Unfortunately, our Parliament has turned down a law change that would allow cannabis and its derivatives to be used for specific medicinal purposes, including as pain relief and digestive aid in the context of HIV/AIDS.

The medicinal cannabis reform bill was tabled in 2002 and has taken seven years ago to come back before Parliament.

 The Green Cross Society supports medicinal cannabis derivative law reform, and believes that  cannabis is a useful palliative option. They are disappointed with the defeat of Green co-leader Metiria Turei’s  private members bill.

In a 3News item, Green Cross campaigner Billy McKee commented that other medication had unpalatable and excessive side-effects, compared to medicinal cannabis derivatives.

Medicinal cannabis is already used in thirteen US states.  Canada, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands also permit use of medicinal cannabis and its derivatives.

Metiria Turei’s bill  would have allowed doctors in New Zealand to prescribe cannabis for 22 approved illnesses and eligible patients would have been given an identification card allowing them to grow, possess and consume marijuana. “We’re trying to get the MPs to support it through to the select committee, so that people who are using medical cannabis and are supported by their doctors can no longer get arrested and placed in jail,” said Billy McKee, before the vote was taken.Some professional drug policy organisations also support reform:

History can produce some useful episodes for amusement on cold, wet and windy days in midwinter. For example, take this article by Andrew Chambers, reviewed by BBC History in May 2009…

Chambers recounts the story of an unfortunate named Alexander Nyndge, amongst others. In Suffolk (1574), poor Alexander wasn’t having a happy time of it. Fortunately, his brother Edward had attended Cambridge, and asked the unhappy man what the matter was, and it turned out to be ‘demonic possession.” But not just any eldritch fiend, as the town curate found out. Upon further questioning, the spectre divulged that its name was Aubon, and that it was from Ireland! A conveniently adjacent bible was laid atop poor Alexander, and Aubon then did dog impersonations before tiring of all this, and fleeing the corporeal entity that it had temporarily occupied- but not before it had temporarily converted Alexander’s ear into a walnut.

Sometimes, to ward off the infernal powers, some people ate New Testaments with bread and butter. In reponse, devils would either try to destroy holy tomes. Literacy could result in problems as well. Two Anglican nuns were possessed after reading Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia.

We usually regard the Renaissance as a time of scientific renewal and discovery, but as Chambers reminds us, there was still superstition, supernaturalism and associated survivals amidst the emergence of modern scientific rationalism.

Recommended:

Andrew Chambers: “Demonic Possession, Literacy and Superstition in Early Modern England” Past and Present (2009): 202(1):3-35

I’m in two minds about this wickedly funny graphic novel. Jesus Hates Zombies is set in a universe where there’s been a zombie apocalypse, and God gets pissed off, sending down his only begotten you-know-what, Jaisus H. down to deal to the unrighteous and soulless. Thing is, because of rampant atheism, he’s been amped down to someone who isn’t supernaturally endowed (although when he does get zapped earthward, he ends up nekkid (with a helluva cute arse, sporting a tattoo yet!) He acquires Laz, a zombie sidekick, who’s the only one who recognises him, and proceeds to inflict serious mayhem. Problem is, apart from the profanity, I suspect that redneck fundies would like the two-fisted baseball-bat wielding manifestation of the “J Man” depicted herein. It’s consensual adult sex they’re not into…

Which brings us to the ridiculous anachronism within New Zealand’s Crimes Act 1961, namely Section  123 - “blasphemous libel.” If you say naughty things about Christianity, and Christianity alone, you theoretically risk one year in schtook.

This is a legacy of the bad old days of Christian confessional and social dominance of New Zealand society, and the United Kingdom has repealed its version of the legislation in question. Even Ireland is under (EU) pressure to dispose of a (cunningly repackaged) multicultural blasphemy law currently under proposal. This runs counter to legislative protections related to free speech and freedom of expression. Fortunately, however, charges can only be brought if the Solicitor General approves, which she or he usually does not.

So, happily, Jesus Hates Zombies isn’t likely to be thrown onto a pile of burning books for being doctrinally incorrect soon. JHZ’s creator, Stephen Lindsay, is a recovering Catholic type of guy, explaining his gleeful and irreverent attitude.

