After the afternoon rainshower finally cleared, Sam headed out to the backyard with Kevin to grub out a stump that was taking up space in the women’s designated organic gardening area. The three of them together had pored over seed catalogs during the dark winter months and decided they had urgent need of a garden, and for weeks the tables beneath the windows had held clusters of seedlings approaching an increasingly pot-bound state. Now Sam needed to stop procrastinating and build the thing.

The garden, to Sam, was a stupid idea in every respect. Standing in the yard, he gauged the level of sun that managed to make its way past the branches of the many surrounding trees. It was laughable, the idea that any vegetables might consider this patch of shadowy land to be hospitable. Besides, the people who lived here had no time to weed and water and address any nascent infestations of bugs or mildew before they flourished out of control. Sam did not actually need to eat in order to survive, but food was one of the primary pleasures of life, and at least here in America it could be had cheaply and easily. He didn’t understand this mentality of people in the twenty-first century going to nineteenth-century efforts to produce a tomato. He had been around then, and it wasn’t that great.

But then, nobody had asked his opinions about time management or the perspectives of history. They had only asked him to grub out a stump.

He lifted the axe above his head and brought it down around the roots. The stump was half-rotted and had been softened slightly by the recent rain, and so the work was relatively easy. As he worked, Kevin moved gingerly around the space, picking up sticks and eyeing the configurations of the land as if there might still be some debate over the size and orientation of the garden box. Back in Lowell, when Sam worked intermittently as a house painter, he had worked with a lot of managers like Kevin: people who weren’t about to get dirty but would keep a hawkeye on you to ensure you stayed on task. Still, it didn’t bother Sam in this instance. He knew who paid the bills.

“Suppose you and Rose’ll be watching over this thing while the rest of us are away on the food tour,” said Kevin. “In late June it’ll really look like something.”

“What about Remy?” Kevin had mentioned that Remy would be left behind to run the bakery in their absence, along with the various staff who didn’t share the house.

“Yeah—he’ll be real busy, though.” For a minute, silently, he watched Sam work. Then he asked, “You used to live in Boston, right?”

“Off and on, yeah. I was mostly in Lowell.”

“It’s one of our stops. You’re gonna have to tell us some good places to hit while we’re there.”

“Sure.” Sam paused, wiping the back of his hand across his forehead. “I used to eat off the food trucks a lot, when I was painting, and I hit a lot of bars. There was this one place—” He laughed, remembering. “The Blind Tiger. You can play darts there. Me and my girl—Tabitha—we used to go there pretty often because I could kind of hustle people at darts. She always thought I was going to get nabbed for illegal gambling, but I mean, it’s just a bet. I can’t help it if I’m a better player. One night I was playing with this guy, and all of a sudden seven or eight cops busted in and arrested him. It turned out he’d murdered two people. But in the chaos of it, she thought they were coming after me. Tabitha about had a heart attack.”

Kevin grinned. He was a serious guy, not much for laughing at people’s jokes, but Sam could tell he liked the story. “So this wasn’t that long ago. You’re how old—twenty-three?”

In fact, it had been almost fifteen years ago, but the bar was still around, and you could still play darts there. And Sam knew that if he gave the actual year, it would have appeared he was eight years old when the story took place. So he said, “Yeah, a couple years, maybe.”

“Amy told me what happened. About the accident. Sucks, man.”

It took a moment for Sam to place what he was saying. Then he remembered the tale he had told Amy months ago: that Tabitha was his high school sweetheart, and that he’d lost her in a car accident the previous spring. At first, with Amy, he’d tried not to say a word about Tabby, but soon realized that it was impossible to undo a hundred and sixty years of habitually telling stories using the word “we.” Still, he tried to speak of her as little as possible. It wasn’t fair to Amy to make her feel like he was always lost in the labyrinth of his memories, even if it was true.

“Yeah, it sucked,” Sam agreed. He went back to hacking at the stump.

“So, with you living here now—this means you and Amy are, like, exclusive, right? You’re not still dating other people.”

He shot Kevin a screwy look. “Were we ever?”

“Well, I don’t know. Remy and Lola, you know . . .”

