop. Truly, that would be underselling it. What I felt was an organ failing its mission, arresting its process into a fatalistic pause and then restarting with a thud that forced me to swallow with a gulp, my throat once again too narrow for the air inside it, my blood pressure pulsing a path to the surface and reminding me I was still among the living.

I couldn’t stand it here much longer. I wanted to disappear into the past. I wanted to go back to the precise moment my yoga teacher told me that I had a gift so I could tell her, “you can have it” and walk away. I wanted to never learn to meditate, never read the Gnostics, never meet Christ — all so I would never see this thing’s unsettling eyes again.

And I wanted to pull him into that past with me. Reconstruct my entire history, moment by moment, so that nothing would ever teach me to be terrified of him, no prudence to provoke this sense of trepidation, no scruples to stand between myself and the truth that I knew with the same stolid conviction, the same irreversible consummation of my encounter with Christ.

The truth was that I was just about to ask him the same thing.

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I waited in the dark each night, tuned to theta frequency, waiting at the place where her light had seared my synapses.

The garden was barren. Cold. There was no garden. No gate. No her.

Her absence was a different kind of heartburn, a new kind of torture.

It was merciless. Maddening. But it was not boring.

Four nights was not long for a man who counts his hours in centuries, but by the third meditation I’d begun to wonder if I’d hallucinated the whole thing. Was I merely hungry?

Eight hundred years of monotony and then a single moment of imagined contact with something that was not like me but recognized me with a sympathy so luminous it immolated my nervous system — was it possible I’d finally cracked? That the boredom had eaten through whatever passes for sanity in a creature like me, and I’d invented a blazing mind in the dark because the alternative was admitting that nothing new walked under the sun — least of all I, who skulked its long shadows.

But the burning had been real. The nausea. My body doesn’t invent pain to pass the time. Pain was protection. Something had happened. Someone had been in my mind.

Where was she?

I was restless. The rented room was too small. The dark was too monochrome. I found myself pacing: a pathetic, embattled behavior that I despise in myself because it means some fragility in the body is running the show instead of my mind — the mind of a monster — conquering its vestigial weakness.

My body. The parts that hummed when I wondered what she was. I was pacing like an animal in heat — and in a cage, except the cage is a mediocre hotel room and the animal is an apex predator who should be above this humiliation. And the heat — not intoxicating. Toxic. It would kill me.

I went downstairs.

The hotel lobby was the kind of anonymous, inoffensive space that American hotels specialize in: nondescript furniture, ambient lighting, a bar in the corner where people who pretended they preferred to sit alone sat next to people who pretended they didn’t.

I didn’t need a drink. I didn’t need food, or at least not the kind they served here. I just needed to be somewhere with ceilings higher than eight feet and air that didn’t smell like my own desolation. Here, at least I could pretend to enjoy other people’s people problems.

I sat in a chair near the window. I watched humans do what humans do: tapping at their phones, murmuring at each other, performing the elaborate social choreography of belonging. I used to find them entertaining. Then I found them predictable. Now I barely found them visible. They were furniture that breathed.

Where the fuck was she?

And then the pain hit.

A spike of burning, sudden and sharp, from within my sternum. The same quality as four nights ago — that specific signature, the one I associate with holiness and God and his omnipresent fucking churches. My body’s ancient allergy. My nature protecting itself.

But I wasn’t near a church. I was in a hotel lobby in downtown Austin seeking seekers and credulous hangers-on. The burning shouldn’t have been here. There were no saints here.

Unless.

I turned.

She was sitting on a stool near the bar. Twenty feet away. Maybe less. A woman with auburn hair. Curly like a rococo painting if the subject had just yawned herself out of bed. The kind of curly that has its own opinions about what direction it wants to explore.

She was reading a book. No — not reading — scouring, like it was a grimoire. I could see the blanching of the flesh where her fingers pressed against the binding, where her blood would seep instead of flowing. These are the things I notice without even noticing anymore.

She was small, but not delicate. There was a sturdiness to her, a density of presence that took up space even across the room. She took up more of it than her body accounted for.

