by Brian Hodge
My devotion was reciprocated, and the time we spent together was lovers’ time. But while I shared her bed and body, I tried not to delude myself that it meant the same thing to Maia as it did me. Millions of people may love their dogs, but none regard them as equals. I kept alive the cut on the side of my lip, where she’d bitten me that first morning, the pain tiny and exquisite. But her teeth never returned to the spot, or sought any other.
“Why not?” I asked one bright afternoon. Now I understood why Aztecs had allowed their hearts to be cut out, and islanders went willingly into live volcanoes. “Is there something wrong with my blood?”
“Is that all you think you are to me?” Maia looked at me with such intuitive depth it felt as if she could take in my whole life between eyeblinks. “I can get blood anywhere.”
“I didn’t say you had to take it all.”
“Yours is special. It shouldn’t be wasted.”
When I suggested they must be reserving me for something, she only smiled, with mystery and allure. We were out walking, had gotten far from home by this time of day, Maia showing me some of the mundane, everyday sights of Dublin. Her arm looped in mine, she steered me down a side street, more purpose in her stride now than before. When we were across the street from a brick building that looked like a school, we sat atop a low wall. Before long the doors opened to release a flood of young boys in their uniforms—dark blue short pants and pullover sweaters, with pale blue shirts and red ties. We watched them swarm away, and one in particular she seemed to track, until he was lost from sight.
“I had children once. But they were killed by soldiers,” she said, as if the grief still came unexpectedly sometimes. “Life is cheap enough now but it was even cheaper then. Before I could have any more, things happened to me, and then…I couldn’t. So I just watch strangers, children whose names I never know. I’ll pick one out, pretend he or she is mine, and it goes on like that for a year, maybe two. And then I go to another school and pick out a new one, because I’ve noticed the other’s looking older, and I don’t want to know what becomes of him. Or her. It’s easier to imagine a good future than to deal with the truth, watch all that bright potential start to dim.”
“Then obviously I’m an exception.”
“Exception. You’re that, all right.” When she touched my leg, I could feel the thrilling heat of her. “I was following you that day. Like I always did. I’d first noticed you six, seven months before. Such a pious little thing—it was the most adorable trait. Like little American boys growing up wanting to be cowboys, before they find out the world doesn’t have cattle drives anymore. I wanted to save you from yourself, if I could. And then the bomb almost took care of it for me.”
I’d never once imagined our history predating that day.
“You were standing there between your friends’ bodies. Too shocked to cry. I wish I could tell you I steered the bricks away from you in midair, but something like that is beyond me. I think I was as surprised as you that you were okay. But I couldn’t walk away without touching you. And then…then I saw your knee.”
Across the street, the flood of schoolboys had been reduced to a trickle: the laggards, the stragglers, the delinquents.
“Sometimes—and it is rare,” Maia went on, “I can taste more than life in someone’s blood. I can taste all the truth of that person. Lilah’s the same way. The blood and the flesh of a special or gifted person are full of images. Take them in and we can learn things they might not even know about themselves.” Her eyes locked on mine, clear and hard. “If you think the rite of Holy Communion is only two thousand years old, you’re a few thousand short.
“When I licked the blood from your knee that day, I knew you were either going to be a saint, or a butcher.”
I thought at first she meant working in a meat shop. Then I realized what sort of butcher she meant.
“From one to the other, that’s quite a jump,” I said.
Maia shook her head. “They’re closer than you think. There’s always been a certain type of man, if he can’t save a soul, he’s willing to settle for exterminating it. Your Church has attracted more than its share. And I tasted that potential in you.”
She’d kept track of me ever since, she admitted, always knew where to find me when she felt like watching me sleep. And while it disturbed her to see me hand my life over to the Church, she was patient enough to let it run its course without interfering, knowing all along that it wouldn’t last.
“What made you so sure?”
“You were too raw and open for it to last forever. There’s no faith in anything so strong it can’t be shattered by one moment’s glimpse of something it doesn’t allow for. And I knew someday you were bound to see one of them…and it would leave its mark on you.”
I looked at my wrists. Maia was right. There, in the flesh, over the veins… Many weeks had passed, yet there was still a mark where that tormented Christ had grabbed me with his handful of shattered bones. Since he’d pierced the skin and his blood had mingled with my own, a transfused message that I was to carry inside until, perhaps, I found someone able to read it.
His commission: Save me from that impotent, slaughtered lamb they have made of me.
With one fingertip, Maia touched the healing split on my lip. “I’ve tasted you before,” she said, “and I’ve tasted you after. So I know the difference, Patrick. He’s in there. You still carry him. We can use that.”
VI. Haereticae pravitatis
I didn’t know what she was waiting for, one day being as good as another to bleed. I was used to it. I wondered how much Maia would require; if it made a difference to her where it came from, wrists or throat. Wondered if she alone would be involved, or Lilah too, or maybe all three of them, opening me like a heretical gospel written in flesh and blood and seed. It was Lilah I feared most, because if she were involved, I could only be read once.
Still, I never considered running.
