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The only time I ever see her
Is when she’s behind me in the mirror.
Even in the distance I can hear her.
I try to listen but her whispers make my ears hurt.
__
In all honesty, you don’t mind the kids.
The others do—the others like you, you don’t know the human word for it—hate possessing the kids, hate the monotony, the powerlessness of it all. Hard to further the agenda of the Prince of Darkness from the body of a 12 year old, and no one’s keen to relearn algebra over again, something that came into existence when many of you were still young, relatively speaking.
But you don’t mind. You kind of like it, actually. You like the routine, the interpersonal dynamics of their families, the opportunity to observe humans from some place vulnerable and protected. Many of your peers truly hate humans, want them gone, wiped from the face of the Earth and everywhere else, but you have, you’ll admit, a bit of a soft spot for them. This earns you a lot of teasing, a lot of being called a word that you don’t know how to say directly in any human tongue but you know is roughly equivalent to fucking pussy, at least in English.
So when the opportunity comes to take one, some teenager pulsing at the veil on the continent you know as Suvarnadvipa, its ancient name, you knock. You’re curious, always have been.
The boy is a bit older than you expected, his faint soul lurking at the tipping point between their world and the next. He looks sad, scared, but they always do, even the brave ones. Another reason the rest of them don’t like kids--you always have to talk them through it. Calm them down, help them go quietly. You hope you bring some peace to them in the final moments, like a guardian angel would, if those were real. Well, they used to be. Not many of them left anymore, and they usually only show up for the big players, which this kid is decidedly not.
“Where am I?” he asks, his brown eyes big and round and teary. He’s not here physically, of course, his body lying below you human-side, his face blue and cold on the pool deck. Only his soul is here, but something akin to their physical forms do appear to you in your mind’s eye—whatever it is you have that correlates to a mind, that is.
“You’re halfway.” you tell him. He starts to cry for real, big fat tears rolling down his face—a nice face, you notice, handsome and healthy and rosy cheeked. That’s not always the case. That’s usually not the case.
“Halfway to where?” he asks, and you – in whatever form it is that you appear to him as, you honestly can never tell how it manifests—gently turn his shoulders and walk him forwards towards the light. “Wait—” he tries to turn, looking for the way back down into his body, reaching towards his father in the other world. But it’s too late, you hate to say it, hate to tell them. The die’s been cast, kid. Trust me, you’re better off up here.
“Can’t I go back?” he asks
“Don’t worry, Lochlan.” You like to use their names, you find it helps them relax. “You’ll like it there, I promise. I hear it’s really nice.” You, of course, have never been.
With a little push from you, Lochlan stumbles forward, crying out pitifully, but the light takes him anyway, to wherever it is that good things go.
__
You blink to consciousness in a heat so arresting you wonder if you got sent back already. Sometimes it doesn’t take, the window closing before you can slip in and implant yourself. But no, it’s a different heat then where you come from. There’s humidity, for one, and birds singing, and some man has his strong arms around you, crying quietly above Lochlan’s body.
This is the father. You remember. Once you slip in, the major memory points come to you instantly—family members, lovers, friends, the moments leading to death. The rest of it comes later, in fits and starts, and it’s kind of your favorite part. You like learning about these kids, about what made them tick. Every one so different from the rest, so different from you and those like you.
As the final memories of life filter in, you see the last vision Lochlan had—his siblings, the mother, the father, four robed figures above him while he floats down into a watery grave. Whoa. Upstairs didn’t send those to everyone. He must’ve been a spiritual kid; good for him. You hope he’s happy where he is now, then laugh to yourself. Of course he’s happy. He’s in the good place.
You want to commemorate this, somehow. Make it known that Lochlan got a sign in his final moments, that he meant something to someone up top. All that comes to you is a human cliche that makes you laugh but probably plays differently from a teenager waking from a near death experience.
“I think I saw God.” you rasp, and then you turn to the side and vomit, the unfamiliar sensation of bile in your windpipe silencing you for a moment. The father gasps, grabs your face in his big hands, stares at you like he’s seeing you for the first time. And isn’t he?
“Lochy.” he sobs, and okay, you note that. Lochlan, Lochy. Cute. “Oh, Lochy. Son. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” And then the father is hugging you tight to his broad chest and you inhale hard, smell his laundry detergent and spiced cologne and thick human body smell. You miss the body smell the most, when you’ve been away too long. The soft heat of it.
