by Radclyffe
“You know what it is to love a woman. You know what those two lovers felt…and they did love. In the dark hours of the night, they would lie together, knowing nothing could be more perfect, more pure, than the love they shared. Such passion, so deep it was almost a pain…” Christabel’s hand slid over Ada’s jaw, lower, onto her throat, where Ada felt her pulse throb against the slight pressure. Lower still, and her hand was caressing Ada’s shoulder, the swell of her breast. Ada, eyes still closed, sighed. It was Maud’s touch she felt, and she was captivated by it. She felt the burning pain of Christabel’s words, the heat surging low in her abdomen. Everything that had seemed so wrong, that had caused her to accept Jim’s proposal as some sort of act of contrition, felt suddenly pure and powerful and right, as Christabel caressed her body and their lips touched for the slightest of moments.
“They were very much in love, the lace merchant’s daughter and the milliner. But they knew the world would scorn them. They swore very solemnly they would be together always, that this one brief, passing life was too small for such love. Little did they know how fleeting their moment would be.”
Christabel ran a hand up Ada’s spine to caress the back of her neck and twine in her unruly hair. Ada sighed. The other Christabel slid lower, pressing through skirts to reach the focus of Ada’s need. Now Ada moaned with the building desire, the frustration she felt every time she looked at Maud. Maud filled her head. Though she knew it was another girl, Christabel, to whose words she listened, all she could think of was Maud. Maud’s slim fingers touching her, working for her release, just as she had always dreamed. She reached desperately for Christabel, drew her to her with all of the force she longed to use with Maud, and kissed her, a deep, exploratory kiss, as she drew Christabel close, needing to feel a woman’s form close to her. She felt the swell of breasts against her own, felt the curve of Christabel’s waist in her grasp. She smelled violets again. Maud.
“Oh yes, yes my love…this is how it should be.” Christabel pulled back slightly, gasping for breath. There was pure joy in her tone. “You are like me, Ada Faithful.” Ada pushed forward, compelled by an urge she couldn’t understand but was powerless to resist, to kiss Christabel again, to taste those soft lips once more. She was hungry, she felt she wanted to consume the other woman. She wanted to kiss Maud until her lips were bruised. But Christabel drew her, irrevocably. Christabel held back, just allowed Ada the slightest brush of her lips. Ada was aware of hot tears streaming over her cheeks, but she could neither stop them nor explain them.
Christabel kissed her softly, then spoke again. “But, my love, do you not want to hear the end of the story?”
“Tell me.” Ada was breathless and aching, full of a desire she had never known before.
“The lace merchant’s daughter and the milliner swore they would spend their forever together. They declared that if one should die, the other would surely follow, consumed by grief. Christabel and Lillian would never be divided, for neither of them would be able to bear life or the cold eternity of death without the other.”
“I understand,” Ada breathed, thinking still of Maud. Her heart was singing at her final realisation of how much she loved Maud. She could not live without her. She would tell her so, the first chance she got. “I understand. Forever together.”
“I knew you were like me…you understand forever…” There was something darker, a sadness in Christabel’s tone. Ada felt it as a weight in her own heart. “A life is not long enough, however long it is lived. It is over so soon.”
“But to make the most of each moment…”
“Yes, my love. To know what it is your heart desires and to follow it…to grasp a tight hold of it.” Christabel grew restless, her hands moving more quickly, more roughly over Ada’s body. Ada felt herself respond to her very apparent desire. She was approaching a crisis of her passions. The sensation pulsed through her veins in waves, molten hot.
“I know. I know what it is I want,” Ada replied. Maud filled her mind.
“You can have it. I can give it to you, my love. Forever, with me.”
Ada tensed, suddenly fully aware of Christabel. This was not Maud, and Christabel’s voice had taken on a strange tone. “No. You are to spend your forever with Lillian. I have my Maud. And I’m going to find her tonight…”
“She will leave you. She will spurn you and leave you, to be alone.” Christabel spat the words at Ada with real venom. Jolted out of her illusion, Ada was afraid.
“Is that what happened to you. With Lillian?” she enquired.
“You didn’t hear the end of the story yet,” Christabel said plaintively.
“Tell me.”
“The lace merchant’s daughter was taken ill. It was influenza and she was never strong. She died.”
Ada gasped at the wave of sadness that overtook her. Her mind was racing to understand, and failing. “But I thought…”
“I was the lace merchant’s daughter.”
