First published February 2026.
The story begins as you'd expect: a wet summer night, a bar tucked just off the highway, a brewing storm, a boy alone. He sits at the counter, one ankle crossed over the other in a pose that is meant to appear languid but comes off more like he needs to piss. His nice dress shirt is thirty years out of fashion, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and his muscular arms are cushioned in a fine deposit of fat. Not as much as he’d had on him when he died, but enough to take the threat out of his evident strength. He does not have a name. He has accepted that he will not get one.
There is a wide-eyed innocence to him, a naive androgyny that lends the appearance of a much younger individual. A whisper of facial hair above the lip, slight sideburns carving out his jawline, long lashes, a delicate mouth. It balances out the harshness of his other features, drawing attention away from the hollows under his eyes, the broadness of his face, those dagger-like eyebrows perpetually poised in an upward crease. As he sits at the bar, he looks almost stupid. Oafish, Silas would say. It would be an insult from anyone else. In honesty, it’s an insult from Silas as well.
He toys with his drink and looks around. This is the way to do things: sit and wait. A good hunter never needs to be in pursuit, never lets his prey get far enough to run. Even as the crowd parts around him (a more animal corner of their minds recognizing the rot in his bones, the bile on his breath), he knows he will have his pick. Still, never one to prolong the inevitable, he'll leave with the first unlucky fool too drunk or too thick to heed that long-buried instinct.
This happens to be a young gentleman with ruddy cheeks and burnished gold hair. The fine scarlet flush in his neck makes his neatly combed close-crop appear straw-yellow. He looks about as funny as his new companion, who knows his intention from the moment he sits down.
“Hey,” says the gentleman, haltingly. He knots his fingers together, wipes at a fine sheen of sweat on his chin.
The boy raises his eyebrows and doesn’t smile, but moves his lips in a way that conveys the sentiment. His hand twitches up and stops before it is able to make any adjustments. Men in particular prefer him to be messy-looking, lost.
“I’m,” the gentleman says, and clears his throat. The watch on his wrist is the same color as his hair, and it looks expensive. He catches the boy looking and tugs his sleeve over it. “Uh. I’m Benjamin.” Benjamin is drunk. It’s a shame, because he seems nice—nice enough, anyway, to brave conversation with a stranger at the bar despite his fear of being pick-pocketed.
“A pleasure,” says the boy, turning away to break eye contact. This is a move that drives most guys crazy. From the way Benjamin twitches in his periphery, it's working. “You from around here?”
“Naw,” Benjamin says. A hint of accent breaks through; the boy supposes he spent the first few years of his life in some southern state and moved away before middle school. “Just passing through.”
“Through to…” The boy gestures with his drink when Benjamin doesn’t fill in the rest for him. “Where, exactly?”
“I just landed a job around Chicago,” Benjamin says, a note of pride coloring his voice. “Gonna be in finance.”
“Interesting,” the boy says. His friend for the night certainly dresses like a finance guy, even in a town that consists mostly of drunken college kids that move in to party for a few years and then abandon ship for someplace bigger and better. If the boy had to guess, Benjamin went to school in a place just like this. “Not New York?”
“Naw,” Benjamin says, shaking his head vehemently. “Well, not yet, anyway. I prefer Chicago.” Before the boy can say anything else, he adds, “What about you? Where you headed?”
“You don’t think I live here?” the boy says. He lets a hint of amusement spill out, even as his stomach turns. Benjamin’s gray-blue eyes twinkle when they meet his own, and it occurs to him that this is exactly the kind of guy other people think he is. Sweet, disarming, a little—well, a little dumb.
“You? Naw.” Benjamin takes a sip of his drink. “Your accent doesn’t match up. And you seem ready to hit the road, yeah?”
“Yeah,” the boy says. “Suppose I am.” Almost before he can act, Benjamin is pushing back from his seat, waiting for him to follow. “Are you coming with me, Benjamin?”
“For a while,” he responds. “Maybe—for a night? And, please, call me Ben.”
As they emerge from the warm light of the bar into the cool blue tones outside, a crack of lightning splits the distant sky. Ben holds the door open, and this is the last impression anyone will get of him: strong profile weakened by the slightest underbite, one arm around the shoulders of a much younger-looking man as he shepherds him into the waiting darkness.
