A young woman once said to me she was looking for a beautiful soul, I asked her if broken counted as beautiful. Caught off guard, she let her face show the shallowness of her statement, she let her face show me that she had no concern for a beautiful soul or souls at all for that matter. Right off the line I had a feeling about this girl, a feeling that stuck deep down to this day. That she was awful. Some people in this world spend their time thinking and some spend their time trying to convince people they do. She was the latter. 'I'll think about it.'
Neat.
To be fair, I met that girl on this website where you can pay a nominal fee to meet single people who also paid a nominal fee just to ignore you, so you can't really expect much from her. I bring this up so as not to give any false pretense about anything that I am about to say, I tend to judge, folks. I like to think that I fall under the above category I just made up as someone who spends most of the day wasting time thinking about things that are never relevant to anything important. In doing all of that thinking though, I often realize that I am just peering at my peers, prying into their personal ideals with my own imagination. In my own defense, it is a really fun pass-time. I would recommend it to anyone.
What I would not recommend to anyone is spending all of that time thinking, thinking about anything other than the little things about people that you can poke fun at. Throughout my stay on this planet I have learned three things, I will share the first one now. Feel free to write it down; thinking is deadly. Deadly, friends.
Since we are on the topic, I know a lot about wine. I know way more about wine than will ever be applicable to the world. If you hand me a glass of wine, I'll tell you exactly what I'm holding. Garnet in color, Pinot Noir. Tight, pale orange rim indicating a cooler climate, France. Ripe cherry on the nose, definitely Champagne region. Earthy notes on the back end, very medium bodied even for an old world Pinot, Louis Latour, twenty-ten vintage.
I have no applications for this.
How did I gain this knowledge? The answer, which is to be expected due to today’s college drive to teach useless information, naturally, is college. More specifically there was this nice combination of genes that I met in college named Kathy. Kathy knew a lot about wine. How did she gain this knowledge? I'm not sure, but what I did know was that she had damn near edible legs. Volleyball. So when Kathy Legs invited me to Sequoia Grove Valley, I had to learn a lot about wine. I had to learn way more about wine than will ever be applicable to the world.
Kathy Legs, come to find out, did not know one thing about wine. She was just rich and had a wine cellar. Legs was not her last name. This is the last mention of Kathy Legs.
I loved Sequoia Grove!
I would return there a few years later with an okay set of genes with nice legs. Soccer. Professional woman’s soccer. She was almost famous, so I took her to Sequoia Grove to get drunk and show off everything that college taught me.
Almost Famous did not know one thing about wine. Did I menion is not applicable?
What is applicable is that I am from a little town called Rouland, I had three friends growing up there. I am going to tell you about two of them. What happened to the third one? Nothing! He is alive and kicking.
Kicking is a word.
He has no legs.
Johnny Antonio did however, and I met him when I was nine years old. He was an odd kid, meaning he threw rocks at squirrels and ate dirt. Funny story about the former later. The day that I met him, I was riding my bike down Sunberry Blvd. for no reason, I was only nine after all. Johnny was wearing sandals, I note this because on principle I have never worn a pair of sandals in my life, though I've owned two. About six yards aware from his sandals was a possum, in broad daylight, how fun! Johnny Antonio did what any nine year old boy would do, he threw a stick at it. Much to his (and my) amazement, he hit the thing, right in the damn eye. I introduced myself as the general of a stick army and asked him to join me as an archer.
Johnny would later be my best man.
Before the wedding I invited him to my family reunion that I must attend to represent the rest of my family that is choosing not to attend. It's a nice gathering of old folks and familiar faces in what looks to be a scene from a hover-round commercial. My favorite part of this whole event is dinner of course due to the silence that rises from these fat sea muscles feasting on their lifeblood. This year they really outdid themselves with the 'bring a dish to pass' model. Dinner at the seventy fourth Seymoure reunion was fourteen buckets of original recipe and a batch of grandmas meatballs.
Can't forget grandmas meatballs.
Luckily for my dignity the man that was going to stand beside me on my wedding day would have done the same for a crispy ten piece were that ever to happen, marriage I mean. Oh my, we can only hope that does not ever happen. So there he was, my best man, making great company with the people who can hover around as far as and in any direction they please. Let me make one thing very clear, if you're not on a board wearing McFly's jacket, there is no reason for you to need to 'hover.'
