Hel
Grief is a language I never properly learned. I spent three weeks trying to conjugate it anyway, driving from one forgettable town to the next, feeding just enough to keep moving and never enough to feel anything. Millbrook receded in my rearview mirror, and Father Roth receded with it.
I haven't known such pathetic weakness since I was turned.
Then I heard the rumor.
It reached me the way rumors reach something like me, not through gossip, but through appetite. A ripple in the air two towns over, the unmistakable residue of a feeding so controlled, so precise, that only someone who fed the exact same way would recognize the signature.
Three women in Ashford were treated at the same clinic for what their charts politely called unexplained exhaustion. Apparently they've had unmanageable fainting spells and missing hours of their lives. One of them, according to a nurse I charmed into talking, swore she'd spent the evening with a man whose eyes had gone very dark just before everything went black.
I know that particular kind of 'dark.'
It took me four days to find him. Four days of nursing coffee I didn't need in Ashford's diners, of walking its narrow high street at dusk, chasing that same electric hum I'd first felt the morning he nearly took my head off with his car door. When I finally found the source, my hands went cold in a way they hadn't in over a century.
He was alive.
***
I watch him from across the street through the fogged window of a wine bar with a name too clever for a town this small. He sits in a corner booth, collar traded for an open shirt, and I almost don't recognize him without the black and the exhausted decency he wore like a second skin in Millbrook. Emphasis on almost.
The woman across from him laughs at something he says, tips her head back, and bares the long line of her throat like an offering she doesn't even know she's making. She has the specific, starved prettiness of someone who apologizes for taking up space and can't quite believe her luck that someone is finally looking her way.
And boy is he looking alright.
Just walk away. I tell myself that for nearly an hour, sitting in my car while the heater ticks as it cools, watching gold light spill from the bar onto the wet pavement. I tell myself Michael Roth is not my business anymore, that Vera made her point clear enough among the headstones, that grief bled dry is grief you're finally free of.
Then the woman stumbles out on his arm forty minutes later, and I know exactly what's about to happen, since I've done it myself countless times before.
I follow them to the alley behind a shuttered bakery, close enough to taste it when it starts—that thinning of the air, that electric hush that comes right before a hunger like ours opens its mouth. He has her pressed gently, almost tenderly, against the brick, his hand cradling her jaw the way a man might hold something he intends to keep dear, and she is sighing a name into his collar that isn't his.
Her pleasure is real. That's the cruelty of it. I watch her chase her own release like it's the last good thing she'll ever feel, and underneath it, invisible to her, I watch him take it. Not blood, not breath, but the raw, embarrassing desire that lives beneath a person's skin, drawn out of her thread by thread until her knees finally buckle and he catches her, gentle as a father catching a fainting daughter.
She'll wake up tomorrow feeling hollowed out and call it a hangover.
I step out of the shadows before I've decided to.
"Hello, Father."
***
He doesn't startle. That, more than anything, tells me everything about the three weeks I spent mourning a man who was never actually gone. He lowers the woman carefully onto an upturned crate, brushes damp hair from her forehead with something that might almost pass for tenderness, and turns to face me, his features settling back into the mild, patient mask I remember from Millbrook.
"Helena." My real name, in that same unhurried voice he used to hear confessions in. "You followed me."
"Vera told me you were dead. She described it, Michael. I mourned you."
Something moves behind his eyes; not quite guilt but not quite amusement either.
"Vera found the church that night. She found a body wearing my collar and my wedding ring, burned past recognition, and she was satisfied enough with her own handiwork not to look closer." His mouth curves, humorless. "I've had a long time to learn how to make sure someone finds exactly what they came looking for."
"How long, exactly?"
"Longer than you'd believe. Long enough that I stopped counting around the time your kind started calling themselves succubi and mine started calling themselves men of God. Becoming one seemed the easiest arrangement, in the end. No one questions a priest's late nights. No one questions why the lonely and ashamed keep coming to him and leaving lighter than they arrived, Helllll."
The low growl of my name makes even my skin crawl. He must be something more than I; else, why would his true nature unsettle me so? I've seen more than most, and yet my heart still pounds.
Behind him, the woman stirs faintly on her crate, murmuring something soft and sated in her sleep. My stomach turns, and it's no longer hunger or curiosity.