Sam knew. They were openly chatty about being polyamorous, which gave Sam the heebie-jeebies, which he knew was ridiculous given that he was, at this very moment, about as non-monogamous as it was possible for a person to be. Only the previous night, just after he had hugged Rose in the kitchen’s intimate dimness, he found his way into the bed of a dreaming woman who had more than appreciated the providence of his arrival. And on top of that, there was the fact that he and Tabitha weren’t broken up, only separated by a sort of dictatorial court order, and that they still loved each other every bit as much as they always had. He had no doubt that she felt the same as he did, even though he couldn’t ask her. Lola and Remy’s version of polyamory was child’s play by comparison with his own life.

Of course, theirs was by mutual consent. He knew perfectly well that Amy would be furious if she knew about his nighttime rounds, but he also knew he could just as soon give it up as she could give up eating. And within the demands that his nature imposed on him, he tried to be sporting about it. He wasn’t greedy; he paced himself; if anything, he starved a little between encounters, so diligently was he trying not to raise suspicion by being out of the house too much at night. And when he observed how Lola and Remy lived, he felt a sort of thieves’ virtue. In all his time with Tabitha, they had never found it acceptable to build genuine romantic bonds with people besides each other, pursue other partners for the recreation of it, or—of all the repugnant ideas—invite other people into their own bed. Like nearly all Mara, they made use of relationships with unsuspecting humans as a way to keep money flowing in or a roof over their heads, but they both understood those relationships were a means to an end and nothing more. When they were together, it was only them. They gave themselves entirely to each other, and in those moments the rest of the world could go to hell.

“We’re not like that,” said Sam, finally pulling his thoughts back to Kevin’s suggestion. “Good for them that they can handle it. I wouldn’t be able to. And I don’t think it’s Amy’s speed, either.”

“I’ve known that girl for a long time,” he said. “She’s a sweetheart. She’s gotten trampled on by assholes more than once.”

Sam stopped swinging and grinned at the provocation. “What are you trying to say?”

“Nothing, just . . . she let you in, so, you know . . . be good to her. Treat her right.”

Sam threw him a look of side-eyed reprimand and hoisted the axe again. “I know how to work a relationship,” he said, and muttered under his breath, “Do I ever.”

Kevin tossed the handful of sticks onto the haphazard woodpile by the fence. For months Sam had spent nearly all his free time with Kevin and the others—far more time than he had spent around any humans, or at least waking ones, since he’d stopped being one himself. All things considered, they knew him well; knew his habits and quirks and weaknesses, his sense of humor, the things that delighted and disgusted him. Kevin’s sudden paternalistic concern for Amy annoyed him more than he wanted to admit to himself. He turned his attention back to the hard physical work at hand, which was gratifying and good, and which showcased the uncanny strength and endurance of his body. If that intimidated Kevin, then all the better. He didn’t need to know where it came from.

~ * ~

Once Amy got home from the bakery, Sam proposed they go out to dinner—just the two of them, for once. They ended up at a gastropub—the type with brick walls and high ceilings and pseudo-industrial decor, which was Sam’s favorite type of dining establishment—where he got two very good beers and a corned beef hash that made him want to weep from its perfection. He and Amy shared a plate of truffle fries, and alone there with her, on a date, it struck him anew what a supreme pleasure it was to share food with someone, especially a lover. It was something he had never been able to do with Tabitha. His body quickly burned whatever food he put into it, but in hers, food was a foreign object that simply sat there and made her feel deathly ill until she broke herself apart into droplets to get rid of it. There were many advantages to being made of water rather than fire, but the inability to eat was a particularly bad tradeoff.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

On this night, when he still felt touchy about Kevin’s comments and was trying to take to heart Susanna’s advice to get down off his cross about Tabitha, he leaned in to feed Amy fries across the table and let himself feel the genuine joy and intimacy of the moment. After dinner—for it had been early—they drove to a nearby park and hiked through the springtime woods, where the trees were just beginning to burst forth with yellow-green leaves and the wet moss formed a rolling carpet in varied shades of sage and emerald, dotted with purple and gray. The park’s keepers had laid down wooden paths over the muddiest places, and on these Amy walked ahead of him, giving him the chance to admire her from the back. She had put on a light nylon jacket and her hiking boots, but also wore shorts that barely reached below her adorable ass. And with her hair down and spread across her shoulders she looked young and carefree, liberated from the near-constant preoccupations of work.

