“You can’t keep running from this, Riley. Wherever you go, this gift will come with you. I should know.”

The priest’s voice is even and reasonable, nothing but reasonable. Riley hugs himself, grimacing at the twinge of pain — the bones of his jaw are aching, and the passage of his throat is paper-dry. He can’t get up off the floor.

He’s never felt this bad before. Three times already today he’s been sick, like nothing that’s ever happened to him before, and he’s scared. He’d put so much thought into getting off the island, but once he’d made it to the mainland, where was there to go? Spending four years in prison hadn’t done much for his financial solvency, and the woman at the motel front desk thinks he’s a junkie. He’s got the kind of debts nobody can pay, and leaving Crockett Island doesn’t mean he’s left that behind.

Maybe it’s something in the ground there, back on the island, something from the spill that leaves him sick and weak and crazy whenever he tries to leave — family ties, generations’ worth of poison. Or it's something he's eaten or something he drank, and the comedy of that is not lost on him. Something in the water that’s giving him withdrawals now, and that’s made everyone on Crockett Island so fucking weird, that's what's inside him now and making him sick — it’s a better story than whatever else this is. Magic powers, faith healing, monsters, for Christ’s sake, even—

Riley smiles, showing teeth. He can feel his lips catch on his dry teeth. “I don’t want your gift, Father. Go ahead and keep it.”

Nobody can make him take this. They’re not on an island anymore, trapped with nowhere to go and nothing to do but eat at each other — Crockett Island does something to people, and old Monsignor Pruitt was Crockett Island born and bred.

“You don’t look well,” the priest says. His forehead is furrowed, his dark eyes liquid with awful sincerity. “It’s hard for the people who care about you to see you this way, Riley. Taking off the way you did, it was hard enough convincing them something worse didn’t happen to you. It’s time for you to come home. Your mother sent me here to bring you home.”

“And you didn’t come by ferry, I’m guessing.”

What would it have to be? Somebody’s fishing boat, maybe, or maybe that thing — maybe it can fly. He sees it in his dreams now. Not the dead girl and her face haloed in glass — something too big to be living, with blackened nails. Rationalize that.

Father Paul’s smile is humorless. “No, Riley. I didn’t.”

“What did you do to them when I was gone? My mom and dad? My brother?”

“Your family is fine, Riley. You don’t have to worry about them. They’re worried about you, but they’re stronger than they ever were. Erin, too. She asked me to tell you that she loves you and that she’s sorry.”

What does Erin have to be sorry for? For staying behind? Still missing the child they took from her, too afraid to go back to the mainland and hear she's crazy and a liar again, Erin who's honest even when it hurts her. He should have tried harder. Riley exhales, letting his head drop. “You have to know on some level that what you’re doing is insane.”

Miracles, sure, fine. Call him a skeptic, but a couple of bogus faith healings aren’t the worst deception ever to take place on Crockett Island. But somewhere there has to be a line, and for Riley, it’s the blood.

“ Everything you’ve ever done, everything you’ve been through, has all been preparation for this. Coming home, healing, becoming whole. It’s terrifying, isn’t it, but only because the idea is unfamiliar to us. It’s all right, Riley. You don’t need to fight this.”

“Nothing about this is all right.”

He must be losing his mind. Riley hugs himself tighter, rocking back against the closet door and feeling the metal fixtures rattle.

Father Paul kneels beside him. He still wears those tight dark jeans, and incongruously, a pair of Converse tennis shoes — Riley wonders, absurdly, if this is how he thinks young men dress these days or if this is what he wore the first time around. It’s impossible to see the old Monsignor in this man — Riley remembers only shaking hands and uncertain steps, and the weight of sadness stooping him. The memory of Monsignor Pruitt is eclipsed now, and rubbed out.

What do you have to do for that kind of certainty? Those steady hands? Riley has learned to mistrust that kind of buoying confidence in anything. He’d felt that way once in Chicago, he’d felt certain of what they were doing there and he’d believed in it, and that had been the foundational mistake of it all.

Certainty is terrifying, and Father Paul radiates it from every inch of him; it shines from his fiercely serious face, too strongly set to be handsome and too smooth to be familiar. Riley can detect something like a throb of muscle in the corner of his jaw, or else a vein.

