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I t felt like a double-life. Most days, Silas was gone, undoubtedly looking for supposed witches or vampires he might send me to murder.

At night, the more I played the role he wanted me to, the more I was free to go to mass.

It was the last thing Silas would think I was doing—which might be one reason why it felt so safe, despite how painful it was each visit.

The sacristy smelled of beeswax and old incense, a small room hidden behind the altar where priests prepared for mass and stored sacred vessels. Father O’Malley had led me here after another mass I couldn’t get through, offering me this quieter space to recover from my ordeal.

I sat on a wooden chair, my hands still trembling slightly, watching as he methodically extinguished candles and stored away vestments.

Every movement seemed practiced, reverent—a ritual in itself.

The walls were lined with cabinets of dark wood, worn smooth by generations of hands.

A crucifix hung above a small washing basin, Christ’s carved face captured in an expression of serene suffering that made me look away.

This hidden room felt like crossing into another world entirely, far removed from the Puritan simplicity I’d been raised in, where even a cross without Christ’s image had been considered suspect by some.

“The pain subsides more quickly each time,” Father O’Malley said, noticing my still-shaking hands. “Your body—or whatever animates it now—begins to recognize the difference between destruction and purification.”

“During the consecration, it feels like I’m being torn apart. I don’t get why that moment is so difficult. It’s like it’s I’m the one being sacrifices, like my body is the one being broken.”

“Yet here you are.” He smiled slightly. “Still whole, still yourself.”

Was I, though? Still myself?

Father O’Malley removed his stole—the long embroidered cloth he’d worn around his neck during mass—and kissed it before carefully folding it into a drawer. “Do you know what happened on that altar tonight? What happens during every mass?”

“Your priest said some words over bread and wine,” I replied, falling back on what Daddy had taught me. “And all of you pretended they became something else.”

If my bluntness offended him, he didn’t show it. Instead, he nodded thoughtfully. “That’s a common misunderstanding. We pretend nothing. We believe—no, we know—that the substance changes while the appearances remain the same.”

“That’s impossible,” I said automatically.

Father O’Malley’s eyebrows rose slightly.

“Is it? You still appear human in most respects. Your face is the same one you’ve always known.

Yet something fundamental to your nature has changed, hasn’t it?

The substance of what you are transformed while the accidents—the outward appearances—remained largely the same. ”

The parallel caught me off guard. I’d never considered my transformation in those terms before.

“That’s different,” I protested. “What happened to me was... unnatural.”

“Was it?” He sat across from me, his hands resting on his cane. “Or was it merely something outside your previous understanding of nature? The world contains more mysteries than we can comprehend, Alice. The line between natural and supernatural isn’t as clear as we like to believe.”

I shifted uncomfortably. “Daddy always said Catholic beliefs about communion were blasphemous. That you claimed to sacrifice Christ again and again, when scripture clearly says He died once for all.”

“Your father misunderstood our teaching,” Father O’Malley said gently.

“We don’t sacrifice Christ anew—we participate in His one eternal sacrifice.

Time works differently in sacred spaces.

” He glanced toward the altar visible through the doorway.

“When the Eucharist is consecrated, we’re not creating something new; we’re connecting with something eternal. ”

The concept was difficult to grasp, yet strangely compelling. I’d experienced firsthand how different time felt since my transformation—how nights stretched endlessly, how moments of feeding compressed into blinding intensity.

I still struggled with the idea. “Jesus said to do this in remembrance of him. That’s what it’s all about. Remembering what he did.”

Father O’Malley laughed a little. “That might be how a modern lady like you at the end of the nineteenth century in America thinks about remembrance. But what we have there is a technical term. It’s connected to the Passover ritual and Exodus 13:8.

When Jewish people celebrated the Passover, they were to regard themselves as participants in the original Exodus, as though they were themselves being rescued from slavery by the Lord.

So likewise, when we use the word ‘remembrance,’ it’s not about nostalgia.

