I'm not poor."
"I'd never take a penny that *you* offered -- voluntarily." Krishna lit
a nonchalant cig and flicked the match toward his dry, xeroscaped
lawn. There were little burnt patches among the wild grasses there, from
other thrown matches, and that was one mystery-let solved, then, wasn't
it?
"You think I'm a monster," Alan said.
Krishna nodded. "Yup. Not a scary monster, but a monster still."
Alan nodded. "Probably," he said. "Probably I am. Not a human, maybe not
a person. Not a real person. But if I'm bad, he's a thousand times
worse, you know. He's a scary monster."
Krishna dragged at his cigarette.
"You know a lot of monsters, don't you?" Alan said. He jerked his head
toward the house. "You share a bed with one."
Krishna narrowed his eyes. "She's not scary, either."
"You cut off her wings, but it doesn't make her any less monstrous.
"One thing I can tell you, you're pretty special: Most real people never
see us. You saw me right off. It's like *Dracula*, where most of the
humans couldn't tell that there was a vampire in their midst."
"Van Helsing could tell," Krishna said. "He hunted Dracula. You can't
hunt what you can't see," he said. "So your kind has been getting a safe
free ride for God-knows-how-long. Centuries. Living off of us. Passing
among us. Passing for us."
"Van Helsing got killed," Alan said.
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