Chapter 12: Miri Invites Him In

“I have made death a messenger of joy to thee. Wherefore dost thou grieve? I made the light to shed on thee its splendor. Why dost thou veil thyself therefrom?” - Baha'u'llah, Hidden Words, Arabic 32

I should have been brushing my teeth for bed, what with the operation commencing in the morning and my entire team on-call. Instead, I was brushing them to receive visitors.

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.”