They indulged their appetites, neither flaunting them nor hiding them from me. Only Lilah’s necessitated fatality, and as I came to understand their habits, they didn’t always feed together, but when they did, it was usually at her instigation. Most often, Lilah or Salíce would disappear for a few hours, some nights both of them, coming home after they’d coaxed some man into joining them. As huntresses, they had an easy time of it.
“After more than two and a half millennia,” Lilah told me one morning, when she was in especially good humor, “I can personally vouch that one thing about men has stayed exactly the same, and always will.” She grinned, relishing the predictability of my gender. “Every one of you thinks you’re virile enough to handle more than one woman at a time. And you’re so embarrassingly eager for your chance to prove it.”
I’d never seen the room where the Sisters took them. It was always locked, like the room where Bluebeard kept dead wives. Nor did I see the men themselves; didn’t want to. But on those nights when I knew one would be coming, I’d sit nearby in the dark and listen to their laughter, their ignorance-fueled anticipation. I’d hear the latching of the door. Then it would go on for some time. Often the men grew vocal in their passion, bellowing like love-struck bulls. The Sisters would laugh and squeal. Eventually I’d hear a sudden snap, or worse, a thick ripping. The overwhelmed voice would screech louder still, but I never could discern any clear division between ecstasy and agony, even after their cries degenerated into whimpers and moans that never lasted very long.
The final cracking open of the bones was the worst.
One morning after they’d fed, Salíce found me huddled before the hearth and a blazing fire. I was disheveled from having been up all night, and clutched a blanket around my shoulders because I couldn’t seem to get warm.
“Awww, look…he’s shivering,” Salíce announced to an otherwise empty room. “He misses home, I’ll bet.”
I wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t turn around to look at her. Maia and Lilah would still be upstairs sleeping it off. Maia wouldn’
t let me see her for the next several hours after she’d gorged, but I found that easy to live with.
“Well, he was a noisy one, even by the usual standards, I’ll admit that much.” Behind me, Salíce was coming closer. “Tendons and ligaments like steel bands, Lilah said. What a snap those made.”
I could feel her directly behind me, warmer than the fire, and I jumped when she bent down to snake her arms around me in an unexpected hug. Patronizing, I first thought, but when she kissed me atop the head, I wondered if instead she wasn’t trying, in her way, to tell me that she wouldn’t bite.
“Nobody forces you to listen, you know,” she said. “There’re plenty of places in this house where you wouldn’t hear a thing.”
I nodded. Salíce didn’t need to tell me this, though, just as I shouldn’t have had to tell her that listening to them feed was the best way of putting my future in perspective.
“You’re worried about the divination? That’s all?” She almost sounded amused. “Forget about Lilah, why don’t you. So she looks at you like a kidney pie. The thing to remember about Lilah is, if it wasn’t for scaring people, she wouldn’t have any fun at all.”
Salíce told me to wait right there, that she really shouldn’t show this to me, but so what. She disappeared into an adjacent room that overlooked the back lawn. It was full of tall windows and sunlight, locked file cabinets and computers. When she came back, she handed me a small news clipping.
“It was a bigger story in Italy,” she said, “but I’m assuming you don’t read Italian.”
It was dated the previous week, about a theft from the church of a small village seventy-some kilometers north of Rome. During the night, someone had smashed a spherical crystal reliquary and stolen the relic inside, which wasn’t identified, only described as dating from the earliest years of Church history.
“Our friend Julius had this done. He lives in Capua, with a beautiful castrato boy named Giovanni. He used to throw the best parties, until Vanni deafened him with a pair of nails, so they’re pretty sure he’s dying now. But I think he wanted it that way, because he still loves Vanni after what that little eunuch did.” She rolled her eyes. “They want to grow old together.”
Since I didn’t know who or what she was talking about, I read the article again. It still struck me as an incomplete puzzle. “I don’t understand what this has to do with me, or Maia, or…”
“Don’t you get it? The relic—it’s for the divination. Lilah can’t bother you with those lovely white teeth of hers if she’s got them busy on something else, can she?”
Ghouls already; now body thieves? Asked what the relic was, Salíce just laughed and told me to be patient, adding only that if it was genuine it could prove to be quite illuminating. Pour my tainted stigmatic’s blood into the mix, and it might be their best opportunity yet for stealing the secrets of Heaven and Hell.
“I’d’ve thought you already knew them,” I said.
“You think because we’ve lived a long time we hold privileged information?” She shook her head. “There’s some older than we are, and they’re no better off. We’ve all got our ideas, but there’s too much we can never agree on.
“At Julius’s last party, two years ago, we managed to summon and imprison an Ophanim. We thought we might get some answers out of it. But it was already insane. And wasn’t flesh and blood like Maia and Lilah are used to. So we raped it and sent it back, out of spite, and that was the end of it. We didn’t learn anything that most of us hadn’t already suspected.
“But you,” she said, with a faint smile. “We’re thinking we might learn more from you than even one of Heaven’s inmates. We don’t even have to summon you down—you’re already here. And all you have to do is bleed.”
* * *
When she learned how much Salíce had told me, Maia wouldn’t speak to her for two days. After it got to be too much to contain, they shouted at each other for half an hour.
