My girlfriend makes me want to be a better person. Sometimes I even am, at least in the old-fashioned Dungeons and Dragons vision of moral alignment I used to care about back before I found out that magic is real and it's a lot more interesting than any of the games I played in college. I was always neutral evil in my old gaming group, looting tombs and stealing artifacts and using them to upgrade my character, and I guess you can say I'm a better person because I don't do things like that anymore. In games or in real life.

But there's a big difference between selfless and being good. Being married to Ursula taught me that--she's a genuinely good person, someone who's always doing the right thing for the right reasons, and I don't just mean because she's a superhero. She was always a good person, even back when the law called her a con artist and a thief--she's nudged her alignment around a little too over the years, gone from embracing her inner Robin Hood to seeking wisdom at the feet of cosmic oracles, but she always had an instinct for protecting the small and the helpless. It's what I always found beautiful about her, even when I wanted to own it instead of embracing it.

Me, though? I don't think there's a spot on the charts for what I've become. There isn't a place on the alignment grid for 'ruthless fucking bastard'. I try to be good, but sometimes you have to do very wrong things for very right reasons... or at least that's what I tell myself as I stand outside the ingloriously faded facade of a closed burlesque club, the sign above the entrance promising ' IVE NU E G RLS' in peeling painted letters.

It's a place not many people know about, and certainly not my wife--one of the few secrets I still keep from Ursula is that there are places and people the mystic intuition of supernatural superheroes like Epiphany will always be steered away from, cracks and hollows in the topography of the universe that all sorts of things use to conduct their dark business. Back in my days as a collector of magical artifacts, I was a part of the whole ecosystem of amoral extremophiles that thrive in places the universe doesn't want anyone to exist in, and even though I've forsworn my old avarice I still know where to go if I need to find people who know the kinds of secrets Epiphany is unlikely to uncover.

So long as you're willing to pay the price for what you need. I bring my offering inside, wishing I was either too good to lower myself to this or too wicked to feel bad about it.

"Well, hey, Jackie," the thing at the door says in greeting, its featureless face contorting in a mirthless parody of a smile. "Haven't seen you around here in a while, heard you turned nice and boring ever since you hooked up with that doll of yours. You really like her enough to go straight, or is this just another long con like it was when you were scoring the Eye of Glory?" I don't flinch at the mention of my real name--if the Verdant Kiss couldn't find that out, it wouldn't be the oracle I need it to be. But I can't stop my eyelid from twitching just a little.

It's probably not even my name that does it. Looking directly at the Verdant Kiss's children is enough to trigger an atavistic fear response in anything even ancestrally human. They hit that uncanny valley button we've all heard about, the instinctive dread we have of anything that pretends to be a person even though we know it's not. A moving mannequin made of burnished wood, its grain and hollows forming a rough approximation of a face? If you saw it out of the corner of your eye you might be fooled, but look directly at it and you'll know what it is. And protocol demands a respectful gaze for the children of the Verdant Kiss.

"You know me," I chuckle, keeping my voice tightly controlled as I watch a dozen tiny flowers blossom and wither along its scalp in a briefly-considered parody of hair. "I may be reformed, but one thing I've never been is straight. Does the Kiss have any openings?" The club looks deserted, but that doesn't mean much; ordinary people are warded from even getting within a ten-block radius of the place, kept out by subtle warnings their conscious mind slides right past and their unconscious flees from instinctually. Only the people... and I use that term loosely... who have a touch of dark magic to them can enter the sphere of the Verdant Kiss's influence, and they do so at their own risk.

Another pair of flowers, this time bright pink roses, bloom in the hollows of the mannequin's eyes. This time, they stay. "For you, Jackie? You're a favored guest, always have been. The Verdant Kiss never forgets a kindness, and you've been kinder than most. Come right along and bring the offering, I'll announce you." It turns... well, honestly she turns, I can see as she lurches into motion that she's almost fully formed and she's chosen a shape that suggests a female gender... and leads me through the darkened lobby and on into a club whose dusty tables and moth-eaten chairs have seen better days. I don't know if this was ever a true burlesque joint, or if it only adopts the form the same way the Verdant Kiss's children look almost human, but whatever it was it isn't anymore. It's a nest.

Or really more like a nursery. The Verdant Kiss is up on stage, a massive willow tree with a trunk that curves in the shape of a pregnant woman, and all around her I can see her roots sprawling in every direction and budding child after child after malformed parody of a human child. The younger ones barely even have a pair of spindly arms, while a few are so close to fully independent they're almost entirely detached from their parent, but they all share that same desperate yearning to *become* that I've seen every time I come here. Every once in a while I see it in a person on the street, too, and I think to myself, 'You left too soon. You weren't ready yet.'

Because that's what all the Verdant Kiss's children want. That's what she must have wanted as well, back in the timeless aeons of her adolescence when she was walking the universe in the form of a person and pretending she was one of us. She's older now, she's given up the pretense of humanity and settled in to raise the next generation of her kind, but her kids still need to season themselves with the spice of individuality. To learn how to be more than just the branch and leaf of the parent they came from. It would almost be sweet if it wasn't so absurdly dangerous.