At length, they arrived at an abandoned stone house a little ways off the path—a remnant of some long-ago settler, now with one wall caved in and the remaining ones mostly covered in graffiti and moss. They went over to explore it, and when they rounded it to the side that faced the woods, Amy backed him against the wall and unbuckled his belt, thrusting her hand into his shorts to get him excited—not that he needed much help. He took her quickly in the shadow of the far corner, finishing just before a family wandered over with two boisterous kids. Amy giggled as he hastily zipped up his fly and tried to maintain his balance.

Afterward, they made their way over to a low stone wall and heaved themselves up to sit on it. Sam took out a cigarette, and Amy held out her hand to request one as well. It made Sam smile with secret pleasure as he lit it for her. Amy didn’t smoke very often—not cigarettes, anyway—but he liked it when she did, and it made him feel somehow closer to her, more aligned. It was yet another indulgence he couldn’t enjoy with Tabby, not because she couldn’t, but because she didn’t care to.

“We should do that kind of thing more often,” said Amy, exhaling a thin stream of smoke. “Keeps it interesting.”

“I’m in.”

She grinned. “Of course you are. You’re the one who finished.”

“I’ll take care of you when we get home. Promise.”

“Oh, I know you will.” She looked thoughtful as she took a drag. “Kevin texted me about the conversation he had with you earlier.”

Sam looked away from her, ostensibly to exhale but also to conceal any visible scowl. “Yeah. He couldn’t have made his point any better unless he’d been polishing a shotgun as he said it.”

“He’s just being protective. I don’t think he was expecting you to move in when you did. I thought he understood, but apparently the communication wires got crossed a little.”

“Is it a problem?”

“No, not at all. You know he’s a control freak, that’s all. He doesn’t like being caught by surprise.” She glanced at him. “Anyway, he’s probably also trying out his daddy mode. Rose is pregnant.”

Sam turned his head abruptly to face her. He hadn’t seen that coming at all. “For serious? Are you sure?”

“Yeah, she told me almost a month ago, but it was top secret.” She issued a jaded laugh. “Anything to get out of that job, apparently.”

“Maybe that’s what she’s been so emotional.”

“Could be. And obviously it was a surprise, or maybe one of those ‘let’s pretend the inevitable isn’t going to happen if we do this’ surprises. But it caught Kevin off guard, that’s for sure.”

Sam grimaced. “Thank God we’ll never have to worry about that.”

Amy looked at him suddenly, her brow furrowed hard. “Wait, what?”

“About having kids. It’s a good thing I can’t. That’s the kind of surprise I think we can both do without.”

“You never told me you can’t have kids.” She sounded almost indignant.

He stopped with his cigarette midway to his mouth and glanced at her. “Of course I told you. The first time we slept together, remember? When you were hunting around on your night table for a condom, and I told you it didn’t matter because I couldn’t get you pregnant anyway.”

She uttered a short laugh. “I thought you meant because I’m on birth control. And I decided to just say ‘fuck it’ and hope you didn’t give me an STI because I was too horny to think straight.” The steady gaze she had leveled on him was oddly unnerving. “How do you know you can’t have kids?”

“I got real sick when I was about seventeen. High fever and all that. I was in the hospital for a couple weeks. The doctor told me afterwards that I wouldn’t be able to.” This was more or less true, although Amy didn’t need to know the details: that the doctor was actually one he’d seen on a TV show many years later discussing the connection between high fevers and male sterility, and the disease in question had been cholera—a death he had narrowly escaped, only to stumble into the next one four years later.

“But they didn’t actually test it?” she asked. “Like, ask you to come in a little paper cup and then put it under a microscope?”