“Dad.” you croak. You like this too, calling someone Dad, Mom. The novelty, the immediate intimacy and connection.
“Son.” the father cries back, and hugs you harder. Lochlan’s body is still weak, recovering from whatever the hell it was that this kid just went through. The details are still unclear to you. But you hug back best you can, gasping, sucking in the moist human air.
--
The family is taking you home to a place called North Carolina, where you have never been. You’ve done the United States a dozen times—you really liked New Mexico, haaaaaated Oklahoma—and it’s always interesting to go somewhere new. You haven’t been back in a while; most of your recent possessions have been in South America, for whatever reason.
You learn a lot on the long plane ride back, the most pressing of which is that the father, believe it or not, is probably about to go to jail for something involving your boss’ favorite invention—money.
The melodrama is almost too much for you, and you wonder if the kid killed himself because he was ashamed of what his dad did. But that doesn’t feel right—you can usually tell when you’ve hit on the right motive, something ancient and humming in your chest, a vestige of the soul that used to reside here crying out for acknowledgment.
The plane ride is helpful for determining this, lets you sit silent and watchful in your nice lay down bed—you certainly have never experienced one of these before, and it delights you—as the mother and the father and the brother argue in hushed tones in various configurations throughout the flight duration.
“What’s happening?” you ask the sister, in her bed next to you. The first few days are the hardest, when the memories are the sparse and you aren’t 100% sure how your host would react to things. You usually play it safe, speak the minimum amount of syllables necessary, and that seems to work for this kid, this Lochlan.
“Here.” the sister hands you her phone with a news article pulled up, which informs you that the father is being indicted by human authorities for embezzling—you understand this to be modern human speak for stealing, another favorite of you and those like you—tens of millions of dollars. The denomination of human money means nothing to you; there is no money where you come from; but you vaguely understand that to be a lot in their terms, mostly by the way the mother and the brother’s voices are rising in pitch and hysteria as the father shushes them, looking around the cabin.
“Shit.” you say, handing the phone back. The sister nods, her pretty eyes rimmed red. She had cried straight through the first four hours of the flight.
“Shit is right.” she confirms, and you smile inwardly, proud to have said something that it seems Lochlan would have said.
Your boss likes stealing, so you see no problem with this, particularly because it seems like the father stole money from other wealthy people, which isn’t even exciting. Go steal from some poor people, if you really want to make a scene. But you say nothing, because you understand that humans don’t think of things that way. There’s no accounting for taste.
__
Most of your possessions now last a few months, at most. People are good about sniffing things out these days, made worse by the proliferation of information on the Internet, which your boss did not create, despite the accusations. People catch on quicker, can find the methods to drive you out faster. And those are real, unfortunately; the cross and the chanting, invoking the crowd Upstairs to come down and beat your ass back to where you came from.
You like to think you’re better at it than most, because you’re okay with taking your time. You don’t go straight to the crab walking and vomiting and eyes rolling all the way back. You ease your way into it, try to push the agenda in other ways, more creative but less flashy. You’ve found that you last the longest in human girls going through puberty, so much of the oddness you introduce into your host’s presence waved away with Well, that’s just how they are at this age. So easy to turn an eye away from a human woman’s suffering, but that’s no surprise to you.
There are things you can’t help, however. There is no longer a soul in the body and that has consequences. You can’t help the uncontrollable hunger, the blood lust, the leering libido, the way the air feels cold around your host’s body. There is no soul, so that hole must now be filled with other things. You have to eat every day like you’ve been starved for years, masturbate every night, sometimes multiple times. You wear long pants and sweaters in the dead of summer, cut your soft wrists and thighs in the privacy of whatever room you can find, sucking on your host’s blood until you feel the body go light headed. It’s the same in every host; you’ve never found another way.
You used to be able to hang out for years, but those days are long behind you.
Sometimes you leave because you just get bored, or fed up. You can’t just enter any random dying person. There needs to be a window, the sliver of deliberation while Upstairs decides whether or not they’re going to take the soul. With kids, it’s quick, but you’re quicker. But that usually means when you come human-side, it’s into a bad situation. Kids who have a gap big enough to let you slip in come with dire issues—problems with their brain, with their families, with their reality. It’s exhausting and often times you just do with you can do, fuck up what you can fuck up, and go.