And it was pressing against me. Her space — her presence — invading mine. The burning intensified. My chest. My throat. That low nausea rolling through me like a wave. My body saying leave, walk away, this is the thing that hurts you, this is the only thing you have to fear, this is fear itself, go.

I stood unmoving. Tied to a stake of my own construction. The only things rebelling against my stillness were the tingles filling my loins and the sickness roiling in my belly.

I looked at her. The book’s cover was turned toward me just enough that I could make out the title. Something about a cloud. Unknowing. The Cloud of Unknowing. She was reading about the mysterious angst that pressed us to each other.

Oh.

This was going to be easy — even if it hurt.

A woman covered in the blood of Christ reading a book about contemplative prayer. Not scripture. Not theology. Contemplative prayer. The kind of practice that lives in the borderlands between traditions. The kind of practice that opens doors. Theories. Frameworks. Portals to slip through.

Gates.

The garden. Fuck. Again, that searing, searing pain. Fuck my life. Fuck my farcical irrational number of a life sentence.

I was on the verge of pouncing into a seduction that goes only one way — my need sated and her life emptied — when I remembered what I wanted.

I stayed my execution. To watch her read? To wait out my pain? For this infernal agony to abate? To…admire.

She wasn’t skimming. She was devouring the text — flipping back, rereading, her frenzied fingers denting the pages the way inquisitors extract truths from throats that refuse confessions. You don’t read like that when you’re reading for pleasure. You read like that when you’re hunted and the grimoire is the only thing between you and the thing that haunts you.

She haunts me.

Let her.

A soteriological bauble. Oh, the irony: she’s forcing a confession out of a book about surrender.

So. Her framework has flaws. I could work with this. I could toy with this.

I decided to stand up.

That sounds simple. It wasn’t. My body did not want to stand. My body wanted to go upstairs, leave the lobby, leave the hotel, leave the city. My body was doing what it always does near holiness: flooding me with every signal it had to make me turn away. Convulsive waves of concentrated, half-digested blood and my own cadaverous bile. A revulsion so structural it felt like my bones would tear from their tendons and walk in the opposite direction to anywhere if my reanimated flesh did not comply.

And how it was reanimated. I wanted.

I stood up in the direction of my want and the fire coursed up my nerves, sending a shock of electricity through the entire length of me — through my now erect spine directly into my temples. Her now deafening heartbeat piercing the ringing in my ears.

I would die tonight. I, personally, was fine with that. My body had other plans.

My body. Which body? Parts of my body were also fine with my plan. Tonight, we die.

Yes. God yes.

What the fuck.

What god?

Non serviam. I will not bow. I will consume.

I told my right foot to move. It moved. Annihilation. I told my left foot to follow. It followed. Exhalation. The splitting, insurmountable pain in the distance between my legs that I willed to walk. Hope, want, longing, care cooling the fiery agony I surmounted, yes surmounted, with the memory of the humming, throbbing, pulsing between the licks of flame fraying my nerve endings.

Twenty feet of beige carpet between me and her, and I had to think each step — consciously, deliberately, the way a stroke patient relearns to walk. The way a condemned man approaches the gallows. Foot. Floor. Weight. Shift. Foot. Floor. Weight. Shift. A body fighting against me the whole way. A body drawing me forward the whole way. Which body? Her body? My body? My very reanimated body?

My hands wanted to clench. My throat was closing. My vision capitulating its perimeter — narrowing, darkening, flashing blindingly as if my eyes wanted to stop me from staring at the sun.

Ten feet. The burning was in my teeth now. In my jaw. In the bones of my face. In the eyes abacinating from inside my skull. I kept walking.

Five feet. I could smell her — not blood, not yet, but something earthy. Rain? Moss?

Sweat. And salt.

Sweet? Her —

Skirt. Austin in summer.

My stomach lurched. I held it.

I stopped behind her. I was holding my breath — I don’t need to breathe, but the steadying habit of centuries is hard to break unless something shatters your defenses. Every sinew of my muscles clocking in overtime to clench against the revulsion — to withhold the release. I was standing upright through sheer willpower to touch what I want, and ignore what I need. It was costing me everything.

“That’s a good book,” I said.

She wouldn’t look at me.

