Jefi’s energy felt… well, it felt contemplative at Shepherd’s back. “You like him.”
Shepherd shrugged and pulled out another book—Dostoyevsky, a personal favorite. “Let’s just say I’m on a first-name basis with his demons, and they’re worthy. When he was on earth, I never knew he was a vampire.”
Jefischa’s energy blinked. “How could you not know?”
Shepherd sighed and situated himself, sprawling like a particularly large, long-legged human male might, had he not been an angel and wearing a form for the sake of the entering mortals. “He didn’t repent the things he did as a vampire. I mean, they’re supposed to have a mantra, right? ‘No shame.’ But nobody can do that for real, right? Most vampires, they slip up—they kill somebody they didn’t intend to, they turn someone who goes rogue. Even the ones who become vampires just to be evil—to kill indiscriminately—even
they
feel shame. But not Adrian. If he hadn’t made his livelihood in sex and blood, I’d swear he was a saint.”
Jefischa was quiet for a moment. “You liked him, when he was on earth.”
“It was nice. A good man’s penitence is a rare and precious thing. I was grateful when he was relieved of it, though. He bore the burden too long.”
“Shepherd?”
“Yes?”
“All you know of humanity are the things they regret.”
There was a dark silence then, and Shepherd didn’t know how to make it lighter. “Yeah, Jefi. That’s about right.”
“Have you ever heard them, right before they go to sleep before a big, exciting day?”
“No.”
There was a subtle fluttering near where Shepherd’s shoulder would be if he’d had one. “You should. It feels like flying.”
Shepherd had a sudden, irrational wish. He wished that he had real hands and not just constructs of energy. He wished that he could ruffle Jefi’s hair—if he had any. He pushed the wish aside but managed to lighten his wings up to an open gray-blue. “I’ll be sure to try that, Jefi. But for now, let’s give him a day or two to himself and then go visit. I can feel his penance now, and he shouldn’t be alone for too long.”
“Why? What’s he regret?”
“Dying and leaving his loved ones alone.”
Jefischa made a suspicious sound, and Shepherd extended an energy-construct arm. Jefi draped himself across Shepherd’s “body” and made himself comfortable. From the way he was bobbing his head, Shep figured he was listening to music. “C’mon, Jefi,” Shepherd said after a moment. “You know it’s no use grieving for that one. Mortals have a short time, that’s all.”
“Yeah. But Shep, he wasn’t mortal.”
Well, yeah. A vampire in love probably assumed he really did have worlds enough and time, didn’t he?
“We’re all susceptible to ending, Jefi. Even you, and even me.”
“I don’t believe that, Shep. Falling isn’t ending. I think there will always be a Shep and a Jefi. The world wouldn’t spin right without us.”
“And we’ll always be together, right?”
An affronted silence. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be Shep and Jefi!”
“Oh. Of course.” Shepherd was usually a restless, brooding sort of presence—unless Jefischa was this close, purring over him. So the reassurance actually made him happy. For a moment, a mere moment, he felt an anticipation of something unknown like Jefi had described, but it was immediately lost in the blissful hum of eternity ever after.
They gave Adrian a couple of turns of the sun and then went in during Jefi’s hour. Adrian was draped on a couch, playing some sort of electronic game on a big screen with a recently departed teenager who had messy brown hair, jeans, and the rapidly fading marks of a fatal motorcycle crash. They were busy making lights and sounds for a moment, and then the teenager—who hadn’t heard the two angels come in—said, “Are you sure no one cares if we’re playing
Grand Theft Auto IV
? Because my mom kept telling me this game would fuck up my morals.”
Adrian caught Shepherd’s eyes and winked. “Well, mate, I think if you’ve ended up here, you’ve probably got nothing to worry about.”
There was a sad and quiet silence. On the “television” in front of them, a character took a clip in the gut, vomited cartoon blood, and died. “Yeah. Do you think she knows that?” The kid’s leather jacket repaired itself as he spoke, and what looked to be a fatal head injury knitted itself up as well. “I…. You know. We were fighting a lot when I ended up here.”
Adrian pressed pause on the game—something about the movement suggested he’d had conversations like this many times before. “Mate, most mothers love their sons. If she was bitching at you to clean up your act, it’s because she loved you. She’s going to miss you, no two ways about it. But she’ll look at your pictures and cry, and then she’ll let you go, because she knows someday she’ll see her little boy again.”
There was a thoughtful silence. “Will I know?” the boy said. “Will I know when she’s coming?”