Once you’re gone, then the body is really done. The host drops dead, usually chalked up to whatever allowed you to slip in in the first place. You wish you could explain that to the ones who drive you out. Do you know how many families would kill for what you have? You want to say. The ones who don’t even have a dead body to mourn? You have the body. And what’s more, the body still talks back.
You understand, of course, that the humans would not see it that way.
The more you live in Lochlan’s body, live in Lochlan’s life, the more you wonder why the decision from Upstairs took so long. He’s handsome and healthy, long wiry limbs and pouting pink lips and thick curly hair. He seems like he was a good kid. The parents like him, the brother and sister seem a mix of fraught and indifferent, but you’ve seen worse. He had friends, kids that come up to you on your first day back in his school with quaking lips, wide eyes, telling you in frantic voices that they heard you died.
No, no. You tell them. I just got sick. Really sick. But I’m better now. Someone hugs you. You hug back, take in that hot human smell again. You so rarely have a host like this. You don’t want to leave. So you don’t.
__
The father goes to jail soon after you all arrive in North Carolina, as was to be expected. You had no attachment to him so it takes a bit of conjuring to bring up the appropriate emotion. You know you didn’t hit the mark, the way the brother stares at you during the arraignment and asks why you seem so calm.
I’ve been mediating. You tell him, pulling from the memory you have of Lochlan sitting in a monastery not long before he died, legs crossed, pondering. The brother scoffs and turns away, continues to watch you from the corner of his eye.
At first, you’re put off by this, how quickly the brother seems to have caught on. He watches you always, sharp eyes tracking your movements across the room. It initially makes you nervous but then memories come forward, memories of those same eyes tracking Lochlan back when he was here. Okay, then, so maybe not necessarily an inkling. Maybe the brother was always this protective, this looming.
The deeper memories come to you in flashes across time—at the dinner table, on the tennis court, in Lochlan’s bedroom. You sit with the sister on the porch drinking wine—despite not feeling its effects, you love alcohol, as everything like you does—and a memory comes forward on this same porch, many years ago. Lochlan sat with the sister then, too, in these same chairs, but instead of wine he had lemonade in a tall, icy glass with a paper umbrella. His legs didn’t reach the porch floor, his feet in their pristine sneakers swinging just above the stained wood.
“Cheers.” the sister said to Lochlan, clinking her matching tall glass against his. She was younger then, hair in a ponytail, precious teenage acne studding her chin, braces on her teeth.
“Cheers.” Lochlan responded, taking a long pull from his lemonade. The sugar on his tongue was so present it makes your mouth water as you remember. He loved his sister. He loved them all. A good kid.
You keep waiting for the shoe to drop, some memory of the father slapping Lochlan hard across the face for stealing a $20 from his wallet, or the mother calling him a disgusting faggot, something to surface, to explain why you were able to slip into the gap, why there was something to debate. But it doesn’t come.
At least, not for a while.
__
The brother comes by your room late one night, knocks on the open door frame while you fiddle with Lochlan’s phone. You have never understood the human obsession with screens. The rest of the world was just right there.
“Hey, Lochy.” he says, and you look to him. Something old, something of Lochlan’s, stirs within you when you look at him too long. Handsome brother, everything Lochlan wasn’t. In any other body you would expect to hate him but not in this one.
“Hi.” you say. You like how high your voice is, the whininess of it. It makes people want to do things for you. To you.
“You feeling okay?” the brother asks, and you tamp down panic. Like you reasoned before, it’s all normal. All things he would’ve said to Lochlan if he were here.
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Good.” The brother is often awkward for someone of his stature. You think Lochlan drew this out of him, this self-consciousness. You can’t understand it. “Well. It’s a really nice night out. I was going to go down to the pool.”
You don’t know what Lochlan would have said to this. You initially thought he and the brother avoided each other as a rule but it’s become clear that’s not the case. “Oh. Cool.”
The brother looks at you weird. Wrong answer. “Sooooo.” he draws it out, waiting for you to say something. You don’t know what he wants. “You coming?”
Oh. Okay. “Sure.”
“Nice.” the brother says, and then proceeds to strip off his polo, dropping it unceremoniously just inside Lochlan’s doorway. You now notice he’s already wearing his swim trunks. His body is tanned and perfect, the kind of body that would make people do things they’d later blame on your boss. Your body responds, something both familiar and alien at the same time. You are, for the first time in a long time, puzzled. The brother smiles at you. “Meet you down there.”
