Chapter 5: Simeon in Elysium

"Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." - 1 Corinthians 13:12

^{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.