At my wrists.
“Maybe you’ve the chance I never had. Maybe they’ve a use for you they never had for me.”
And in the new morning, he left me there alone. I sat against the old pagan stone after I heard the faraway sound of his car.
The stone remembers, he’d once told me, and so do we.
Demon est Deus inversus, I’d been told by another. Save me from that impotent, slaughtered lamb they have made of me.
On this rock will I build my church, some scribe had written, putting words in the latter’s mouth.
The blood remembers.
Three days later my flesh remembered how to bleed.
And the stone how to drink.
*
Regardless of their orbits, planets are born, then mature and die, upon a single axis, and so the stone and those it honoured had always been to me, even before I knew it. Now that I was here, I circled the stone but wouldn’t leave it, couldn’t, because, as in space, there was nothing beyond but cold dark emptiness.
They came while I slept — the fourth morning, maybe the fifth. They were there with the dawn, and who knows how many hours before that, slender and solid against the morning mists, watching as I rolled upright in my dew-soaked blanket. When I rubbed my eyes and blinked, they didn’t vanish. Part of me feared they would. Part of me feared they wouldn’t.
As I leaned back against the stone, she came forward and went to her knees beside me, looking not a day older than she had more than twenty years before. Her light brown skin was still smoothly translucent. Her gaze was tender at first, and though it didn’t change of itself, it grew more unnerving when she did not blink — like being regarded by the consummate patience of a serpent.
She leaned in, the tip of her nose cool at my throat as she sniffed deeply. Her lips were warm against mine; their soft press set mine to trembling. Her breath was sweet, and the edge of one sharp tooth bit down to open a tiny cut on my lip. She sucked at it as if it were a split berry, and I thought without fear that next I would die. But she only raised my hands to nuzzle the pale inner wrists, their blue tracery of veins, then pushed them gently back to my lap, and I understood that she must’ve known all along what I was, what I was to become.
“It’s nice to look into your eyes again,” she said, as if but a week had passed since she’d done so, “and not closed in sleep.”
Since coming to the stone I’d imagined and rehearsed this moment countless times, and she’d never said this. Never dressed in black and grays, pants and a thick sweater, clothes I might’ve seen on any city street and not thought twice about. She’d never glanced back at the other two, who stood eyeing each other with impatience, while the taller of them idly scraped something from the bottom of her shoe. She’d never simply stood up and taken me by the hand, pulled me to my feet, to leave me surprised at how much smaller she looked now that I’d grown to adulthood.
“He stinks,” said the taller Sister. From the feral arrogance in her face, I took her to be the flesh-eater. “I can smell him from here.”
“You’ve smelt worse,” said the third. “Eaten it, too.”
As I’d rehearsed this they’d never bickered, and my erstwhile angel — Maia, the others called her — had never led me away from the stone like a bewildered child.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Back down to the road. Then back home to Dublin,” Maia said.
“You … you drove?”
The flesh-eater, her leather jacket disconcertingly modern, burst into mocking laughter. “Oh Jesus, another goddess hunter,” she sighed. “What was he expecting? We’d take him by the hand and fly into the woods?”
The third one, the sperm-eater by default, slid closer to me in a colorful gypsy swirl of skirts. “Try not to be so baroque,” she said. “It really sets Lilah off, anymore.”
V. Sanguis sanctus
They were not goddesses, but if they’d been around as long as they were supposed to have been, inspiring legends that had driven men like my uncle to murder, then as goddesses they at least must’ve posed. They were beautiful and they were three, and undoubtedly could be both generous and terrible. They could’ve been anything to anyone — goddesses, succubi, temptresses, avengers — and at one time or another probably had been. They might’ve gone through lands and ages, exploiting extant myths of triune women, leaving others in their wake: Egyptian Hathors, Greek Gorgons, Roman Fates, Norse Norns.
And now they lived in Dublin in a gabled stone house that had been standing for centuries, secluded today behind security fences and a vast lawn patrolled by mastiffs — not what I’d expected. But I accepted the fact of them the same way I accepted visions of a blaspheming Christ, and ancient stones that drank stigmatic blood, then sang a summons that only immortal women could hear. All these I accepted as proof that Shakespeare had been right: there was more in Heaven and Earth than I’d ever dreamt of. What I found hardest to believe was that I could have any part to play in it.
They took me in without explaining themselves. I was fed and allowed to bathe, given fresh clothes. Otherwise, the Sisters of the Trinity lived as privileged aristocrats, doing whatever they pleased, whenever it pleased them.
Lilah, the flesh-eater, aloof and most often found in dark leathers, had the least to do with me, and seemed to tolerate me as she might a stray dog taken in that she didn’t care to pet.
The sperm-eater was Salíce, and while she was much less apt to pretend I didn’t exist, most of her attentions took the form of taunts, teasing me with innuendo and glimpses of her body, as if it were something I might see but never experience. After I’d been there a few days, though, she thrust a crystal goblet in my hand. “Fill it,” she demanded, then pursed her lips as my eyes widened. “Well — do what you can.”
I managed in private, to fantasies of Maia.
I’d loved her all my life, I realized — a love for every age and need. I’d first loved her with childish adoration, and then for her divine wisdom. I later loved her extraordinary beauty as I matured into its spell. Loved her as an ideal that no mortal woman could live up to. I’d begun loving her as proof that the merciful God I’d been raised to worship existed, and now, finally, as further evidence that he didn’t.
My devotion was reciprocated, and the time we spent together lovers’ time. But while I shared her bed and body, I tried not to delude myself that it meant the same thing to Maia as it did me. Millions of people may love their dogs, but none regard them as equals. I kept alive the cut on the side of my lip, where she’d bitten me that first morning, the pain tiny and exquisite. But her teeth never returned to the spot, or sought any other.
“Why not?” I asked one bright afternoon. Now I understood why Aztecs had allowed their hearts to be cut out, and islanders went willingly into live volcanoes. “Is there something wrong with my blood?”
“Is that all you think you are to me?” Maia looked at me with such intuitive depth it felt as if she could take in my whole life between eyeblinks. “I can get blood anywhere.”
“I didn’t say you had to take it all.”
“Yours is special. It shouldn’t be wasted.”
When I suggested they must be reserving me for something, she only smiled, with mystery and allure. We were out walking, had gotten far from home by this time of day, Maia showing me some of the mundane, everyday sights of Dublin. Her arm looped in mine, she steered me down a side street, more purpose in her stride now than before. When we were across the street from a brick building that looked like a school, we sat atop a low wall. Before long the doors opened to release a flood of young boys in their uniforms — dark blue short pants and pullover sweaters, with pale blue shirts and red ties. We watched them swarm away, and one in particular she seemed to track, until he was lost from sight.