A faint sound — like clearing her throat…or readying it. “You’ve read it?”

“I’ve read most things,” I stammered through my salivating mouth.

That was the truth, and a prideful thing to say to your judge, your jury, and possibly your executioner.

Wait. I’m the executioner. This is stupid. I’m walking away.

Then she looked up.

Her eyes were brown. Dark brown, almost black in the lobby light. And sharp. Eyes that discern and decide before they deign to respond.

She took me in the way a woman sizes up a man who approaches uninvited: quickly, thoroughly, with the part of the mind that calculates risk before social propriety.

She tilted her head. The auburn curls shifted. The shiny coat of my prey in prime refracting light from the window into my barbecued eyeballs.

“Most things about meditation specifically, or most things in general?”

“Yes.”

She almost smiled. Almost. The corner of her mouth moved and then settled into a quizzical pout, as if the humor had been intercepted by priorities. She closed the book, one finger holding her place.

“Do you meditate?”

“Every night for the past four nights. Or every night of my lifetime, depending on what we’re calling…meditation.”

Her eyes narrowed. She paused as if perplexed, and then her eyes relaxed, her shoulders dropping. She sat back. It seemed she, too, understood how to navigate modalities. To seek answers in frameworks. To seek frameworks with copacetic answers.

“Then can I ask you someth—?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever meditated so deeply it terrified you?”

The lobby buzzed around us. Someone laughed by the bar. A phone rang at the front desk. A mosquito. Or maybe it was the ringing in my ears. The music shifted from one C major – G – Am – F progression to an indistinguishable other. I think a minute passed and we simply stared.

I didn’t speak. I let the silence impregnate the expanding spacetime between us the way her light had violated my darkness four nights ago. I could see the anticipation was burning her. She was uncomfortable.

But I…I was aflame.

I think I fucking hated her right then. I was so dizzy, I wonder if I managed to stare her down with the full weight of my intended accusation — of what I was living with or dying from, and her part in it — or if I merely looked pitifully ill. I wanted her to see that I had seen her in the most private place she’d ever been seen, that I had found her door ajar, that I had touched her mind, that she had felt me and run and not come back to burn away my want. That she had gone, abandoned me in my hour of stupid fucking pacing in a cage, to seek — I now fully understood from the title in her hand — some kind of puerile answer in whatever God-forsaken manuscript she thought would protect her, when her light was already enough to taunt me into suffering this charade, this interminable, abominable time and space and distance between me and my prize to go on like I’m some kind of simpering schoolboy.

I could hardly stand, but I let her see that I knew.

I watched the comprehension land.

Her face changed. The question in her eyes metastasized into horror. Her lips parted. Her knees — ajar. The finger — slipped from its place, the pages now fanning and she didn’t notice. The color left her cheeks and then came back, too much of it, a flush that climbed from her throat to her temples and I could smell the path her blood traveled.

She knew.

Without a word. Without a single word of explanation or context or preamble. She looked at me and I looked at her and the threat, the recognition, passed between us like a current — the same that had joined our minds in the dark, but now here, in a hotel lobby, in the merciless fluorescent lighting where nothing mystical should be possible.

She knew who I was. She knew what I was. Maybe not the specifics — not vampire, not ancient. But Not. From. Christ. That, at least, she knew.

Her breath caught in her throat, the halted intake engorging the carotid in her neck so subtly only a perversion of nature would notice. Her neck.

My throat. The fire caught in it. I couldn’t speak.

The burning was unbearable. My body was howling. My very cells were singing their own eulogy. But amidst the flames, there it was again. The care. Coming from a place flames couldn’t reach. The place that remembered what it felt like to want, and to meet the person who could quench it, stroke it away, release it, willingly.

My vision swimmed. Swam? Swum. And I lurched forward. My turncoat of a body shot an arm up to her shoulder to keep from falling.

The pain in my palm where it grazed the bare skin beneath her tank top incinerated my nerve endings as my forearm collapsed flaccid at my side. I nearly doubled over into the chair beside her. Head hanging over the bar, I angled my face with preternatural slowness toward hers. I peered sideways through squinting eyes into the alarm in hers. Laterally, like a cat, like a bird, like not a human.