Me, I’ve moved on. Personally, Jesus may have been (a) a great moral teacher, or (b) a materially non-existent compilation of several such moral teachers within allied traditions of messianic and/or esoteric Judaism. If the latter, then this portrayal is as fictional as the original compilation, and just as harmless as the “gay Jesus” depicted in Morton Smith’s work and those who believe in the gnostic “Secret Gospel of Mark” and its authenticity. I don’t care anymore, except from the perspective of human rights and civil liberties.

Much amusement. Show it to your fundie friends (if any) and watch them spontaneously combust…

Recommended:

JHZ: http://www.alternacomics.com

Proposed blasphemy law abolition bill: http://progbills.wikidot.com/crimes-blasphemy-repeal-amendment-bill

Today, Ireland passed its civil partnerships law, stopping short of same-sex civil marriage, but otherwise equalising rights and obligations related to same-sex couples and cohabiting straight couples in areas like inheritance, maintenance obligations, shared housing and so on.

Kieran Rose of the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network hailed it as an ‘historic civil rights’ reform.

According to the Irish Times, however, other pro-reform organisations were more sceptical: Mr Rose said concerns remained about issues of legal support and recognition of “the many children being parented by same-sex couples”.Fellow campaign group Equals was more critical, describing the Bill as a “discriminatory and second-class piece of legislation”.

 Christos Tsiolkas: The Slap: North Sydney: Allen and Unwin: 2008.

Why does Australia have so many talented, highly creative LGBT authors? When I heard that Christos Tsiolkas, Melbourne-based gay second-generation son of Greek immigrants had won the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2009 for South East Asia and the South Pacific, I pondered this, not for the first time.

For those who wonder why Christos’ name is so familiar, he wrote the novel Loaded (filmed as Head On) in the nineties, dealing with the life and times of a young unemployed Greek Australian working-class gay man, unable to settle down in either the Greek or gay communities. Since then, he’s become an expert at dealing with the effects of past and present traumas in personal lives, revealing the abrasions, awkwardness and discord beneath them- witness his second novel, The Jesus Man, which deals with past childhood trauma, and his funereal, majestic and sombre Dead Europe, a harsh yet evocative perspective on atavistic racist and anti-Semitic currents in Southern and Eastern European societies, dealing with its effects on a second generation Greek-Australian gay immigrant and author.

Dead Europe is my favourite Tsiolkas work so far, probably because I quite identified with his experiences, although I’m the third generation son of an Indian immigrant. Like Southern and Eastern Europe, India has its own past injustices and social divisions to remedy, some of which find violent expression in the present. It’s quite a dark book, and he achieved it almost effortlessly.

Finally, we come to The Slap. Quite appropriately for the current ridiculous referendum debate in New Zealand at present, it centres on an adult’s spontaneous use of physical force against a bratty five year old, Hugo. Hugo is the son of alkie Gary and Rosie, his determined and upwardly mobile wife. His assailant is Harry, a ghastly entrepreneurial type cheating on his wife Stella, who is intimidated by verbal and borderline physical aggression toward her, and who needs anger management courses badly. Harry is the son of Greek immigrants, cousin to Hector, an upwardly mobile formerly working class fortysomething civil servant, married to Aisha, a vet. Rosie and Aisha are mates with Anouk, a childless author and television screenwriter, while Tracey is the receptionist at Aisha’s veterinary practice, while Connie is a student nurse. Hector had sex with Connie, but is concealing it from Aisha. Problem is, Connie is also mates with Richie, an exuberant, unapologetic out seventeen year old, who also secretly fancies Hector. Then there are Manoulis and Koula, Hector’s seventysomething parents.

It’s a slice of life novel about the practicalities of life in multicultural Australia today, an uncomfortable fusion of privatised Howard era aspiration and the progressive social changes of the seventies and eighties in that country, which have led to some unresolved loose ends. As with New Zealand in the case of conservative Christians from Pacific Island backgrounds, it looks like one of the multicultural (and class?) fautlines is about childrearing practices and the appropriate limits of child discipline if it involves physical force.

