Chapter 8: The Voicemail and the Void
The silence after the storm was a physical weight in Benoit Blanc’s apartment. It pressed down on the sagging shelves of case files, the dust motes caught in the slats of the blinds, the half-empty bottle of Pappy Van Winkle he’d been saving for a reason that now felt like a joke from a crueler universe. He’d stumbled in an hour ago, his clothes stiff with other people’s blood and cliff-side grit. He smelled of sweat, gunpowder, and the cold, ozone stink of that thing.
He’d showered until the water ran clear and cold, scrubbing at skin that felt permanently stained. He poured two fingers of the good whiskey into a cut-crystal glass. Set it on the side table. Didn’t touch it.
His phone was a dead weight in his hand. The screen was cracked from a fall during the fight. He unlocked it, his thumb leaving a smudge over Jud’s name in his recent calls. There was a voicemail. Left yesterday afternoon, before the world ended. Before the claws and the blood and the terrible, gasping rebirth on the grass.
He pressed play and brought the phone to his ear.
“Hey. Benoit. It’s me.” Jud’s voice, warm and slightly breathless, filled the silent room. A little laugh, soft and private. “So, I’m an idiot. You know that, right? I’m walking back from the rectory, thinking about that ice cream, and I’m just… I’m grinning like a fool. A complete fool.”
Benoit closed his eyes. He could see it. The sun was out for a change, weak but welcome. Jud had gotten a double-scoop of vanilla bean in a waffle cone. He was talking, hands animated, telling some story about a parishioner’s stubborn cat, and he’d gestured too wide. The cone tipped. The whole thing plopped onto the sidewalk with a soft, sad sound.
Jud had stared at it, his face a perfect canvas of comic devastation. Then, without a second thought, he’d knelt and tried to scoop the melting mass back onto the cone with his fingers.
“I got vanilla all over my fingers,” Jud’s voice continued, a smile in every word. “And my sleeve. And then I just… I looked at it, and I looked at you trying not to laugh, and I thought, ‘Jud, you absolute walnut, what are you doing?’ So I just nudged it over to a seagull with my foot. He seemed grateful. I am a fool. But you make me happy, Benoit. Happier than I have any right to be. Just… anyway. Call me later.”
The message ended with a soft click.
Benoit played it again. And again. On the sixth listen, he opened their text thread. He scrolled up, through days and weeks of Jud.
jud 4:12 PM
running late, Mrs. henderson’s sink is possessed i think. see you at 7?
jud 9:22 AM
i saw a cat today that looked just like you. very serious. attached a photo.
The photo was of a fat, grey tabby with a grumpy expression, sitting on a fencepost. The next message, two minutes later:
jud 9:24 AM
okay maybe not just like you. sorry. that was weird. ignore me.
jud 11:05 PM
can’t sleep. thinking about your hands. is that allowed?
The typos, the rambling, the sudden bursts of earnest feeling followed by flustered retreats. It wasn’t foolishness. It was enthusiasm. A sweet, unguarded heart tripping over itself to communicate. Benoit’s vision blurred. He wasn’t looking at the phone screen anymore.
He was seeing Jud in a sun-drenched kitchen, laughing, wearing an apron dusted with flour. He was seeing Jud holding a small, sleepy child against his chest, humming a hymn, a mother’s infinite patience in the curve of his shoulder, in the gentle sway of his hips. He was seeing a simple wooden altar, wildflowers, Jud in a cream-colored suit, blushing so fiercely his ears were red, tears of pure joy cutting tracks through his smile as Benoit approached.
A future. Solid and warm and terrifyingly normal. A white picket fence was too trite, but maybe a little house with a garden. A dog Jud would inevitably spoil. Mornings.
The fracture in his chest widened from a crack into a chasm. The ache was so profound it was soundless. He put the phone down carefully, as if it were made of the thinnest glass. He walked to his bedroom, the floorboards creaking their familiar complaints. He sat on the edge of the unmade bed, in the dark.