Sam dragged on his cigarette to buy himself a moment. This conversation was going in a more technical direction than he was prepared to handle, especially since it had been so many years since he’d paid any attention to the details of human reproduction. Even when he lived in a human body, his understanding of it had been rudimentary at best, and his current body was a different matter entirely. When he made love to Tabitha, seed-stealing succubus that she was, her dreamer’s seed passed to him; he then passed it along to his own dreamers, although by then it was not at all the same.

Like anything else with a hint of demon to it, it could be either summoned or dismissed. The heart’s desire—that was the key to whether it would take root in a dreamer’s body and grow. Whether that happened was well beyond Sam’s sphere of influence; his only power was to fulfill dreams. If a woman wanted pleasure, he would happily deliver it. If she longed for a child, he could be the catalyst for the magic that could make that happen. If she wanted neither, then he had no choice but to find another dreamer. But from long experience, he had grown very good at sensing that underlying hunger in women he encountered out in the world, however casually. By the time he paid someone a visit, he was fairly sure she was interested in what he was selling.

The children conceived through those visits—the cambions—looked and acted human, but weren’t, exactly. They were immune to death by war and famine and pestilence, and thus fated to survive the disasters that periodically threatened the world. Sometimes, though rarely, they were born with extraordinary skills. Over the years he and Tabby had made thousands of them—and when the Spanish flu arrived in 1918, they all survived. When wars broke out, and soldiers were called up, the cambions all came home. The magic lasted only a single generation, and the children they bore were fully human.

Sam understood it was part of the great hidden machinery that kept humanity going, and he also thought about it hardly at all. He would do what his nature called him to do, because he couldn’t do anything else. But it left him poorly equipped to handle questions like Amy’s, and he couldn’t be sure how far she would take it. If he said he’d been tested, would he be expected to know the medical details? If he said he hadn’t been, would she ask him to submit a sample to a lab and find out for sure? He could already hear Isaac, in his mind, laughing his ass off at the request to forge those results.

“No,” he admitted. “It’s what the doctor said, and I took his word for it.”

“Maybe it’s not true, then.”

Sam shrugged. He was growing nervous that coming up with shaky explanations for how his body worked, out here in the open space of this park, would catch the attention of that pair of deranged harpies the succubi called their Leaders. They had spies everywhere—Sam had learned that the hard way.

“Anyway, it sounds like you’re not too concerned about it,” she added.

“Not at all. Hasn’t made a difference in my life so far, and I doubt it ever will.”

She stubbed out her cigarette on the stone and shot him a small smile. “You don’t think it would be cool to have kids one day? Or kind of sexy to be trying for it? It seems like it would be, I don’t know . . . primal.” She looked at him to gauge his reaction.

Primal. The word, and the idea Amy had paired with it, set off in Sam’s mind a small explosive filled with intense flashes of memory, all of himself and Tabitha, together. They came at him rapid-fire: the shadows undulating across her stomach as he lifted her hips; the soft ends of her hair trailing across his chest; the desperate feeling, when she climaxed beneath him, that he could never get deep enough, never enough. His love for her was a part of that, but not all of it. Something instinctive in him was driven to fulfill his purpose, some single-minded part of his psyche, and understood that it needed her. He didn’t know if it was true that the first Mara were made when Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden, and the angel, to drive them away, struck his flaming sword against the river that flowed out of the garden, giving the demons left behind by the Serpent no way out but through the burning water. Each one, it was said, had been split in two as it fled into the world. Forever after, they would cycle between their two needs: to tempt humans, and to put themselves back together. It sounded dubious to Sam — but it was hard to dismiss it entirely when his body seemed to recognize his partner’s as part of its own, and without her, he felt the constant ache like a phantom pain.

“I really never thought about it,” he told Amy, “but if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not talk about things I can’t do.”

She winced a little around her eyes. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to be an asshole.”

“You ready to go home?”

He helped her hop down from the stone wall, and they started back toward the house. As they walked down the path, she put her arms around his waist and squeezed him in a tight hug. It was at moments like this, far more than when they were in bed together, that he was struck anew with the fact that his body seemed so perfectly human to her, so indistinguishable from the real thing. She couldn’t tell. Nobody could.