The line at the Delancey Street Starbucks was long, but seating was still plentiful, and so Tabitha was willing to wait. Once at the front, she ordered a venti caramel macchiato with whipped cream, which would probably make her feel slightly sick, but would taste good enough to make the next half-hour less painful. Once she had her enormous coffee in hand, she settled into one of the black leather armchairs, took a cleansing breath, and opened up Instagram on her phone.

She had first tripped over Amy’s account when, not very long after her release from the lake, she had stopped in at the Whole Foods where she bought her favorite brand of flavored water and almost ran smack into Sam. It had been wholly unintentional; she had never imagined Sam would enter a Whole Foods at all, because it was exactly the sort of earnestly pretentious environment he couldn’t stand, and yet there he was. She had never before seen the girl beside him, but it was clear that they were together. Though Tabitha instantly snapped herself into a little puddle in the produce section as soon as she spotted them—a risky but instinctive move, no doubt one of the odder moments on the day’s security video—she continued to watch them. It wasn’t as painful to see him then as it would be now, because she had spent so many months underwater, in an elemental state, and that had the effect of sapping her human emotions; she was a kind of demon, after all, and the longer she lived in the form of a monster rather than a human, the more she came to resemble one in soul as well as shape. What she felt then was mainly puzzlement, seeing Sam with this apparently human woman in a Cascade Mocha Crafters logo shirt, walking through an environment that should have been a foreign land to him. When they stopped at the mushroom display and he passed behind her with a covert squeeze to her backside, Tabitha was even more confused.

She had looked up the name from the T-shirt logo online, found her way to their Instagram, and from there to Amy’s personal profile. Ever since then, she had checked once a week—no less, but definitely no more. It was a habit that needed to be managed for Tabitha’s own mental health.

She sipped her coffee and clicked over to Amy’s photos, scrolling back quickly to find the spot where she had left off. There she was, in khaki cap and apron and teal-blue shirt, posing with a tray of cookie bars. The girl’s entire life seemed to revolve around the bakery, and it was a wonder she had time for any sort of an outside life, let alone one with Sam in it. Yet there amid pictures of co-workers and friends, meals and pretty scenes of Portland bursting into springtime splendor, he smiled out from a crowd gathered on a great brick town square—Pioneer Square, she figured out—with Amy at his side. First live show of the season! she had captioned it. #lovemusic #pioneersquare #portlandstyle #stillfreezing.

The girl was a serial hashtag abuser. It was only one of the things Tabitha disliked about her.

Sam, however, looked adorable in the picture. He wore his old black leather jacket with a hooded flannel beneath it, and a knit cap pulled over all but the frontmost part of his hair, which spiked at all angles for lack of combing. Although Amy was looking directly at the camera with a big-eyed gaze and an impish smile, Sam was glancing at someone beside him, mouth slightly open in laughter.

Mischievous. Mildly rakish. It was how he managed to look in most photos—something about the elongated shape of his eyes, and the round prominence of his cheeks, and the way his mouth was a shade more sensuous than that of most men. When Tabitha had first seen him, in a seat across the aisle on a Salem and Lowell Railroad train so many years before, it was his charisma that attracted her. Here was this man, black-haired and swarthy and coarse of features, and rather short besides—and yet he carried himself with a swagger that was lacking in men far more aristocratic or aesthetically pleasing. When another traveler vacated the seat across from her and he moved to take it, she felt an instant shiver of flattery at his attention. Yet until he began to talk to her, throwing in the carefully coded phrases used by the Mara—it’s a strange world, isn’t it?—she hadn’t even realized that he was an incubus. He was simply a man who moved like he had something to offer.

She was willing to bet it was that same quality which attracted Amy to him—and of course, by now, Amy would be well aware of what that something was. It was obvious enough what Sam saw in her, too: an undeniably cute body, a lighthearted outlook, and a shared obsession with food. Here was a plate of truffle fries; here was a slice of the chocolate cake she and Sam were sharing. Here she was on a hike in the woods, in a selfie in front of some stone ruin, #nature #datenight #youcrazykids. A group of her friends from the bakery—the tall guy with glasses, and the gregarious-looking French guy, and the pink-haired chick, all toasting marshmallows around a fire ring in a cozy little scene. And then, most recently, a picture of herself and Sam lying on the grass, taken with the camera held straight above their faces. It hit Tabitha with a clutch in her gut.