“You didn’t have any right!” Maia cried. “I should’ve been the one to tell him those things.”
“Then what you were waiting for?” Salíce asked. “Until he got too old and decrepit to run away from you?”
I listened to them argue as I listened to them feed: out of sight and out of reach.
“The problem with you, Maia, is that there’s still a part of you that refuses to admit you’re not like the rest of them, and never can be again. Aren’t you ever going to accept that? Ever?”
“Because I’m not strictly human anymore, that means I can’t still be humane?” Maia’s voice then turned bitter, accusing. “Of course, you do have to possess that quality before you can slough it off.”
“Inhumane—me? They always thank me when I feed on them. What I take they’re already swimming in to begin with. They can’t wait to give it away. You can’t make any such claim, so don’t you even try.” Salíce groaned with exasperation. “My god, you still think you can fall in love, don’t you? You pick them out when they’re children and you dream about what might’ve been, and on the rare occasion you meet up with one again when he’s grown, you think if you put on enough of a front you’ll both forget what you are.”
“Keep your voice down,” Maia warned.
“You’re afraid he’ll hear something he doesn’t already know? Oh, wake up, he’s got excellent hearing. The only thing he doesn’t know is how you look after a meal. That’s the one thing you can’t pretend away, isn’t it? Not even you’re that naïve. And damn right you are that most of them would have a problem loving you back if they saw how bloated your belly gets with all the blood.”
Whatever Maia said next I didn’t hear. I was too busy facing Lilah when I realized she’d been behind me, watching me eavesdrop.
“It’ll blow over. It always does,” she told me, and nodded in the direction of the argument. “Salíce always has had an attitude of superiority because she never has to get any messier than any other little cocksucker bobbing her head beneath a table at Mr. Pussy’s Café.”
“Do you ever resent that?” I asked.
“Do I? God, no. But then, I know what really makes Salíce so insufferable over it in the first place.” Lilah laughed, long hair uncombed and tangled in her face, as she leaned into mine. “Nobody’s afraid of her. She hates that. Maia and me—they fear us. But nobody fears Salíce.”
“I’m not afraid of Maia, either.”
Lilah loudly clicked her teeth. “But you are of me.” She stared triumphantly through the crumbling of my self-assurance. “Then maybe you’re only half-stupid.”
As she’d predicted, the argument soon blustered away, ending when Maia stormed from the house and cooled down out on the back lawn. Through the windows I watched her, a slight distant figure in somber grays, walking slowly amid grass and gardens, finally sitting beneath an oak, where she distractedly petted one of the slobbering mastiffs that had the run of the grounds. When I braved the dog and joined her, we sat awhile in that silence that follows the clumsy dropping of another guard from around the heart.
“After that first day, and the bomb,” I said, “why didn’t you come to me again? I’ve always wondered that. I’d’ve followed you anywhere. I’d’ve been anything you wanted.”
“There’s your answer, right there. It’s too easy for people like me to take whatever we want. Where’s the joy in that? After so long, it’s only gratifying one more appetite.” She watched her hand scruffing the black fur across the dog’s huge head. “It’s important to me that if someone like you comes back, it’s because you do it on your own.”
“Because it’s more real to you then?”
Maia shrugged, stared off into the gray sky. “What is real, anyway?” she asked, and while once I thought I had those answers, now I wasn’t even sure of the questions.
In the black-and-white faith I was raised in, there’d been no room outside of Hell for the likes of the Sisters of the Trinity. And while I realized they weren’t goddesses, neither were they demons. I no longer believed in d
emons, at least not the sort the Church had spent centuries exorcising. Where was the need of them, other than keeping the Church in business? One pontiff with a private army could wreak more havoc than any infernal legion.
Because of Salíce, now I understood that the Sisters weren’t the only ones of their kind. When I asked how many of them there were, Maia didn’t know, or wouldn’t say, and I realized with an unexpected poignancy that whatever monstrous acts it was in their nature to commit, they were no worse than what went on between wolves and deer, and that those who committed them were still as lost in their world as the most ignorant of us mortal fools in ours, working and loving and praying and dying over our threescore and ten.
Black-haired and black-eyed, hair tousled in the breeze, Maia turned her unblinking serpent’s gaze on me, so unexpected it was almost alien.
“How much would it take to repulse you?” she said.
At first I didn’t know how to respond, then asked why she’d even want to.
“Because it obviously takes more than eating men alive to do it. You don’t find that interesting about yourself?” She wouldn’t look at me, instead smiled down at the dog. “I’ve made lovers of grown-up children before, and sometimes they’ve run and sometimes they’ve stayed, but do you know who I’ve noticed is most likely to stay? It’s you refugees from Christianity. Now why do you suppose that is?”
I had no idea.
“My guess is it’s because, most of you, you were weaned on the idea of serving up your god on a plate and in a little cup and eating him in a communal meal. Then when you can’t believe in him anymore, and you find us, and see how willing we are to eat others just like you, how we need that…then isn’t a little part of you, deep inside, relieved? Because that means you’re the god. Your ego is still too fragile to see yourself as just food. So you must be God, right?
