Gather round, my children, my kith and kin, my darlings of tooth and claw and feather; gather round and listen close. It's an old tale, that of the murder-saints- what were they, you say? What are they?
Funny thing, that. Funny thing-
They're not dead, you know. We'd know if they died. Things like that, they echo. If they died it'd twitch a thread through Heaven and Hell and even here in our land of black rock and bone. If they died, something in all of us would die with them- something that knows what it is to be hunted. To be prey. Something that makes us everything we are. The murder-saints are gone, but they'll come back. They'll come back for you, my darlings, and for me, and we'll know.
Our cousins have an idea that they're one soul in two bodies, and I don't know how true that is. They say that mistakes were made by their Almighty, that something was separated that never should have been touched, that something whole was warped and wronged. That their bodies, in their human days, were made to slot together.
The murder-saints are flesh and blood and bone, are sawing up our bodies in their tiny grimy sinks in the name of God. The murder-saints are angels who clawed their way up through heaving mud and leaf-blown snow to lie gasping on this earth. The murder-saints are the messiahs of our people- the murder-saints, in love with their own grief, in love with humans and all their little cruelties, in love with a world of small death and bare boards.
In love with fault-lines where the dark bleeds through. In love, more than anything, with each other, and here's the Mother-granted truth: the murder-saints are only men.
Men like that- they are the natural order.
The murder-saints breeze into town. Car sleek as a whistle, rumbling with the bellyache of its machine-hunger for a chase, and that's how we know to scatter. I've known entire families of us to pick up and go at the first trace of their gasoline on the wind. I ask them, how do you know it's them? And every time they say they smell different. Not the same as other humans in other machines. Different.
And they breeze into town. Into the scuzziest dump of a motel with the rattiest carpets and the rustiest taps, and there they make like kings or animals, spreading out like they own the damn place, spreading out with their gun-oil smiles and their bandaged fingers and their shirts worn three days straight. When the murder-saints go to a place, they own it just by being. By screwing the local bartender up against the alley wall, by flirting their way into the small-town morgue, by standing in the laundromat at one A.M in their boxers as their bloodied jeans spin like dreams.
Wherever they go, they tower. That's how you'll know them, or part of how.
The murder-saints are semen-stained sheets and skin-warmed crucifixes, are danger-signs and storm-warnings, are sleaze-bags and pretty boys and knights going after some North star of a Holy Grail, and that Grail is (so they tell themselves) peace, but their peace isn't our peace. Their peace is the clarity that comes in the sinking of a blade into creature-breast- the second after it slides between ribs, just before it hits the heart-meat.
They love each other in the way of all monsters- with the gentlest of claws, like the other's the only piece of beauty that ever mattered. That kind of love, it's inexcusable. It eats and eats and eats and never stops being hungry. No matter how deep they get into each other's brains and guts and grime it'll never be enough, not until one's crushed himself completely into the space taken up by the other. They don't know their limits. It's what makes them things to be afraid of. You think loving makes them human? Their bodies are what make them human. Loving is what makes them terrible.
Never, ever separate the murder-saints. Together, they'll kill you. Alone? They'll burn down your house and slaughter your little djinn-babes, your wolflings, your shifter-young. And they won't do it in front of you. They won't care enough for that.
Remember what I tell you, my dearests, my darlings.
The murder-saints are beautiful, of course. I met them once, many decades ago, before they became the legend of themselves. They seemed unaware that their shadows had wings. They were tall and glorious and their souls felt older than their bodies, spilling darkness into their eye-sockets, ancient and strange and simpler than aught I've seen since. The murder-saint were made from old, old stuff, believe you me. Less was more in those days- a dollop of courage, a sprinkling of self-sacrifice, a good bit of the kill-heat, and there you had a human in the old-fashioned sense, a creature somewhere between animal and angel. None of this wishy-washy paper-thin stuff of humans today. Today's people make terrible predators and even worse prey, but men like the murder-saints- men like that-
That's the way it was set up.
The murder-saints are only men. That's the trick. None of these fancy extra bits.
The murder-saints are bare-knuckled prayer-knuckled warriors fighting down in the dust with the rest of us, and for that we could respect them. For that, they are honoured.
I followed them back to their motel, that day, in my scrap-bucket truck. I watched through the window as they bickered, ate, laughed, mocked grainy talk shows. The television-blue glow of their skin and their teeth. I was afraid, of course, and so were they beneath all that iron. I could smell it on them. Their fear bothered me. It stank rank and awful. Something stillborn. They drank too much. They slept too long. I watched them all night, through each phase of the moon. It floated in their window like a drowned thing.
The murder-saints are only men. Do not let that fool you. They are only men and they are wolves. They are only men and they are the creatures in your wardrobe, my sweethearts. They are the shadows under your stairs.
They say that someone separated them, and that when they come together again the world might end with it.
They say that the murder-saints are beauty and wisdom and a love that roared so loud the universe bulged at its edges. They say it's like catching wind in a paper-bag. What they don't say is that the murder-saints are good men, and that what makes them good is what makes them appalling. What they don't say is that for each time they rest their foreheads together, someone, somewhere, walks over a grave.
Things like that- they echo.
Only men, my little ones. Only men. Would you believe that?