What he had been before.
What he was becoming again.
Things could be different.Icould be different. A Savior instead of the saved.
His preacher was right. There was no difference between them. Just two men, running in a futile attempt to escape fate.
He just didn’t think it was going to happen so soon.
Decker brushed a blistered, shaking hand over his face, cradling his cheek in his hand. “Laurie.”
Laurie hadn’t begged him. Hadn’t given him anything but an envious, steady peacefulness.
He should let him die.
Bury him in a nice grave in the old cemetery at the edge of town, with a cross headstone and a plain inscription. The rest of them might follow. They would fight, but they would follow if they all became human.
If he tried harder, lived up to his potential instead of masquerading as human, would bodies soak the ground with blood? Would Cricket have died if he listened to the growing threat under the chapel instead of being snared by the promise of someone loving him as a human?
You love me as I am, but can I?
Thomas wouldn’t have survived the curse. His body and his morals would have rejected it even if he had awoken. Cricket would have been—Cricket. Wild and free, becoming even more untethered by true immortality. He would have been dangerous, and beautiful.
Laurie, you would be radiant. You would be good, and I could teach you what I am. What I know.
A choked sound left him, caught between a laugh and a sob.
Laurie’s heart slowed.
He didn’t know the first thing about being what he was. There wasn’t time between survival and fleeing his parents for the Americas.
I can learn.
I will take care of you.
You will hate me.
Laurie would hate him, but he would be here. Hate could be reasoned with. Death could not.
Fangs prickled at his lips, and the steady, focused, cloak of his ancestors—his maker, his mother—enveloped him in warmth stronger than a thousand suns.
You will be my only. My one creation.
Laurie’s head tipped to the side when Decker slipped his armunder his neck.
His fangs sank into his neck, smooth, easy, with a millennia of instinct. Venom-bitter blood trickled down his throat. He drank past the acrid tang of the attack, the sweetened taste filling him with a peace he’d always dreamed of, longed for, ran from.
He lost himself until Laurie’s face went grey and his failing heart stuttered, the only witness being the two pigeons gone still in the rafters.
Hunger consumed him until he and Laurie were one, and preservation of his kind tapped against him, whisperingenough.
Decker dragged in a breath, trance-like.
Home. This is home. We are home.
Guttural chanting in a language more ancient than Laurie’s God trickled from Decker’s lips, weaving together the fabric of his only creation in a ritual that was never taught, but engraved on the bones of every creature like them at their turning.
This is right.