In the gas station bathroom, the boy kisses a trail down his neck and then clamps his jaw down as hard as he can where ear meets throat, piercing into the carotid artery. He is not quite able to catch all of the fallout with his mouth, and blood spurts out around his cheeks, dribbling down onto the cracked porcelain sink. Ben makes a singular, pinched sound of agony before the boy jams his fingers down his throat to muffle the noise. His flaxen hair is stained scarlet, his nice shirt half-unbuttoned to reveal the down of chest hair. At the end of the night, the boy will take his watch, but he'll wish he could have had this instead: this chiseled body, this large, sharp nose, this earnest masculinity, reminiscent of an oil painting.
Benjamin is unconscious in a matter of seconds and dead in scant few more. In this time, the boy feeds. His tongue flits out on occasion, staunching the flow of blood so he can gasp for air, but aside from that it is sweet and steady, tinged with alcohol, flowing to his cold extremities and pumping them with brief vitality. It is not enough. It will not be enough.
As Benjamin’s heart slows to a reluctant halt, the blood cools, and the boy guides him down from the sink into a slumped position on the floor so that gravity can do the rest of the work. Soon, he is pulling, straddling the corpse to get a better angle, leaning down and searching for those final drops. For a split second after he finishes, his body is awash with euphoria, limbs tight and undulating with ecstatic pleasure; it is the closest sensation to sunlight he has felt in decades. That fades quickly, however, and he withdraws, scrambling backwards, the last human threads of his being recognizing the corpse in front of him, the act he has just committed.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, screwing up his eyes as if to stop himself from crying. Even though he is no longer capable of such a feat, he feels it scrabbling at his insides, feels emotion pushing at the split seams of his face and ribs, as if one wrong move might turn a crack to a fissure and spill what remains of his insides on the shitty, grimy tile of the gas station bathroom. The muscles in his abdomen spasm with some combination of guilt and nausea, and he doubles over so his elbows kiss the floor. Prostrate, penitent.
It is like this every time. Every time he cries tears that will not come. He presses his unfeeling mouth to the lifeless form of the almost-lover in his arms. Every time, he is remorseful. Every time, sated, he swears he will never do it again, even as he presses bloodied fingers to his lips and scrounges around for the last metallic remnants of his dinner. Every time, he finds himself hungry again. A vampire who repents is no less a killer than its unflinching counterpart. In many ways, he is more dangerous, because he allows the burden of his conscience to make him sloppy, drunk with longing. He convinces himself—it convinces itself—that it is almost human, when in fact it is not. A fox that longs to slumber in a henhouse, lulled to rest by the soft cooing of animals that it is meant to eat. Animals that it is going to eat, once it's hungry enough.
He wipes his nose with the yellowed sleeve of his dress shirt (even though, again, his nose is no longer capable of producing secretions other than the occasional oily and faintly foul-smelling black sludge) and begins to scrub the blood from the tiles.
Silas is waiting for him outside. Silas, Silas, Silassilassilassilas. The word echoes in his head until it is one long hiss. His sire, who does have a name, who carried one with him at birth and took it to the grave. It is a suitable name, sufficiently sibilant and adequately ominous when slipping into one’s ear for the first time.
The boy hangs his head, tugging the hem of his ratty sweatshirt over the sanguine mess that has become of his nicer clothes.
“Oh, please,” Silas says, screwing up his long, sharp features into an unsettling impression of woe. “Please, forgive me. I’m just ever so sorry.” The boy’s sire is all shadow, only a pointy elegant white face and pointy elegant white hands visible within his mass of dark clothes. The few time the boy has seen him in sufficient interior lighting, Silas has been dressed like a Halloween store’s approximation of a plague doctor, even though the rest of him looks like it clawed and bit its way out of the eighteenth century. Now, Silas clasps his waxen hands together as though in prayer and shakes them earnestly, knuckles clenched so tightly that the bone threatens to penetrate his thin flesh. The boy watches the motion as if hypnotized. “Please, please, please! It’s pathetic. I want to vomit just listening to you. Did you even check if your prey was a hunter before diving in?”
“Sorry,” the boy mumbles, and he looks down. The truth is, for once, he is not sorry. He runs out of contrition by the time he has to face Silas; all that remains is a hollow anger and the vague notion that one day he might shove his maker out an open window at midday. Silas would never let him get that close, though, and he doesn’t know where the elder vampire sleeps.