However unintentionally in our case, he’s written a highly readable and topical book.

In today’s GayNZ.com international news column, a hapless sixteen year old had ‘gay demons’ casted out of him. What’s going on here? Here’s some background on the origins and strange antics of this subcategory of fundamentalist Christian, and why they think legless devils apparently inhabit us…

Firstly, what are Pentecostals? Arthur Parham founded the Bethel Bible College in Topeka Kansas in 1900. At Christmas that year, Agnes Oznam reportedly started speaking Chinese after being filled with the Holy Spirit. Even if no Cantonese or Mandarin speaker was actually around to verify it… In 1906, African-American Pentecostal William Seymour was kicked out of his Holiness church, whereupon some disgruntled and sympathetic former parishioners invited him to set up another church at 312 Azusa St, in Houston Texas. Pentecostalism spread to Canada, Latin America and Western Europe after that.

And ‘exorcism’? This term implies belief in literal demonic entities who possess one. To remove the offending ‘demons,’ one resorts to particular religious literature, set ritual patterns, formulas, gestures, symbols, icons and other talismans. Catholics and Muslims also believe in exorcism, but place strict limits on its use. In Catholicism, only ordained ministers are permitted to recite the formula, against those who manifest sudden multilingualism, blaspheme a lot, display supernatural abilities and an aversion to Christian holy names. The mandatory formula is set down in “Of Exorcisms and Certain Supplications” (1614/2000). Both Catholicism and Islam caution against confusing this with mental illness. Unfortunately, Pentecostals tend to see demons and evil spirits everywhere. These antics embarrass mainline Protestants and non-Pentecostal Calvinist fundamentalists, who are sceptical themselves about the authenticity of Pentecostal attributes.

This is nothing new - Stephen Greenblatt related one seventeenth century case where Anglican sceptics cracked down on Catholic and Puritan exorcist enthusiasms by challenging their authenticity. Pentecostal exorcisms are boundary marking behaviours. They mean that the Pentecostal is feeling threatened by your physical proximity and attempted rational conversation, so repeats comforting rote biblical proof texts and rhetoric aloud, labelling you to reassure themselves- and annoy you, so that you cease conversation with them.

While these may reassure the faithful, Pentecostal performances may puzzle the uninitiated. In December 2004, Metro’s Paul Malcouronne wrote an article on Bill Subritzky, an eightysomething Auckland Pentecostal, as well as one of the ringleaders of the campaign against homosexual law reform in the mid-eighties. In the ’90’s, his Dove Ministries imported the two antigay hate videos at the centre of an unsuccessful hate speech ban case that went all the way to the Court of Appeal, where the ban was struck down. Subritzky was a homebuilder before he went Pentecostal, and lists a whole set of ‘demonic influences’ in one book from the eighties. Apparently, one is exposed to demonic possession if one has indulged in pornography, watched Sex in the City, attended wild parties, Mormon or Jehovahs Witness church services, or studied karate, kung fu, judo, ouija boards, transcendental meditation, Buddhism, yoga, parapsychology, accupuncture, astral travel and fortune telling. Hard/goth/punk rock, heavy metal, Uri Geller, Jonathon Livingstone Seagull, Dungeon and Dragons roleplaying games and UFO cultism are also verboten. Oh, and homosexuality.

Homosexuality? Yup. Subritzky encountered someone with misshapen legs, one of which was seventeen centimetres longer than another, while on ‘crusade’ in Tonga. He exorcised gayness from him, and the leg shortened back to its normal length. And in Malcourrone’s article, Subritzky gets overheated about ’sodomy’, ‘back passages’ and filth, although straight extramarital sex is just as bad. In this case, I visited the website of Manifested Glory Ministries, which appears to be a small Connecticut fundamentalist church run by an African-American woman, “Prophetess” Patricia MacKenney. I could find little that was actively homophobic on their website, but reading their rhetoric, it seems obvious that they take a highly supernaturalist view of the surrounding world, and impute nearly everything of adverse origins to ‘demons.’ I just hope no-one with bona fide visual and/or auditory hallucinations, like someone living with schizophrenia, gets mixed up with them. It’s certainly angered people in the Connecticut area, judging from this CNN transcript:

Robin McHaelen, who worked with the 16-year-old boy at the center of the video in her position as executive director of True Colors Inc., a gay youth advocacy and mentoring program in Connecticut, said the video was taped in March. She would not identify the teen. The boy is the fifth teen True Colors is aware of that has undergone an event like the one documented in the video. But unlike the boy, not all the teens approached a church or religious organization.The event, McHaelen said, reflects a culture and society that doesn’t believe a person can be both Christian, lesbian or gay.McHaelen said she talked to the boy since the incident and said he’s feeling very conflicted and confused in trying to reconcile who he is with his religion.“He’s 16 and having the feelings that he’s having, the relationships he’s having, and then [he’s] being tormented by ‘What if I’m going to go to hell because of what I feel and who I am?’” she said.McHaelen notified the Connecticut Department of Children and Families, as she’s mandated to do in her position when she suspects abuse or neglect of a minor. However, she told CNN the department will be looking into whether or not abuse or neglect occurred by the parents and family of the boy, not the church. The department declined to comment Thursday.

I covered Pete Pittaros’ story in a recent Health/HIV article on callboys, with the opinion that perhaps “Greek Boy Pete” and his American counterpart, Luke, were selling themselves short. Now, I’ve had a look at the trailer of the movie about a year of his life in the escort industry, and I’m not sure what to think. For one thing, as the accompanying publicity notes, it’s a fusion of documentary and fiction.

Pete is definitely top in his field (and in bed too, by the looks of his trailer!). If his DNA profile is on the level, he used to be a financial advisor before he decided that he could make more on the game after he got laid off. The film fleshes this out with more detail- he arrived in London recently, he got a “Hookie Award” for best male escort in 2008 (in New York), and the result is a likeable lad.

If anyone ever thought that sex work is easy, Pete shows us that isn’t the case. Neither he nor his fellow gentlemen of the evening are glamorised, awkward intervals happen, and the path to true love with another rentboy, “Kai”, isn’t all that easy. Added to which, there are Internet advertisements, photo shoots and networking.

He reminds me of a much hotter, younger gay male version of Saint Madge- he’s definitely into image management, presentation control and no, I don’t think that the label rentboy is appropriate. Pete isn’t a drugged out, homeless street sex worker- he’s far more intelligent, calculating and professional than that. So, is this short film about him a canny marketing piece? Who exactly is Pete Pittaros, “londonboypete” or “Greek Pete?”

Recommended:

Greek Pete Film website: http://www.greekpetefilm.com

[Reprint: I thought this deserved a second airing to tie in with Jay’s article on yet more regulatory holdups with new ARV drugs for PLWAs. It was originally published in 2005-C.]

Generally, the Clark administration and our community enjoy a close and convivial relationship with one another, but there is a thorn in that rose garden. It is Pharmac, the Crown agency that administers government pharmaceutical benefits.

In a recent issue of the Australian Health Review, I came across an article on the regulator from Dr Peter Davis*, a medical sociologist at the University of Auckland. I was interested to read his comments.

According to Dr Davis, Pharmac was formed as a Crown agency that administers (mostly imported) pharmaceutical product purchase and distribution amongst New Zealand District Health Boards as they are currently constituted. It is one of the few surviving legacies of National’s public health sector restructuring from the nineties, and has served the needs of the current administration as well. It is run as a corporate structure and is entrusted with keeping down pharmaceutical costs and also maximising benefit to the greatest possible number of pharmaceutical product consumers.

Dr Davis’ assessment is that Pharmac has contained prices, despite opposition from manufacturers and ambivalence from medical groups, as well as some health consumer organisations. Pharmaceutical industry representatives argue that Pharmac obstructs access to new treatment options, but Davis observes that pharmaceutical benefit costs threatened investment elsewhere within the public health sector.

He explains that New Zealand pharmaceutical supply, purchase and demand economics rely on three principal groups- overseas manufacturers, consumer organisations and medical practitioners. Central government needs to mitigate manufacturers and their commercial demands and balance them with the needs of public hospitals and related service providers.

