Chapter 2: Simeon On His Knees

"The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone." - Isaiah 9:2

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.