Walk among us (7 page)

“Reading anything interesting?”

The book thudded to the floor, and Calvin bent swiftly to pick it up before Matthew had a chance to enter.

“Sorry,” he said, slipping it back onto the shelf. “I couldn’t sleep.”

Matthew stood in the door’s outline, eyelids still noticeably heavy. His dark hair was flattened on the side he’d slept on, and a crease furrowed his cheek from his pillow. He’d pulled on his pants before coming down, too, and patches of the dark hair trailing into his waistband stuck together from the dried come they’d never cleaned away. He looked rumpled and delicious, and for a split second Calvin felt guilty about wanting him again.

“I don’t snore or anything like that, do I?” Matthew joked.

The slight tease relaxed him a little. “No, of course not. I just needed to go to the bathroom and get a drink. I decided not to go back to bed.”

Matthew nodded, like it was a perfectly rational explanation for why he was rummaging through the other man’s things. “I just wasn’t sure.” He ventured closer. “This is new for me.”

“You’ve never had someone spend the night before?”

“I’ve never spent more than a couple hours with someone I was intimate with before.”

Calvin gaped at him in surprise. “You have got to be kidding me.”

“Why?”

WalkAmongUs:ACallingofSoulsstory

“Because you’re gorgeous. You’re smart.”

“And I see demons.”

So he was going to stick with that. Calvin realized he would have been a little disappointed if he hadn’t.

“Consider that a personality quirk.”

“Most would consider it crazy.”

He wasn’t going to touch that one. He didn’t really like the topic as it was, anyway.

Gesturing toward the books, he finally tore his eyes away from Matthew’s delectable half-nudity. “What’s with all the Bibles? I don’t think I’ve ever known anybody who had so many.”

“I used to study them.”

He fingered the spines. “Oh, like a religion major?”

Silence stretched as vast as a grave between them.

“More like…I was a priest.”

Calvin’s head jerked around. That was almost more surprising than the demons. “A priest? Really? Like, with a collar and everything?”

A faint stain appeared in Matthew’s cheeks. “Yes.”

“Did you leave because of the gay thing?”

“No.” He snorted softly under his breath. “Dealing with coming out would have been easy. I left because of the seeing-demons thing.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “I’m going to put on some coffee. Do you want some?”

Not really but he nodded anyway. When Matthew turned to go to the kitchen, Calvin followed. The entire situation grew more intriguing with each new detail he learned about the man.

Matthew picked up a burnt orange kettle from the stove and held it under the tap. The sound of rushing water was homey and familiar, and Calvin sat in one of the two wooden chairs at the narrow table against the wall in order to watch.

When the kettle was on the burner and the cafetière was filled, Matthew finally leaned against the counter to regard him. “You can ask whatever you want. I know you’re curious. I know I distracted you from asking about it over dinner.”

His mouth opened to speak, and then froze. After several seconds, Calvin exhaled and shook his head. “I don’t even know where to start.”

“Take your time.”

Matthew didn’t press and Calvin didn’t rush. His mind raced through everything he had seen and felt and heard over the past thirty-six hours, and still, it muddled too much to find anything coherent to ask. He finally settled for something basic.

“Did you stop believing in God?”

The sadness was back in his eyes, barren and hollow. “No, I still believe.”

WalkAmongUs:ACallingofSoulsstory

“So why leave the priesthood?” Actually, now that he thought about it, a priest matched perfectly with how he’d characterized him at Krauss’s. Someone who had listened to a lot of woes. Someone in the service of helping others. “You implied you weren’t out. There wasn’t any reason for you to really give it all up, was there?”

“You mean, other than the fact that I hate Him for giving me this sight? The church tends to frown on its followers despising the Lord as violently as I do.” The kettle began to whistle, and he turned away to pour the steaming water over the coffee grounds. “Besides, demons thrive on grief. You’d be surprised how many show up at services, ready to prey on those who come seeking solace. It’s hard enough to see them elsewhere. I couldn’t deal with it there too.”

Rather than wait for Matthew to serve him, Calvin stood and plucked two mugs from the tree on the counter. “But you didn’t grow up like this. This is something recent?”

