Page 42 of We Were Eternal Once

I want him gone.

I shove open the gate to our courtyard and come up short—he is not alone. You sit next to him, speaking quickly. How did I miss the sound of your voice? Was my anger so great that I did not recognize you?

You glance at me, the words dying on your lips.

What were you speaking of? The secrets of the Elders? Please, do not say you’ve confided in him before me.

Rage turns my insides and I think once more of violence.

I smother it, because I will never win you if I defy you.

You do not invite me to the conversation. “Evening, Melinoë,” says Essemteu.

“Hello,” I greet in return. I pause just steps from you, waiting for my invitation to sit. It doesn’t come. You both stare at me, wordless.

I understand I am being dismissed.

He comes several more times, each while I am away hunting. I hunt alone more often now, choosing to wander the vast streets of Alexandria for several hours before picking my prey. Sometimes I follow the human I picked for several days before taking them. Other times I grab bodies in the street and feast.

We still hunt together, though it is less often. I don’t know what you do when I’m gone. Sometimes I think to hang back, to follow you, to watch.

You would know, though. I do not feel your presence, I know it. You would know if I were near, watching.

Essemteu’s visits are inconsistent. Sometimes they are daily, then he will disappear for several weeks, seen only at the full moon meeting.

These meetings have become spectacles. Something changed the day you spoke of the First, something that deepened the divide between the factions.

Theon says the First is proof that we should not feast on humans. “We are not a mistake—we are what comes after,” he says. He thinks this is a profound thing to say, waiting for someone to write it down like his heroes he studies.

But they’ve adopted the five rules. Sometime in the last few months, the rules snuck their way into the group. If they found my journal of scribbled notes of your history, they would dismiss me from the group. Would they risk your ire? By now every word you say is sacred, fodder to either side for their surety of their righteousness.

“If it is as you say, then the humans are the mistake, and we are what comes after…to correct that mistake,” Zahra smirks. Theon frowns, puzzling over his own words.

“We are like the gods,” Ardashir says, his gaze turning to you. He is reverent where Theon is critical. I expect that any day now Ardashir will kneel at your feet just as I do and ask to worship you. I suspect his intentions are of a more carnal nature. It upsets me and amuses me in equal measure.

I cannot fault him for loving you as you deserve.

“We predate the gods,” you say. You have not given them an age, I suspect you never will. Is it because you are not so old, or is it because your antiquity rivals our understanding of mankind? Theon tries to trap you in a lie, stacking questions like tiles, waiting for them to fall. He asks the same question two ways to weigh your answers.

“Which gods?” Theon asks. “There are an awful lot of them.”

Essemteu tsks. Even so many decades removed as a priest in the temple of Thoth, he regards them as holy. He once asked about my time in Delphi. Theon must have told him, I do not think I ever come up in your conversations with Essemteu.

“Do you still worship him?” he asked once.

“Who?”

“Apollo. The god of your temple?”

God? I do not recall a god, but a goddess. I try to recall the face of the serene statue that looked down on me as I worked, but I no longer see it. It warps from the feminine to the masculine. That cannot be right. Has time stolen this memory from me as well? Many centuries later I will find out he was right, that the temple in Delphi did not serve a goddess, but a god named Apollo. Perhaps I saw the face of Athena and her temple at the base of the hill, just below the main temple? Or perhaps I saw Eileithyia, who is said to have a small altar there?

When I recall that altar, all I think of is you making me on it, our blood covering its surface.

“I see,” he said, disappointed in my lack of piety. “What fragile thing drove your devotion?”

What should I have said? Ignorance, I think. Ignorance of you, of what was outside the walls of the compound. I knew only the temple and the gods and goddesses within.

“Poverty,” I said instead. He laughed, patting me on the shoulder as though I had told a great joke. Essemteu would never understand. He was a priest in his temple, the highest calling someone of his birth and station could hope to achieve. Even remade, he was afforded luxury most would kill for.