Chapter 267

Even after the mirage-like fragrance vanished, time flowed on indifferently, and the edge of winter arrived. Though the swamp remained lush and green year-round, Isaac’s world slowly faded. The worlds of books that once set his heart racing, the boundless wings of imagination in his mind—none of it could fill his emptiness.

By contrast, Yuri and Gezar’s faces overflowed with joy more than ever. They lived like grafted trees sharing one root. Gezar was Yuri, and Yuri was Gezar. Without words, they acted as if reading each other’s thoughts. Day by day their speech dwindled, to the point that Isaac feared the very function of language might atrophy away.

Their sole concern was each other. Isaac felt like an illegal trespasser in their kingdom. They provided him with food, clothing, and shelter, sometimes listened when he spoke—but no more. Little by little he became a forgotten presence among them. As if he were a dog chained outside: they never checked if he left food in his bowl, never noticed if he lay sick all day.

He began to wonder if they had ever given him even a handful of true affection. Wracked with loneliness, he realized it was time to leave the ruins of that amusement ground and cross the border of boyhood into the world of adults. He decided to set out with no belongings, to wander like a stray dog never loved, until his rags of clothes and shoes rotted away and he himself perished.

The night before he left, Isaac thought of the face identical to his own—the brother he had not glimpsed since Ezra secluded himself with the woman marked by the birthmark. He thought of him for a long, long time, and was overcome by a strange feeling. A foreboding, as if the world would collapse and everything burn to ash.

And the next morning, as if by lie, the brother he had not seen for so long appeared. Gezar happened to be away in the village, and Isaac himself was just about to set out.

Having lived without mirrors, Isaac was startled by Ezra’s changed face and grown body. His brother, now a young man, stood eye to eye with him.

Isaac smiled at him as if at his own reflection in the mirror. The bitterness he had harbored over Ezra never once seeking him out melted like snow. He felt relief—that he could say farewell to his beloved brother before leaving.

Strangely, Ezra gave off the very same fragrance as Isaac. The scent of fresh blood spattered on rain-soaked earth. Savage, exploding with vitality, yet it felt familiar. Yuri had defined such individual odors as pheromones.

Sensing Gezar’s pheromones had always been torment. But Ezra’s pheromones, born of the same DNA, did not disgust him. On the contrary, they felt comforting. When Isaac asked if he was living well with the woman marked by the birthmark, Ezra gave a cryptic smile and replied:

“Weakness is tiresome.”

Ezra then dropped the smile and, gazing out the window at the main house where Yuri and Gezar lived, asked:

“Everything’s the same here. Does Gezar still go to the grocer’s every Monday while Yuri stays behind?”

The forced casualness of the question was strange, and when Ezra turned his eyes on Isaac, his face bore an anxious hunger—as if he could not afford to miss a single word about the couple.

Gezar had long wished for a death free of shame and pain, a noble death—but because of Yuri Berec, he was granted new life. From deep within his chest, gratitude surged up. He realized something profound.

He had always loved Yuri, but what he now felt was a new dimension of love, imprinted in his very genes. As if they had been born as preconditions for one another, joined from the cellular level upward. In that world, there was no loneliness, no emptiness, no moment when they could not understand each other.

Like Adam and Eve, like sun and moon, light and shadow, they were the pair embodying all myths, all symbols, all ideas of beginning and end. Only after meeting his counterpart could Gezar see himself not as a debased beast but as a being worth sustaining life.

And so Gezar and Yuri named one another alpha and omega—beings who were the beginning and the end of everything. This new humanity held infinite worth for exploration, and they swore to dedicate the rest of their lives to researching one another’s mystery.

That day, Gezar had gone out to purchase groceries and visit the bank to renew their checkbook. The grocer and the bank were nearly two hours away by car, so each trip consumed half a day.

When his turn came, he stepped up to the bank window, handed over a checkbook reduced to a cover of empty stubs, and presented an identity card with a false name.

