coming from the man next to me. Feeding in person would’ve been so much better than the scraps from their dreams, if only they would let me.
"What?" Stavros asked, frowning.
"I'm remembering pomegranates and you're remembering…" I caught Stavros' eyes, that deep shade of brown with little whispers of gold.
"My ya-ya—grandmother, in Greece," he said, eyes crinkling at the corners.
Love. That was the taste. I sighed and swayed. I hadn't tasted love in millenia.
"What is it?" Kais asked, his own grip tightening as Stavros' softened.
"That's how I can feed here," I said, holding Stavros' gaze for another second before looking ahead of me. "Emotions. Preferably the pleasant ones. It's not substantial, but it doesn't make me feel sick either. I won't touch your people."
We broke out of the small crowd and turned a corner to a side street.
"It's bigger than I expected," I said, craning my neck and trying to see how much of this abandoned town my priests had managed to claim for their flock. "Does the gate go all around?"
Stavros opened his mouth to answer, but his eyes snagged over my shoulder on Kais and his mouth snapped shut. I could pull at Stavros' threads and he would unravel for me. Of the three of them, he cared the least where I came from and craved me the most. And if I took advantage of that, Kais and Zach would probably toss me out on my ass. Better to be docile and cling to safety as long as I could.
Kais pulled on my arm and I turned, discovering our destination. It was large and gothic, one of the oldest buildings in the old town. It'd been bruised, this old beast of a church, but there was only so much a Hellion could do from the street and I knew the second they forced me onto the steps that this was consecrated ground.
Was God watching me now? Wondering how a reject had made it back to Earth and up to the door of a church?
"It's beautiful," I said, eyeing the scorched doors, the wrought iron swirls of ornamentation. "I see why they cling to you."
"Just get inside," Kais muttered, thinking I was speaking about him and his people.
I wasn't.
4
Who Is My Neighbor?
Kais
Be patient in tribulation. Patient in tribulation.
It was becoming my mantra in life.
"But why is she here?" Leanne Bateman asked. At her side, her husband Scott remained seated in the pew, his eyes on the succubus confined to the chair to my right. I wasn't sure if the fix of his stare on the creature was the same suspicion as his wife's or something else.
"She wants safety from the Hellions, same as us," I said, not sure I really believed the words.
"Couldn't she get that somewhere else? Why does it have to be us?" asked Oscar McCann, our engineer. He was a widower and he had a daughter about Zach’s age named Heather, who'd recently moved in with another widower the same age as Oscar. The father wasn't taking it well. Actually, Oscar hadn't been taking anything well for about a year and a half.
I looked at the woman—the succubus—to my right but she remained silent, eyes cast down to the tear in her dress that revealed one pale, elegant—fuck. A leg. It revealed a leg. She hadn't spoken through the entire inquisition the town led. I'd been grateful at first, but I wasn't sure it was doing us, or her, any favors at this point. She just sat there, looking other, looking like the Hellion she claimed she wasn’t.
"We don't know that there is somewhere else," Stavros said. I was surprised he was standing with Zach and I. He didn't wear the collar, he didn't give sermons, he didn't offer council, and Stav rejected every staple of our position but fighting back Hell. It was good though, we needed a united front.
Or you could just do as they ask and throw her back out the gate. What's really the loss?
"She might be here under false pretenses," Zach said, and I stiffened, resisting the urge to crane my neck and gape at him. "She may be sent from Hell to test our wills, our faith. She may be the snake in Eden—"
For the first time, the succubus made a noise, a little snort under her breath no one but the four of us on stage could hear. Her head twitched a little, a soft shake of the head, but she didn't interrupt Zach.