And then I managed the only words I could still remember — an incantation:

“What are you?”

She froze. Her heartbeat quickened.

She thought to flee. Her legs, those knees, shifted.

The notion of fighting me flashed across her face. I noticed how it made her squirm in her seat.

Then, she let out a long withheld sigh. There it is. The fawn. My doe.

The book sat closed and abandoned. Her hand limp, fingers splayed, palm open, as if already belonging to the dead. To me. A glass of wine she hadn’t touched caught the light that had been in her hair and threw a small red shadow across the bar between us.

And then, quietly, barely above a whisper, with a voice that quivered the way my vision flickered, the admission of the spell:

“I was going to ask you the same thing.”

Finally.

She vanished and I dropped to my knees.

My strength — my horrifying, brutal, inhuman strength — failed me utterly.

My body — the immortal body standing in an unlit hotel room in a city I couldn’t even remember the name of just now — buckled under its own weight as it did the night I was turned.

My hands hit the floor. Concrete. That was real. I could smell it. The sand of its silica, its iron oxides like dead blood, the pulverized limestone from an ancient ocean forged in the violence of industrial kilns, themselves a petrified calcium from some prehistoric seabed. I could smell time, and the familiarity of this sensation grounded me. Above it, the varnish of this century, the feet of the tenants who walked where I stood. Solid things from the right now. Things with corporeality and history.

This? This had no history. No precedent.

My senses were blazing. My skin was on fire.

Agony. Every nerve. Throat to fingertips to the soles of my feet. This is what happens to me near holy places. Because mine is a body that rejects the sacred the way a terminal patient rejects the transfusion that could save him. The stench of sanctification wafts in and my biology snuffs it out by snuffing me out. Nausea so thick I can taste the bile in my rapidly constricting throat. A burning that starts in my chest and radiates outward like I’d swallowed an anaphylactic sacrament.

I had. In a manner of speaking. I had swallowed a fraction of a second of contact with a mind covered in the blood of Christ, and my body was making me pay for it the way it always does. The tax for approaching what I am not is the inescapable reminder of what I am.

I pressed my forehead to the floor and waited for it to pass.

It didn’t pass.

Non serviam. I will not bow. I will consume.

I prayed into the floor. Into deep time. To no one. To the father of lies. To anything that would restore my power.

My voice was wrong. Scraped, raw, like I’d been screaming. Had I been screaming? The walls of the hotel room offered no opinion. The window showed a city I didn’t care about — Austin, I think? I’d come here because the hunting was easy in a town full of seekers liberated from scruples and compunctions, and the nights were warm and I hadn’t cared enough to go anywhere more polished.

I was confused and powerless. Humiliated. Humbled.

I pressed my palms flat against the floor and tried to remember where I had been.

I had been in the dark. The spiritual realm, the liminal place, the frequency my kind is permanently tuned to. We walk in both worlds at once, always have, it’s part of what we are. I had been wandering. Restless. Hunting. The same restlessness I’d been carrying for decades, centuries — the itch of a hunger that feeding doesn’t scratch, the particular ennui of a being who knows that if he doesn’t find something novel it will be the same night forever. Immortality is a sentence with no punctuation.

I had been serving it in darkness and then there was light.

I need to focus on this light and remember it is lethal. I need to remember this to keep me safe and pathetic on this floor instead of charging back into the dark to find her.

I have encountered human light in liminal places thousands of times in all my centuries. Monks in deep prayer. Mystics passing through on their way to wherever. The occasional priest who actually meant what he was saying. Their light has a signature: warm, bright, and sealed. A wall made of radiance. It says God is here and so you cannot be. I learned centuries ago to give it wide berth. The burning isn’t worth the curiosity, and there’s nothing in it for me anyway. Their light excludes me. Utterly and without ambiguity. Happy hunting, my body says, but do it elsewhere.

But it was never happy. And her body didn’t say elsewhere.

