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.Come to tempt him, they had.Calling in to him.All night, it might go on, and that horny bugger inside, all alone in the world, sunk to his knees in prayer, trying not to imagine how they’d look, how they’d feel.No reason they couldn’t’ve come on in as they pleased — it was just their sport to break him down.”“Why?” I asked.“To prove they were more powerful than his god was?”“Aye, now that could be.More powerful … or at least there.Then again, some say that, by the time the Sisters of the Trinity finally got to their business on those who gave in, all the hours of fear … flavoured the monks better.”“Flavoured? Their blood, you mean?”“All of them.It’s said each consumes a different part of a man.One, the blood.One, the flesh.And one, the sperm.It’s said that when they’ve not fed for a good long time? There’s nothing of a man left but his bones, cracked open and sucked dry.”I couldn’t reconcile such savagery with the tenderness I’d been shown — the sweetness of her face, the gentle sadness in her eyes as she looked upon us, two dead boys and the other changed for life.Only when she’d tasted my blood had anything like terrible wisdom surfaced in her eyes.The sun had breached the horizon behind us when Uncle Brendan stopped the car.There was nothing human or animal to be seen in any direction, and we ourselves were insignificant in this rugged and lovely desolation.We crossed meadows on foot, until the road was lost to sight.Ahead, in the distance, a solitary standing stone listed at a slight tilt.It drew my uncle on with quickened steps.When we reached it, he touched it with a reverence I’d never thought resided in him, for anything, fingers skimming the shallow cuts of the ogham writing that rimmed it, archlike.“It’s theirs.The Sisters’.Engraved to honour them.” Then he grinned.“See anything missing?”I looked for chunks eroded or hammered away, but the stone appeared complete.I shook my head, mystified.“No crosses cut in later by the Christians.It wouldn’t take the chisel.Tried to smash the rock, they did, but it wore down their sledges instead.Tried to drag it to the sea, and the ropes snapped.So the legend goes, anyway.Like trying to pull God’s own tooth.Or the devil’s.If there’s a difference.” He shut his eyes, and the wind from the west swirled his graying hair.When he spoke again his voice was shaking.“Killed a boy here once.When I was young.Trying to call them up.I’d heard sometimes they’d answer the call of blood.Maybe I should’ve used my own instead.Maybe they’d’ve paid some mind to that.”On the wind I could hear the pounding of the ocean, and as I tried to imagine my generous and profane uncle a murderer, it felt as if those distant waves had all along been eroding everything I thought I knew.I asked Brendan what he’d wanted with the Sisters.“They didn’t take the name of the Trinity just because there happens to be three of them.Couldn’t tell you what it is, but it’s said there’s some tie to that other trinity you and I thought we were born to serve.Patrick, I … I wanted to know what they know.And there’s some say when they put their teeth to a man, the pleasure’s worth it.So what’s a few years sacrificed, to learning what’s been covered up by centuries of lies?”“But what if,” I asked, “all they’d have to tell you is just another set of lies?”“Then might be the pleasure makes up for that, too.” He took a step toward me and I flinched, as if he had a knife or garrote as he would’ve had for that boy whose blood hadn’t been enough.Brendan raised his empty hands, then looked at mine.At my wrists.“Maybe you’ve the chance I never had.Maybe they’ve a use for you they never had for me.”And in the new morning, he left me there alone.I sat against the old pagan stone after I heard the faraway sound of his car.The stone remembers, he’d once told me, and so do we.Demon est Deus inversus, I’d been told by another.Save me from that impotent, slaughtered lamb they have made of me.On this rock will I build my church, some scribe had written, putting words in the latter’s mouth.The blood remembers.Three days later my flesh remembered how to bleed.And the stone how to drink.*Regardless of their orbits, planets are born, then mature and die, upon a single axis, and so the stone and those it honoured had always been to me, even before I knew it.Now that I was here, I circled the stone but wouldn’t leave it, couldn’t, because, as in space, there was nothing beyond but cold dark emptiness.They came while I slept — the fourth morning, maybe the fifth.They were there with the dawn, and who knows how many hours before that, slender and solid against the morning mists, watching as I rolled upright in my dew-soaked blanket.When I rubbed my eyes and blinked, they didn’t vanish.Part of me feared they would.Part of me feared they wouldn’t.As I leaned back against the stone, she came forward and went to her knees beside me, looking not a day older than she had more than twenty years before.Her light brown skin was still smoothly translucent.Her gaze was tender at first, and though it didn’t change of itself, it grew more unnerving when she did not blink — like being regarded by the consummate patience of a serpent.She leaned in, the tip of her nose cool at my throat as she sniffed deeply.Her lips were warm against mine; their soft press set mine to trembling.Her breath was sweet, and the edge of one sharp tooth bit down to open a tiny cut on my lip.She sucked at it as if it were a split berry, and I thought without fear that next I would die.But she only raised my hands to nuzzle the pale inner wrists, their blue tracery of veins, then pushed them gently back to my lap, and I understood that she must’ve known all along what I was, what I was to become.“It’s nice to look into your eyes again,” she said, as if but a week had passed since she’d done so, “and not closed in sleep.”Since coming to the stone I’d imagined and rehearsed this moment countless times, and she’d never said this
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