2. Bless Me, Father #2
"But for the both of us? It's gotta be a demon, right?"
I sighed and let my head fall back on my shoulders, staring up at the stone arches of the ceiling. "Well in that case it's my favorite fucking demon, yet," I said. I groaned and rolled my head, wincing at the crack, the bite of tangled muscles pulling. "We gotta tell Kais, don't we?"
Zach was quiet and when I looked at him again, the blush was evident on his cheeks. "Can you…can you do it without me? Or just…introduce the idea without me? Like when it's my turn to patrol?"
I scoffed at him. "You were eager enough to wring the details out of me! Fine, sure. Your shift is next anyway." I shook my head and started to walk away.
"Stav! Do you think…does that mean…she's coming?"
I swallowed and glared at the open doors of the church, vicious sunlight pouring through, stretching across wood pews and stone tile to just barely reach my toes.
"I don't think we're gonna be lucky enough to face a demon that looks like that, Zach," I said. "But just be ready, in case."
It would be a shame though, to have to kill a creature as beautiful as that. I hoped Kais would be faster.
I skipped the confessional for the next conversation, pulling Kais to the far side of the diner we used as a cafeteria for the community.
He sat across from me, easy going at first, laughing at the plain questions I posed at the start.
Was he having vivid sexual dreams? Regularly? Same girl every time?
By the time I got to the eyes he was upright and stiff, that cool brown skin turned almost ghostly white and faintly green.
I nodded, that was enough confirmation. We'd skip the specifics this time.
"Zach too," I said and Kais' eyes widened a fraction. "You hear anything from the flock?"
That was more my nickname for the community. I knew it pissed Kais off a little, but it was fun to piss Kais off a little. He got this twitch under his left eye as he tried to laugh through his irritation.
"Nothing," he said. "Got a couple adulterous thoughts last week, but it was community specific. I nearly suggested the couples just swap for fun and not worry about it."
I choked on my roasted beet, coughing through the laugh.
We ate mainly out of the garden and from the chickens we raised.
Looting had grown thin after the first year and we'd been quick to try and establish our own independent food source.
We weren't the only ones left alive. We were just one of the few groups trying to hold a little humanity together, rather than matching the enemy for violence and cruelty.
"You think demonic?" Kais asked, frowning.
"I dunno about you, but my dreams weren't holy," I muttered, staring at my plate as Kais shifted uncomfortably across from me.
"Fair enough," he said, nodding. "It's a new tactic."
"But to what purpose?" I asked. "I mean…what is this doing to us really, aside from the, um, obvious?"
Making me come in my sheets like a teenager every night .
"Have you felt groggy in the morning?" Kais asked.
I blinked and shrugged. "I'm not a morning person."
"I am. Zach is and he's been sleeping late too."
"I'm not really in a hurry to wake up lately," I said, and Kais fought his smile, shaking his head and rolling his eyes.
Over his shoulder a few women entered the diner.
Women were outnumbered in our community, and most of the ones we'd picked up came with husbands.
I tried not to think about what happened to all the other women of the world, the ones we didn't find.
But the few single women of the community had a habit of letting their eyes slide in our direction. Especially Kais'.
He had dark, tight curls that he let run a little wild on his head.
He didn't admit to it, and I didn't ever catch him at it, but I suspected he had some hair product stashed away because that wasn't a natural carelessness.
And while Zach and I, and the men brave enough to join us as we left the gates, all did a decent amount of manual labor around the community and a fair share of working out, it was difficult to get Kais to sit down for more than a few minutes at a time.
He either had endless energy, or he needed a constant distraction from whatever was running through his head.
But in spite of the attention he received, as far as I could tell, Kais kept to his vows.
I wonder what it's like to have restraint .
"You almost done?" he asked, sure enough starting to shift anxiously in his seat.
I nodded, focusing on my food for the moment, ignoring the invitation in Emma Keene's tipped head.
Kais got first glances, I got second—an unrefined and less beautiful option, but I knew how some women saw priests.
We were a challenge. Could they make us break?
Were they more tempting than our devotion to God?
What they didn't know, and I opted not to tell them, was that some of us just weren't very good priests.
Kais waited for me to take the last bite before jumping out of his seat. "Come on. It looks like a storm's brewing."
I glanced out the window and up to the gray clouds starting to gather. "What do you think they'll give us this time?" I asked, rising and taking my dishes to the bucket at the counter. "It's been a while since we had some kind of plague of carrion."
Kais pushed the diner door open and the whiff of sulfur, bitter and damp, hit quick.
"Hellfire," we both said.
I pulled the helmet of the fire suit off my head as I stepped into the old local station, sucking in a deep gasp of air.
It was hot inside the building, hellfire turning the world into an oven.
Most of the community was down in cellars and basements of the select few buildings we could man and keep cool enough for safety.
Old wooden structures had burned down years ago, before we even arrived.
