Art has not known peace since the night you’d graced him with your presence. You had seeped into the confines of his sacred home, trailing darkness in your wake. He called out to you, pleaded for you to stop haunting his nightmares and face him instead. He tried to cast you out with God’s word, but against you, he was powerless. Without you, he was nothing.

Nothing will ever erase that night from his mind—the way he writhed beneath you in surrender and pleasure while your canines pierced his neck. You fed on him as if he existed for that sole purpose, and in that moment, he had never felt more whole. Not when preached, not when he prayed, nothing compared to you.

You were always there—every waking thought was consumed by you. He saw you in the stained glass of his church, in the sermons he preached about evil and temptation. Your name would slip from his lips like a prayer when he dreamt of you, hoarse and desperate while his hips rut against his mattress. His breath came ragged, hair damp against his forehead as your unholy beauty haunted his sleep.

The feeling lingered in his repentance, in his confessions. Humiliation and shame bore down on him as he spoke of you—of what he wanted to do with you, of what you had already done to him.

You were a blight, a fiend, a menace to his soul—yet he loved you with a fervor that was beyond words. In his most impure thoughts, he imagined taking you in the nave, the place where he vowed to serve God and God alone. He had resisted as much as he could, but you were the spawn of the devil. Pure evil. He couldn’t resist you, and it had been far too long.

“Come to me.” Art pleaded, his intertwined hands under his chin as if he were about to say a prayer. His eyes were trained on the silver cross on his bedroom wall, the moonlight making it gleam, almost like a taunt. A taunt of how you can unravel him, of how a priest is no match for a supernatural creature like yourself.

“Hear my call.”