"You feed on their want," I say slowly, understanding arriving in pieces. "Not fear. Not blood. Desire. That's your hunger."
"And you thought yours made you a monster," he says, almost gently. "I let half a parish confess their most private longings to me every week for eleven years before I ever laid a finger on one of them. Guilt seasons it beautifully if you're patient. But I guess you already know something about that."
"Don't," I say, and hate how my voice shakes on the word. "Don't you dare compare us. You stood in the woods and told me you were trying to save me."
"I was." For the first time, something like weariness cracks through the mask. "I've spent three centuries telling myself the same lie you're telling yourself right now: that there's a version of this hunger that doesn't cost anyone anything. There isn't, Helena. There's only the version where you're honest about the cost and the version where you pretend you aren't paying it."
***
We end up two streets over, in an all-night laundromat that smells of bleach and fabric softener, because apparently even things like us need somewhere ordinary to stand while the world falls apart. He buys two coffees from a vending machine neither of us will drink and sets one in front of me like an offering.
"So what happens now?" I ask. "You go back to Ashford's little wine bars on your eternal hunt, and I go back to running from my own sister for the rest of eternity? Is that the arrangement?"
"What do you want to happen, Hel?"
The question sits between us longer than it should. I think of Millbrook—of Elaine's kind, assessing eyes; of the apartment I abandoned mid-lease with half my life still folded in its drawers; of the strange, unfamiliar ache of missing a place, something I haven't let myself do in over a hundred years.
"I want to go home," I say, and the admission costs me more than I expected it to. "I want Millbrook back, and I think you owe me that much, since you let me believe you were dead for three weeks."
"And if I say no?"
I lean in, close enough to smell the wine and the borrowed want still clinging to his collar.
"Then I go find Elaine myself and tell her exactly what her husband does after confession. I'll even tell her what he tastes like, if she asks nicely."
It isn't really a threat I want to make good on, not with the same conviction I'd have had a month ago, but I need to know what he's actually willing to lose.
"Or," I add, softer, watching his jaw tighten, "you could just sleep with me instead. Call it professional courtesy between colleagues. I promise I'm considerably less trouble than a confession."
"No." He doesn't hesitate, and there's no performance in it, no priestly restraint straining at the seams the way it used to in Millbrook's confessional. Just a flat, tired certainty.
"I'm not doing that. Not to Elaine, and frankly, not to you either. You don't want me. You want a witness. Someone who's seen what you are and didn't run."
It lands closer to true than I'd like, and I hate him a little for saying it out loud.
"Fine," I say, straightening. "Then the deal is this. You help us move back quietly, no questions, no interference, and I promise to feed elsewhere. Not your parishioners. Not your little support group. Not so much as a bad craving in a hundred-mile radius of your church. I'll even help you come up with whatever rubbish you want to feed poor Elaine after she sees you have risen from the dead."
He studies me for a long moment, the coffee going cold and untouched. "And you'll keep that promise?"
"I kept your secret for three weeks without even knowing I was keeping it," I say. "I think I can manage this one on purpose."
Something akin to relief passes over his face, quickly buried. "All right. I'll help you move back, but Helena, if I so much as smell a feeding within my town again, the deal is off, and I will personally make Millbrook the one place on this earth you cannot hide in."
"Noted, Father." I offer him my hand, and after a beat, he takes it. His grip is warm, human, and entirely unremarkable, and somehow that unsettles me more than anything else about him has tonight. "I still have half a lease's worth of belongings sitting in an apartment three towns from here. If we're doing this, we might as well start tonight."
"Lead the way," he says, and for the first time since the cemetery, I feel something in my chest loosen. No, not trust, not exactly anyway, but its distant, wary cousin.
We leave the laundromat together, two creatures wearing the shapes of a priest and a woman he once nearly ran over, walking side by side toward my car and whatever is left standing of the life I thought had been burned to the ground. Behind us, in the alley, the sleeping woman will wake in an hour with a headache and no memory worth keeping.
"Oh, and Father," I say, suddenly.
"Yes?" He hisses.
"Call me Helena again, and you and I will have to revisit our little agreement, starting with Elaine."