But his voice is soft, as he dips a hand into the pocket of his coat. “Let me help you, Riley. I owe it to you to help.”

When he withdraws it, there is a pocketknife in his hand. Riley can’t take his eyes off of it — the red plastic handle, the little slip of blade. You can’t kill a person with a thing like that. Hard enough to kill yourself — and Riley’s thought about that too, the one-way trip off Crockett Island. But for this, it might just be enough.

Father Paul holds the blade over the palm of his hand, close enough that the knife just dimples the skin — Riley can smell the remnants of blood on the blade, or else his mind is playing tricks on him, filling in the thin strange perfume of hard metal. He can smell the salt of the priest’s skin, the soft dark mineralic note of his body beneath his clothes, and it makes Riley’s blood throb — he can feel his own pulse deep in the pit of him, down at the root of his cock.

Everything is too bright, too immediate, and it makes him want to cry even as it makes him want to touch everything — the fading plaster, the shiny industrial carpet, the last throbbing edge of daylight as it creeps away behind the plastic blinds. He’d tried to fumble on the light switch, and that had been a mistake. Now he’s here in the dark. His body is surging with something he never even knew he was denying, and that terrifies him — his whole frame is shaking, and his throat is broken and raw. Something inside of him has snapped like a wire and out comes appetite, surging like a chemical flood.

Before, in the city, he’d used to do a little coke at parties. It didn’t ruin his life or clean out his bank account, it just made him into a better version of himself — funnier and more comfortable and easier to get along with. Everything felt better, looked brighter. Whatever this is must make cocaine look like a bad cup of coffee.

Riley can’t keep himself from laughing, but the sound of it is a dry husk in his throat. “You think you can help me?”

“Yes, Riley, I think I can.” Father Paul makes the first cut.

Riley goes for him with all his strength, and his own strength surprises him — lunging at the priest and feeling him topple down, his long legs losing their bearings, clawing back the shirt collar to find the throat. There on the floor, he straddles him, feeling his chest heave — Father Paul or Pruitt or whoever he is, his skull knocks against the carpeted floor as he jerks with the impact. His convulsive blinks make his dark eyelashes flutter, but when Riley sees his face, he is smiling.

“I wouldn’t have come here if I didn’t care about you,” he says, but his cheeks are pink with surprise; his breath is coming in shallow surprised gusts, and the hem of his tee shirt is rucked up to reveal a vulnerable stretch of belly. He holds out his hand for Riley to drink, but the blood is dripping slowly down, leaving bright spots on the collar of his shirt.

Riley wants his throat — always there under that little banded collar, the vulnerable flesh. He must have come here incognito, and no white paper collar tab is going to protect him. Riley digs into him with his teeth, feeling the flesh yield — Father Paul jerks beneath him, letting go a sigh that might be satisfaction or dismay or surprise, only that Riley doesn’t care. Breaking through the skin is easy, with the ache in his jaw it even feels right, and the burst of pure sensation soaks his mouth like a climax.

A sound tears free from his throat when he breaks away for air, an inhuman noise. This is what the old priest really wants to give him, what he came here for, and still, the force of Riley’s hunger staggers him. The knife slips from the priest’s grip, and Riley seizes it.

Father Paul grasps for him weakly, passing a hand over his head like a blessing — Riley’s buzzed hair prickles. He hasn’t felt like this either, not in a long time — this sick desperation, and hunger to be touched. He wants to force himself inside him, he wants —

Father Paul is panting beneath him, choking out the words to some child’s prayer. Riley drinks without ceasing, he drinks until his throat feels tight — and it’s monstrous, but it’s the closest thing he’s ever felt to a miracle, going from absolute hunger to incomprehensible satiation.

He’s never felt like this, and somewhere a part of him is thanking God for that. More than hungry and more than sick.

Father Paul shudders beneath him, and his prayers have broken into sounds of confusion — his arousal is becoming unmistakable, thrust together hip to hip like flint and steel to make fire. The priest’s erection is heavy with blood, and the shape of it is thick beneath Riley’s hands, straining against the dark denim.

He can feel his confusion, the keen high bite of shame at his state as it rattles through his body — and to Riley now the strangeness of this is suddenly clear. This is a kind of intimacy that neither of them knows a name for, and sin doesn’t remotely begin to cover it at this point. It all comes through in the blood.

