My breath hitched as we pulled up to a large house outside city limits. We are safe from the vampires here, he had said as we dismounted and he put up the motorbike's kickstand. I trusted his instincts. I stayed beside Priest and the others. The house was in the wastelands, closer to City Sector Nine than the wastelands, but none the less near enough to the crumbling ruins of old cities to make my stomach twist. We had been riding through the day and only just arrived at twilight; the suspended hour, the hour my parents had called "transition time". My family and I had used that time to lock the barn, barre the doors and windows, and to pray. The farm seemed so distant to me as I stood in the remains of the parlour with the fading wallpaper and torn furniture. I uprighted a chair. Someone had had it upholstered in dark green, but a gash through the back turned the silky colour brown. I didn't want to think how.

Priest was circling the house, I could see him each time he passed by the parlour window though he did not look in and see me sitting. He put a novice and another priest to work making them gather water from the well. I could hear the slam of the screen door and their footfalls in the kitchen before the gush and slosh of water being poured into the stopped-up sink. It was a romantic sound. As I leaned back in my chair I also listened to the sound of the opening and closing door learning to separate the novice's tread from the other priest's; one light and sure, the other heavy and dragging. After the water gathering had stopped and I heard the scrape of chairs and the sighs of exhausted men reclining in them, I lifted myself out of my chair and headed to the kitchen. Standing in the doorway, leaning against the dirty paint I address them. I warn you, I said, I can't cook. Don't worry, said the priest, there's nothing to eat anyway. He smiled nicely and produced three aluminum cups from the bag at his feet. I joined them at the table. The priest filled them with the water in the sink and we all drank deeply forgetting the taste of sand.

Priest stayed outside till the novice and the other priest had moved into the parlour. Their voices rose and fell as they talked over their separate plans of what they would do once they reached the city. The novice wanted to find his little brother from whom he'd been separated nine years previously. The priest said that he would volunteer himself at the hospitals, he had talent as a healer. It was true. When we were attacked four days ago by roaming vampires Priest had taken a wrong step and nearly had his head bit clean off. Instead he fell back against a rock and knocked himself unconscious. This vamp then began encircling he and I, but when it stopped to sniff at my feet I kicked it, reached for the gun in my boot and shot it down. The healer priest said that I was quick and a smart girl. He was the one that cleaned Priest's wounds and made me and the novice hold Priest down when he began to thrash violently.

I sat at the table in the kitchen till Priest walked inside then I turned and looked for the stairs. I climbed all the way to the attic with my bag slung over my shoulder navigating around the spots on the floor where blood had pooled and dried. Around split beams and holes in the floorboards, past gathering herds of spiders and their cobweb cities, till I reached the topmost floor. This place must have been a hotel, I thought. Or a bordello... So many bedrooms. The attic got the last pieces of sunshine. I set down my bag beside the door. The room was untouched, save for the spiders and moths who had gathered in the corners like small masses of white gauze. Whatever had passed through this place had not had either the desire or the determination to climb six flights of stairs to reach the attic. Yet the room was nearly bare, a dresser, an oil lamp and a mattress on the floor were the only things left behind.

My bag held all my belongings: my clothes and books, spare keys to doors I would never open, a cross that had belonged to my mother when she was a girl. It was meant to be a wedding gift, as was the tradition in our family. If I had married before her death she would have given it to me on my wedding night. But I longed for something other than the comforts of the marriage bed. I longed to be a doctor. Doctors were typically nomads travelling from town to town. It was a life that appealed to me. If ever I became good at it I could eventually settle down anywhere I liked; instead of tramping through the wastelands people would seek out my help. Yes. I would settle eventually. Perhaps by the time I was thirty I would have enough money saved to buy my own small plot of land. I could grow herbs and vegetables, for the soil was indeed improving in ten years or so it would be rich and fertile again. It was the way of things. Life would come back to us and the earth would be renewed, I knew it. Would I ever marry? I did not know. Perhaps. I did hope that the man I married – if ever I chose to – would be a good man: honest, brave, kind, tender. But that was as far ahead as I envisioned my future. I trusted chance and opportunity more than God for circumstance had always presented better opportunities than God ever did. Circumstance and not God had brought Priest to my hometown.

When I was a little girl some of the doctors that passed through my old town left books for me, a few trained me, but most ignored me. I was only a child when the interest had started, most doctors did not have time for curious little girls. But the books that some had left behind were beyond price to me and the kind few that bothered to sharpen my skills I always thought of as dearly loved and sorely missed grandfathers. I will not soon forget them. From the books they left behind I learned everything. I could only take two with me on the back of Priest motorbike, but the other seven I had nearly memorized. Illnesses sprang like wildflowers in my mind, diseases like flies circled and clustered while other terms and sickness I listed aloud every night before I sleep. All are amassed and held in my brain. My books, the last two I carried, I thought of as my mother and father. I would not be parted from them for the world.

