pilate
/
walking round always mad reputation, leave a pretty girl sad reputation / this that what-we-do don't tell your mom shit, this that red cup all on the lawn shit / got a fresh cut straight out the salon bitch
Corradh is handsome in the way of a predator, though I think most of us are: me with my snakes, Adonai with his killing horn; even Hagar, if you care to look at her close enough and find the way her pupils lie in dark reptilian slits.
But he does it better than all of us. More subtle, more savage. A slick black panther only slightly reworked. As kids I often begged him to open his mouth, let me poke around in the dark and wonder what he could kill with those teeth. If he would ever use them against me—if he would ever be willing to use them for my benefit. Looking at him now, the same thoughts cross my mind.
Do you love me? Do you love me enough to kill for me?
That is the only kind of love that matters, I think.
When he grins, it looks… wrong. Deeply. Wrong in a way that only began to bother me when I grew up and understood what he was—wrong like a fairytale illustration cut-and-pasted into a Lovecraftian horror. Pretty like a blood spatter or the ivory shine of a visible bone.
My teeth will never dull, he says; and I smile with just my lips, wryly, not because I know he is right but because I wish, knowing it will never happen, he would be wrong.
I catch his clump of figs easily. They are ripe to the point of bursting, and when I grasp them the invisible pressure cracks one open, spilling golden syrup onto the tile at my feet. I watch a host of seeds seep into the grout, patterned like ants. The unscathed ones, I let gently roll to the ground at my feet; the broken one I pop into my mouth and begin to chew, slowly and then thoughtfully as my brother asks his question.
Some part of me is about to laugh. Some part of me wants to say: we are gods. We have gold, and power, and the bodies of animals. We have power over Solterra’s mortals; and the shrines, and the sacrifices. Is that not godly?
Instead I pretend to think a moment longer, then answer. “If we were gods, you would lord over the entrance of the underworld, and eat the souls too sinful to be saved.” I spit the fig’s stem onto the ground at my feet. And when I look up at him, I grin half-heartless: “And I would be the god who led them to sin while they were still living.”