“Six years ago. I was officiating at a funeral, and there was a demon standing over the widow. I didn’t think about it too much. The weather was awful, and I was tired, and I convinced myself I was seeing things.” He poured out one cup and then hesitated over the second. “Do you take milk? How full do you want this?”

“Black is fine.”

Matthew finished with the coffees and went to the fridge. “The widow had a heart attack that night.

Everybody blamed it on the grief. Including me.”

Calvin watched the muscles dance along his bare back. They were tense again, in spite of sleep, in spite of the release from their coupling. Knowing this topic was the cause—that, ultimately, he was the reason since he’d brought it up—made him wish he’d chosen the crawling-back-into-bed option instead.

“I saw another one following someone out of confessional two days later.” Matthew continued the story, either unaware of Calvin’s regret or uncaring. “They found him with his wrists slit.”

“It could have been coincidence.”

“Maybe. Until the third time ended in another death. And the fourth.” Matthew was silent as he poured milk in his cup, adding enough to make the coffee a very pale tan. “I saw the fifth talking to Father Abraham. I panicked. Lashed out and hit him over the head with one of the candlesticks on the altar.” His thumb picked at a chip in the rim of his mug. “It would’ve been better if I’d killed him. Father Abraham insisted on going with the thing in the ambulance when it showed. Told me to wait and that we’d talk when he returned. Except he didn’t, of course. And when they finally got the ambulance pried open like a tin can after the crash, they only found his and the EMTs’ bodies.”

Calvin pushed his coffee aside. He didn’t want it anyway, and he suspected Matthew didn’t really want his. Taking the other man’s hands, he held them out in order to slip inside the circle of his arms, wrapping his own around Matthew’s waist.

Matthew hesitated to return the embrace. “Don’t feel sorry for me.”

WalkAmongUs:ACallingofSoulsstory

“I don’t.” He smiled. “I like the way you feel.”

He hoped the honest answer and attempt at levity would be enough to batter his reluctance. He nearly sighed in relief when Matthew pulled him into his chest.

“Why do you think you see these things?” he asked gently.

He felt Matthew’s shrug. “I’ve never been able to figure that out. I just know I won’t let God down by ignoring others’ suffering and letting them just walk free.”

A man who believed in God also believed in the Devil. “And you’re sure you didn’t get this gift from…

someone else?”

“The Devil isn’t interested in ending suffering on earth,” Matthew replied. “He wouldn’t give a man incapable of witnessing it without acting the means to put a stop to something nobody else can.”

That made sense. And made it even clearer why Matthew would be so furious with his God now.

He only had one final question.

“Why my father’s funeral?”

Matthew sighed. His broad hands stroked up and down Calvin’s back, though which one of them it was supposed to soothe, Calvin didn’t know. “I can’t face them regularly,” he admitted. “They’re monsters.

Evil. And I’m not a violent man. I never even held a gun before this started happening. But I can’t stay locked in my house indefinitely. I do some volunteer work in Watson Park, but I stick with the children as much as I can. Demons tend not to bother them. I go out when I’m least likely to run into people, and when the guilt starts to gnaw at me too much, that I’m shirking this gift God has given me, I pick a funeral and wait.” His breath ruffled across his ear. “I’m sorry. I know it’s random.”

“I’m not. Sorry, that is.” He pulled back and smiled. “If that’s what it took to meet you, then random’s just fine with me.”

Slowly, Matthew tilted his head, brushing a tender kiss over Calvin’s lips. Though Calvin sank into the caress, Matthew kept it gentle, almost chaste in its delicate touch. He kissed like it was his first. Or their first.

Maybe it was. Truth set people free, after all. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out Matthew didn’t have anyone else to confide in.

“When do you go back to New York?” Matthew asked when they parted.

Calvin licked at the stubble darkening his jaw. “Tomorrow morning.”

“Can you stay until then?”

He paused. There were pluses and minuses to both possible answers. “I can stay until this evening.” It was a compromise between what he wanted and what was necessary. “If I’d known there was a guy like you around Watson Park, I would’ve planned on flying back later. Where were you when I was growing up gay in this backwater town?”

