“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 down 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 Salice 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?” Salice 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?
“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.” Salice 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 naive. 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. “Salice always has had an attitude of superiority because she never has to get any messier than some little cocksucker bobbing her head beneath a table at Mr. Pussy’s Cafe.”
“Do you ever resent that?” I asked.
“God, no. But then, I know what really makes Salice so cocky over it in the first place.” She 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 Salice.”
“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 greys, walking slowly amidst 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 someone like us 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 grey sky. “What
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 that they weren’t goddesses, neither were they demons. I no longer believed in demons, 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 Salice, 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