You stand up and wander to Lochlan’s dresser, pull open a drawer where you feel swim suits might be, and are met with a pair of white trunks with a blue and orange flower pattern, neatly folded on top. You grab for them, shuck your shorts and pull them on.
And then, there it is. A memory surfaces from deep within your body. Some small room, blood colored and hot and wavering. A bed, a woman below Lochlan, pretty with crooked teeth. Lochlan’s dick inside her, moaning and slick animal sounds and a heat building from within in as he drives in and out. You’re oddly proud of him, for a moment. He lived a life.
But the moans aren’t just from below. There’s something to the side. You concentrate to open the memory, seeing beyond the periphery. Next to you, the brother. Naked and panting, beautiful neck bared, chest heaving. And your hand, Lochlan’s hand, under the sheet, in between his thighs. The feeling of the brother in Lochlan’s hand, cock thick and hard and hips pulsing upwards. The brother gasping, eyes locked on yours, coming hard against your palm, Lochlan’s palm. The flood of arousal and pride and want in Lochlan’s stomach, somehow entwined with and totally divorced from the woman beneath him.
And no one you know was even there to make it happen. Pardon the blasphemy but—Jesus Christ.
___
The water of the pool is cool and dark, lit only by a single underwater pool light at the deep end. You’re done possessing poor people, you think as your head breaks the surface of the water, followed by your torso, your long legs. You love having this strong body, this big house, this family that loves you, even in its strange way. You don’t want to leave it, ever.
The brother appears beside you as your head breaks the surface at the deep end, his legs dangling into the water. You think about swimming between his thighs, but decide against it. Seems a little fast.
It’s funny to think that so many humans view lust and arousal as a sin, because you’ve never experienced either, aside from the ghostly pangs of those who lived in your bodies before you. You don’t know what it’s like to want, to yearn. That’s your punishment.
You swim up to the lip of the pool, haul up a bit to cross your arms on the pool deck, head resting on them. The brother sits next to you, hands braced against the stone deck. He’s thrown on a light button down shirt, the front open and stirring in the humid night breeze. There’s something hot and eager between your hips—Lochlan liked that.
“You seem a little funny, dude.” he says to you, and you laugh, hope it sounds natural.
“What makes you say that?”
The brother shrugs. “You’re just...being weird. Didn’t think it was possible for you to talk less.”
I’ll get better, you want to say. Just give me some time.
Instead you just shrug, dunk back under the water again. You come up again closer to him, place your hands on his knees. It’s deep here, Lochlan’s feet barely touch, but your energy reserves are basically endless so it’s easy to tread.
The brother looks from your face to your hands, eyebrows creasing.
“What’re you doing?”
“Nothing.” You kick up a bit and forward, getting in between his knees and resting your forearms on either one. You brace yourself against them, gently threatening to force him into the water. You wouldn’t. You might. What would Lochlan have done?
He stares at you, eyes flinty and sharp in the moonlight. The humidity on the exposed portion of your body is driving you crazy.
“Are you Lochlan?” he asks.
“Of course I am.” you tell him. What other choice do you have?
You kick forward, nudging your forearms up until your chest is almost against his inner thighs. You cling to his legs and let your own legs stall, just hanging there against them. His hands are clutching the rim of the pool, straining against your weight. Just tip in. You sing inside. Come be disgusting with me. You’ve already done it before.
He’s hunched forward, so it doesn’t take much on your end to edge up another inch until your faces are almost touching. You use his thighs as a lever to drive yourself up. He lets you.
You kiss him.
He lets you.
One big hand comes around to the back of your neck, holding you in place. You’re distantly aware of the lights of the house not fifty feet to the side. Someone could be in the sun room. Someone could be looking out the window. What the fuck do you care? It’s not your life.
The brother’s tongue is in your mouth, his hands in your hair, almost pulling you up from the water. It strains your neck. You have to let go of his thighs, brace your hands against the lip of the pool and lean your full weight into him to stay upright. Your torso presses against his groin and you can feel he’s hard. Humans, these fucking freaks.
And then it’s over, the brother is pulling away. You crash back into the water and when you surface, he’s gone.
You stay in the pool doing laps for another half hour or so to calm your body’s heart rate. You love luxuriating in the water, when you’re human. Not a lot of that where you’re from.
___
The sister knows, you are sure of it.