Most of the time, he lived forgetting that he was a murderer. But whenever he faced that counterfeit ID, the name Gezar Bazelli erased, a chill ran through his body—as though an unseen finger jabbed his heart, warning him he would someday pay for his crime.

Then he would remind himself of reality. He and Yuri were still wealthy—while fleeing police investigation, they had liquidated everything into cash, fenced it, and converted it back to money. They had conquered the Bazelli curse of genetic disease and become stronger than ever before. And he had achieved transcendent union with his eternal lover, Yuri.

At that very moment Yuri was feeling discontent. Last month he had ordered a newly published novel, but its ending had left him unsatisfied. He had spent two straight days immersed in it; no wonder the lackluster conclusion left him empty.

The bank clerk, riffling through signed slips to match the handwriting of his false name, looked up at Gezar’s smiling face and asked:

“Something good happen today?”

Startled, Gezar returned to his usual blank face, cutting off the man’s curiosity.

“Not really. Please send the checks by mail.”

“Of course. But to Fogwater Bend, it’s such a rural region—mail will take more than two weeks.”

Nodding, Gezar requested a few temporary checks and left. He stopped by the grocer next door, buying a week’s provisions and a heap of exotic fruits Yuri loved.

Cradling the paper bags, breathing in the scent of fresh fruit, he thought of Yuri’s pheromones—sweet, like the fragrance of crushed pulp. He longed to bury himself in that scent known only to him, to roll in it with Yuri until the world’s last moment.

Fifty kilometers away, Yuri surely sensed his happiness. His bad mood eased, replaced with swelling joy.

Gezar could feel Yuri’s emotions across vast distance, and Yuri could sense his as well. This inexplicable phenomenon, beyond all science, Yuri named the Imprint.

It was as if a pair of channels had opened in their minds, constantly interacting. And they were not merely passive viewers of those channels—they felt each other every instant through them.

They shared emotions. At such times, it was as though they were one unit. With no misunderstanding, no misinterpretation, knowing one another wholly, Gezar marveled at a world where loneliness and emptiness vanished.

Immersed in happiness, heading for the parking lot, his eyes caught the village’s lone bookstore. In the window lay the week’s issue of Time magazine, its cover showing images of the new technologies Isaac had recently grown fascinated with: “Internet” and “World Wide Web.”

The boy would like this.

Until now, Gezar had been indifferent to Isaac. But lately the lonely boy, who had seemed to grow up into an adult all on his own like an isolated island, had weighed on his mind.

Staring absently at the cover, he stepped inside and picked it up.

Isaac and Ezra had once appeared suddenly before Yuri and Gezar, like great boulders dropped onto a sandbar. However high the waves swallowed the sand, the boys had remained by their side. Rarely did they need help; they taught themselves, fed and clothed themselves, polishing stone into jewels.

Thus Gezar, as foster father and uncle, treated them like adults, not children. But Yuri saw them as immature, in need of care, and often helped them before they even asked.

After Ezra, who had awakened early to sex, left to find his mate, only Isaac remained in their home.

In Gezar’s conception, Isaac did not even seem like an alpha. He showed none of the hot-blooded vigor of other boys his age, did not experience rut like Gezar. He seemed sexless, a static thing, sequestered quietly in the shed. Yet when Gezar looked at him—especially into those blue eyes—he felt an uncanny unease.

Though only fifteen, Isaac was strikingly mature, his frame that of a grown youth. To Gezar he was like a wolf—raised by human hands, trained not to harm, but never stripped of its primal instinct, a creature that might awaken to cannibal hunger at the taste of a single drop of blood.

Starting his car to return home, Gezar suddenly felt something strange. In the other channel of his mind, he sensed emotions of disgust and fear. At first he thought Yuri must be reading a horror novel or watching a thriller. But this was no safe fear felt through paper or screen. It was real.

He first feared an armed intruder had broken into their home. But then, woven into Yuri’s sharp feelings, came shame, betrayal, and hatred. In that instant Gezar’s mind filled with Isaac’s face—the wolf who had tasted blood. The wolf who, in his absence, had found its chance to feast on human flesh.