As an industry, pharmaceutical manufacture had become enmeshed within New Zealand’s state-subsidised public healthcare system until the mid-eighties, when the Fourth Labour Government moved toward targeted service provision, and the Bolger and Shipley National administrations carried on their policy orientation. They tried to corporatise the public health sector, but were mostly unsuccessful. Until the Clark administration, Pharmac had some degree of autonomy from ministerial discretion.

Davis argues that Pharmac ‘works’ because it bids for cost-effective medication and pharmaceutical companies and the regulator negotiate over relative access costs related to different pharmaceutical product lines. Pharmac can also negotiate volumes of “limited release” targeted at specific groups, which reduces consumer prices. Unfortunately, this public good objective is mitigated by Pharmac’s use of “cost/utility requirements.”

Translated into plain English, what does “cost/utility requirement” mean? Essentially, Pharmac provides fixed purchasing budgets, which mean that Pharmac’s staff assess whether requested supplier prices are worth estimated therapeutic benefits. Here, I am afraid that I must agree to differ with Dr. Davis’ analysis. He contends that the regulator does respond to evidence-based claims, weighed alongside the aforementioned cost/utility assessments.

However, I noted that has been no such documented procedure recorded for protease inhibitors as specific pharmaceutical products, and People With HIV/AIDS as a consumer group. Without such a detailed assessment, it is difficult to evaluate whether or not the needs of People Living With HIV/AIDS are being served. Furthermore, Davis does question whether pharmaceutical manufacturers have fewer incentives for product research, development and investment, if their markets suffer as a result of purchaser monopolies.

However, without a regulator, any existing social inequalities may worsen, given that consumers may be forced to pay top dollar for new products and experimental treatments, without access to independent clinical verification about the effectiveness of the aforementioned new treatment options and potential combination therapies. At the moment, Pharmac provides those.

So, is Pharmac an effective regulator? From Davis’ useful description and analysis, there may be particular problems for PLWAs. Due to the effectiveness of protease inhibitor treatment regimes, PLWAs have increased survival prospects, but gradually develop tolerance for their existing treatments until they require access to new treatments. Due to prior effectiveness, new protease inhibitor treatments could be argued to present high costs for a tiny consumer population, which means that rationed access occurs, and will not serve the interests of PLWAs who have developed tolerances due to their small scale.

However, I question whether Dr Davis has fully considered the context of palliative care and the specifics of pharmaceutical economics in that context. It could be argued that if PLWAs are denied access to protease inhibitors and their condition deteriorates, healthcare costs are clearly incurred. After all, hospitalisation requires commitments of staff time, renumeration, hospital bed occupancy, medical supplies, equipment wear and deterioration, and other costs. While protease inhibitor access rationing may save short-term pharmaceutical costs, they might end up transferring costs downstream to other areas of public healthcare. Shouldn’t this be taken into account within any cost/utility analysis?

If I were the AIDS Foundation or other HIV/AIDS related consumer groups, I’d get myself a good health economist and argue the point about whether rationed access does contain total healthcare costs, rather than focus narrowly on pharmaceutical policy alone. Doctor Davis has done an excellent job within his paper, and offers considerable food for thought and political strategy amongst our communities.

*Yes- that Peter Davis.

Highly Recommended:

Peter Davis: “The Ins and Outs of Regulating Pharmaceuticals in New Zealand” Australian Health Review: 28: 2 (8/11/04): 171-181.

Available online (Abstract/PDF):

http://www.aha.asn.au/publications/articles/issues/ahr_28_2_081104/ahr_28_2_171-181.html

 John Marks: Reason to Believe: HarperPerennial: New York: 2008.

This book is about the United States and its fundamentalist and evangelical communities. As an ex-fundamentalist myself, I read it with considerable interest.

Apart from fundamentalist Nelson and Mount Roskill in Auckland, New Zealand has no real ‘Bible belt” of our own on the same scale as the Southern United States, the cankered heartland of US fundamentalist Christianity, so there’s little comparable analogous geographical and regional sense to that which Marks manifests.