She’s in touch with the other side, you’ve gathering through hours of observation and flashes of memory. Lochlan watching her through a cracked door as she meditates in front of a candle, back straight, eyes softly closed, chanting. Her gaze, soft but concerned, as she carded a hand through Lochlan’s hair while he lazed on the beach somewhere in the Caribbean. A deck of well worn tarot cards in the bottom of her dresser drawer.
You don’t know if she realizes it, that she had a line to Upstairs. But she did.
You also don’t know if Upstairs has been sending her signs or if she’s just preternaturally observant. Probably a combination of both, you figure. It usually works that way.
You sit in the kitchen, scarfing down a second helping of scrambled eggs. This is the worst part, for sure. The endless hunger. You can’t disguise it. One of your quickest evictions was in the body of a teenage girl in France who died of a heart attack due to a severe eating disorder. When you came back and couldn’t stop eating, her family figured it out quick, brought in a priest who cursed you in the name of Saint Pierre and well, at that point you had no choice but to go. You had tussled with Peter before, had no interest in doing it again.
“Wow, you’re hungry.” the sister comments from across the table. She sits with her newspaper crossword and a mug of tea, half of a vegetarian omelet cooling on the plate next to her. You resist the urge to ask if you can have the rest.
“I’m a growing boy.” you quip. Lochlan seems the type to quip, but only at express moments.
“I thought you hated eggs.” she says, and this stops you, one shovelful of them halfway to your mouth. You’ve made this mistake before, not paying attention to food preferences. It’s just all so overwhelming.
You shrug. “Not anymore.”
“Hmm.” the sister replies, snapping the pages of the newspaper straight and pretending to read. “Also, there are extra Band-Aids in the basement bathroom cabinet.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Oh,” she feigns innocence, big dark eyes turned downwards but the attention all on him. “I saw you sucking on your finger the other day, after you nicked it with the kitchen knife. It’s not good for you, to ingest all that blood.”
And then, those eyes back up, on you. Not looking away. She gives you the faintest smile, and unclicks her pen.
Fuck. Fuck.
You follow her movements over the next few days, watching for signs that she’s going to rat you out. Rat you out, you think to yourself. Like she’s in the wrong.
She catches the brother in the upstairs hallway. They think you’re gone, off practicing something called lacrosse, but you are not wasting your precious human seconds learning how to catch a ball in a small net and throw it into a larger net. You’d much rather spend it here, haunting this house, learning everything you can about this boy, this Lochlan, your host.
“Is Lochy okay?” the sister asks, one hand around the brother’s arm. The brother stands tall and slightly away from her, like he doesn’t want to get too close.
“Why are you asking me?”
“Because you’d know.”
“I don’t.”
“Sax.” she sighs, her free hand curling into a fist against her collarbone. “I’m worried.”
The brother scoffs. “Newsflash, Pipe. You should be. Our dad is going to prison and we’re all gonna be out of house and home in about six months.”
“Who cares!” she cries. Oh, Upstairs is going to love her. You can already see it – Saint Piper. “He’s sick, Saxon. He eats so much and barely sleeps and he’s just—you know. He’s weird.”
You take a little offense to that. You’re trying.
“He’s always weird.” the brother says. “Maybe you’re just finally seeing it.”
“Saxon.” Her eyes are wide, pleading. “Please don’t joke. I know you know.”
You find your body holding its breath. Does he?
“I do know, Piper.” he finally says. “But it’s the least of our problems right now.” The brother flees down the stairs. The sister braces her arms against the wall and begins to cry.
Later, through a crack in her door, you hear her praying. And you know you are done for, unless you figure out a plan.
___
It’s easier than you thought it’d be. The weakness of humans surprises you still, even now.
You come to him a few nights later, appearing in his dark doorway the way he did to you. You’ve done it before, but not like this. Not while he’s awake.
“Lochy.” he says, and you close the door behind you. Lock it.
You don’t ask permission, which you feel is probably something Lochlan would have done, but you’re something different now. Lochlan and something more.
He doesn’t move as you approach and slide under the covers. You’re only in Lochlan’s underwear, your skinny chest bare. The brother is naked, as Lochlan’s memories told you he might be. You had remembered another night, the brother leering and goading, showing off for Lochlan before retreating to the bathroom, teasing the open door before he closed it to jerk himself off.
You did this to yourself, you want to say. This wasn’t Lochlan and this wasn’t your boss, it was only the brother.
You kiss him again, bringing a hand up through his short hair and he makes a sound against your mouth that’s almost a sob.
