"You shouldn't try to talk too much," Alek told her as he took the chair by her bed.

"Don't tell me...what to do."

He smiled sadly. She returned the smile with one just as sad. And then her smile was wiped away by curiosity. She shook her head. "Can't be...must be...Alek's son? Are you?"

Alek tilted his head.

"Are you?" she repeated in earnest.

He thought about it. It would be so easy to lie now, to tell Kandy Kat that that was true, that Alek was gone and he was the son she had never known existed in this world. But somehow...he just didn't want to. The hour was getting late. Lies would gain him nothing.

"It's me, Kat," he said. "Serpent Boy."

"Can't..." Again a shake of her head. Her hand went up, her skinny hand, and touched his face, a face that had not aged a single day since his thirty-third birthday. The thought send a shard of anger so deep through his heart he thought it should stop beating immediately.

Immortality for him, but none for her. In some evil twist of fate, the G.o.ds had seen fit to take a bit of brilliance like Kat and leave a worthless shadow behind.

It wasn't fair. And the unfairness gave him strength through the anger and he began to speak, and he talked about the night of the senior prom and how Kat's blue dress had caught on the door of his Thunderbird--that 1958 great white shark she loved so much--and how they had gone to a dress-fitters up in Ithaca, the only one they could find at that late hour, to mend the tear. And while there, the dress-fitter, feeling sorry for Kat's plight, had given her a whiskey sour with a cherry, and Kat broke her front tooth on the pit of the cherry and he talked about how, by the time they were done at the dentist, the prom was half over and how they chose to drive out to an overlook near the Hudson and how Kat wasn't angry and how Alek said he felt like Lil' Abner and how things like this always seemed to happen to him and would she forgive him? And she kissed him, though carefully with that swollen mouth of hers, and told him she wished she could spend the rest of their lives together like this. That everything was perfect, the night and the full moon, and so was he, and would he make love to her tonight? She was ready, so ready, and happy to have waited for him.

And by the time he had completed the story, Kat had fallen asleep.

He held her hand and watched her and thought about all that he had lost and all he would never get back, and after a half hour--fifteen minutes or so past visiting hours, yet no one came to get him--Kat opened her eyes again. "Alek," she whispered. "Why didn't you?"

"I couldn't," he answered.

"Because...of this?" Again she touched his face.

"Yes."

"What is it?"

He thought about that. "Something I have to live with for a very long time."

"Tell me about it?"

He nodded. And he did. And he told other stories. He talked about the night and what it was like to see in it with eyes unlike those of others. He talked about history and what role his people had played in it. He talked about growing up different from other boys and not understanding why. He talked about the craving and how he lived with it and how it kept him apart from everyone else.

Kat turned her head and closed her eyes.

Time pa.s.sed, how much he did not know. Time suddenly meant very little.

She was awake.

"My mouth is so dry." Kat looked at the beside table, unwilling to ask for any help. Alek set her hand down and reached for the Styrofoam pitcher and the plastic gla.s.s with the bent straw. He helped Kat drink, his eyes burning with unshed tears. He wondered why a husband was not here. He wondered where her children were. He wondered at last where all the fans were, the ones who had given her these gifts. He wondered how anyone could be loved and then abandoned so. And maybe the two of them had touched on some deeper level at last, because Kat said, in time, "Tired of lies, Serpent Boy. All of them...all the fans, the fame-givers...why aren't they here? I'm so scared and they're not even here to say goodbye. I don't want to die."

Alek moved to the head of the bed and gently cradled the crying woman. He shivered at the touch of her. Her first breath left him sick to his stomach; the smell was prolonged death, a fetid miasma of decaying flesh. Alek lifted the birdlike weight against his shoulder, careful of the needles and tubes. He wanted so much to help, to end this.

"You're not alone now," he said.

Kat didn't have much to say. She spoke in frantic spurts, wandering somewhere between the pain and the medicine, the past and the present. Her life, her loves, the children she wished she had had. She even laughed once when she talked about how she had almost gotten married some time after Alek left her.

Then she slept and Alek waited.

It took a long time. Near morning she opened her eyes again, for the last time. She was painfully lucid. Before she died she said, "What does it feel like?" Then the room turned cold and Alek realized Kat had gone elsewhere.

He sat for a long time, still holding her.

She had gone elsewhere because this world never deserved her. And because his world could not endure such a light. She had not belonged to him anymore than Robyn had belonged to Edward. Like Edward, like Kage, he did not belong to anyone. He was trembling when he gently laid the body out straight. He closed Kat's eyes and smoothed her hair and straightened her gown before he got up and prepared to leave.

What does it feel like?

He told the truth.

"Alone," he said.

The End