Six months ago it had all been so simple. Johan’s life had been crumbling into despair and ruin. He’d been on the verge of suicide, the rusty blade of an antique pocket knife poised and ready to rip a jagged hole in his scrawny arm to let his suffering run out into the gutter where he lay. He was at rock bottom, no hope in sight. His bloodstream was saturated with The Fix. It had seeped into his muscles and burned up every ounce of fat and flesh in a million tiny floods of ecstasy. It had filled him with a need that would consume him. No matter how much he took he would never feel high again. He’d lost everything to the drug and every second he was without it was agony. It was time to die.

Then he met Solomon.

First, the world exploded into fire and noise. The alley that was Johan’s home swirled with the heat and light of Solomon’s descent. Johan had been dazed, the ache of need compounded by the bruising impact of the air being torn away in a column of heat, sucked into a newly formed crater. Solomon had dragged him away from the horrors of that alley; swept away the pain and terror of withdrawal. With Solomon, Johan had known peace for the first time in months. Solomon had taken his need from him, taken his emptiness and despair and replaced them with a warmth and love that Johan had never known. He asked so little and gave so much.

Life was complicated now because Johan had a future again.

He straightened the collar of his robe, checked that the incense in the censer was burning well, and looked at Solomon in the mirror. The warm brown, semi-translucent surface of Solomon’s chitinous back rose and fell slowly as he nuzzled into the side of Johan’s face, tiny threads of deep red trickling beneath the surface of Solomon’s carapace as Johan’s blood cycled through his body. Solomon’s legs gripped Johan’s face softly, one across the bridge of his nose, one resting across Johan’s left eyebrow and gripping the skin of his forehead, and one stretching along the line of Johan’s cheek and curling under his jaw. Johan could feel Solomon’s other legs entwined in his hair. He smiled at the intimacy of it. Solomon’s appearance was somewhere between an oversized cockroach and a crayfish, a six legged insect-like creature with obsidian eyes, delicate claws, a flexible segmented shell and a long tail that coiled around Johan’s neck. On his pale underside he had a retractable ovipositor which dispensed what Johan had come to think of as holy beads. He was an improbable looking saviour.