You will be a doctor, I whispered to myself in the growing dark of my room. You will be a great doctor... a great doctor, a magnificent–. Priest interrupted my thoughts when he walked into the little room I had claimed as my own. I was sitting on the mattress reading, both books spread out in front of me. I could not hear the other priest or the novice in the parlour six floors below, it was as though I had reached the top of a mountain while they still lay at its feet. And this mountain was a quiet one. For what came next I was unprepared. Priest knelt down by the mattress on the floor on which I sat reading. He took both books from me and set them down on the floor. He stared at me then with his sharp blue eyes and though I said that I was tired and wanted to be alone he did not listen. His eyes were ringed with dark circles and his hands shook. He reached forward and touched my hair gently with the tips of his fingers before pushing his hands through it. You have no idea, he whispered and I sat immobile, just how beautiful you are. When he kissed me I remembered a similar sensation when as a child I had tried to kiss my reflection in a pool of water and been dismayed that I felt nothing.

I had always wondered why Priest took me with him the day he passed through my hometown. My mother had recently died, perhaps that was the reason. Yet my father still lived, so perhaps that was the reason. Our farm had been small, we bred cattle and horses that my father sold to other farmers, to the mayor's wife, to the schoolteacher. My father was a big man with broad shoulders and curly dark hair. I remember this best along with his laughter and smiling eyes. I could sit upon his shoulders until well into my teenage years. The townspeople called him the kindly giant, I called him papa, and my mother called him love. I suppose this last name was the one he treasured most and as soon as it was no longer whispered to him he saw no need to act as love, nor to be as loving as he was before. Before my mother died he was a happy man, but upon her burial his demeanour changed. He became quiet and withdrawn preferring the company his business afforded better than my own. I understood better than he thought. I had my mother's hair and fair skin. Yet I also had his dark eyes and small nose. Perhaps it was the combination of all these things that he could not bear to see for it meant that I was not his little Athena sprung from his forehead fully formed, but a grown by-product of my mother's love for him.

When he arrived Priest admired my father's work and alongside him grieved for the loss of my mother. I found Priest strange and intoxicating, like a heavy perfume. His garb was plain and black and had been dirtied by desert sands so I washed it for him and dyed it anew so that it shone like dark water. For this he was grateful to me and I held that gratitude close like future favour owed. He blessed our livestock, each and every one. I thought I caught him looking sideways at me when I said grace, but no more than a memory. But then he offered me passage to city sector nine. I said yes. This was his favour, his expression of gratitude and a great gift. He promised he could keep me safe and would ensure that I trained at the city's best college. I asked him to swear it to me. He did. When I asked why he said that God had spoken to him. He said the determination was written in my face and t'would be a waste to leave it to smoulder in the desert amidst cow and horse dung. I left my father a letter and stole away with Priest in the night. I am ashamed to say I never said goodbye, but his business would prosper now without a headstrong intellectual daughter to embarrass him. I kissed his cheek before I snuck away. I did not look back over my shoulder as I rode away on the back of Priest's motorbike with my arms wrapped around his waist; I did not wish to turn into a pillar of salt like Lot's wife. Looking back means regretting the decision one has made and I did not regret my decision nor that along with my mother's red hair I had also inherited her steely nerves.

Priest removed every inch of clothing that covered him. Unnecessary, I thought, for what he wants to do.Yet I did not stop him. In retrospect I see that what I did was more for a matter of survival than out of placidity. If I had fought or resisted he still would have pressed on and hurt me worse than he was about to. I did open my mouth, once, to plead with him to stop, that God was watching, but he covered my mouth with his own and sucked the air out of me. It is hard to say how quickly I was out of my own clothes, but he had done it fast and pressed me back against the mattress. He had taken my boots off my feet gently, unbuttoned my jacket and unlaced my dress before he pushed me down against the mattress. As he loomed over me he asked me if I loved him. I said nothing at first, then, no. He lay down by my side on the mattress and pulled me close, holding me fast as he whispered in my ear how he adored me, how he loved my mind, and, above all, my auburn hair into which he sunk his hands wrist deep.

Priest was thin, I could feel the bones of his body pressing through his skin and against me. He was angular and hard and I was far from the soft thing I'd once been. I wondered how long he had gone without food, for I had not eaten anything over the past two days. How long had Priest been fasting? Was I the one who had eaten his last share of the food we had gathered? I suddenly felt very guilty as though I had pushed him closer towards the brink of madness and desperation. Would he kill me after he was done with me? Would he slit my throat and drink my blood for sustenance? I'd heard of starved men doing such things out in the wastelands. No. He was not a barbarian or a madman, only in lust which he mistook for love.

He had left me in my shift, a simple white cloth of cotton. When he trailed his fingers up my stomach and past my breastbone to untie the shift's collar my skin tingled. Goosebumps raised themselves in absence of his touch. Yet I could not watch him, could not look at his face. The moths hummed in the spiders' webs, their wings beat to the sound of my own heart. They sang sweetly, a sound I could never have recognized had Priest not touched my skin, not stripped me of my clothes, not buried his face in my stomach and moaned. I was nearly naked with a strange man in my arms, but I only cried a few tears, enough to streak my face and wet my eyes but not render me blind or dumb with fear.

