Page 24 of Good Vampires Go to Heaven

Beau looked dubious. “Ah never heard that before. And mah MawMaw was a traiteur. That’s a folk healer.”

“You learn something new every day,” Regina said, laying out her tools and setting them beside the towels Patience had already brought in.

“Want red hot. Need red hot,” Zeb continued to moan.

Tears welled in Regina’s eyes for some reason. Maybe belated shock at everything that had happened today.

“Ah tol’ ya he was delirious,” Beau said behind her. “Goin’ off the deep end.”

Definitely off the deep end. And a weeping Regina, who could only smell the scent of cool, clean rain, appeared to be going with him.

Whoever said “Pain makes you stronger” never had a wired penis . . .

Zeb alternated between agony and ecstasy.

First, soothing hands cleansed his body, all of it, head to toe, front and back, with warm water and pine-scented soap. It felt as if the washing went on for days. He wanted it to last forever.

Floating, floating. Warm water. Soft hands.

Like a mikvah, the ritual purification of his Hebrew religion, he mused. Not just a bodily cleansing, but a spiritual one, as well. Was there significance in that? A higher level of abrading away sin? A return to innocence?

Hah! Zeb had never been truly innocent. Not even when his father had taken him to the temple mikvah when he was a child and spoke softly to him of the laws set down for his people by Moses. As an eight-year-old, he’d been more concerned about a return to the running games with his cousins, or the honey oatcakes his mother had been baking that morning, or whether he should bash in the neighbor boy’s head for teasing his sister Leah for bed-wetting.

“Zebulan, you must walk a straight path in your life dedicated to God.”

No, no! Zig-zag is the best way, especially when being chased by Samuel. He runs like a gazelle.

“You must fast before the Shabbat, to show your discipline.”

But Mother’s oatcakes are so good!

“Love of Yahweh, that is the most important thing.”

How about other kinds of love? He might be a mere eight years old, but he was a precocious boy, and he had heard things, and he knew about strange dreams that brought damp linens.

“Anger is never the answer. You must learn to turn the other cheek.”

Hard to turn my cheek and throw a rock at the same time.

Would his life have turned out differently if his father had not died when he was ten? Perhaps a few more lessons in the mikvah would have molded him differently.

Water splashed on his chest, calling him back to the present, and he heard a female voice swear. This was no mikvah, he realized when he opened his eyes . . . both of them now since the crust had been softened on his one bruised eye . . . because women were not permitted in a male bath, and this was definitely a woman who was ministering to him. A red-haired woman. And a witch, besides!

“I am unclean,” he said, not at all what he’d meant to say. The ritual cleansing should be male only, just as the female mikvah was for females only, menstruating ones. And he should not be touched by female hands in his sinful/dirty state. Plus, he was married. Well, not anymore, but still . . .

He could not say all that. Too many words! “I am unclean,” would have to suffice.

But she seemed to understand and responded, “Aren’t we all?”

“Not you. Vangels are the next thing to angels,” he said.

“Hardly. And especially when it is discovered what I have done.”

Uh-oh! “You will be in trouble for helping me?”

“Not so much what I did, helping you, but that I did it without precise permission.”

In other words, you did what you knew would be forbidden. Just like a woman!