I picked up my tumbler, took another sip of the scotch, then considered adding another layer to my next meeting with Emily. Vaclav had been her lawyer, for what? thirty years as far as I knew. She was absolutely devoted to him.
How much change was she willing to accept in her life. After all, she was pushing eighty. At least I thought that was how old she was. Emily was very careful about revealing her exact age, at least to me.
“So how long,” I ask him, “do you think it'll take for you to make a move?”
He gave me an appraising look, shifted some of the muscles on his face as he thought. Perhaps this wasn't a serious as he led on.
“Oh, I've been thinking some time within the next five years or so,” he suggested. “It's a significant move, and there are of course others who perhaps have decades more experience in the field.”
He smiled that broad smile again.
“I may have to go back to university!”
“I'm sure you'll do fine,” I told him. “You've been a pretty effective lawyer as far as I can say. And I doubt there’s many lawyers around who have your total years of experience.”
“Thank you for the vote of confidence,” he replied, then shook his head. “Now how long has it been since you've had a chance to sit down with me and chat. This has been wonderful. You should come by again, when it’s not about business.”
I wondered about that. It had been at least two or three months since I actually had time to sit down for a social visit.
“It's been a while,” I admitted.
“Well then,” he stood up and motioned for me to join him with Stephanie over at the room's couches. “Let’s relax for a few minutes and catch up on things.”
I check my cellphone. Yes, I still had around forty-five minutes before I had to leave and I always looked forward to the chance to hear Vaclav’s opinions on what was going on in the world. Although to start off with he had a question for me.
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“You know I can't help but notice that the time this meeting on the eve of a full moon,” he said to me. “Now as I remember last year you hired a new admin assistant.”
“Ah yes,” he wanted to talk again about my werewolf. I remember that he hinted on inviting her to one of his parties. But so far he hadn't.
“You mean Teresa,” I said to him.
“Yes,” he replied, “How are you getting on with her? I can tell you, I’ve had some interesting experiences with werewolves, both of the male and female variety. They have the most fascinatingly fractured souls.”
This certainly piqued Stephanie’s curiosity, and she slid somewhat closer to Vaclav, gaze moving smoothly from him to me and then back.
Whenever I go to visit Vaclav I always get a feeling like I've entered a kind of different world, one that almost wholly existed before I was born. And he comes across less of how vampires are generally portrayed in the media, and far more of a man out of time. And that got me thinking about the difference between now and when he lived his human life. And how we think about souls now.
There are numerous theories about souls these days. And what they have to do with the re-animation of modern dead.
It was an interesting choice, for instance, the new pope trying to welcome back into the church what he called lost souls, those who survive on afterlife. Of course, there’s also the whole idea from of revelations and Jesus’s undead army, but that’s a different story completely.
Now, unfortunately, there has been no scientific definite proving of the existence of souls. Scientists these days seem to point towards the electromagnetic nature of humanity and how that affects whether we walk around, or whether we fall down and stay there.
Of course, the religious amongst us believed that all along since the beginning of time. But some of our more established religions have been seriously affected by the events around what is happened over the last fifty years or so.
There was the significant schism in the Catholic Church for its willingness to admit the re-animated under its umbrella, at least a couple varieties of them. With their idea that any soul can be saved, as long as whatever you happen to be has a soul then you can be part of the current Vatican.
And certainly I don't think it's hardly worse to have a vampire or such leading a congregation than the other kinds of men in the past. And then, there’s the whole drinking of blood which is as old as Catholicism itself.
Teresa and I get into some pretty intense discussions over that, I can assure you.
Of course just because her branch of Catholicism will have nothing of that it makes me wonder exactly how long-term our relationship is going to work. After all, the church has been around a documented seventeen hundred years or so. Vampires, werewolves have only been officially documented for fifty. Who knows what will happen over the next fifty let alone a few centuries?