She drank a slow sip of her coffee and took in the photo. It wasn’t the picture that got to her, exactly. Amy was smiling, as always—tattoos on display, the little silver stud in her nose glinting, her wavy brown hair spread around her. She wore a pink flannel and a white T-shirt of fabric so tissue-light that the lines of her bra were visible. Beside her lay Sam, dressed in the same type of tight black T-shirt he wore for prowling, his forearm resting just above his forehead; between his index and middle fingers, a cigarette smoldered. He looked at the camera with something between patience and mild annoyance. No better way to spend a spring day, Amy had captioned it, and then began her litany: #splendorinthegrass #thosearms #youandme #loveyoumore.

Those arms, indeed. It was the first thing Tabitha had noticed: Sam’s bicep bulking the space between their faces, the masculine shadow of hair at the inner edge of his sleeve. How intensely she missed his body—the warmth of him and the scent of him and the touch of his beautiful hands, the play of shadow and light against his back when he undressed, the way he whimpered when she pleased him especially well. All of that was in Amy’s custody right now, and she had to grit her teeth and abide it; Sam was someone who needed a companion, and she couldn’t fault Amy for wanting him.

The love, however, stopped her short.

It shouldn’t have surprised her—they had been together for months, after all. She didn’t fear that Sam had replaced her, because she knew him better than that. Besides, if he was truly done with her he would have found another succubus, not a human. Her dismay was in the absurdity of the claim of love, not in real fear of it.

Sure, she thought. See how that works out for you. He and Amy had been together since the winter, and it was now May; pretty soon, Amy would get the idea to spend a day at the beach. Or a backyard pool, or perhaps to shower off together on a nice hot day. There weren’t going to be any hashtagged photos of those things, because Sam couldn’t tolerate a single one of them, and had no doubt been running the shower all this time in a locked bathroom while cleaning himself off with a washcloth safely outside the tub. Eventually she would grow inspired that they should get a tattoo together, and he would refuse, because it would last perhaps a few days on his body before his skin renewed itself and coughed it up. Or she would get in the mood for a road trip up to Vancouver, B.C., or a cheap long weekend in Iceland, and it would no longer seem unimportant that American passports were the one document Isaac refused to crib together.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

But then, it might not take a Mara-related crisis to throw their #splendorinthegrass into disorder. She hadn’t yet lived with Sam through baseball season, for one thing. She hadn’t argued with him enough to have brought out the Victorian-era chauvinist he could become when backed into a corner, and for that matter, she had not yet heard him quote Fight Club one million times.

She sighed and thumbed the picture back and forth on her screen. What are you doing, Sam, she thought—partly with disappointment in him, partly with the sort of fondness that forgives a mistake before the error has even been acknowledged. Lying there like one of you hasn’t already lit the fuse.

~ * ~

It was just past ten o’clock in the morning when Tabitha arrived at the museum again. No visitors had yet arrived, and the curator looked up hopefully when she stepped through the door. At the sight of her face, he broke into a gap-toothed smile.

“Hello again,” he said, with a hitch to his voice that sounded as if he was trying to conceal greater excitement. “Wasn’t sure if you were going to come back after all.”

“You said a couple of weeks. I was trying not to be pushy.”

“Let me find you a chair.”

He raised his bulky frame from the seat and returned with a wooden chair that looked like a museum piece. Once she sat down beside him, he methodically opened several tabs on his computer screen.

“I thought I’d start with theft reports,” he began. “That didn’t turn anything up, but they only go back to 1895 online. You could go to the NYPD archives and put in a request, of course. But I decided to go with newspaper archives next, because those are much better indexed. And I found this.”

He turned the screen a bit toward her and pointed at the spidery, inked text. “From 1862. An article about a Tom McGowan, arrested for assaulting a priest on Charles Street. No mention of any relic, though, or of an angry Irishwoman. I thought, eh, could be—but I came up with at least a dozen similar items. Priests were an easy target, it seems. However, in my wanderings—various search terms—this also came up.” He switched to a different tab and drew a stocky finger down the image. “Another article in a different paper from only a week later. A member of the Dead Rabbits gang—this Cian O’Malley—arrested for murdering a member of the Swamp Angels gang, quote, ‘for stealing items of his own possession, including small cash and a luck-charm made of blessed bone.’”

Tabitha read down the article herself. It was strange to read the antiquated language, and to see the old style of the printing, as if her life from very long ago had suddenly arrived in the present.

“All right,” she said, trying to make a connection she might be missing. “Was Tom McGowan a member of the Dead Rabbits? That he might have passed the relic along to O’Malley, I mean?”

