“I admit, he is rather fetching when suitably sweaty,” Nagi said.“Nevertheless.Eddie is right.You’re allowing your personal misgivings to color the efficiency of our investigation.”
“You can’t just kick me out like this,” I said.“Not after all this.”
“You’re the one with the personal problem with Vic,” Eddie said.“We need him.Way more than we need you at the moment.So go sit this one out.Get some rest.It’s nearly dawn.”
“I need to see how this ends,” I said.
“Go home, Stacey,” Nagi said.“Yara.Please escort Stacey back to her home.”
“Yes, Master,” Yara said, from the front seat.
“I feel so betrayed right now,” I said.
“Yes, well, I’d much rather face your disappointment than your death,” Nagi said.
And they gotout of the car.I watched them call Vic as we pulled away, and I thought… fuck all of them.Fuck them right in the ear.
“Do you know where Hartshome Cathedral is?”I asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” Yara said.
“Can you drive me there instead?”I asked.
“Certainly, madam,” she said.
Brother Al was sittingin the Council Chambers, writing something on a piece of vellum.He paused, dipped his pen in some ink, and then continued writing.I stood behind him quietly, unsure of what to say, unsure how to speak.
“Stacey,” he said, without turning around.
“Brother Al,” I said.
“What brings you here at 5 in the morning?”
“Helping with an investigation.Eddie and Nagi sent me home.”
“Why are you not there?”He did not raise his head from his scratchings.
“I wouldn’t be able to sleep, and I needed some advice.”
“So you come to me,” he said.
He bowed his head and then sat his writing pen down on the side of the parchment.He turned, theatrically, and stared at me.He seemed as if he’d aged twenty human years in a night.His skin was cracked and patchy, and tufts of great white hair sprouted from his ears.A rather unflattering bald spot had cropped up.
“What happened?”I asked.
“Age.Sickness.Weakness.Vampires do not age normally; so long as we are fed a diet appropriate for our cellular regeneration.I have not been able to stomach much of the usual blood of late.My stomach has proven incapable of adequate animal fluid digestion.At the same time, I have vowed myself to swear off human blood.I am caught on the horns of a dilemma, as the young may say nowadays.”
“You drank my blood during the Zombie thing,” I said.
“And do I look the better for it?Or do you see in me the remnants of a great man, brought low by the disregard of his promise to the Lord?”
“Surely you don’t think your aging is because you violated your vows.”
“The Lord is a strange and mighty figure, unknowable to most.All we have are tracings, echo effects of His mighty hands as they move the cosmos.Though I can explain away through biological means my current fall from grace, is it not disrespectful to my faith to search for chemical answers when, in truth, the answer may lie further in my faith?”
“What are you saying?”
“I am a creature of contradictions,” Brother Al said.“A pious clergyman, as much as one can be who thirsts for the sanctity and forgiveness of the Lord for my sins.Yet also, I am composed of shadow etherium—darkness itself, interwoven with my DNA.I am a creature of the underworld, through and through, my existence derived through a curse handed down by the Lord God himself.And yet.Do we who scurry in the darkness—are we cursed forever by our natures to defy God?Or can we find faith, and transform what we are into something more?”
