“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’d leave its mark on you.”
I looked at my wrists. Maia was right.
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:
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.
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, and 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 semen. 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 Salice 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 humour, “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 soooo 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 his laughter, his 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, Salice 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 … he’s shivering,” Salice 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, she 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. Salice 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.”
Salice 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, now, can she?”
Ghouls already; now body thieves? Asked what the relic was, Salice 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.