Adrian smiled at him with an insouciant, fuck-me sort of grin, and he fingered the cord emerging from his chest. “You’ll feel it here, mate. You can come meet her when it’s time.”
The boy felt at the cord as though he’d only now noticed it, and even Shepherd realized that you couldn’t really see them unless you were looking. Suddenly the expression on the boy’s narrow, apple-cheeked face became dreamy… hooded… sultry.
“My girlfriend misses me too,” the boy said, and Adrian smiled sympathetically. The boy began to caress the cord, bathing his hand in its energy. His head fell back against the couch, and his body—or what he imagined to be his body—began to bulge at the crotch of the newly repaired jeans.
Adrian stood from what looked to be a beanbag chair made out of cloud and unobtrusively exited the room, closing a “door” behind him.
“Well, he’ll need to be alone for a while. Was there anything you blokes wanted, or did you want to do the voyeur thing some more?”
Shepherd wasn’t sure about Jefi, but he knew why it took
him
a while to answer. “I… we weren’t aware that humans… uhm… souls… could still do that here.”
Adrian raised a mocking eyebrow. “He was feeling his connection to the human world, mate. He was seventeen when he died. You could probably populate Mars out of what’s pumping through that gold cord.”
Jefi giggled. Shep glared at him and he subsided, but Jefi’s hand was set solidly over his mouth, and his dancing angelic eyes showed that he was still amused. “It makes sense,” Shep said at last, slowly, and then Jefi moved his hand and interrupted.
“Do
you
do that, Adrian?”
Adrian’s smile was both devilish and kind at the same time. “Boyo, I wasn’t even human. I was vampire. We fuck like lemmings on speed. I can
still
do that. And I often do!”
If Shepherd had actually been breathing, his breath would have absolutely stalled in his chest. As it was, Jefischa made a sucking, whooshing sound and almost choked on his own spit, which was pretty damned hard since angels didn’t have any.
Adrian laughed loud and long, holding his middle and whooping until he was wiping his cheeks for tears that weren’t there and gasping for breath, and Shep tried to pull himself together. Before he could get a handle on his shock—or his terrible curiosity—Jefi said guilelessly, “Oh, I get it. You were
kidding
!” and that set Adrian off again. While he was rolling on the pale cloudy floor of heaven, Shepherd and Jefi looked at each other in mortification.
“Not kidding,” Shep said, feeling an odd temperature fluctuation. Jefi must have been feeling it too. His wax-perfect features were starting to turn a little pink.
“Thinking not,” Jefi answered back in a small voice. Adrian was starting to subside now, but he was still giggling a little to himself as he stood gracefully and swept imaginary dust off his blue jeans. He wiped another imaginary crimson tear from a razor-blade cheek and reached out and clapped Jefischa on the back. Jefi and Shep exchanged shocked glances when the slapping sound rebounded and echoed off the vaults of heaven’s anteroom, but Adrian seemed unperturbed.
“That was priceless, you two. Thanks for that!”
“We didn’t do anything, did we, Shep?” Jefi sounded so sad, so insecure. Shep wrapped his arm around Jefi’s shoulders and squeezed reassuringly. He knew it was only his energy, but it felt more solid than usual. But that didn’t matter.
“No, Jefi. I think Adrian was just surprised, that’s all.” Shep glared at Adrian, daring the vampire’s ghost to contradict him. To his surprise, Adrian was instantly contrite and instantly kind.
“Yeah. No worries, Jefi.”
“Jefischa!” Shepherd growled, surprising them all.
“Jefischa,” Adrian corrected smoothly. “No worries. I was not aware that you were not aware, that’s all.”
“We thought… you know… that….”
“Sex gets left behind with the meat sack?” Adrian filled in, and he rolled his eyes when Shepherd and Jefi both started to look shocked again. “Well, physically, yes. Sex is a physical thing. But… but it’s also a connection. When you do it right, it’s all energy, just like the two of you.”
Shepherd grew very still. “I don’t hear about that kind in my travels,” he said softly, and Jefi squeezed his hand reassuringly. Shepherd squeezed back before he realized they didn’t really have hands. “We’ve heard about it in general,” Shepherd admitted, “but… those people are very often happy when they get here. Not a lot of time for….”
“Serene souls, content to wait on their mates?” Adrian supplied with some irony, and Shepherd nodded. His throat felt dry, and in sheer irritability he conjured a glass of water, which he raised to his lips with shaking hands. Jefischa, who was clearly capable of conjuring his own glass of water, took Shepherd’s glass from him and finished it off.