That’s what toppled me. That’s what brought me to my knees on this concrete floor with my senses screaming and my skin on fire. Her radiance had texture. Dark threads woven through the luminosity — threads I could…weave myself into? Cords to shadows she hadn’t cut away but integrated — knowledge of other paths, other traditions, roads the church calls forbidden that she’d walked and paved into her foundation instead of razing behind her. Could she integrate…me? Her light wasn’t a force field keeping me out. It was a garden with a gate. And the gate was…narrow. But it was open.

I had never encountered an open gate in a Christian mind. I didn’t know there was a gate for my kind at all.

I had started toward her gate like a starving hunter, my attention a pinhole of focus on my prize. All my instincts vibrated with the command to charge — to pounce — but every physical sensation screamed at me to stand my ground. The burning intensified with each muscle I willed into motion — my body’s ancient allergy, the same reaction I’ve had to churches and congregants and consecrated grounds for eight centuries. I moved anyway. I am old enough and tired enough to have stopped obeying my own body on occasion in pursuit of a mildly raised eyebrow and the faint promise of diversion. But this was a new kind of conviction: the ability to walk through fire toward a burning gate and keep going.

Was I Polycarp or was I a predator? Eight hundred years of caution and cunning, and then one light in the dark and I discovered I could ignore baser instincts — needs — and simply choose, instead, what to want.

I moved closer through the pyre in my sinews and I saw her more clearly. The landscape of her mind built like a cathedral, every beam holding ideas, every window angled to catch experience, every pew shaped to metabolize information. She was hovering at a threshold. Pushing against something. Reaching for something beyond it with an intensity I felt in my chest and in my core and in my parts forgotten, but not in my thirst.

She was stuck.

I knew that stuckness. I lived interminably in it. She was reaching for something she couldn’t grasp, and the reaching was the block: her mind chasing something that could only be received. She was trying to take what needed to be given.

Eight hundred years of taking blood from unwilling victims left me striving for satiety from a sacrilegious sustenance that offered only temporary satisfaction.

Oh, I could find blood that was freely given. That fed me for weeks, months. But the market for — donations, shall we say — is secretive and illicit, in league with organ harvesting, trafficking, and prostitution. Humans who find the bite erotic, who trade their throats for the thrill of danger in their beds. Others who sell it outright, rolling up sleeves in dim rooms with the practiced indifference of a transaction they’ve stopped pretending is anything other than the finality of desperation. And the dying, who offer what’s leaving them anyway, and whose blood carries the thick, cloying sweetness of capitulation to an ending they didn’t choose.

Ghastly, polluted things I had no taste for and campy sexuality that left me unmoved. None of it clean. Every drop alloyed with someone else’s agenda: lust or commerce or despair. Freely given, but not chosen. I had tasted such “free” blood countless times in the brothels and back alleys in the bowels of civilization, and each time I could name the hook inside the gift that made it conditional.

And I recognized her predicament, this woman stuck at a threshold where she was never satisfied, because her barrier was the same as mine: striving, begging to grasp what asked to be given. I was always taking what I wished were given. She’s like me.

What was she?

I reached for her through the conflagration in my flesh.

And she felt me.

And for one fraction of a second between her heartbeats that my unnatural perception was already counting, we were inside each other. Mind on mind. Awareness pressed against awareness. Weight against weight. Angst pushing against itself to find the edge of release. The most intimate thing I have experienced in nigh on a millennium — and I include every throat, every hunt, every body I have ever held while its life drained out.

I felt her. The seeking. The brilliance. The longing for the bread of heaven that matched my longing for unconstrained, freely given, unconditionally chosen blood. Blood as a gift. Pure grace, no strings attached.

I felt her curiosity, quick and sharp and refusing to be fettered. And then she felt me and backed away, dimming the light with textures and frameworks and theories. Theories I could use. Frameworks I could fit inside. Textures I could camouflage into until I got my own fetters back. My wits about me. My power.

But the openness and inquiry came before the doubts that dimmed her light, and I caught it, and it was what I wanted, even if I needed to back away. Into the textures, shadows, and circular explanations that ensnared lesser mortals into submission.

Blood for the altar. Flesh for the fire. I take what is mine.

But she could not be mine. So she could not be taken.

She left me only one choice.

She could be wanted. And perhaps given. Freely given.