“Well, I don’t know. Both of these men turn up in the Department of Corrections records for Sing-Sing a while later. Those have been digitized by a genealogy site. Tom McGowan is there for assault upon a clergyman, and Cian O’Malley for murder and theft—presumably, stealing the items back. But it doesn’t give anything more specific than that. The Dead Rabbits were a well-known Irish gang operating in a section of the city called the Five Points at that time, and if Tom McGowan had an item he needed to sell privately, he could have given it to O’Malley to fence it. The incidents don’t look related, but it’s an odd coincidence to see them so close together, once we factor in your story. An assault on a priest, and a fight to the death over a piece of bone.”

And cash, Tabitha thought. It was probably the cash that had caused the argument. But it was a worthwhile theory.

The curator tapped two fingers against the table and looked at her. “None of this mentions St. Bridget, of course. Is there anything especially significant about her that might cause all these people to get so verklempt?”

Tabitha shrugged slowly. For her own part, she knew next to nothing about saints. They were a Catholic thing, and in her own Puritan upbringing, the ministers had regularly preached from the pulpit that the Catholic Church was the Great Whore of Babylon, a corrupt monstrosity led by the devil himself. So deeply had this notion been drummed into her head that when she and Sam were first together, it felt unsettlingly scandalous to take up with a born-and-raised Catholic, even though by that point they were both, in fact, demons.

But she knew what St. Bridget meant to the Leaders. According to the Church, she was the patron saint of watermen, sailors, and illegitimate children. They had made her feast day the same as that of the ancient Irish mother goddess, Brighid, who was associated with sacred wells, and neatly replaced the one with the other. The Leaders loathed this deception, but what was more, it was rumored that the relic had come from the human daughter of one of the two Leaders, who had been orphaned by her mother’s drowning. The fact that it had been stolen by the Church, and was still out there somewhere with no resting place, was a long-standing affront.

“I think it’s just the history behind it,” said Tabitha. “Stolen by a knight and all that. How old it is. And maybe they were superstitious about it, too.”

He drew his lips together thoughtfully. Up close, his face had a ruddy, sun-worn look, and his beard contained every shade of gray from charcoal to the lightest ash. “Hmm. Impossible to say where it might have ended up, based on this. The only other record of any of these guys is here, at Hart Island.” He indicated another tab. “The burial records at the potters’ field show all three of them—McGowan, O’Malley, and the man who was murdered, Johnny Poole. The potters’ field, you know, is—”

“I know what it is.” Potters’ fields had been around all her life—the clay-soil fields, useless for agriculture, where the poorest of the poor were laid to rest, often if no one claimed their bodies or if the family could not afford a decent burial.

“Just dates listed for the two convicts, and a bit more for the Poole character. See here—‘Beloved son of so-and-so, survived by brother, sister, brother,’ et cetera. And a contact name for the genealogy. Some people really get into this stuff and submit information to these sites. The black-sheep ancestors are the most interesting, sometimes.”

Tabitha picked up her phone and quickly typed in this information. It was a shame there wasn’t a similar record for O’Malley, but she would take what she could get.

As she typed in the birth and death years, a thought insinuated itself into her mind. “You can search for anyone on this site, right?”

He pointed with his whole hand, indicating the search bar.

“Can you look up Sam Sullivan?”

He typed in the name, and the results appeared immediately. “Five of them. There’s—”

“This one.”

He clicked. “Samuel Sullivan, 1829-1852. That who you were looking for?”

She swallowed. “Look up Mary Sullivan. And Anna.”

There were many by those names, but each had a listing for a burial in 1852. The curator asked, “Anybody else?”

She shook her head. She couldn’t bring herself to ask about Riona, Sam’s youngest sister. Seeing her relatively unique name would have made it feel too final.

“Who are these people?” asked the curator.

“Just—relatives.”

“Ah. It’s always fun to find your dead ancestors on these sites.” He turned on the screensaver and offered her a satisfied smile. “Anything else I can help you with?”

Again, she shook her head. Outside a group of tourists were peering through the window, engaged in discussion; in moments, they would probably come in.

“Just let me know if you think of anything. I enjoy this kind of work. Better than sorting old subway tokens.”

She managed a smile and gathered up her backpack, too disquieted to even manage basic politeness. She thought about that vast, depleted field with the gray sea beyond it, all the bodies stacked beneath rugged yellow grass, and somewhere in there, without a marker, the dearest one.