“Well, I’m not one of those,” Adrian said sharply. Then, looking at them, he seemed to take pity on them. He crouched down and rubbed at the frosted froth of the floor like he was wiping a dirty window with his hand.
“Here, look at this, would you?”
Shep and Jefi both knelt on the floor of heaven and looked at the clear window Adrian had made for them.
“How do you know how to do this?” Jefi asked, and Adrian shot him a scornful look.
“I’ve been here for over two years, humanwise. Do you know how many nights that is, longing for a look at them? Now here: I’m about to share some serious shit with you gits, and you’d best not blow it off.”
“You don’t have to,” Shepherd said seriously. He was almost afraid to learn more about Adrian. In a few moments of conversation, the man… vampire… whatever! had managed to completely discomfit the two of them, and they were a pretty serene duo, all things considered.
“No, you have to guard me. You’ll have to deal with me. And the first thing to understand is that
I’m not human.
I haven’t been for over a hundred and fifty years, but it’s okay. Because until about six weeks before I got blown into a powder, I thought the human race was pretty fucking overrated, if you want to know the truth. Now look at them.
Look at them
!”
They looked. Shep saw three… well, people, for lack of a better word. Two of them weren’t really human. “They’re elves,” he said to Jefi, who peered at them curiously.
“You don’t see a lot of elves, do you, Shep?”
“Elves don’t really have anything to repent,” Shepherd said honestly. “And if they do, they’re not talking to us. In fact….” Shep squinted through the little window. “That entire place—I know that place. There’s over a thousand souls there, but it’s like a penitence vacuum. Hardly anyone there has any true regret.”
“It’s a faerie hill,” Adrian agreed soberly. “Except it’s got more than just the fey. It’s got vampires, were-folk… and her.”
“Wait a minute,” Shepherd said, his eyes widening. “I know what they’re doing together. Do you know how many people I’ve had repent
that
particular position right there?”
Adrian chuckled, the sound oddly gentle. “These three have never been your penitents, Shepherd. And certainly not for what they’re doing right now.”
Jefi cocked his head to the side, and then his eyes got wide. “
Whoa
….”
Shep smacked him lightly on the back of the head, and Jefi recovered himself and remembered his job. “Is that your lover?” he asked with respect. “She’s….” He faltered. And well he might, Shep thought with surprise. She wasn’t beautiful. Adrian—well, Adrian sort of oozed human sex and human beauty, but this woman was plain as a potato. And she was young. Even by human standards.
But Shep was an angel, and he was used to looking at the heart of humans. “She’s lovely,” he said, and his voice was reverent, because she was. Seeing that, he looked beyond the inhuman (almost angelic, if he’d admitted it) loveliness of her two companions in the garden by the light of a waning summer sun.
“They’re all beautiful,” he whispered. “They’re… bright. Even the one with the dark energy, it’s intense and grounded, practically growing granite roots.” He looked up at Adrian. “These were all your lovers?”
“‘Lovers’ is an easy word. I was lovers with most of the hill,” Adrian admitted without even a blush. “Two of them were my beloveds. The third, Fuckface there”—the dark energy—“he was my friend.”
“But now you hate him?” Jefi asked, appalled, and a flicker of a smile passed over Adrian’s pouting, pretty, palely pink mouth. Shep wondered if Jefi longed for that pouting mouth to be open and laughing again.
“Still love him—just not like I love Green or Cory, my beloveds. Not any less, mind you. Just different. Do you see them? All of them down there?”
Shep and Jefi nodded.
“Now you—Shepherd—that’s the angel of penitence, right? You can listen to people’s hearts. Now listen. What do you hear from them? What’s the one sin that they repent?”
Shepherd swallowed and wished for another glass of water, but he didn’t conjure one. “They repent that they let you die.”
Adrian nodded. “Yeah, mate. That’s right. So there they are, and at night, when their longing for me gets too awful, when they can’t stand one more minute of knowing they can never touch me again, they reach out with their souls and let themselves miss me.” Adrian’s hands grasped the cord at his chest. It was thick and almost hurtfully bright. “You see that? That’s low ebb, people. They try… oh
Goddess
, I can feel them trying. They know it hurts me. They know it leaves me weak. Hell, they probably know that this is bad—and I mean just plain
bad
—for all of us. So they stomp on it, and they love each other, and they forge a life together and go on. But sometimes… I can’t even blame them. It’s agony. It’s bloody, excruciating agony… but I live for it, you hear me? I’d give anything—the weakness, the pain in my chest that feels like claws, the knowing time is passing and I’m not even there to share—I’d give it all and take it all right in the pie hole, just to be near them again.”