“Waste of my goddamned time,” Silas spits out. All at once, he withdraws, extending one crooked finger in a beckoning motion. “If I wanted to listen to my spawn simper and whine, I’d have picked a fucking Victorian.” He draws the f in fucking out so long that it becomes its own syllable. Silas’s favorite thing about the modern era is the cussing, even though he enunciates too clearly and still talks like he's gearing up to give the town crier an earful.
Fifty, sixty years ago, decked in the divinest black, with his cruel, perfect features and the citrus powder in his hair, Silas had seemed to the boy like a god. Unknowable, all-knowing, benevolent, for now. He'd swept into the boy’s motel room as he languished, prepared to expire on a piss-stained mattress that had housed more roaches than people, and promised him eternity. Nine months into manhood—nine long months, lurching start-and-stops, hormones bought off of body builders, blood tests done by closeted med students, the first steps in an arduous legal battle for documentation—the offer had seemed too good to be true. A divorce from his mortal body, from his mortal life, which was tapering off into nothingness without ceremony. A transformation in its own right. Self-determination, from now until the end of time: no one would be able to tell him what to be.
Now, he thinks it was just the opposite. The man he could have been was castrated, spayed and neutered so he could be Silas’s house pet. This resentment is the only thing that keeps him alive. The elder vampire likes it, claims it’ll get him places, if only he can bring himself to kill without remorse.
“You waste so much time,” Silas is saying, in a softer voice that means the lecture is wrapping up. “Imagine; you could be unstoppable if you killed quickly and with efficacy.”
“I know,” the boy says. And he reaches into his pocket and palms his maker the golden watch without another word.
“Ah,” Silas crows, holding the glittering thing up to the flickering light of a 24-hour convenience store window. Hot rain spits on the pavement. The boy imagines he can hear a hiss and sizzle. “Excellent work. We may make a monster of you yet.”
Two exits and eighty miles over, the boy sits on the stoop outside his motel room, smoking. It’s been years since cigarettes tasted like anything to him (more than half a century, he realizes with some surprise), but old habits die hard, and Silas fucked off to some darker and danker corner of this nothing place, leaving him to his own devices. The trees are dark and uncompromising, and every couple of minutes, a car screams by. Across from and above him, a mosaic of bitter light pulses behind thin sets of curtains. A room on the ground floor, so blood doesn't soak through someone else's ceiling.
Down at the pool, there’s little life to be seen. A single mother bounces a shrieking toddler on her hip, trying to get him to settle down enough to go to bed for the night after letting him play in the water too long. An older man is on his fifth or sixth lap around the perimeter; he seldom comes up for air, and when he does, he pays no mind to his surroundings. But, there, on the water's edge, is a girl.
Girl is the wrong word. She is a young woman, a little older than he is—a little older than he was, the last time he had a pulse. Her frame is the inverse of his, all sharp edges and angular bends, but her face is round, lips stained and eyes drooping like an old-Hollywood starlet. The feeling he gets is instant and magnetic. Here is a girl that no one will miss, but lost in reflection and haloed in blue-gray light emanating from below, she could be a saint.
As he tamps out his cigarette and stands, her eyes flick up and meet his, drawn by the movement. Something electric snakes through his person, then, a shock that does not set his heart beating again but sends a tremor through his flesh that feels much the same. That smudge of a mouth (not so much a mouth as the memory of it in motion) quirks to one side, but she does not smile.
And he does something he has never done before, never once in the quicksand decades since his death: he leaves his post and approaches her. In those excruciating seconds, she makes no indication that she notices or particularly cares about him, except that those bottomless eyes remain locked on his every movement. As he walks, his hands set to work, smoothing his too-long hair and cuffing his flannel sleeves above the elbows.
Then he's there, and so is she.
Her scent hits him first. Hairspray and floral perfume, dampened but not cleansed by the pool water; beneath that, a fine sheen of sweat. In the split second before she inhales, he wonders if she might be—might be what? Kindred, maybe. Another of his ilk. Any of the pretentious euphemisms Silas loves to spew in the long drives between wilting towns. She isn't swimming, but she has been, and the chill and chemical chlorine stench dampen the signifiers he relies on to discern the living from the dead. But then she breathes in, a faint shudder and flex in her torso from the cold, and her heart palpitates, and it is unmistakable.