Back To The Future was my favorite movie growing up. Which according to Johnny was 'dumb as a cracker in the CPT.' He was white. His favorite movie growing up was Back To The Future II. We stopped talking once because of that, that guy had the audacity to say that he would sue me and my family for my incorrect opinion. At the time I had no real concept of what suing someone meant but I was mad, so I just refused and said 'you can't do that!' I was in fact right, even if unknowingly, which makes me happy and I worry about that sometimes. Add it to the list.
Of course we became friends again, all it took was one day of watching too much television before I called him and we went back to beating the hell out of each other with sticks. Our parents deemed this a worthwhile activity because it kept us out of the house and away from the video games. Instead of pretending to hit each other with real swords, we actually hit each other with tree branches.
But hey, we were outside!
Do you ever sit around and think of all of the things you did as a kid that you'd never dream of doing now? When I was preparing to apply to university, the current trend in my generation was to jump head first from brick wall to brick wall, all while avoiding concrete roads by flying, suspended by nothing, thirty feet above them hoping they didn't make a single error. It was called free running and it was the real reason that nobody tested well enough to get into good schools that year as opposed to the reason that our parents came up with: overabundant and under regulated Attention Deficit Disorder medication distribution for the past sixteen years. To be fair, the father of ADD was in bed with the pharmacy companies, he even came out and said he made the whole thing up. It was the most widely appreciated and most profitable lie told to the public ever because it was a medically backed scapegoat for every terrible parents' terrible kid.
Alienated yet?
I never ran free, but I sure as hell ran a great drug ring at a nice bar outside of Detroit. Johnny had gotten a job there busing tables and washing dishes. He didn't get paid much but the redhead bartender was payment enough for him. He was either a pervert or getting laid, I never asked. I was down there all the time with him because Mick, his hipster boss, would let us buy drinks at full price even though I was seventeen and Johnny was just recently eighteen. That same year I had started smoking pot and doing heavy doses of methylenedioxy methamphetamine. Molly. My boy at school had a solid stash of anything, always. Don't know how, haven't once cared to know to this day. I started getting him all sorts of business and I charged a very reasonable finders fee. At first Johnny gave me a hard time about my lifestyle, which was before he never paid for a beer again.
Years later, when asked why I started wheelin' in the first place I gave the only answer I could think of. The one that my mother gave me the last time I saw her.
"I didn't make enough money to support the addictions I have to fight the depression that slips through the fingers of the little blue pills I take everyday to stay on this earth."
Some good those little blue pills did. Is what I used to think before I started pounding one hundred milligrams a day myself. They go down best with a fifth of single malt and two capsules of color enhancer. Just drop the needle on the record.
Johnny recommended I talked to a therapist. So I got one's number at the bar, later that night. She had freckles, I told her about my favorite one. She told me I shouldn't have a favorite one so soon, and that maybe I should spend a couple more nights deciding. Much to our pleasure I spent exactly fourteen months deciding. This is not what he had in mind.
I did see a therapist though, after mine left me for a drug dealer.
No class.
Therapy was a hoot, though. I would babble on and on about beliefs I no longer have, and pay money to do so. I've paid money for that more than once in my life, which I think is unfortunate.
Something about the dew makes the sweet spot feel better when the ball leaves your shoe. It could be the mist off the spin that chills your face, or the way it sticks to your toe for a fraction of a second so you can really feel the contact and the control over the angle. After all, hidden in the shape of a hexagon is the entire range of trajectories needed to get the ball to the back of the net. The trick is finding it while mid-pivot, center of gravity moving, and the incoming hexagon is tumbling over grass at high speed. For me, it is always easier with an early morning glaze. I'm better when the air is crisp and the sun has yet to pierce the overcast or burn the fog. When the crows call out their wicked poetry and the streetlights guide the small critters across the empty road, when goosebumps crawl over tight skin and water seeps into the holes of worn out souls.
This is my game.
From eighteen yards out, the sound of the sweet spot echos off the nearby floral shop and hits my ears just before the first shot of the day breaks the plain. Goal. Granted I'm alone out here in this field, this makeshift pitch, but every shot feels right and every goal makes the heart beat a little faster. This is my home field, manned or un, this is Los's turf. Shot two will start fifty five yards back. I always start my breakaways with a little hop to get into the action. Hop, step, hesitate. Tap, two steps then another tap of the ball. Two more steps then stop, spit the ball out left behind the heel- round off the left back defender, step step. Shoot, post, goal.