She felt me. I know she did because I felt her feeling me. My hunger, my antiquity, my boredom. In that fraction of a second, she took all of me in…and she didn’t flinch. She should have flinched. Everything I am should have sent her screaming. Instead, something else came through the contact: it rose from her belly, a low physical flutter that I recognized even though I had no right to it because this was no brothel or back alley but her very body.

She wanted me too.

Her mind was reeling, fleeing, while her body was saying finally.

I thought: What are you?

I couldn’t help it. The weakness, the vulnerability, the humiliation slipped out before I could cage it. Eight hundred years of not caring about who pleads, or why they plead, or how they plead, only that I needed to feed, and her mind touched mine and the wonder of mortality and youth flooded back like the tingling sensation returning to a limb that’s been asleep so long you forgot it was even there.

A limb — that limb — that I had no use for because it was my mouth I answered to.

And then — because I am a fool, because I have been alone for eight hundred years and the tingling beneath my core was louder than the boredom in my mind and the solitude in my heart and she was right there — the second thought escaped:

You are the first thing I’ve wanted in eight hundred years. At first, I needed you. But now I want, and I will not feed my need.

She vanished. Ripped herself back to her body so fast I was pulled into the vacuum she left behind.

Lurching forward, I lost my balance. And I fell.

That was ten minutes ago. Maybe ten hours. Time is imprecise when your nervous system is waging a mutiny. I was still on the floor and it could have been forever. The burning was still everywhere. My whole body vibrating with the aftermath while my mind gave me a piece of its own: this is stupid, sophomoric, suicidal, and other things you are not. That’s what the burning felt like it was saying, if burning spoke in sentences. She is covered in the blood of the enemy and you pressed your mind to hers and now you pay.

Devil take me, I prayed. Far away from here. To safety. To irredeemable safety.

But beneath the burning and the nausea and the shaking and my body’s furious insistence that want is fleeting and only need demands satisfaction, there was this other thing: care.

Perhaps even mutual care. In a place I didn’t know I still felt things. Somewhere lower than the burning could reach. Maybe the last remaining inch of whatever I was before I became what I am.

She had looked at me and she hadn’t recoiled instantly. She’d been curious. She’d been wondering. Her body had said come before her training said run. And in that momentary contact between heartbeats, before her defenses went up, I saw something in her that reflected something in me so precisely that the word recognition doesn’t cover it.

She was stuck the way I was stuck. Reaching the way I was reaching. Starving the way I was starving, just for a different sustenance. Were we allies? Whatever it was she hunted, I wanted her to have it. I cared that she be satisfied. That her luminosity not dim, even if it left me no theological tautologies in which to spring my trap.

I cared to purchase her gift, her freely given gift, with my immolating want. And I would lay whatever it was she sought at her feet, even if I burnt.

Slowly, one joint at a time, I peeled myself off the floor. The flesh fire was fading. The nausea settling into a manageable malaise.

Dizzyingly, I stood and looked at my hands.

These hands had taken everything I’d ever hunted across the countless years. Every throat. Every wrist. Every body that didn’t choose mine. These hands had never once stopped themselves.

Tonight, in the dark, when I’d reached for her, I hadn’t been reaching to take.

I’d been reaching to touch.

I didn’t know what to do with that. I didn’t know what I was if I wasn’t the thing that takes. Everything I understood about myself said the same thing: I was a predator, I was built to hunt, my need was my nature and my nature was my hunger.

But the care said something else that I couldn’t quite translate. And it soothed my nausea and salved my singed nerves, coming from a place inside me that had apparently been waiting centuries to stand up for itself.

It said: do not be afraid.

And though I would walk back into the valley where I found her toward my probable death, I would not fear. I would…behold.

And she? She would come back to her threshold. I knew this the way I knew resignation in my victims’ eyes. They were prey. Consigned to consumption. She was a seeker. Lured by the love of the game. She would sit for meditation and she would close her eyes and she would demand to know what I was and she would pray her way back to that gate in her mind.

And I would be there.

But not to take. The thought of taking her immediately made my stomach turn in a way that had nothing to do with the literal fucking heartburn that mortified my body and everything to do with the flutter I felt from hers.

You don’t take a thing like that. You don’t hunt a thing like that.