"Well?" she says, and her voice is high and husky, like the tremor of a leaf in the wind. The boy realizes he's been hovering about three feet from her shoulder, hands relaxed at his sides, mouth slightly agape. Remember the thing before about looking stupid?
"Sorry," he says, playing into it. An apologetic smile without revealing too many teeth, a shift of weight to one hip, a tangling of the fingers. "Long night. Mind if I sit?"
"I don't see why not," she says. She leans back, bare abdominal muscles flexing with the motion, and it elicits a spasm of longing in his gut so sharp and sudden that he flinches back and then hastens a cough to cover it up.
"Sorry," he says again when the girl arches a well-groomed brow. "I'm sorry. I should quit." Several yards away, the cig is still smoldering; he did a shit job of putting it out, but he figures it'll extinguish on its own eventually. Or not.
"Not at all." Her mouth quirks again. That same not-smile. The boy eases down to her left, keeping a few feet of distance just to be safe, and plunges one leg into the water below. It's warmer than he expected—certainly warmer than he is—but it does nothing to ease the ache in his bones. Beside him, the girl is warming by degrees, the damp ebbing from her skin, gooseflesh disappearing. The next thing she says is, "What brings you here?" but she clips it short: "Brings you?" Extra syllables at the start and end of the sentence imply the remainder.
"Just passing through," he says, stretching. "You?"
Her eyes flit up and then down. They remind him of a black hole; they have their own gravitational pull. "Where to?"
"Nowhere in particular," he says. Some accent slips through: paticular. Most of it is gone, sanded down by years of travel, but sometimes he forgets an r or two. "Me and my roommate are going cross-country. See the sights, and all."
The girl nods, seeming to turn this over. "Gap year?" she guesses.
He shakes his head. "More of a post-grad thing. Finished my bachelor's degree at the community college a few months back."
Her eyes narrow, and she gives him a closer look. "You're done with college?"
At this, he laughs. It is only half-forced. "I know. Kind of a baby face, huh?"
"You're telling me," she says, but her mouth quirks for a third time and he knows that he has to have her, even though he's not hungry (well, not starving), even though he just fed. This is Silas's modus operandi, not his: the elder vampire feeds as often as possible, certainly as often as an adult man of his stature would. But if he leaves without this girl, it will eat away at what remains of his insides. She is watching him in a way that means she knows what he is thinking, that she sees his hunger and understands it, though he is sure she mistakes this desire for something baser and more human.
A second passes. And then she relaxes, tipping her head back and closing her eyes and exposing her sun-gilt throat. He twitches. "Get drinks with me," she says, hacking the sentence down again: "Drinks with me." It's not a suggestion.
He is already standing, bending down to offer her a hand, which she takes. Her palm is warm and calloused, which surprises him, but as she rises, her scent rises with her, and it is the smell of meat and chemicals, and he forgets himself. "I could use one," he says.
This time, she does smile.
It turns out that drinks means a gas station run and a trip to the girl's motel room. She pulls her jet-black hair into a slick ponytail, pausing only to remove two strands to frame her face, and hauls herself into the driver's seat of a white pickup truck in one smooth motion. The thing is old and well-maintained, with leather seats and a fuzzy pair of dice dangling from the mirror.
He hesitates with one hand on the passenger-side handle. "You good if I get in?" Stranger danger, he thinks.
"Bout as good as I can be." She is not looking at him, instead fishing trash from the cup holders. An empty soda cup with a fast food logo emblazoned on the side, sticky and sweet. A grease-and-salt-stained paper bag—french fries. As he hoists himself up and in, not bothering with the seatbelt, she reaches over him and stuffs the garbage into the glove compartment. The old food smell clings to the artifacts (and, he realizes, to the girl's mouth and fingers), but this distracts him only a moment from the unmistakable metallic sheen of a gun nestled atop a mess of napkins and paperwork.
This elicits within him three emotions, rapid-fire: surprise, amusement, pity. Each one thuds in his chest like the knell of a church bell. She thinks the gun will protect her. She lives in a world governed by logic: she believes that a semi-automatic pistol will defend her against the stranger in her car, that she's safe. And she would be, if it were anywhere else but here, anyone else but him.
He realizes she's watching him and forces a smile as the truck shudders and spits to life, even as his gums ache with wanting.