I turned back to face him. He was waiting to look at me, waiting for our eyes to meet again. When he laid his fingers against my lips I held still. When he kissed me softly I let my hand brush his cheek. He paused and smiled. Then he lay himself flush with my body and pulled my shift up over my hips till I felt the skins of our stomachs touch. He took my virginity from me right then and there and I did not say one word in protest. I even wrapped my arms around his shoulders and felt all the little scars etched into to the skin of his back. I was tall and had been strong once, but he was larger than I and could be feral in his anger. I'd seen that anger directed towards the novice when he had called Priest fanatical. So I let him have me like this everyday for a week.

Every night he would come silently and head bowed into my room and I let him because I knew that he would never touch another soul, never take more from me than this. The novice and the other priest never knew, never suspected. They assumed – romantically I might add – that Priest slept outside my bedroom door as a guard dog would and did not raise any questions. Priest believed himself in love and he wanted me. In this way we were beautiful. In this way he ensured that I would never forgive him. And though he hurt me beyond repair, I could forgive his kisses, his touches, his words, for they were always true. He did not hide behind desire nor use it as justification so I let him kiss me, let him caress my hair and skin because the truth of his feelings were never hidden. He just could not bring himself to understand them.

After a week we had found and gathered enough food to last us till we reached the city. It had once been a dark place, but the sun was breaking through the smoke and grime and re-bleaching the city. Once blackened, they say, the soul can never be saved, the taint of shame will be too deep. Such things are not true. Priest kept his word and delivered me into the hands of the college which at once welcomed me. They were in dire need of students willing to learn trades and other teachings, especially doctors for the best were old and weary. I found one of the good doctors that had passed through my hometown and taught me as young girl. He was old and faded-looking, but still sharp and remembered me well. Unto him I was committed as an apprentice and for three happy years studied hard and worked harder. Within the city I lost Priest to the hum and bustle of so many people. In my student years I saw so many faces and maladies, afflictions and depravities that my heart dropped. I would have liked for Priest to come to me then if only to see and feel something familiar and close.

But as the years passed so did my fondness for Priest and his past familiarities with me. When my teacher, the great man he was, died, I left the city. Whatever ties bound me to Priest and he to I, were broken then and I felt no responsibility to atone for the sins he had committed unto me. His acts were not of my doing. I had come to the gap that many women and girls that I'd treated had come to before me. They said it was like crossing an ocean, though I – nor they I suspect – have never seen one. Only its grandeur can be guessed at. A closer approximation that I have never heard but would be infinitely more appropriate would be that coming to the gap was like walking to the edge of the desert and looking beyond; only haze and swirls of sand can be seen and the sunlight is brilliant. I was twenty-three years old the day I reached the edge of the desert that had kept me separate and far removed from what Priest had done. I did not cry, I simply walked on and left his image and all thoughts of him behind the walls of city sector nine.

I live. My shop lies in the very middle of town and out from it stem the streets that wind like a spider's web. Above the door is hung the sign of all doctors: two snakes entwined around a staff. My husband tells me that snakes are wise and that they are a woman's symbol, not for the snake that ticked Eve, but because they symbolize new life and the bridge between this world and the next. They suit me well. I am content in this life as I have been in no other before it. My husband – yes, I have married, later than I thought I might, but none the less I am married. My husband is a good man. The townsfolk were surprised by it, a woman my age, nearly thirty-seven and only recently married is an abnormality here where girls as young as eighteen have take their vows. But I am well-liked and my talent is respected and sought after. The people come to me now though less often than when I first set out fresh from schooling. Fourteen years ago earth was not earth but sand and dust. Now the earth is renewed, reawakened from its deep slumber it rebirths treasures of old. Fruit grows here where once there was none. My husband grows cucumber and onions, radishes, eggplant, spinach and cabbage from this land, cool and sweet as love. He is love and he is my earth as once my father was to my mother. I understand now that all things begin again in a fresh cycle. I understand.

Is it too soon to tell? I might be carrying a child. No, I know it is true, I feel it grow as though it were a new tree planted inside me. Perhaps my child will emerge green and smell like grass in springtime, perhaps my child will be the colour of polished wood and so resemble his father perfectly. Perhaps my child will burst fully formed from my brow like a small golden deity. I dream this every night as I lie between the white sheets of my bed with my love sleeping quietly by my side. I feel my child's heart beat warm and strong, it fills my ears like moths in a spider's web; gauzy and thick.

I rarely think of Priest anymore. I do not know where he sleeps at night or where he shelters during the day. Priest would be an old man now. When he was young and I just a child in God's eye he had sought me out across the expanses. When Priest was young he did not want the warm blanket of forgiveness and had actively sought out a way in which he could he never received it. I wonder if he wants forgiveness now.

But those are the thoughts that come at midnight before my child turns over in my belly and I sleep again.