I've only just gotten my blood pumping and already the spatter of the wet ground has decorated my calves and spotted my forearms. One more shot then it's time to get to work. Ball back on the eighteen, standing one pace back and two left, I run and clip the lower right to get a good arc on it, and for a split second I start the day three for three, until it sails over the bar and off target. Put too much on that one. Fetching the ball from the median past the parking lot will be a good warm up before drills.
This unsanctioned soccer pitch, Crystal Field as I like to call it, consists of a one piece steel net frame that I stole from an elementary school two cities over (we'll talk logistics later), a net fashioned out of roll up plastic construction fencing, and perfectly scaled touchlines, goal box and midfield line done in white spray paint. The only thing it is missing is symmetry. I cannot express my happiness that I find myself in a town with a vacant lot and a lazy or perhaps even generous group of city inspectors.
"If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky
That would be like the splendor of the Mighty one
Now I am become Death,
The destroyer of Worlds."
"Gid-e-on.." he croons, half heard by ear, half felt is that strange thrumming resonance that was his shadow.
Gideon felt him, felt him always. It was a comfort and a curse in one. Never alone. For one such as Gideon it should have been all blessing, and he'd embraced the notion of it without truly weighing all that such a thing entailed. He had no regrets, though. How could he when Fafnir crooned his name that way, with that voice that angels had to envy? Each time he heard it was sweeter than the first, each time he heard it a slow, delicious shiver ran through him like a hot electric current. This was love. One corner of his mouth curled upwards against the raised edge of the collar of his jacket.
"Fafnir." He sighed the name the way one would across the landscape of tangled sheets and jumbled pillows. "How are you?"
Tick, tick, tick - his fingers curled about the man's shoulder. To an outsider, it would have looked strange indeed, some black mass that clung too close. Heroin has often been referred to as a monkey on one's back. The slash of his nose pressed right beneath the man's ear, just so he could take in a slow, deep breath of him. It was here that smells tended to gather, cling. Of all of Fafnir's senses - all of His senses! - this one is the strongest.
"I am just fine," he cooed, chest flattening against spine, weightless - but still so strong - knees clamped tight to the man's hips. It's not as if he was going anywhere, not as if they weren't connected constantly, but this certainly beat trailing in his wake like a puppy, did it not?
"Look at all those stars," he rasped, black eyes staring upwards. "Do you know what the stars do, when they get old?"
Pale eyes cast upwards toward the sky at Fafnir's direction, one hand rising to stroke the line of the creature's jaw in a thoughtless line.
"No, what do they do when they get old?"
It seemed a foreign concept, that illusionary, eternality of those cold lights, nail holes keeping the door of heaven shut tight against the refuse of the worlds below. He caught a strand of ephemeral silk hair and twisted it slowly between his fingers, foot steps leading him home, back to the cold mausoleum of the Lanesborough.
He feels different this way. He feels not really cold, but not particularly warm. He is not flesh, but neither does Gideon's hand pass through him, either. It is almost like...taffy. Slick, somewhat tacky and sticky. He is not as sweet. Briefly, his head turned into that touch, eyelids shuttering, shuddering:
"They eat themselves. They spend all of their lives running in fear, until finally, incapable of taking it any more, they devour themselves from the inside out." The wild sprawl of his mouth began to curve, a smile carved from him with a good, sharp scalpel: "It is not unlike humans, is it? Forever picking at one another, undermining good intentions and living on false hopes, until they come out from under them. Such small, fragile lives they live.."
"Very much like humans." Gideon agreed, bitter edge to his voice. Lucky bastards. He released that sticky strand of hair, spools of it spinning off his fingertips like wisps of smoke. He entered the lobby of the high rise and stepped into the elevator. The lights were bright here, cold and unrelenting, always on. He lent against the glass of the elevator wall and closed his eyes with a strained breath. They devour themselves from the inside out... Or else someone did it for them.
"Tell me Fafnir, do you hate them much?"
"No," he said, without hesitation - without even really having to think about it. "I do not hate. Emotions are not something I am well-versed in. I know little more than perpetual, gnawing hunter. Were I to feel such things, however, I would perhaps pity them more than I hate them."
Gideon leaned and Fafnir shifted, slithered, poured off his back to the floor before inching forward, rising once more into a mass of flesh - or as much flesh as a maggot-ridden body could have. Head spun, turned, slow like trees growing, to turn those hateful, depthless black eyes on the man.
