Iris Martin has been dead for one year and has not touched holy ground for nearly two, but on the night of September 21st, she goes to church. It’s the kind of quiet church she’d grown up in: stone so old it remembered being a mountain once; stained glass windows; stations of the cross lining the hallway to the bathroom. When she breathes in, Iris can scent the stories that cling to the walls: the lingering perfume of salt and sweat and human stench, the repetitive exhale of prayer forming a pattern in the dust on the pews. 

She is invited in by an old priest, but she has no interest in confession. Confession had always felt hollow: too easy, too quick—even when she had been alive. There is none of the relief she expects and does not deserve. She had been reborn as a damned thing, after all. A warped monster miracle. She commits the sin of surviving, and she doesn’t know how to confess that.

They pass the stations of the cross on the wall, and Iris tracks the paintings of the Passion of Christ as they walk, inhaling the scratch and sting of dust and turpentine. These depictions are quite simplistic and oversanitized, a story of suffering reduced to symbols; very little blood. Blood. Her throat aches with want. Maybe this time, this night of all nights, she’ll feel different—something other than dead. 

Iris asks for the eucharist. 

She doesn’t dare step close to the altar, although Iris supposes that if she were going to combust into flames it would have already happened. The priest hands her the eucharist. Iris puts it on her tongue. 

It tastes like absolutely nothing. 

She’s going to have to throw it up later, but it's the ceremony that matters right now. When she had been human, the ceremony had carried her through. It had become a kind of kinetic poem, the repetition of phrases and gestures muscle-memory warm in her body. 

The priest hands her a cup. He says, “the blood of Christ.”

Iris takes the chalice. Regardless of transubstantiation, the substance in the cup does not taste the same as fresh blood. The smell of the priest’s blood is far more potent; like honey and sun, oddly. Iris wants that heat. Communion used to make her feel like she was a part of something. 

Her fangs slide free without her noticing, and they pierce through her bottom lip. Venom burns her tongue, sweetness flooding her mouth. She swallows it down. 

She drinks the wine, cold, bland, and sharp. It slides down her throat like a dull razor blade. She waits to feel something. She doesn’t. The chalice is glass, smudged with the priest’s fingerprints. She can taste incense and sweat and a hint of nicotine that has transferred to the surface. 

The priest wipes the rim where her lips touched with a white cloth. When he turns his back, she can see the pulse of blood in his neck; warm, alive. For a moment, she thinks about how easy it would be to kill him. It’s only a moment. But it’s enough. 

“Are you alright?” the priest asks, in the way that old men do; all hovering hands, raised as if to touch her, as if in surrender, already partway to prayer.

Iris wants to laugh in his face. She wants his blood on her tongue and his forgiveness in her ear and she wants it to mean something. But it won’t mean anything. Old men say all sorts of things when they bleed. Iris swallows the rising hysteria and the venom and the scream hiding under her tongue. She holds her breath. She has not needed to breathe for over three hundred days, and if she takes in any more blood-sweet, shared air with this old man, she’s going to kill him. She has never killed a priest. 

Instead, she runs. Iris storms into the cemetery and drags in deep, heaving breaths of night air and soil and stone, and her gums ache, ache, ache. She falls to her knees,  the laden weight of the fucking body of Christ sour in her stomach.

“Forgive me, Father,” she whispers, shaping the words out of habit. They don’t feel like anything. She tastes only pain, metallic, bitter. But she can’t leave the thought unfinished, can’t leave the comma dangling. Iris takes a breath and makes herself say to the sky, “For I have sinned.” 

Except for the churn of her stomach, she hears nothing in response. She vomits up old blood and wine and the eucharist onto some poor person’s grave. 

#

Iris makes it home three hours before sunrise. Home—although she’s never really called it that, in her head she refers to it as ‘the apartment’—is a basement in an old brick building down a side street, next to a bar and a coffee shop. It’s the perfect place for vampires to live: victims stumbling down the street will not appear out of the ordinary, the underground dark and windowless, perfect for sunny days. The landlord doesn’t ask questions, and Iris looks young enough to be a new college graduate. It works. 

The apartment is clean, which means that Sean had a good night. The smell of disinfectant is a blow to her already-burning throat. Iris growls. 

“You smell like wine,” Sean says. He’s on the ceiling, his eyes reflecting yellow in the half-light of near dawn. “Wait. Did you go to church?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Iris cautiously inhales again to speak, and the disinfectant stings. “Fuck, did you get blood all over everything? Why does it smell like you’re trying to cover up a murder here?” 