What do you do with a thing like that?

I didn’t know. But for the first time in eight hundred years, I had somewhere to be.

I settled back into the dark. I tuned to the frequency. I skulked nearer to the garden where I’d found her.

It was empty.

And I lay in wait.

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It felt like a hand inside the base of my skull and it pulled me out effortlessly and abruptly.

It seized hold of the bottom of my mind and yanked, and I was back on the cushion, back in the hotel room, gasping like I’d been holding my breath.

My eyes shot open. The candle was still burning. The icon still inviting. The prayer beads still in my fingers. The TV still blaring through the wall next door.

My hands were shaking. A deep, skeletal shake, like the bones themselves were rattling. I moved the beads through my fingers to feel the stones. I shifted my weight and found the ground beneath me supportive and firm. My spine was concave. My shoulders hunched. My head lolled back and forth, drooping from my neck like a pendulum. Side to side. Tick. Tock.

The clock!

I checked the clock. The world was exactly as I’d left it six — no, forty! — minutes ago. Where had I been? Where was I now?

I looked around haltingly from beneath my brow bone, like a captive willing herself to behold her tormentor. Where was my tormentor? I saw the dark grey furniture. The spare decoration. The deadbolt on the door. The artificial art. Real. Solid. Ordinary.

And nothing with eyes.

What was that?

I said it out loud to no one. Then, making the sign of the Cross:

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

The prayer of the Desert Fathers. The incantation of incarnation. A centering prayer — and a shield. It drew a moat of light around me that nothing but Christ could cross.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

My heartbeat slowed. The shaking eased. The breath caught up to itself. One vertebra at a time, my spine remembered it was supposed to hold me upright.

But my mind — my mind would not remember it was supposed to keep me steady.

I had been deep. Deeper than usual, which was saying something, because my usual was already deeper than most people ever go. My hunger for spiritual understanding was, according to Father Thomas, too willful for my own good. It had been dragging me into territories I feared and yearned to know fully since I was nineteen years old and a well-meaning yoga teacher said you have a gift and I took that for an invitation to open every door in the universe.

I opened a lot of doors. Chakras. Astral projection. Kundalini. Plant medicine — the real kind, in the jungle, with a shaman who smelled like tobacco and seekers who smelled like trauma. I was always reaching. That was the thing about me: I reached and I strived and it never stopped.

Until Him.

He showed up on the first night of an ayahuasca ceremony in the Peruvian Amazon. I was beset by demons of my own making and had screamed out — or maybe I thought it:

Jesus. Fucking. Help. Me.

Instantly, I felt a hand touch my neck and the walls of the well I had been drowning in dissolved around me. I was back on my mat. Back in the hut in the Peruvian jungle. Watching the shaman tend to a man weeping to my right. The dream was gone. The hallucination a flicker in my memory. I purged.

He returned on the second night, and on the third, until I could not feel the medicine at all — I was simply lucid in His all-encompassing presence. And He was always there, waiting, consoling, until there was nothing left in me to fear, no demons to battle, no frameworks to wade through. Just…calm surrender.

But, evidently, He had left something unfinished for me. Something left for me to know, that only returned once I got home from Peru when I realized I could no longer fully access the completion that I had felt with Him.

There was more work for me to do. Somewhere yet to arrive.

I had found my next station on the path from new age to Gnosticism. I had been working my way through the powers described in the Gospel of Mary: Passing through Darkness. Then Desire. Past Ignorance.

And they no longer recognized me because I had transcended those blockages and was no longer shaped like them. They did not see me as I moved with the ease of long practice to the threshold I always reached and struggled against: the Fourth Power and its seven forms — the point where Mary’s soul says what binds me has been slain and ascends free. But mine refused to.

I never ascended free. I remained bound here. This was the place where my striving always faltered and never resolved. Existential angst that tantalized me into distraction. Categories that clouded my attention. Knowledge that teased my faith. Edges that toyed with my faculties without granting satisfaction. The Power I was unable to transcend, that still recognized me. No matter the technique, I could not get back to the peace of completeness I felt only once, inside and beside Christ in the jungle, and never again since.