In John Marks’ case, I was surprised to see that even straight male friendship with a gay man could help someone to deviate away from fundamentalism. While attending a fundamentalist church with relatives, he is aghast to hear one fundamentalist preacher argue that if societies actively repressed male homosexuality and lesbianism, then ‘that’ was a sign of divine favour. What, like Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, wondered Mark, horrified. One other influence is Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, that elderly transgender antiquarian who survived all that the regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist East Germany could throw at her.

Compared to these lives, he refers to Focus on the Family’s “Truth” Project, in which homophobia and quaintly polarised blue and pink gender roles are given ‘divine’ imprimatur. He also relates amusing anecdotes about awful excesses of fundie pop culture like the LaHaye/Jenkins Left Behind saga, Joni (a ghastly saccharin, syrupy campy account of disabled fundamentalist Joni Erickson-Tada, and the similarly tragic Amy Grant.

However, beneath the bland exterior beats a writhing heart of passion. He cites successive fundamentalist opinion polls which indicate that high numbers of US fundamentalist Christians are addicted to smut, both male and female. Sixty percent of fundamentalist women have “lust” problems, while forty percent have committed sexual sin!!! It also extends to US fundamentalist “higher education” and clergy. Marital oral sex is okay- but anal sex isn’t, because it’s nonprocreative! And then there are the ‘technically’ ‘abstinent’ virgins who do everything else but have vaginal intercourse…

Still, some straight evangelicals suffer too. Take Daniel, a metropolitan alternative evangelical badboy who got involved with a young woman. They had sex, they didn’t use contraception, she got pregnant, and now her parents won’t let him see her, or their daughter. It’s not only us they want to make miserable…

Here’s another paradox. Despite the abject racist past of the Southern Baptist Convention, African American social conservatives are making common cause with white fundamentalists over same-sex marriage, although that’s contradictory- they may well still vote Democrat. It’s fascinating to watch the obvious differences with New Zealand, where Brian Tamaki and John Tamihere are the only overt signs of homophobia within Maori communities here, and even they don’t attract much of a following on those issues.

Again, listen to the Evangelical Theological Seminary’s panel on homosexuality. Once more, we hear fundamentalist pink and blue gender role polarisation. One can either be a robust, mature, muscular, football playing, protective, dependable, reliable male, or a submissive, domestic, nurturant, dependent fundamentalist female. And no, one cannot have reassignment surgery if one wants to become the other!!!

However, Steve Parelli and his partner Jose contrast with this. They’re gay evangelicals, and both met inside a so-called reparative therapy group. They realised that they weren’t so exgay after all, which resulted in Steve leaving his wife and family. She’s become an even more emphatic fundamentalist, and Steve is estranged from his daughters. Despite this, he hasn’t abandoned his faith.

John has made peace with his past, but given that he was a former war respondent in Bosnia during the Balkan Wars, he asks excellent questions about an allegedly ‘loving’ deity that would let this happen which are never adequately addressed in this book. I agree with him.

This is another dark one- this time, about Lucas the Queerwolf’s lesbian vampire mate, Kyrie…

_______________________________________________________________

1609, Marseilles.

The smell of smoke and roasted human fat threatened to gag her as she tried not to cry. In her broken hands she held a corn dolly, repeatedly stabbing down on it with a loose splinter of wood, wishing it into a poppet. But that would have meant a clip of his hair or other traits of his body. She licked a bloodied strand of hair and her stomach yawned empty as she glared banefully but impotently at the sleeping and drunken guards outside. She would not cry. She would not give any of them the satisfaction. She knew that the cynical village priest considered her a madwoman, not truly a witch, and that this was naught but a cynical land grab.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw it. It was an ebon cloak, and it wrapped around the stupored guard. He awoke and tried to squawk, but it came out as a strangled gasp. There was a percussive crack and he lay with eyes glazed over, contracted in fear at the unknown predator. Her cell was thrown open, and like a lover’s whisper, the graceful angel of death stood over her:

“You are a brave one. You do not cry out.”

“Are you Azrael, come to take me from this life? I had not imagined her a beautiful woman.”