His breath came faster, hotter, against Calvin’s cheek. “Chicago. I only left there when I couldn’t stand WalkAmongUs:ACallingofSoulsstory

seeing the monsters everywhere.”

“Lucky for me, then.”

“You said you didn’t believe in luck.”

“Yeah, well, I can admit I might’ve been wrong about that if you promise to take me back up to bed and keep me there until the sun goes down.”

Matthew tightened his arms until Calvin’s ribs ached. He didn’t protest. It made him feel alive.

“You have my word.”

WalkAmongUs:ACallingofSoulsstory

Chapter Five

The last thing Calvin saw was Matthew standing on the porch.

It wasn’t quite three, but the sun was starting to go down, and the wind was starting to rise. It would take him two hours to get to the airport, a fact he made the mistake of sharing with Matthew over lunch. He didn’t want to go, but the weather and circumstance gave him no choice. Matthew insisted on fixing him some food to take with him while he cleaned up. There was something oddly endearing about kissing Matthew at the front door while he pressed a sack of sandwiches into Calvin’s hand.

Driving away made him ache.

He had no illusions that it was anything but a one-night stand. A few hours of solace for both of them.

Matthew got a night where he wasn’t so lonely, and Calvin didn’t have to think about the reasons that had brought him to town in the first place. They could both pretend their lives were straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting instead of an M.C. Escher woodcut. They had both known it came with an expiration date.

But Calvin liked Matthew. He liked his sad eyes, the way he couldn’t quite smile even when he was completely relaxed. He liked the slope of his shoulder, how broad it seemed, how capable of holding up the world, but also how it curved over Calvin when Matthew nestled into his side. He even liked that the man still believed in God, in spite of the path his life had taken.

The thing that made the night one of the best he’d ever had also made it worse. Because part of him didn’t want to go.

His thoughts stayed on Matthew as he finally got on the highway to head back to Chicago. Out of curiosity, he stopped at an internet café and spent half an hour noodling around online, trying to find out if there were other incidents like the one at the graveyard.

In twenty-seven minutes, he found nine, in and around the Chicago area. All cases had been dismissed. A couple had been labeled pranks, elaborate ruses to mess with the police. It was the most common WalkAmongUs:ACallingofSoulsstory

explanation for bodies going missing the cops could offer. It also gave credence to everything Matthew had attested.

It wasn’t that Calvin didn’t believe him. It was that he knew he shouldn’t. It was something out of a movie, or a horror story, or a child’s imagination. More than once, he caught himself staring at a person hunched over a keyboard in the café, wondering if he was really a demon.

When one of them called him a fag and told him to take his staring elsewhere, Calvin decided he’d done enough snooping around.

The clock blinked seven seventeen when he finally pushed his hotel room door open. Without turning on the light, he dropped the two sacks he carried onto the black hole of the bed and leaned his pilot case against the wall. He wasn’t tired. If he crawled into bed now, he’d be there for hours, staring up at the ceiling, lost in his own thoughts. He might even be tempted to call Matthew, just to assuage the dark mood slowly sweeping over Calvin at leaving him behind.

That was too dangerous.

People. And lights. And alcohol. That’s what he needed. He’d kill enough time so he could just drop when he finally returned to his room.

He washed up and changed his clothes, stuffing his funeral wear into the outer pocket of his case without thought of folding them first. The shirt smelled like Matthew’s house. He’d initially intended to give the clothes away to Goodwill when he got home, but maybe he’d hold onto the shirt. For something to remember Matthew by. He wouldn’t wear it, though. The memories would be too intense.

Calvin noticed the bag as he sat on the edge of the bed, tying his tennis shoes. The art supplies from Wal-Mart had yet to be touched. He hadn’t said a word to Matthew about his desire to draw him. The closest he’d gotten was confessing at one point to imagining him in various poses. But the itch remained, and with an entire evening on his hands, it occurred to him he could make his obsession with the man fruitful at the very least.

He carried the whole bag down to the hotel bar. The lighting wasn’t the best, but the music was relaxing, the proximity to beer an added bonus. Ordering a draft, he took a seat at the end of the counter, his back to the door, his heart already thumping in anticipation of putting the lines to paper.