“And you killed his father who tried to kill you?”
“I did.”
“Father and son,” he pauses for a second before he asks me. “What did it feel like?”
Emotion wells up in me at his question. I thought I calmed down since realizing this isn’t Father Paretti but I guess not. The anger I felt against Brian comes to life as easily as a flame I’ve tended.
“Like I was being consumed, eaten alive from the inside,” I tell him. It’s true. In the moments when I confronted Brian, when I made the decision to go after him, it was like a monster coming to life and clawing its way out of me. I remember how I felt when my anger boiled beneath my skin like thorns cutting and piercing my body until I felt like a weapon. “I wanted to kill him. I decided on it, and when I decided on it there was no stopping me. Not even when he fought back.”
“Ah, so he did fight?”
I scoff. “He did. He tried. It didn’t make a difference. None of it mattered. Not even god himself could have stopped me. Hetried to kill me, cut me with a knife but it didn’t matter. And the thing is that when I saw the knife, I was relieved,” I confess.
“Why?”
“Why?” I let out a bitter laugh. It sounds hollow in the confines of the confessional. “Because I could do what I wanted once he gave me a reason. That knife freed me. A lot of people will do anything to survive, even kill to do it. It’s their last resort, you know?”
Not Father Paretti hums like he knows what I’m talking about. “Yes…I do know.”
“It wasn’t like that with me an-and those men. I was always going to do what I did to them. I didn’t have to, I told you that before, remember?” I ask. It’s silly to play along with him that he’s the priest I know, but in for a penny, in for a pound, right?
“Refresh my memory,” he says. That’s all the initiation I need to tell him what’s been weighing on me. Eating on me like decay and rot that’s settled into the abandoned houses down by the docks. Those houses were some of the first lodgings built in Vesper Point for the longshoremen and whoever built them did it with no thought to providing a safe and warm place for the souls that called them home.
There’s nothing safe or warm about those houses.
Those houses are too wet, too cold, too cheaply built that anyone staying in them inevitably fell ill. Even the strongest sailors couldn’t fight against it. My soul is like that. Too wet, too cold, too cheaply built. Nothing warm or safe about it. I’m dying.
“It wasn’t out of survival when I attacked Brian tonight. I could have left. Gone home and he never would have known I was there, and I didn’t have to kill Mike either,” I tell him, my words come faster as I speak, because I know even if this man is not Father Paretti, he might do what the priest did two years ago. He might assure me that I acted out of necessity, out of survival. He might swear that I “did nothing wrong”, that what happenedthat night isn’t my fault. I know differently. It’s all my fault. I know what I want to say now. I’ve thought the words so many times, but never said it to anyone.
“You asked me how it felt earlier and I want to change my answer now.”
There’s a beat of silence and I hear the scrape of a boot as he moves. There’s a sound of cloth and a soft thump like something heavy rolling over. The confessional booth creaks and I wonder if he’s up against the separating wall. I lift my face to look through the screen between us but I can’t see much. The only light in the church is the moonlight coming in through the big windows on the opposite side of the room. It’s enough to make out his shape, but only just. I see a flash of teeth in the dim light.
Is he smiling at me?
A shiver rolls down my spine and I scoot away from the divider. There’s an edge to everything that wasn’t there before. I wasn’t scared of Brian but now fear pools in my belly. It wraps itself around me like a snake and it’s hard to breathe. Why do his teeth look wrong? His smile is sharp like a knife, teeth longer than they should be but that can’t be right. I’m seeing things in the dark. That’s all it is. I swallow hard and drop my eyes from the not Father Paretti’s smile.
“I did it because it felt good,” I tell him. “I did it because I wanted to. I was happy they were gone and that I was the one to do it, and that knife. That fucking knife. When he swung it at me like the spineless loser he was, it was perfect. That knife became my reason and he was perfect for that one shining moment. He wasn’t a waste of space,he was mine. Just like his father. He gave me the excuse everyone else will understand when they find out because I know theycan’t understand me.I’m not normal, I-” my voice cracks and I swallow past the lump in my throat, “I was normal before but I’m not that woman. Not anymore.”
I’m crying when I finish speaking. I don’t wait for Father Paretti’s imposter to answer me. I get up and stumble out of the confessional. I almost fall when I trip over something, a bottle, I think. I hear it clatter and skitter across the floor of the empty church. The sound echoes in my ears as I flee home.
Eleven
JULIAN
The woman slams the door to the confessional booth and runs away crying. Naturally, I follow. I slip out of the confessional booth and head after her. She’s intoxicating. I have to know who she is.
“He gave me the excuse everyone else will understand because I know they can’t understand me.”
She’s killed and she wasn’t upset about it. At least, not once she calmed down. I can still hear her sobs in my ears when she burst into the church but somewhere in her confessional there was a shift. Clarity. The way her emotions steadied and I heard who she really was spoke to me, surprised me.
“I was normal before but I’m not that woman. Not anymore.”
Normal is something that was stolen from me when I became a vampire. Rosanna sucked it out of me and left nothing in return. For a very long time there was a void where I used to be. That was when Rosanna liked me best, and to be honest it was when I liked her best too. When we were together and I was nothing, we destroyed everything.
Nothing and no one was safe.
We went on like that for decades, until one day I woke up and there I was. The man I’d been before staring back in the bloody water of the puddle I’d passed out beside after a bender with Rosanna. We were vacationing in Budapest, at least that was the lie we passed off to the humans. I remember it was raining that morning. The gentle downpour washed last night’s supper off me and into the gutter. I’d seen myself before, of course I had but that was the first morning I’dlookedat myself. Rainwater got in my eyes, splashing up at me from the puddle as I leaned close enough to it that my chin was in the dirty water.
