Page 20 of Where Light Cannot Follow

Then stop.

What the hell am I doing?

I don't know this man. I don't even know where I am.

Then I remember Virgil standing beside me. He's lifted his face toward the figure, or whatever he perceives in this swampy, sultry cesspit. But there's caution in his expression, tension in his body. Like a cornered animal, uncertain if the approaching presence means harm.

"Who is that?" I ask.

Virgil's face snaps toward me. "You broke the loop."

I frown. "How long was I in it?"

"Only a few hours, I suppose, by mortal measurements of time."

Hours? Shame heats my cheeks and sends ice down my spine. I never surrender to this kind of base indulgence. Lust is a temptation I mastered a decade ago. Or so I’ve always believed. The more unsettling truth is not that I lingered, but that it felt effortless to do so.

Virgil's posture softens. Somehow, his cashmere hasn't gained the rumpled, damp appearance my clothing has acquired in the steam. He turns fully toward me. "Most souls I guide through this space spend days here. Months, even. Years sometimes.”

I scoff. Years. Wasted on desires of the flesh.

Virgil raises a brow but doesn't comment. He seems relieved to redirect attention from the figure still moving beyond us. "To answer your question, that's Satan's wife."

"Wife?" I glance back at the person in the shower. I understand there are different expressions of gender, but something in me knows this is a man.

Virgil considers me momentarily, and when he speaks, his voice quiets. "Do you see something else?"

"A man," I answer. The subject of our discussion runs his hands down his chest, soap sudsing and sliding along skin, drifting along defined abdominals, disappearing just beyond sight.

"You see a man as well?" Virgil asks, and it seems the first unguarded thing he's said, as though he speaks without thinking. He clears his throat and drops his gaze to the shadowy floor. "That is Satan's husband, then."

"Satan has both a husband and a wife?" I ask dryly. Of all the topics I wish to discuss with my perceptive guide, our mutual attraction to men is not among them.

Virgil's grin turns mischievous again. "None of this is real, Dante."

"So Satan—he isn't real?"

The smile vanishes. "No. He is very, very real. And you should exercise extreme caution regarding him. Don't speak one of his names unless absolutely necessary." There's such gravity in his expression that it sends a sudden chill through the environment, ice swallowing the shower's heat. He glances at the scene. "And don't touch what belongs to him."

"I have no interest in that man," I say.

Virgil gives me a look that suggests the hours we stood here contradict that statement. Shame courses through me again. Even disconnected from my mind, he's still privy to my secret failures.

He spares me from further self-examination by posing a question, laugh evident in his voice. "Do you see the door yet?"

I scan the room and realize, with a start, that I do. It's nowhere near the figure, but the knob glints dimly in a far corner. Virgil and I turn simultaneously, neither looking back as we exit. But something lingers in me, a foreboding sense that I’m not walking away from danger, but towards it.

10

VIRGIL

When we step back onto the bog's path, I hesitate mid-stride. Something has changed—a barely perceptible shift in the quality of the bruised sky overhead, the texture of fog curling between half-drowned trees. I remain mostly disconnected from Dante's mind, which means this alteration belongs to my perception alone.

I do not know why.

Dante moves forward like the unstoppable force he believes himself to be, his coat carving through the mist as he strides ahead. I quicken my pace to match his, but the discomfort of my realization refuses to dissipate.

My perception of this realm has not shifted in... centuries of mortal time. Perhaps longer. I have become a constant, a thing that exists in a state approaching inertia. I observe the changes of the world around me as I stand motionless. An artifact that witnesses mortal reality but remains untouched by its currents. The swamp has always appeared precisely thus to me: mournful, stagnant, eternal in its decay.