“I’m thorough.” Sean drops to the ground. He’s in an old bathrobe. His hair, a permanent mess of salt and pepper curls since he died in his forties, is wet from a recent shower. Sean wears death like a comfortable coat. He’s been dead for longer than Iris had ever been alive, and she is forever in awe of how this does not seem to bother him. “Did you throw it up? You’re covered in …” Sean wrinkles his nose. “Never mind—I don’t want to know.” 

Iris shrugs out of her jacket and throws it at him. “It’s been a terrible night.” 

“It’s your birthday,” Sean says, catching her jacket in one hand and sliding a glass of blood across the counter. “Drink this.” 

The blood is A+, her favorite, and smells … shit. Better than the priest did. Iris’s teeth slice into her lower lip. She thinks she’s going to be sick. 

When she hesitates, Sean rolls his eyes. “Iris Martin,” he says. “I’m really not feeling this year-long penance, Catholic guilt bullshit.” 

She’s not feeling his attitude. Before she stops to think, Iris grabs Sean by the throat and slams him against the living room wall hard enough to crack the plaster. He lets her, but his lip curls back in a warning. “Easy there,” he says. “You know you won’t forgive yourself if you actually hurt me.” 

The monster under her skin throbs like a heartbeat, a pulse that’s too fast and too familiar and nothing like her own used to be.

“Iris,” Sean says softly. He doesn’t touch her; his hands are still raised in surrender above his head. Through the haze of her vision, he is a blur of scruffy beard and dark hair. She can feel his breath on her face. When she doesn’t let him go, Sean lets out a low growl; Iris feels the vibration of it in her hands holding his throat, in the air between them. He’s older, and stronger, and when she’s like this, all furious instincts, she remembers: they’re not human. And challenging him would be incredibly stupid. 

Iris clenches her eyes shut, holds her breath until she remembers that she doesn’t actually need to breathe and her lungs stop screaming, and lets him go. His scent shifts immediately; softer is the only way she can think to describe it; clean like water and pine and not sharp as he swallows back his own venom, relaxes, adrenaline fleeing the charged air between them. 

“Alright, kid,” Sean says, and slings an arm around her shoulders, pulling her in close. 

Iris wants to cry. She smells the cup of blood he presses into her slack fingers and doesn't flinch this time when her teeth slide free. 

“You’ll feel better when you drink this,” Sean says in her ear, matter-of-fact. “Wine and Communion taste like shit, and you’re starving.” 

Iris keeps her eyes closed, silently sending out a plea to a God that she doesn’t quite believe in, who stopped listening a long, long time ago, and downs the whole fucking glass. 

#

When the sun rises, Iris draws the curtains tight and locks herself in her room. She whispers a prayer that sounds more like an apology and tastes like the sting of microwaved blood from last night on her tongue. She rereads an old collection of poetry she’d kept from a class she’d dropped out of before she turned into a creature worse than a devil. She traces the line breaks with a finger; the pages are worn enough that they rip under her too-sharp nails. Something shivers under her skin at the sight of the slashes through the text, a kind of feral joy, sour like adrenaline in her mouth. It’s an echo of something she can’t quite reach, abstract and swelling, like there’s more than soulless space inside her. It’s warm. She hasn’t felt it in so long, she doesn’t know what to call it. She holds the sensation tightly in her clenched jaw, fangs extending into her lip, blood running down her chin, until she falls asleep.  

#

The next night, restless, she goes back to the church. The light in the rectory is on, just small and flickering. The priest is home. Iris doesn’t dare go close to the actual chapel. She skirts the edges of the property, staying close to the cemetery. She settles on sitting at the feet of a statue of St. Francis of Assisi. He’s dripping moss and plants, the kind of vines that sneak in cracks and carve stone: spidery, strangling things. His hands are outstretched and there’s a gurgling fountain just to the right of him. It makes for a peaceful place to pray. 

She’s not really praying—she’s just kneeling. Kneeling and staring at the half-lit stained glass windows, her throat dry as bone. 

She smells Sean before she sees him, catching the sting of his familiar pine-scent,  and the even sweeter pulse of the blood he’s holding in a thermos in his hand. “Stop babysitting me.” 

A soft laugh, far too quiet for human ears, reaches her through the trees. “Stop needing to be babysat.” 

Iris twists around and glares at him. He steps around the statue of St. Francis and sits down next to her, holding out the cup. He shakes it and the scent of the blood mixes intoxicatingly with the metal of the thermos, the woods, the water of the fountain. She licks away venom and old, bitter blood. 