He buries his face against the priest’s wet throat, crying out like a child — his throat is burning, and his mouth is filled with a dull ache, even as he swallows greedy pulls of blood. His pitiful ragged body shakes with need, and he feels Father Paul pressing against him, rocking against him with mingled shame and urgency. He can taste his remorse, filling him up inside like a vessel with someone else’s sorriness — the strange rush of good intentions and guilt, all shot through with nameless desire, makes Riley feel somehow embarrassed just to be witnessing it, even if he doesn’t understand how.

“Ssh, ssh, ssh—“ Father Paul presses a hand to his lips, but blood-hunger has dulled his dexterity, and his hand fumbles uselessly at Riley’s mouth. Riley gashes at his own throat and guides him to it with both hands.

His mouth fits the wound — Riley can feel the heat of his exhaled breaths as they come shuddering through his nose, and his hot tongue probing shyly along the edges of the bleeding gouge. He makes a whimper of something like shame, but still he drinks.

Riley liberates Father Paul’s erection from the denim of his jeans, roughly enough to make him gasp in pain — his cock is flushed and slick, curving back against his belly, and the smell of desire drenches the air, stark and marine. Beneath that is still the smell of Father Paul’s skin — soap and salt and antique masculinity, and Riley wants to suck it off of him, he wants to wash it away with teeth and tongue until there’s nothing left but blood and come. He is nothing but appetite.

There should be fangs, Riley thinks. This would be a lot easier if the pair of them had fangs. The word for this is on the brink of his lips, but he can’t say it.

The priest’s body is pitifully vulnerable as well as monstrous — he grasps at his clothes, making a fist in the back of Riley’s tee shirt, and the ragged sound of his breathing is painfully arousing. Riley ruts against him, pressing Father Paul’s long thigh between his legs — their bodies match together, and the electrical charge that connects them now is barraging him with images, Crockett Island from a thousand different angles and every one of them wrong. The wrong faces, the wrong clothes. Black birds laid out on a gray sand beach; a woman’s folded hands. The screen of a confessional — that Riley knows, even if he hasn’t seen the inside of the old-fashioned confession booth at St. Patrick’s for a very long time now; years.

He knows with a horrible surging certainty that he’s violating something special, something separate, but neither of them can stop now, they are bound together by something much worse than sex. He tries to stroke the sweat-damp hair away from Father Paul’s forehead, but his hands are shaking from the adrenaline of it.

The priest cries out at the touch, arching into him, and the burst of salt-smell announces the spill of come — Riley thrusts his fingers into that open red mouth, working roughly in the soft wetness of tongue and cheek like it’s just another hole. He can feel the razor’s edge of his repulsion and his desire as Father Paul sucks the blood from Riley’s fingers, raking him with teeth.

Riley’s own satisfaction is shrinking back, draining away into a place he cannot reach. He is fading now, too — back into that blackness, where nothing can reach him.

“Help me,” he says, with his bloody fingers pressed against the priest’s chin. “I don’t know what I’m doing. Help me.”

Show me, save me. Something. Give me something. Whose voice is asking now? Whose blood is singing out?

He withdraws, and Father Paul kisses him on the mouth in a sacramental press of lips — his hand cradles the back of Riley’s head, and the hot tears wet Riley’s cheeks. The blood runs.

He is at the very edge of himself — as the feeling leaves his extremities, and the colorless dark throbs at the edge of his vision, he knows he is dying, and only the pressure of Father Paul’s arms around him remains a constant. Father Paul strokes his shorn head, rocking against him with a rhythm Riley cannot hear.

Our Father, he prays over him, who art in heaven.

*

It’s easy in the end, even easier than he’d thought. What’s hard is coming back.

They lie together in a tangle on the motel carpet, like a couple of animals. There is no pain in his throat any longer, not even the dull itch of a scab, and in the darkness, he can see everything — the way the dark hair hangs against Father Paul’s forehead, seen from below. Riley’s head is in his lap, resting against those long thighs,

“I don’t know what happened,” Riley says. There’s no point in sitting up; his dominant arm is folded against his chest, crusted in brown blood.

Father Paul takes his hand and grips it in his own. He has big hands and long tapered fingers; his blunt thumb rubs over the skin of Riley’s knuckles. There used to be scabs there, where the skin had split, and now nothing.