“I am sorry, child. I tried to get here sooner. If I had, I would have bestowed my mercy and benisons on the others. Ah. You prefer the touch and caress of women, then. My spies were true. No, I am not death incarnate, save for those who deserve it. What is your name, little one?”

“Kyrie. Although I want no part of the priests religion. I followed the old ways, as did most of the womenfolk in this village. Then the landowners accused us, wanting our land. Now I am the only one who remains. Just before morning, they will put me to the torch as well.”

“I want to offer you a gift, Kyrie. You said, just before morning. Excellent. Child, how would you like to live forever, an immortal ivory predator, preying on those who desire to exploit and oppress?”

Kyrie considered the woman without fear: “What must I do then, goddess?”

“Only lean your throat back, my child. Do you consent to this?”

“If what you say is true, then I welcome it.”

As the woman swooped down on her, she saw needlesharp teeth. In the moonlight, they looked like carved ivory needles. She felt an initial moment of pain as they sliced into her neck, and then she was falling, but upward, as her ironclad new lover’s caress took her elsewhere. Her heart slowed to a halt, her eyes saw new things, her ears heard new and clearer sounds, and something more than blood began to pulse through her blood. She watched intent as the other cast a razor sharp nail across her upper chest, urging her childer to drink. Eagerly, the younger woman did.

When they tried to come for her, she was waiting. She ran at them like a wildcat of the African lands, grabbing their heads and twisting them, snapping their spines. At length, she saw the priest, running fearfully, until it collided with her sire.  He collapsed as if against an adamantine wall as Kyrie finished off the last of the soldiers. Her sire held out the priest, impotently gesturing at her with his cross:

“Alas, old one. Did you not know that only works when the belief is authentic? My dear, I believe you have something to demonstrate to this old torturer.” The quarry became the huntress as Kyrie wrenched his head up and her newly razorteeth cut deeply into him, drinking deeply as he cried out into an empty void, save that nothing heard him again. At least, not in this life.

2009, Wellington.

In the distance, the Church played “Under the Milky Way Tonight” as her memories swirled around her. They were not all sweet, not all the caress of immortal and mortal woman lovers over the years, not all dispatching the oppressors with the dark leopard’s teeth and speed. Oh, no, she had her eye on one tonight.

The other woman was watching her, intently. She almost liked her openness and the hunger within it, if she didn’t know what the purpose truly was. She wondered at her pursuer’s ardour and the metal within her that caused this.

With her silks and velvets around her, she swept out of the bar. After a time, the other woman followed, trailing her at a distance down Manners Street, as she stopped in a window to primp at her hair and take a turning into the Glover Street oneway, where the clothing factories were. She saw the figure halt at the end of the street, then start to run toward her, bellowing in anger and rage. Kyrie turned, but not in surprise. Her face set, she flowed toward the other, her fingers outstretched, her teeth sharpened instruments of her rage at this intruder. How dare the likes of her infect her sanctuary?

(Unbidden, the memories came to her, of a railway carriage full of the Revenants of Overjissel, as the shafts of fatal sunlight lanced through them, and the prisoners of the orange triangle screamed and crisped into fire and flaming flesh and the lives of many centuries lived in peace and co-existence came to an end, as the Nazi hierarchy and their Dutch liaison turned from the scene. Kyrie stood, in the adjacent tomb, with two vampire infants that she’d been able to save from the carnage.)

(In September 1945, she took her revenge, as the Red Army poured into Berlin, and the old Dutch man ran out of ammunition. There wasn’t much left of him after she ripped out his throat, but she made sure he suffered as much as the Revenants of Overjissel.)

The face was his, only female. It looked at her with a mixture of hunger, obsession, fear and lust, but not for her immortal flesh, lying against her own. Although perhaps it did, deep down, and her fear of this was what drove her. The other fought like a demon, until she tired, and in that instant, Kyrie had her, breaking her neck, consigning the last descendant of Abraham Van Helsing down to hellfire.

In the sudden stillness, Kyrie rose and walked sedately down the walkway, into oblivion and unsolved mystery. She smiled to herself, with memories balmed and endings made. She could start to heal, insofar as the undead could.