"In mine breast, mine heart does not beat, Gideon. I am a shadow, a shade - nothing here except for sighs. Hate, anger - these things are beneath me." And then he smiled: he smiled like a well-paid whore might, endlessly pleased.
"Do you love?" he asked. "Do you, at times, reach within your chest and pull out something that flutters, that flickers, that dares to feel? No matter how oft it may be broken, the heart is the only organ that still works."
He opened his eyes and let them settle on Fafnir, their cold fire set in features reflecting the glut of putrid emotions that word brought forth. Love. I hate the word. As I hate hell, all Montagues...and thee. He let the back of his head rest against the cold, hard glass.
"I have loved." Came the reply after the long silence. "I don't want to anymore. It's brought me nothing, and taken more than I should have offered." He gave Fafnir a chilling smile that did not reach those eyes. "Although the loss of it brought me you. My twin, my shadow."
He moved forward, caging the other between the stretch of his arms as he backed him up against one of the elevator walls.
"Love is not for creatures like us. And it is a lesson I was slow in learning." A lesson not over. Given a half a chance, that weak, slow-dying wish to be mortal again would reach out, allow in that hideous creature called hope and let it take roost in his heart again like a beast, making his soul its scratching post.
"Oh, but it is," he whispered quietly. It is amazing how Fafnir can go from mad to not. It wasn't that Fafnir was insane. He was the opposite - he was too sane. Imagine knowing everything. Imagine what that did to a mind. His hands lifted, gently curling in lapels, and then higher, gently stroking the glorious pale of Gideon's jaw.
"I watched Him," the words were whispered, wary. Best not to speak too loud of some things. "I sat with Him on His thrown, in His endless sunbeam. He watched the world pass Him by, totally indifferent..and then, one day, a small girl-child put her hand into His. The world does not prepare anyone for that - not even Him. And with time, He fell in love. The black mass, rotten and maggot-ridden that was His heart began to beat, and He loves her."
His eyes looked up and he smiled at Gideon - that smile that made the world seem not quite so cruel, if a monster like he could smile.
"We are meant for love - but it us you and I, He and the nightmares that must work the hardest and remain forever vigilant. Love for us is not some simple human imperative. It is something we must work for." Long, liquid black hair spread and flattened against the glass wall, a waterfall of silk.
"Soon, too, I will love you. Not as lovers do, but as that which I am part of. I would kneel at your feet, wash them, as you are my savior. He would have put me back into Him, Gideon. I would rather not be at all, than be without..." and his features fell. They collapsed, wishes and fishes, left in the dirt. "I would not have been me anymore."
Gideon's smile softened but slightly. He stroked the backs of his fingers against the other's cheek.
"We aren't all meant for love, Fafnir. That old woman tonight? She lived her whole life without a mate. Jilted once, she spent all the brief years she had alone. I don't want to love anymore. It's nothing but pain and trouble and it's nearly ruined me. Love...or some twisted, half breed of it is what stole my life and made me the slave and prisoner I am now."
The elevator drew to a halt and the door slid open. He pushed away from his lean over Fafnir and moved for the hallway and the door of his flat.
"But with you, I will never be alone. I don't need love anymore. I've found something infinitely better." He gave Fafnir a charming grin thrown over his shoulder as he unlocked the door. " How could I have let him do that to you? You are too perfect."
He shut the door behind them and, shedding coat and shoes made for the hearth and the comfort of the couch. He stretched out there, languid with the peace that the sating of hunger brought. He sighed with the bliss of the heat pouring off the hearth.
"You will become my savior too I think. Save me from my own worst impulses and from the ennui and corrosion bred by your other Master."
The Shadow followed - forever followed - only to crawl up the back of the couch, peering down at the man sprawled upon it.
"Ennui is perhaps the worst - it devours slowly. At least Entropy is natural. Ennui is a lack of change - very unnatural." He pitched forward and slithered down the other side: hair and flesh, silk and the slow roil of maggots under it all pooled across Gideon's chest.
"He is not so evil as He might seem. He - and I - are like....hurricanes. Do you call hurricanes evil?" he asked curiously, folding forearms atop the man's chest, just to rest upon them, black hair a curtain of sweet, smokey smell. His head ducked in, tongues curling about, one leaking from the corner of his mouth. "But He is vast, frightening."
"I'm afraid lack of change is what defines things like me." He murmured curling an arm around the other as he poured onto his chest. He smoothed fingers in a lazy pattern along Fafnir's back, watching those depthless onyx eyes with loving admiration. Gazing upon Fafnir was like beholding one's own reflection in the sheen of an oil slick. Beautiful and black and distorted.