"Hello, Jackie," the Verdant Kiss says, speaking in the creaks and groans of bending wood before her child can even introduce us. "It's been a very long time for you--almost long enough that I noticed your absence. Is it true what they say, then? Have you given up your dalliances with the night people in favor of the tiresome splendor of the world of light?" I know she knows the answer, and I know I've never been in more danger than I am right now--if she doesn't appreciate my offering, or even if she does, I might never leave this room. The Verdant Kiss is bound by no pacts or protocols, only the path of her nature. And it's the nature of any plant to seek sustenance.

So I kiss a little butt, at least metaphorically. "I am still the Dilettante, your grace," I murmur, keeping my tones calm and even but never anything but respectful. "I have different reasons for my dalliances, different secrets that I seek, but I assure you that I have always been a creature of the night." It's not a lie, I tell myself. It's not the truth, I tell myself. I'm not sure which shames me more, but it's something I can work out later if I leave here in one piece.

"A fine and finely considered answer," the Kiss demurs, as satisfied with me as she'll ever be. "Tell me your questions, and I will give you the answers you seek."

I steel myself--this is what I came here for, after all, the whole reason I delved back into the shadows on the edge of existence and the shadows inside my own soul, and I know it's worth it even if I know the woman I love would hate me for walking this path. "There are rumblings," I say, my voice thick with dread. "Rumors that the multiversal empires have broken their treaties and gone to war, that the balance has been tipped and entire universes now clash in open conflict. But the conflict is too distant for our sages and scryers to learn much. Your roots stretch deep into the fabric of existence, your grace. Do you know what has happened? Can you tell us if there's a threat we must prepare against?"

I hear the sound of branches, bending rapidly back and forth under great strain, and it takes me a second to realize I'm hearing laughter. "No threat," the Kiss replies at last, her boughs still quaking with amusement as she struggles to put it into terms a limited, three-dimensional mind like mine can understand. "Only a cosmic jest truly worthy of the finest audiences, a hundred hundred Towers of Babel crashing and falling into each other at the gentlest push. A single mortal, herself the butt of a vast and terrible joke played by the omniverse itself, has set the wicked against the wicked in a conflict long overdue, and it will weed existence of many of them before it is done. But if you care for the friend of a friend, you should seek the last grain of sand from the hourglass of the Paradox King. It will lead you to what you seek."

It means very little to me, even though I've heard of the Paradox King--which isn't easy, not after the final battle against him undid the very events which brought him into existence, but I pride myself on my ability to ferret out secrets. And my ability to keep them from others. "The last grain of sand," I repeat, just to make sure I understand the essentials. "And a friend of a friend who's in danger from this conflict on the other side of the multiverse. I think I can take it from h--"

I don't even get to finish my sentence before the heads of each and every one of the Verdant Kiss's children turn to look at me. "And the offering?" they ask. "You're not going to do anything as tediously heroic as denying us what's rightfully ours?" I see flowers blooming everywhere, a sign of yearning anticipation and terrifying menace all at once, and I understand what these questions were all about. The Verdant Kiss wanted to see if I still retain the darkness in my heart I need to do what has to be done here, and perhaps to revel on the hold evil still has on my despite my best efforts to reform. I'm not a good person, after all. Not like my wife. I have the right reasons, but my methods will always be the ones that served me best. And those are the ones that make me my worst.

So I remove the enchantment from sweet old Molly MacKenzie, mother of three and grandmother of six, and allow her mind to emerge from the lazy indolence that left her following me mindlessly past all those wards and enchantments that would otherwise have kept her safely away from the Verdant Kiss and her hungry children. "Wh-what is this place, where, where am I--?" she stammers out, but it's really all she can say before the roots begin to wrap around her.

I watch it happen the same way I always do, refusing to look away and lie to myself about what I've done and what I've consigned my offering to. The Verdant Kiss needs to give her children experiences, thoughts and ideas and memories and opinions that come from outside her so that her offspring can become their own individual selves and escape the orbit of her personality. They can't just go walking out into the world as they are now, they're simply not prepared for it, and their mother can't leave this place without exposing herself to the scrutiny of those who mean her harm. So she relies on people like me to bring her offerings. Minds to consume and digest and shower onto her beloved children, to give them what they need to exist among humans undetected.

It's not painful or anything. But I can see Molly's eyes go vacant and glassy as every last scrap of her mind and memory is drained out, all sixty-seven years of it, leaving her nothing more than an empty husk of a person. She loses a lifetime of experience in a matter of seconds, all those precious moments from a long life well-lived turned into mere rain for the roses blossoming from the skin of the Verdant Kiss's many children. Because I needed this information. Because I couldn't think of any other way to get it. Because I thought lives depended on it.

And maybe they do. I take my leave while the Verdant Kiss is distracted in the embrace of her latest lover, bowing and scraping as I make my way back out to the lobby... and the mannequin who greeted me walks side by side to the exit with me. Her bark has taken on the blush of human skin, and the finest of feathery vines now form something indistinguishable from hair. Even her eyes look almost like a person's... or to be more precise, they look like one person in particular. Molly MacKenzie.

I know I'm going to see those eyes staring back at me for a long time, long after the child and I part ways. I'll see them every night in my dreams, and in those haunted moments when the past comes back to remind me who I truly am. Because I am not a good person... but I'm good enough to hate the bad old self I can't let go of.

THE END