The word Jesus used there actually means joining ourselves to his death and resurrection, the distance of time and space completely removed, so that his sacrifice is real for us, and in us. ”

“So you genuinely believe that wafer becomes flesh?” I asked, unable to keep the skepticism from my voice.

“I do.” His certainty was unshakable. “Not in a crude, physical way that our senses can detect—the appearances of bread and wine remain. But in its deepest reality, its substance, it becomes Christ’s body and blood.

” He leaned forward. “The body and blood of Christ can be both symbolic and literal, just as you are both dead and alive.”

The words struck me with unexpected force. Both dead and alive. It described my condition perfectly—this liminal existence, this neither-nor state that had become my reality.

“You said before that I wasn’t the first... like me... that you’d encountered.” I realized I was changing the subject. “The others—did they come to believe as you do?”

Father O’Malley’s expression grew distant. “Some did, in time. Others found the concept too difficult to accept. Faith isn’t something that can be forced, Alice. It can only be offered and received freely.”

I thought about the Order, about Silas and his rigid certainties. There had been no freedom there—only commands and consequences.

“How can you reconcile this?” I gestured at myself. “My existence with your faith? Silas says that vampires are abominations, unholy creatures that God will destroy.”

“Silas Blake’s theology is warped,” he replied with surprising frankness. “God’s creation is vast and complex. Scripture tells us that Christ came to reconcile all things in creation to Himself— all things , Alice, not just those that fit neatly into our human categories of good and evil.”

He rose and moved to a small cabinet, returning with a worn Bible. The sight of it made me tense—the last time I’d tried to touch scripture, the pages had scorched my fingers.

“Don’t worry,” he said, noticing my reaction.

“I won’t ask you to touch it yet. But I want to share something with you.

” He opened to a marked page. “Did you know that all Christians for nearly fifteen hundred years believed that when they received the Eucharist, they received the true body and blood of Christ? This wasn’t a Catholic innovation—it was the universal understanding. ”

I frowned. “That can’t be right. Daddy said—“

“Your father was speaking from a tradition barely four centuries old,” O’Malley interrupted gently.

“Listen to what Ignatius of Antioch wrote in the early second century—a man who had learned the faith from the apostles themselves. He spoke of certain heretics who ‘abstain form the Eucharist and prayer, because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father, of His goodness raised again,’ then he exhorted the Christians he was writing to at Smyrna to ‘stay aloof from such persons.’ Have you ever considered, dearest Alice, that the earliest Christians might have considered your father to be a heretic on account of what he told you concerning the Eucharist?”

The certainty in his voice gave me pause.

The implication that my late father was a heretic might have sent me into a rage if it wasn’t for the fact that this priest had cited a source that was hard to deny.

I mean, even if this Ignatius guy wasn’t inspired like the apostles, since he learned from the people who actually wrote the New Testament, he probably had a lot better of an idea what things really meant than my father did more than eighteen hundred years later.

What had me so startled, though, was that Daddy had always presented Catholic beliefs as late corruptions of true Christianity.

Father O’Malley was suggesting something different—that it was the Puritan view that was the innovation.

“But scripture—“ I began.

“Scripture supports this understanding,” he said, turning pages.

“In John’s Gospel, chapter six, Jesus tells his followers quite explicitly: ‘Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.’ When many of his disciples found this teaching too difficult and stopped following him, did Jesus call them back to explain it was just a metaphor? ”

I had to admit I didn’t know. I’d read the Bible cover to cover multiple times in my human life, but Daddy had always explained the difficult passages for us. That particular passage had always confused me, but Father O’Malley seemed to find its meaning plain.

“No,” Father O’Malley continued. “Instead, he turned to the twelve and asked if they would leave too. He didn’t soften his stance or clarify that he was speaking symbolically. He repeated the hard teaching and asked for faith.”

He handed me the open Bible, careful to hold it so I wouldn’t have to touch it. I read the passage he indicated, seeing it with new eyes. The words themselves seemed to shimmer on the page, challenging my understanding.