"I will always be this." Said with the audacity of one still too young to fully grasp the true nature of eternity, but old enough to see the scope of his own world was infinite. He turned Fafnir's question over in his mind.
"I think that it is easier to view something that destroys without passion or prejudice as evil than it is to accept the hard truth of how little influence one has over such forces. Being frightening just adds to that perception of evil." He drew a finger up the hollow line of Fafnir's spine.
"Speaking of which... I'm afraid a friend of mine has just such a perception of you, luv."
His back curved, a line of arch that was like a pleased, pet feline. Those black eyes started to slit, slowly, even as his mouth twitched.
"I know. He does not like me." There was a slow, subtle sort of sadness in his tone.
"But I understand," he said, quietly, settling his gaze on Gideon. "Were I him, I might mistrust me as well."
He fell quiet a moment, listening to the slow, constant, reassuring crackle of the fire in the heart, the sounds of popping wood, when the heat found a pocket of sap. Finally?
"But you like him, do you not..?" There was nothing..accusatory, in that question. Fafnir merely desired the truth, that's all.
"I do." He confirmed, curling his hand around the nape of Fafnir's neck, the grip affectionate and reassuring. "Though I'm afraid the fact that I do will cause both of us nothing but trouble. It seems that I can't help myself. I tried asking him to stay away, and he declined."
He mused at the way Fafnir's skin crawled beneath the cool weight of his palm.
"Don't take his dislike personally, luv. He just doesn't understand you."
He shook his head instantly, banishing such worries.
"I do not, Gideon. In order for me to take such dislike personally, I would have to know him as a person - and I do not, know more than he knows me. Mine ire would only be directed at him if he hurt you." His brows drew, trying to find the right words.
"Catlin reminds me..." and then a soft laugh; it sounded nothing like before. Not madness, not wild, wicked rooks. It sounded like water, babbling in some deep, dark place, the caves beneath the world, slowly dripping. Slowly wearing away. "He reminds me of the cat that lives here. Wild, untamed. I smell like dead, rotting mass. I am not shocked that he would claw at mine hand."
Pale fingers peeled from where they were at Gideon's chest, the lineless tips pressing to the hollow of the man's cheek.
"I will leave him be, as that is your desire. And should our paths cross, I will behave. I swear it. I am sure his secrets taste sweet, but I will find them elsewhere, save should he deem to say them to mine ears."
"Thank you...." Gideon whispered breathlessly, lids drifting shut at the press of a kiss. Short nails curled inward against that strange flesh. "You don't need his secrets. I will give you all the secrets you could ever want."
He nuzzled against the other's cheekbone and whispered all the secrets of the dead woman they had left behind that evening. Some clandestine, some innocent. He gave up to stories of the dead that no one else would ever know or hear. Each night he would do this, take the stories of those who sustained him and offer them up to the shadow like leftovers, the choicest bits saved for a beloved pet. No longer did he have to carry the thousands of stories, the lifetimes of all the countless victims. Fafnir drained them out of him, leaving him with a delicious feeling of emptiness.
And with each one that Gideon gave up, Fafnir purred, cooed, mewled and moaned, sustained a little bit more by all of those murmured musings.
Gideon survived the nights on the blood of others. His new shadow lived on the secrets best left unsaid, whispered words in women's parlors, the giggling titters of children in schoolyards. It was a flavor of it's own, a festering fever that rendered the Shadow numb and yet so very full; a tick bloated on vitae. Slim fingers, white as new snow, they clenched and curled. His head lolled on his neck, tiny tremors wracking slim frame, the black of his eyes just rolled up into his head. Every sound he made was strangled and choked, moans he did not let free. This was the ecstasy of gold: to be poured full of so much glory.
He told the poor woman's whole life, from childhood until the moment the crone had died in his arms, thinking he was some kind of angel. When the secrets ran out he let his head fall back and watched with pleasure the orgasmic writhings of the dark beast coiling on his chest. He shuddered himself at the unabashed bliss of that beautiful monster, and smiled coldly.
"You are so perfect, luv. You are nothing short of poetry."
He made a quiet, amused sound, the sort that doesn't get far: it fills small spaces, little licks between lovers. His fingers flexed and unfurled once more and when he opened his eyes, the black that settled on Gideon was like some oil-slick. It trapped everything that got into it, suffocating and cruel.