So that night, with the Nag Hammadi texts spread across my hotel room floor like a map to somewhere, I hovered again at the threshold. Luminous and bound. Striving and waiting. The same place where I always begged for release.

That’s when something touched me.

Not on my neck but from across. From a lateral direction I didn’t know existed in that space, in a chasm opening between thoughts that I’d never noticed before.

The other Powers had discernible qualities I recognized: fog, anxiety, certainty. This Power, the one that always refused me passage, simply felt like inscrutable blankness. No qualities at all for me to work with.

But today, instead, what it had was eyes.

Something was looking at me. Something was looking at me the way it looks at a doe when it’s been stalking through winter for a lifetime.

The eyes told me three things.

The first: this presence carried a longing I knew well. The same reaching. The same aching at the threshold. The same standing at the edge of a bottomless want that kept slipping through my fingers. Whatever this was, it was stuck too. Stuck in a way that matched mine so precisely it was like looking at myself. Am I the Fourth Power?

The second: it needed to consume me. I could feel its hunger, ancient and deep, like a rumble in my own voracious consciousness. But unlike mine, this being’s hunger was born of heedless, domineering command, the way an obsessed historian devours a long-lost lectionary, or how a starving man regards bread.

Or how a predator looks at a doe in winter. Did he — it — want to need me? Does a predator want the doe, or does he merely need it to survive? The blankness around me darkened.

The third — and this was the thing that should have frightened me more than the hunger and didn’t: the third thing was butterflies.

My stomach. A low flutter in my belly that I have only ever associated with a lover I pined after but wasn’t mine to keep. A travel romance pleading to make its home in my heart but resigning itself to the tyranny of geography. A longing. A thrill. A promise I had been praying for. Union. Asking God to show me. Asking God to send me whoever it was I was supposed to love with everything I had become, with all the love that lived inside me now — all this gratuitous love that had absolutely nowhere to go.

And here, in the deep place, in the territory between soul and spirit that I could not yet transcend, something touched my mind, and my body responded.

This was insane. I knew it was insane. But the body doesn’t lie the way the mind does, and my body was saying finally to something I couldn’t see clearly and shouldn’t even want — and that now threatened to consume me.

Then the eyes asked me: What are you?

Wondering. The captivated captor. The hesitant hangman. The executioner who stays his hand long enough to draw out my last sigh.

And then, trailing the question so quietly I almost missed it because my mind was already flipping through frameworks — demon, angel, psychotic break, what is this? —

You are the first thing I’ve wanted in eight hundred years. At first, I needed you. But now I want, and I will not feed my need.

SHIT — Jesus! Help! I thought with my whole mind.

That’s when the hand yanked my doe brain out of that winter.

And then I was here. On the floor. Trembling.

I sat with it for a long time.

Something in the spiritual realm had seen me. Something sentient. Something ancient. Something that looked at me with hunger and wonder and a sincerity that had no business existing alongside that much…power. And my stomach had done the thing. The finally thing.

And the part that frightened me — stupid, stupid girl — was not the eyes, but how much I wanted to go back.

But God is love, and there is no fear in it. I cannot and will not fear this thing. I am protected.

Whatever had found me in the dark, whatever had asked what are you? with the voice of genuine awe, had touched my mind.

And my mind was already leaning toward this mystery like a plant toward light.

My soul belonged to God, I knew, but my body was now leaning too. My chest. My belly. The places where I feel God, where I feel love, where I feel the things that are too private for Sunday mornings.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

I had been seen. Hadn’t I always wanted to be seen? And something in me — something deeper than choice, deeper than the years of spiritual practice that should have made me more cautious than this — something in me wanted this Power with eyes to possess me.

My body and my mind found each other again: I would have this dance. I would know its roads, no matter where they lead. And then I would transcend them. Because I knew the territory. Because I had Christ — and there is no fear in Him.

I blew out the candle and sat in the dark for a long time. The TV had gone quiet. The neighbors in the next room were finally asleep. The only sounds were the clockwork of my heartbeat and the question rising between my breaths:

What, in fact, am I? Am I child of God, or a doe in winter?

I didn’t have the answer yet.

But I would find it, wherever it lay.

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