“You’re not making me feel better,” she says. If she looks at him, she’s going to start crying, so she keeps her eyes on the church. The priest has gone to bed. The light in the rectory is dull. 

Sean taps lightly on her jaw. “Iris.” There’s power in an older vampire’s voice. Iris feels the tug of it in her spine, sits up straighter, and flashes her teeth at him in defiance. 

Once, when she was very young, newly reborn and wild, Sean might have snarled back at her for that. But Iris is a year into her new life and not particularly dangerous, so Sean doesn’t move. “Hey,” he says, gentler now, almost human. “Will you please look at me?”

“Are you going to give me the I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed speech?” Iris takes the thermos from him. The metal is almost warm against her fingers. 

“I’m not mad, and I’m not disappointed,” Sean says, and sighs. “Iris, do you think I don’t remember what this is like?” 

Finally, Iris looks at him. She’s half expecting there to be pity on his face, but his expression is as still as St. Francis’s statue. His eyes are reflecting the light from the rectory; a lovely, strange sheen. Sean has never pretended to be anything other than what he is: a vampire. She can’t use the word monster with him. He isn’t a monster. The creature shivering under his skin is not the guilty, lonely thing hers is. 

“This is hard,” Sean says softly. “And that’s okay.” 

“I know,” Iris says into the cup of blood. Sean’s understanding might actually be worse than pity. She keeps her eyes fixed on the blood in the cup, swirls it around. The red is almost blue, maybe purple? Edges tinted black against the metal. It’s beautiful. 

It’s really fucking good. She hates that it’s so good. 

“You know,” Sean says, digging his elbow lightly into her ribs. “It is actually okay for you to enjoy things sometimes.” 

Iris curls her lip at him. 

He laughs. “I’m just saying, kid. You can’t be miserable like this forever.” 

“I’m damned, aren’t I?” Iris swallows the last delicious mouthful of blood, licks the edges of her lips clean. “Dead. There’s nothing for me in church. There’s nothing for me anywhere that’s not inherently a little dark and fucked up.” She can’t look at him. She stares at the empty cup. 

“Mmm,” Sean hums. “I don’t think that’s entirely true. Come on,” he loops his arm under hers. Iris doesn’t resist as he pulls her to her feet. “I know something that will make you feel better.” 

#

He takes her to one of those hipster coffee shops that is trying to pretend that the early 2000’s never happened; all flickering lights and exposed brick and aesthetically stained maps on the walls. Through the overly-large windows, Iris can see a group of people gathering, and a microphone stand being adjusted. She has memories, dull from death but sweet with wanting, of coming to places like this when she’d been alive. Since she died, the night has belonged to bars and unforgiving stars and harsh lights and awful hunger. There is no place for her here, along with living bodies and emotions that are— 

Iris stops. 

Sean stops with her. “Trust me, kid,” he whispers. “We’re okay here. You’re safe.” He pushes the door, and it swings open with a soft scream of rusted hinges. “Imogen, can we come in?” 

Imogen, a girl with over-large glasses and a bright green beanie, sticks her head around the door frame. 

She smells human, although the scent is slightly off. Is there something wrong with her blood? Iris wrinkles her nose. She’s not hungry anymore, but venom still sizzles on her tongue at the scent of so many warm bodies so close. 

Imogen looks at them with such an unguarded expression Iris wonders if she’s been hypnotized. “Sean, you brought us a new vampire?” She winks at Iris. “Come in, both of you.” 

“Thanks,” Sean says, and pushes Iris through the door because she can’t seem to make her legs move. “Imogen,” he says quietly. “Is a witch. So don’t even think about drinking from her.” 

“Why did you bring me here?” Iris is realizing that the sick-sour feeling in her throat might be rage. Or possibly fear. She’s never met a witch. “Sean, is this a fucking poetry reading?” 

“Yes,” Sean says casually, tightening his grip on her arm. “Calm down. I know you have that old book in your room. I know you like poetry, kid. It’s not a secret.”

They’re talking too fast for human ears, but a scrawny-looking kid with a shock of brown hair across the room laughs. Iris spins out of Sean’s grip. 

“It’s a poetry reading for the damned, little vampire,” the kid says. He’s not really a kid, Iris thinks. He looks probably twenty-five. He smells like salt and honey and a spice she can’t quite place. She sniffs again and the spice is not a spice at all but venom, clear and clean. The vampire stands and saunters—there’s really no other way to describe it— over to Sean and Iris. There’s a cross dangling on a chain around his neck, glinting gold in the flickering lights of the cafe. His skin is ashen, whiter than hers, tinged green along his cheekbones. “I’m Val.” 