“I’m sorry, Lochy.” he says, and you wonder what he’s sorry for. This is the best you’ve felt in a millennia and you don’t think your host would feel differently. He kisses you back, one hand against Lochlan’s waist, another sliding up his back. You feel goosebumps erupt along your legs, your arms. You don’t experience lust; the physical sensation is the next best thing.
You hitch a leg up around his hips, turning over to bring him on top of you. Kissing, teeth gnashing. You bite his lip harder than you mean to and he pulls away, stares at you with a look in his eye you don’t like. You move to his neck, sucking hard at his pulse point to make it go away.
He lets you turn him onto his back, move down between his thighs. You’re not a succubus but you’ve all got a little of that in you, and you need every ounce of it. For the first time, you feel like you’re fighting for your life. You take him in your mouth as far as it’ll go—you’re restrained by the limits of whatever Lochlan’s talents were when he died, which are, surprisingly, substantial. The human smell at the juncture of the brother’s thighs is enough to finally get your dick hard. You want it forever. For maybe the first time, you want, you want.
“Oh my god.” the brother chokes, grabbing at your hair, your shoulders. No god here, you think. Quite the opposite. “Lochy, baby.”
Well, that’s a new one. You wonder if Lochlan ever heard that from him, before he moved on. You feel this weird responsibility towards Lochlan, to do what he would’ve wanted to do. You hum against the cock in your mouth, take it further until you gag, thick spit coming up from your throat and dripping down, making it easier. Something in you likes this. Something you and also not you.
You keep going, your world narrowed. Some of the things like you possess just to have sex with humans—they love it, can’t get enough. You had never understood, until now. The faint ghost of the body’s soul wrenching inside of you, crying out, jealous, desiring. It’s insane. The brother’s thighs are shaking under your hands, his hands in your hair. He fucks up into your mouth, babbling.
“Lochy, baby, please, I’m so sorry, never leaving you again, I promise, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please stay—”
And he comes, the fluid hot and salty on your tongue, down your throat. You’ve never done exactly this before, but you know what to do. You swallow and look up, open your mouth to show it’s all gone. The brother groans, covers his eyes like it’s too much. You have to hold his hips to keep him from turning over entirely.
Once he’s settled, you sit up, heaving. You get why humans do this—even without the arousal, the depravity of it is sexy in and of itself. You think the brother will just lie there and fall asleep—he seems the type—but he surprises you by coming to life all at once, curving up to get his hands on your shoulders, pulling you close.
He reaches between your legs, seems surprised to find your dick soft. He looks so disappointed, you wish you could explain. It’s not you, kid. You want to say. Just a rule of the game.
“Did you want that?” he asks, voice cracking. You’re relieved that you don’t have to lie, a rare occurrence.
“Yes.”
“Then why---”
“I’m just nervous, Sax.” You feel almost more nervous saying his name, even shortened. You can tell he doesn’t believe you, but you’ve got nothing for it. You lie in silence, staring at each other, before he speaks again.
“Are you Lochlan?”
“No.” You tell the truth this time. It seems like he can keep a secret, after what just happened between you. “But I am something similar.”
Your thoughts, again—does he understand what people would do for something similar? For something even remotely like who left?
I am not a monster, you want to say. I am a gift, for those who can see it.
--
The brother is, perhaps, one of the smarter humans you’ve encountered in your time with them.
You stay. In the house, in the world, in his bed. You stay. He does not call for the sister. He does not hold a cross and ask for Gabriel to take you. You feel him look at you after he’s fucked your body, his brother’s body. His cold blue eyes watching your face, searching, probing.
“Is there any Lochy left in there?” he asks you one night. He is particularly morose, hair mussed, eyes red rimmed. If you were capable of human emotion, you imagine you would feel sympathy for him. But you aren’t, so you don’t.
You are, however, capable of your own strange kind of kindness. The truth is, there is some of Lochlan left within you. The way a nuclear blast burns shadows onto nearby walls. You have not told a soul what the brother does to your body, what he asks you to do to his. If you were only here to further the agenda, to sow chaos and discord amongst these simple idiot creatures, that information would be long gone. There is something there of your host that keeps you here, silent and worshiping in this room, if only a trick of the light.
“Yes.” You tell him, reaching out to touch his cheek. He softens and almost smiles.
The brother holds you, and you wonder if, for the first time in a century, you might remain human for another year.