Blood Lines

The answer wasn't as important as shutting off the words, banishing the specter of isolation they invoked. He couldn't just walk away, so he had to change the subject.
    'I plan to build a temple, as I have always done when I start a new life, and I will gather acolytes to serve my god.
    This is my only concern at this time, Nightwalker, for the acolytes should be sworn as soon as possible-a god deserves worshipers, rituals, all the little things that make being a deity worthwhile."
    'Then why try to control the police and the justice system?"
    'New religions are often prosecuted. I have a way to prevent that and so I do. With no need to hide, I will shout AKHEKH from the top of the highest mountain. And once the temple is large enough to provide me with the power I need, your innocents will be safe." Tawfik stood and held out his hand. "You live like a mortal, searching for immediate solutions, immediate answers. Why not plan for eternity? Why not plan with me?" He now had enough of a key to the Nightwalker's ka that if Richmond would just voluntarily reach out and take his hand, that act of trust would plant hooks that the younger man would never shake loose.
    In time those hooks would pull him closer and, in time, he would feed.
    Scent and sound told Henry that Tawfik had not lied once since he began to speak.
    Henry felt young, confused, afraid. For the seventeen years he had lived as a mortal he had fought to gain his father's love and approval. Tawfik-older, wiser, incontestably in control-made him feel the way his father had. Four hundred and fifty years hunting the night alone should have erased the bastard who only wanted to belong. It hadn't. He didn't know what to think. He stared down at the offered hand and wondered how it would feel to be able to plan for more than just a part of one mortal lifetime. To be part of a greater whole. But if Tawfik hadn't lied…
    'Your god is a dark god. I want no part of him."
    'You need have nothing to do with my god. Akhekh asks nothing of you. I ask for your companionship. Your friendship."
    ' You are more dangerous than your god!" On the last word, Henry launched himself forward. Red lines flared and he found himself flat on his back two meters away.
    Tawfik let his hand drop slowly to his side. "Foolish child," he said softly. "I will not destroy you now as I could, nor will I take back the offer. If you grow tired of an eternity alone, come to the corner where we met tonight and I will find you." He felt the Nightwalker's gaze on him as he turned and walked away, not entirely displeased with the evening's work. The surface of the other's ka boiled with emotions too tangled for even millennia of experience to sort out but all of them, eventually, came back to him.
    The evening mass was nearly over when Henry slipped into the church and settled into one of the empty pews at the back. Confused and frightened, he had come to the one place that had, through all the years and all the changes, stayed the same. Well, almost the same. He still missed the cadences, the grandeur of the Latin and occasionally murmured his responses in the language of the past.
    The Inquisition had driven him from the church for a time but needing, at the very least, the continuity of worship, he had returned. Sometimes he saw the church as an immortal being in its own right, living much as he did during carefully prescribed hours, surviving on the blood of the mortals who surrounded it. And often the blood was less than metaphorical, for more had been shed in the name of a god of love…
    He stood with the rest, hands lightly holding the warm wood of the pew in front of him.
    Over the centuries there had been compromises, of course. The church declared he had no soul. He disagreed. He had seen men and women without souls-for a soul can be given up to despair or hatred or rage-but did not count himself among them. Confession had been a trial in the beginning, until he realized that the sins the priests would understand, gluttony, anger, lust, sloth applied as much to him as to mortals and that the specific actions were unimportant. He did the penance prescribed. He came away feeling part of a greater whole.
    Except that he could not, since his change, take communion.
    So once again I am set to one side, different from the closest thing to community I have known.
    He found it interesting that Tawfik-the only other immortal being he had met since Christina and he had parted- came complete with a