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I rolled my eyes, staring back at the house. I could see in the windows. Valerie’s shape moved in the kitchen, but the Deacon wasn’t visible.
“Trust me, I don’t want to be here. But Valerie is, uh … friends with the Deacon and wants to go to church up here. I said no to Sunday service but compromised on this dinner thing.”
“She shouldn’t be here either,” Sorina said.
“What harm can he do?” I asked, not wanting to know the answer. The red, weeping Jesus from the small church stayed with me.
“I think you should know better than to assume he’s harmless.”
She was right. I knew better, but diving deeper into our past with Sorina wasn’t something I was ready to do. Not yet.
Why open your fears for someone new when you could hide them, play at being normal, be an unscarred human instead of this mangled mess of a person I seemed to be then. I cleared my throat, the scent of the Deacon still strong. “Maybe that’s why I’m here. To watch after her.”
Sorina leaned against a tree, her black dress hanging off her loosely. I could see the points of her nipples, the faint outline of her hipbones. The fabric wasn’t sheer, but it was thin. I didn’t think she wore anything under it, almost as if it were a formality to wear anything at all. The air was chilly. She should have been cold.
I’d never wanted someone before. Not the way a normal person should. The urgent flood of desire normal teenage boys felt—that was lost on me, taken from me.
But when I looked at Sorina, I wanted to bury myself in her, taste her, bite her. Not out of obligation, not out of order, but out of want.
And the hardest part to grasp, to stomach, was that I wanted her to do everything back to me. I wanted her to touch me, too. I wanted more than the feel of her hands on me as she washed me in her tub. I wanted something darker.
Shoving away my want, I snuffed out the joint, returning it to my pocket.
Sorina shook her head and reached for me, so I handed over the joint, and her fingertips grazed my palm.
“Why are you here? The real reason. No ominous fucking riddles. You’re like a walking omen.” It was a lie, but I wanted to jar her. She was like a poem, a dark and haunting one. English was my favorite class, along with mythology. I enjoyed being lost in the stories, the other worlds. Even in their horror, they were safe because they couldn’t get to me. Not the way a bitter memory could.
“To watch you. I’m here to watch after you.”
“I never asked you to.”I’m here to chase you.The thought was red in my head, circled by light.
“And I never asked to want to, but I do.”
“And I never asked to fucking dream about you, but here we are. Two new kids in a town that no one gives a shit about, hiding in the woods.”
“What happens in the dreams about me, Nicholas?” she asked, her eyes on me, but also one the house, as if every bit of her was tuned into it, waiting for someone to come out. To pierce our meeting with an arrow.
I didn’t want to be crude or scare her away. But the words I wanted to use would frighten someone like Kyrie off, not Sorina. I wanted to say they were wet dreams because I woke up soaking in sweat—soaking in tears. And there were other dreams, too. Dreams of her mouth on me, a slow release. My arousal mixed with the horror. She was a winged demon, with fangs, talons, a screeching cry that could kill you. A tail ripped off, red spilling all over the ground.
She was horrifying and beautiful in her wrongness. And though we existed together more often in night, in the dreams she was bathed in sunlight at times. “I—”
Valerie called for me then, and Sorina ducked down, hiding her red hair and pale skin from view.
I turned away, a faded goodbye falling from my mouth as I walked through the gate and back to the lawn.
* * *
I imagined his eyes white and unseeing behind his glasses. Not unlike Markus.
Not unlike the winged thing in my nightmares.
Vampire.
That’s the word I’d used for it, though it was more grand and horrifying than the romantic image peddled in movies and books at that time.
That wretched being was at the forefront of my mind on the ranch. The all-seeing being.
The son of God is a vampire,Markus had said.