Part of moving out of the city and up the coast was keeping up our access to a reliable water source. Move too far inland and the water supply started breaking down. Too close along the coast and you had to deal with the new residents of the bays and harbors.
"My turn," Zach said cheerfully, meeting me at the open floor of the fire station's garage. "Kais still out there?"
I nodded and rolled my shoulders, pulling the heavy, hot jacket off my shoulders. "It's moving north now. Should be done in another hour or so."
"Any more coming?"
"Not as far as we can see to the south, but you never know," I said, shrugging.
"No dreaming tonight," Zach said, pulling on his jacket and then helmet, patting me on the shoulder as he ran for the door.
I suppose I was supposed to feel relieved about that.
I set the helmet and jacket down on a bench, debating briefly if I could risk it before taking off the cowl and gloves too.
It was better to stay prepared, but I wouldn't do anyone any favors if I overheated in the middle of a second round of hellfire.
Will Norton, an old Boston city planner and current head of our community security, met me at the door of the office, a bottle of water in his outstretched hand. I guzzled it down gratefully, stepping inside and heading for the screens.
Bethel had a limited amount of power to work with, mainly from a windmill farm nearby.
A lot of the remaining human communities we knew of were nomads, traveling north into Canada, trying to out-run hellions.
The good news for us was that our choice to remain stable left a decent amount of resources to work with that the nomads had overlooked, solar panels and security cameras and computers we could rewire for our limited uses.
"Kinda typical," Will said, shrugging a shoulder. "You know, for hellfire."
I nodded, but kept watching. We'd learned a lot since the Rising, but Hell wasn't one for being predictable. "How’re the safe houses?"
"Kais is just finishing up with the last one," Will said, sliding back into his chair and slipping his glasses back down to his nose.
He tapped a series of keys, pulling up the images of the schoolhouse, the police station, the library, the church—all the buildings where people could wait out the latest disaster.
The school library and church were all on the southern end of town.
I'd just finished clearing the way back from the school, which also served as the growhouse for our food, and protected us from events like the one taking place now.
Kais and a few of our volunteers were gathered around the police station, managing the fires there and at the diner.
"And the gate?" I asked.
"Untouched," Will said, but he pulled the visual up for me.
We'd built our gate out of crucifixes when we'd realized it really was effective against the Hellion races. The wooden posts surrounded all of Bethel now, six square blocks of our small town. It wasn’t quite the picturesque little village it must’ve been before the Rising, but it was the safest place we’d found to offer our flock.
Hellfire didn't touch the gate, although it didn't prevent the hellfire from raining down within our boundaries, and no hellion could cross. Most wouldn’t even come within a few feet.
On the screen, the ground outside the gate was smoking, a few little fires still burning on what was left of the grass.
"Nothing coming for us yet," Will said, changing the screens to the cameras pointed out to the world.
Except there was something coming.
"Fuck, what is that?" Will breathed, sitting up in his chair. I leaned forward, squinting at the image. It was only a shadow, and a significantly smaller one than we usually saw coming for us. I held my breath at its approach, a softly sinuous quality to its movements.
Twin pin pricks of light appeared at the top of the shadow and my gut dropped.
"Shit. Is that…is that a woman?" Will asked. "Is there a woman out there?!"
She was burning, flames licking up the legs of a dress, dangling at the ends of her hair, still clinging to the tips of softly twisting horns on top of her head.
"No woman survives hellfire, Will. I'm going back out. Send Kais or Zach," I said, running for the door. " Only Kais or Zach, you got me?"
"Gotcha, Father," Will answered as I stuffed myself back into the fire suit, wincing at the title.
So she was a trap after all , I thought, even though I hadn't really seen her face. But those little pinpricks of light. It was her.
My dream girl .
The hellfire was north past the fire station now and I ran with my helmet off. I wanted to see her face. Look her in the eye for real. She had to be an illusion. If hell was smart, they'd have made all their creatures look like her.
The opening of the gate was two blocks south and I was panting by the time I reached it, the air still heavy with the smell of sulfur, with the heat of the fires.
She was there, on the other side, still limping slowly closer.
Aside from the horns— which weren't just on fire but were a gleaming gold, curling back and ridged like a ram's—this was absolutely the woman I'd been fucking in my sleep.
Except battered. She was soot marked, and I couldn't tell if the blue stains on her temple, shoulder, and her knee as it peeked through a long tear up her skirt, were blood or something else.
Her eyes held mine and the world seemed as quiet as it had in my dreams, her face bobbing over the corner of a large crucifix. I kept waiting for her to stop, to wince away from the gate like the rest of her kind, but she just hobbled closer until she was inches away. Then less.
I could hear Kais calling my name behind me from a distance, but it was muffled.
Her breath was sweet, brushing over my face as she leaned into the gate, embracing it in a way I'd never seen from a hellion before.
There was pain in her gaze but she sighed, knees giving out.
The flames dressing her vanished as she embraced the gate.
"Sanctuary, Stavros," she whispered, eyes fluttering shut.