He didn’t sob. The tears were a quiet, relentless leak, a hot spill he couldn’t stem. He cried for the man on the voicemail, the sweet, bumbling man who tried to salvage ice cream from the pavement. He cried for the vampire with pale-fire eyes who had snarled at the moon. He cried because he didn’t know how to hold both in his mind. He cried for the wedding that might never happen, for the child that would never be placed in those gentle arms, for the simple, terrifying fact of wanting something so completely it felt like a diagnosis.
He whispered it to the shadows, to the scent of Jud’s shampoo still on his own pillow. “I love you, Jud.” The words were raw, scraped from the bottom of the chasm. “I love you, and I’m terrified I’ll never get to keep you.”
The shore was different at night when you were alone. The rocks weren’t romantic, they were hostile. The sound of the surf wasn’t soothing, it was a constant, grinding reminder of inevitability. Riley Flynn sat on the cold stone, the same spot they’d occupied what felt like a lifetime ago, and felt like he was dissolving into the salt air.
He could still feel the phantom weight of Paul against him. That night. No talk of vampires or curses or blood. Just a blanket, a shared flask of terrible whiskey, and Paul’s voice, low and calm, making fun of Bev Keane’s insistence on polyester blends. They’d talked about nothing. Favorite trash movies. The best fish and chips on the mainland. Paul had confessed a love for obscure Norwegian black metal bands from the 90s, the CDs shipped at great cost and hidden like contraband under his vestments. He’d talked about the comic books he read as a seminarian, how the epic battles of good and evil felt simpler then.
“I just like the flowers around the church,” Paul had said, his head eventually finding a resting place on Riley’s shoulder. “The lilies Mrs. Keane hates. They’re stubborn. They grow through the cracks in the stone.”
They’d counted stars until their eyes grew heavy. Riley had woken at dawn, stiff and cold, with Paul asleep in his arms, breath not fogging in the morning air, but utterly still and peaceful. He’d looked younger. The lines of torment smoothed away. Just a man. His priest.
Now, Riley stared at the black water and wanted to scream.
He wanted that. Not the dramatic, anguished, star-crossed crap. The mundane stuff. He wanted to wake up with Paul in an actual bed, tangled in sheets. He wanted to make him coffee he couldn’t drink, just to watch him pretend to sip it and make a face. He wanted to hold his hand walking down Main Street in broad daylight, just because. He wanted to see him in a stupid suit, flustered and beautiful at an altar, saying yes.
He wanted to kiss him. Not as a desperate, final act before a battle, but slowly. To learn the taste of him without the metallic hint of blood, to feel the cool press of his lips and know it was a choice, not a last resort.
But a cold knot of fear sat in his gut, heavier than the gun he no longer carried.
Paul was compassion made flesh. Even as a monster, his first instinct was to protect, to comfort, to step between the horror and the helpless. He was assertive in his kindness, firm in his grace. His words were always measured, soft, trying to heal even when he was breaking.
And what was Riley? A wreck. A recovering addict with hands that still shook sometimes for no reason. A temper that flared hot and ugly. A history of taking the easy, selfish way out. He was all rough edges and failures, a core of resentment and fear he tried to hide.
What if Paul saw that? Really saw it? Not the man who protected him on the shore, but the real, disgusting core of Riley Flynn—the one that had failed his family, his friends, himself? The vampire feared his own hunger. What would he think of Riley’s? For oblivion, for escape, for something to numb the constant ache of being himself?
Paul loved flowers and collected metal CDs and read comics. He was a gentle scholar in a monster’s body.
Riley was just… broken.
The wind picked up, whipping salt spray into his face. It felt like the island itself was spitting on him. He buried his face in his hands, the heels of his palms pressing into his eyes until colors bloomed in the darkness. The tears were hot and angry, mingling with the salt.
He cried for the man who talked about lilies growing through stone. He cried for the future he could picture with devastating clarity—a quiet house, a shared life, a ring on Paul’s finger—a future that felt as impossible and distant as the mainland lights shimmering on the horizon. He cried because he wanted to be worthy of a love that felt like a miracle, and he was terrified, bone-deep, that he wasn’t.
He sat there until he was empty, until the cold had seeped into his marrow, a solitary figure mourning a peace that hadn’t been destroyed, but one he feared he would never be allowed to earn. The sea kept grinding the rocks to sand, an endless, patient destruction. He had never felt more alone.