"What does that make you, Gideon?" hissed quietly. Silk slithered, bunched where the Shadow settled his knees on either side of the man's hips, rising up a bit. Hair swirled and spilled, a Dance of fucking Fairies across Gideon's chest. The white of his hands flattened, spread themselves up across collarbones.
"I am beginning to grow concerned about how you speak of yourself, Gideon - as if you were offal to be scraped from beneath the bottom of a boot." He flashed all of those fangs in a smile, the sort of smile that belonged on a feline, a friend of Alice - or perhaps a foe. "Surely you do not feel this way."
He suppressed a soft groan at the pleasurable weight that pressed against him as Fafnir sat up.
"Nothing like me was ever meant to be, Fafnir. I am an aberration of nature. Even you and Bylah have roles, you are gears in the machinery of the universe. I had my role in those workings stolen." Bitter words, yes, but said with the coolness of one resigned. His chest rose under the stretch of those white fingers with breath that body did not require. It was a hard habit to break, and doing so was camouflage to the fragile creatures that he insisted on surrounding himself with.
"God tolerates no shit," Fafnir spat, quietly. "Nor, for that matter, does nature. No matter what you believe, it turns out the same: If you were not meant to be? You would not. Either God or Nature would have long ago snuffed out that which you are."
A clawed finger pointed at him. "Your kind would not have been tolerated and would have been removed long ago. As it stands, you and yours are still here. Thus, you must serve some purpose in the grand scheme of life."
He opened his eyes to gaze up at Fafnir in amusement.
"God? You surprise me, Fafnir. There is no such thing. And as you so accurately pointed out earlier nature has no conscience. It suffers all manner of horrors and freaks to exist and wreak their havoc The difference between myself and a hurricane is that even a hurricane can be beneficial. My existence benefits nothing. We are hideous marionettes, animated by strings held by a devil bent on nothing but destruction, death. We are the black holes of mortality; humanity collapsed inward on itself in a hungry pull, luring all others into our orbit only to suck them into the abyss with us, giving nothing in return."
He slid his hands up those writhing arms. "What purpose could that serve, Fafnir?"
"Who do you think is in a better position to know of God, you or I?" Fafnir asked, vaguely amused himself. "Perhaps 'God' is too encompassing a term, but if you think that your small little lives are not orchestrated by some higher power, you are terribly mistaken, Gideon. There is more than simply 'this', as it were - and there are other worlds than these."
He shifted, pitched forward, settled himself on Gideon's thighs.
"Otherwise, you shall need a very compelling argument as to why your Shadow is speaking to you." His hand went waving, doves in flight. It did not matter. "Nature has no conscience, but it does not tolerate something without use. Those bugs, those birds, those mammals great and small, they have all adapted, engineered themselves to survive in the cold, cruel places of the world. Your kind, too, have adapted. That means something, Gideon. Perhaps your purpose, your role in this life you live was for me - as I, in turn, might have been for you. You gave that woman something. You gave her some last flickering fire, some last blast of glorious pleasure before she died. I gnaw at secrets. We all serve some purpose, no matter how cruel or banal it may be. Dung beetles roll up balls of shit."
He suddenly grinned, wide and unchecked. "Everything has a purpose, Gideon. Knowing what that purpose is is not mandatory for living. It might drive you mad with wondering, but if you were not meant to be, you would not be - much less would you be part of a small whole. There are others like you in this city, some which have spanned over a thousand centuries. Do you truly think that which should not exist, without purpose, could last so long?"
Gideon sighed and sifted dark strands through the sieve of his fingers.
"We don't evolve, Fafnir. We aren't born, we are made. We have not changed since the oldest of us can recall. Even disease, even viruses evolve and change to kill the things they inhabit. If we have any use or purpose we are some small toys, death's tools." He smiled darkly.
"My purpose... I'm a plaything being punished for the moment.... and I'm more than happy to have the purpose of being your guardian, luv. " He drew his lower lip between sharp teeth, chewing thoughtfully upon the flawless pale flesh. "If others knew what we were they would hunt us, kill us, destroy us and rightly so. So we hide in plain sight, pretend to be what they are and prey upon them like wolves in sheep's clothing."
Lifting his chin he rolled his head to one side.
"It's nothing that bothers me much, Fafnir. It's my fate and I am resigned to it." A slow smile bared sharp teeth. "But if I am a monster, I am going to give new definition to the word."