“Iris.” She can’t stop looking at the cross. “Do you go to church?” 

Val grins, wide enough that his fangs are visible. “Oh, no. Not for me. Church doesn’t have anything to do with God.”

She stares at him. 

He flicks his tongue out over his teeth, tilts his head to the side like a curious bird. “Why do you ask? Do you go to church?” 

The yes gets caught in her throat and feels like a lie. A growl slips out instead. She bites her lip. 

Val doesn’t flinch at the sound. “We’re all damned,” he says, shrugging. “Nothing to worry about.” 

Imogen taps a microphone. “We’re going to get started!” 

Sean propels Iris around Val and pushes her into a chair. Val throws himself into the kind of chair that was probably once a couch or a loveseat and is now only half of that and a disgusting green. “Are you reading tonight?” 

“No,” Sean says absently. “Not tonight.” He’s finally let go of Iris’ shoulder, apparently trusting that she’s not about to attack anyone. 

“You write poetry?” Iris hisses. A young girl with bright yellow eyes is stumbling up to the microphone. She smells like wet dog; the scent all heavy in Iris’ nose, blocking out the human girl’s sweeter blood. “Is she a . . .”

“Werewolf?” Sean shrugs. “Yeah.” 

“And you didn’t think to mention this once in the last year?” 

“Not really.” 

The werewolf girl reads a poem about love. Iris narrows her eyes at Sean. He winks. 

Val steps up to the microphone and sings an improvised song about a thunderstorm. The entire experience is so bizarrely intimate. They’re all sitting here, wedged in this hole in the wall, vampires and werewolves and witches and ghosts and other creatures she doesn’t recognize, magic sweet and sharp in their blood. Iris has not been around this many people since she died. There’s a fluttering of something in her ribs – something bright,  a twinge of heat. She bites her lip, searching for the taste of it. 

“It’s not church,” Sean says softly in her ear. “But it’s something. And I know you want what you remember of church, right? Love? Connection? Here’s some poetry.” 

It’s not the same thing at all, but Iris is too warm and full of blood and dizzy with the barrage of new scents to protest. Maybe he’s right. Maybe there’s something here. For the first time she can remember since she died, she can breathe. There is no one to feed on here. She can sit. And be. And listen. 

“This is the Collective,” Sean whispers as another vampire takes the microphone and reads an ode to winter nights. “We meet every night.” 

Every. Night. 

The monster inside of her aches. No, Iris aches.

She chases the feeling through the words of the next poem. She thinks, I am damned. The poet describes her bloodlust as the image of a wine-dark wave in the middle of the open sea. Iris thinks, I am dead. The poet says being alive is a dream and crawling out of her own grave is waking up. The aching inside Iris sharpens into something she wants to name. 

Sean wraps an arm around her shoulders. The creatures around her snap their fingers for the poet. Iris tilts her head up and back, towards the paint-specked ceiling and glowing lights. Around her, the low murmur of voices settles into a soothing hum. This doesn’t quite feel like happiness, but it’s something sideways of that, almost sacred. 

#

“Do you still pray?” she asks Val when they take a break from reading to get drinks. She’s heating up glasses of blood in the back at Sean’s instruction, which is apparently something that you can do here. 

Val runs a hand through his already tousled hair. “Of course I do. I find God and I have a lot to talk about, these days. I said I was damned more as a joke, really. I’m not sure. You don’t have to lose faith because you die, Iris.” 

Venom is hot on her tongue. Iris takes a breath. She lets it out. “You know, no one has ever told me that before.”

Val’s cross gleams gold in the muted cafe light. “Look,” he says. “The world is complicated. There’s magic and miracles and witches and werewolves and vampires and all the rest of it. Everyone has their own beliefs, and tells their own story about what’s happening to them to justify their lives. You just have to edit your understanding a little. You’re dead. You came back a little different, right? So did everyone here.”

It’s a nice speech. “And you don’t mind being damned?” 

“That word again.” 

“What else do you want to call it?” 

“Do you feel damned, Iris? Here? Right now?” 

The microwave dings. 

Iris starts at the sound. Val laughs. He says, “Welcome to the Collective,” and hands her the glass of blood. 

She takes it, sensing an unnamed ritual in the gesture. The rim of the cup is cool against her lips. The blood is warm and sweet on her tongue, soothing as honey on her throat. She drinks the whole glass.