"Can I—" he says. "Can I roll a window down?"
"Go for it," she says, jutting her chin to indicate a crank to his right. When he does, the outside air hesitates for a split second before rushing in, spinning currents of the girl's scent into thin threads that swirl and eddy throughout the cabin. It does not spare him the intensity of flesh, of that fluttering pulse which nigh-imperceptibly thrums through her seat and into his, but it introduces other smells, more noise. Damp wood and sun-soaked leaves and nighttime soil, twined with piss and cigarette butts and empty bottles still sticky with booze. When he was alive, he thought the filth of nature was better, somehow, cleaner than the filth of man, but he knows better now. Filth is filth. The stench of his rotting intestines, surely little more than a black slurry by now, would mark even the most fecal alleyway like a field of daisies by comparison, and he cannot think of anything more natural than decay.
He holds his breath for most of the ride. Silas has told him that he no longer needs to breathe, that his lungs don't work anymore and all he's doing is wasting vital energy to simulate the motion. But the boy's chest still seizes up in panic when he stays under to feed for too long, and the habit is hard to kick. By the end, he's tense all over, stiff joints aching.
The girl departs, and he waits outside. He has no ID to speak of, and there's not a snowball's chance in hell he passes for a day over eighteen, even though he died at twenty. Part of him is grateful, swallowing stale mouthfuls of gas-station-concrete air that do nothing to settle his stomach, and luckily she's still getting drinks when he doubles over and vomits black tar into the bushes, a stringy mixture of blood and bile and chunks of his own flesh. He grimaces, straightens, and scrubs at his teeth and lips with the corner of his flannel shirt, hoping to pass it off as grease, hoping the stains in his gums and the earthy-sick smell won't give him away. A cicada hums in a tree nearby.
When the girl returns, she looks at him funny but says nothing. On the ride back, he flexes his jaw, massages his throat (still burning after the acidic expulsion from his ruined gut), and begins to ask questions. Where is she from? (No answer). Okay, fair. Did she go to college? (Yes, but she dropped out after a year). Why? (No answer). He's beginning to get the hang of this girl: nothing too personal, nothing specific. What was she going to study in the beginning, when she went? (That's the thing; she doesn't really know. She was into forensics but couldn't narrow her field of study down, and there were some personal issues the summer after freshman year that needed addressing). He is sorry. She says not to be. What's her name? (What's his?)
For a moment after she asks this of him, the boy fumbles. He could lie—he's done it before—but the false name (Eduard or Eli or some E-name) dies on his tongue when he glances at her. The girl's eyes are black and sparkling and infinite, like a precious stone, like a glassy sea at midnight. So he clears his throat and asks what she's doing out here in the middle of nowhere. Getting away, she says. Looking for something.
And then it's quiet again.
The boy is starting to think maybe he'll just wait for the girl to fall asleep and slip away, leaving her unscathed, when she unlocks the door to her motel room and he is hit with her physicality all over again. The bed is unmade, sheets and blankets tangled, one pillow on the floor, an impression in the shape of her body still warm from when she last lay down. Two bottles rest on the nightstand, one on the floor below; the television, still on, hums static and occasionally hisses with electricity. There's food in the refrigerator, though to him it smells of earth and rot, and her bathing suit is somewhere in the bathroom. Clinging to it all is a faint stench of sweat and flesh, of hair and oil. He cannot smell but does imagine her toothbrush in the next room, the spittle and meal particles on the bristles, her fingerprints on the mirror and the toothpaste.
He must have recoiled, visibly, because the girl is looking at him sidelong. "Sorry," she says. "Bit of a mess. Didn't think I'd have company."
"Oh, no," he says, forcing himself to relax. "Not at all."
She enters first, flicking her long black hair over one shoulder and exposing the back of her neck. Carotid, he thinks. The rest follows: Subclavian. Pulmonary. Brachial. Underneath it all, Food.
There isn't much in the way of furniture, so she ends up cross-legged on the bed while he sits on the floor, back between the wall and the TV stand. When he glances up, vivid orange-and-white pill containers stare back at him. Spironolactone, says one. Estradiol. Progesterone. A strange sensation overtakes him, then, a twisting in the bottom of his insides. Envy? Pride? Grief, maybe—traces of his own life linger in that of this stranger, traces of his own fears.
Those dark eyes pierce right into his when he turns away, so he licks his lips while he tries to think of something to say.
"Was it difficult?" is what he lands on. He can practically hear Silas groaning.
"Sure," she says, bending over the side of the bed to grab one of their spoils. She tosses one to him—a shiny can: white, blue, and red—and cracks open her own with a glossy black-painted nail.
"Worth it?" he asks, because he needs to know. The barriers haven't gone away, only changed shape, and it must have been a lengthy, complicated process for her to get here.
She makes an affirmative noise. "Course. You?"
This catches him off guard. It shouldn't. "I, ah," he says, and turns his gaze to the popcorn ceiling. "I had to stop. Health reasons."
Her expression softens unexpectedly. It's strange on her features, molded to a certain shrewdness. "That sucks," she says. "I'm sorry."
"What are you gonna do," he says, and laughs even though it isn't funny. Something about health reasons tickles him.
There isn't much to say after that. He doesn't touch his beer, abandons it when she motions for him to sit on the bed. Eventually she kisses him (after he pussies out on more than one attempt), and she tastes of booze and smoke and meat and lipstick, and, well, that clinches it. She has to die. It becomes easier after this realization—how much he craves her, needs her—and instinct takes over, slackening his muscles and guiding his movements. Once or twice, she withdraws, giving him a searching look, and it plunges through the roiling deep that has become his consciousness, grabbing hold of his heart and tugging, and he gasps, momentarily coming to his senses before yielding to baser inclinations.
It seems natural for them to have sex, because it is. It's not a requirement in this process, but it usually ends up happening. She goes into the bathroom. He follows. There is a black bag on the floor, silver jewelry scattered by the shower. She unbuttons his jeans and he hooks his thumb in her bra, and the scent is divine, the taste, the touch; her skin is warm and pulsing against his cold stillness. His mouth tingles with anticipation, something twitching in his gums. A vein pulses in the sweet flesh of her neck. He resists a moment longer, needs only to ease her up onto the sink, where her back strikes the grime-fogged mirror and she gasps, a single, sharp inhalation that he would have missed if he weren't hanging on to every expansion and expulsion of her lungs, every twitch of muscle, every shudder of bone. He kisses her again.
When he withdraws, she is looking at him, and just for a moment he sees himself through her eyes. Grayed out teeth, chapped skin, hollow cheeks. He sees the graveyard dirt churning in his stomach, the desperation in his restless hands. He sees something less than human.
"Sorry," he says. Too early. The apology is meant to come after, when the meal has stopped moving. "I'm sorry." He's mumbling, too, which would piss Silas off. He moves his mouth to her neck and kisses her there, because it doesn't matter how bad he feels; there is a hole inside him that needs to be filled. Sweat. Chlorine. Beneath that, traces of perfume, of cherry body soap, of meat, of meat. Something catches in his chest, and he leans in, and—
A point of pressure, just below the sternum. His body freezes instinctively, senses the first splinters splitting the fibers of his shirt, senses the angle—aimed at the inside of his left shoulder blade—and knows danger.
His teeth retract.
And the stake goes in.
The second it connects with his heart, something ruptures. He splits open, spine cracking, a flash of pain like a bolt of lightning at the core of his being. He is dying. She has killed him. A hunter. His eyes wander, first finding the buzzing fluorescents above their head and next settling on the black bag on the floor, open now, wooden handles protruding from between flaps of fabric. Ah, he's been a fool. As she removes the blood-soaked weapon and guides him to the floor, he thinks she could have brought it in with her and he wouldn't have known. All he could think about was the scent of her hair, the warmth of her body. And he'd needed it more than he'd been afraid. That was his first mistake.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, so close to him that her nose brushes his ear. There is a thck as a hot tear drops onto his cheek, then another. A slender hand slips into the crook behind his shoulder, propping him up against her chest, where her heart beats steadily against the failing lurch of his own shallow approximation. “You seemed nice.”
But he doesn’t mind. It’s been so long since his blood was outside his body. A part of him, the last part conscious enough to form thoughts, knows that this was bound to happen. The hunter will leave him for her next mark, and he will become one in a long list of victories, face forgotten. But it doesn't matter. Cradled here in the smooth tile expanse, borrowed pulse passing for his own, the sweet eternity that lights upon his tongue tastes much like the one his maker promised to him all those decades since.
He is warm for the first time.