“Yes.”
“I was.”
“I don’t…understand…” Was Christabel a madwoman after all? Ada backed away slightly, but could not quite break the spell. Something pulled her to Christabel.
Christabel seemed to be smiling. As Ada watched, she faded. The solid woman began to fade. Skin, pale in the darkness, became suddenly translucent, until Ada could see the outline of a headstone a few feet away through Christabel’s body. Wide-eyed, her heart hammering, Ada did not scream. She stared. Christabel was still there, she could feel her, but now she could barely see her. She was a mist in the form of a woman, a wisp of white in the dark. A ghost.
Compelled by a logic she did not control, Ada turned to look at the headstone against which she had been leaning. White stone, with black engraved letters. Even in the night she could read the name. Christabel Ann Jessop. She couldn’t make out the words below, but the dates stood out very clearly. 1861–1880. Christabel Jessop had been dead for ten years.
“You’re dead.” She spoke the words to the white haze in front of her. Try as she might, she did not feel afraid. Indeed, she did not even doubt her sanity. How could she not accept what she saw with her own eyes? In moments, Christabel was solid again, looking at Ada with hollow eyes.
“I am lost in forever and I am alone.” Christabel’s voice was full of pain. “You’re like me. You can be with me.”
“Is that what you thought? That you could seduce me into eternity with you?”
“You wanted to be with me.” Christabel sounded so plaintive that Ada could not help a swell of sympathy.
“What of Lillian?”
“She lived. She let me go into forever on my own. She visited my grave for a while. But then life’s currents drew her away. When it is her turn to come to this side, she will never find me. I am lost. But you could share this with me.”
“Surely I would have to die to do so?” The notion sparked real fear in Ada’s stomach. Would Christabel attempt to keep her, by any means? Her life seemed suddenly so precious to her.
“Death is really nothing. Just a moment and it is over. It is what you must leave behind, and what you find on the other side you should fear. Not death.”
“I don’t want to die. I love Maud.”
“She is human. She is fickle and will change her mind. If you should die, would she follow you into forever?”
“I would not expect it. This life is enough. Shared with her, whatever we face.” A new joy surged in Ada’s heart as she spoke of convictions she was only now aware of. She would not marry Jim. Even if they had to leave home, leave the city, she would find a way to share her life with Maud. She would not be Christabel. She would not be a ghost of herself while she was alive, and she would not spend eternity in sadness. She would live every moment well enough to die happy, knowing she had loved.
“This life is short. Do you not see? It is perilous. I can give you love, always.” Christabel reached out a cold, pale hand. Ada let her grasp her own warmer fingers, but she shuddered.
> “I am not your Lillian, and you can never be my Maud. I am sorry, Christabel, but I will take my chance with life. I am like you. And I will live my life how you wanted to live yours.”
Christabel’s eyes widened and her grasp of Ada’s hand tightened. “Death is cold, Ada. I am alone here.”
Ada felt the sadness creeping up her arm, a chill spreading into her body. Tears sprang into her eyes. To slide into death with Christabel seemed a real possibility. She fought it, clung to her love for Maud, her new hope.
“Remember your life with joy. You knew love. In moments you have shown me how important that is. Rest, Christabel. Have faith in your Lillian. She will find you.”
“What if she does not?”
Ada could not fight the tears. She pulled Christabel closer, brushed a gentle kiss on the cold lips. “She will find you. Rest.”
“You will go to your Maud. You will love her, with every living breath?”
“I will, I promise.”
Christabel reached for another kiss. Ada allowed it. She closed her eyes and prayed to anyone who would listen that love was as powerful as she craved it to be.
When she opened her eyes, Christabel was gone.
Ada lingered a while in the dark churchyard, her eyes filled with tears, but her heart surging with hope, determination, and joy. She would fight, if fight she must, but Maud had to know the extent of her love.
She took the walk home through the dark streets quickly, her head aching a little in the aftermath of the gin, the remainder of which she discarded. In the back of her mind there was a slight fear, a vague doubt, that Christabel had been a figment of a gin-and-distress-turned brain and she’d actually spent the past hours in the churchyard alone, drunkenly muttering to herself. A ghost? It seemed so ludicrous as she walked, more or less sober, back through the respectable residential streets to her home. And yet the doubts were so easy to push away. Christabel had seemed so real. The emotions were so real.
Even if it had all been a drunken delusion, Ada would not undo it. She saw now the path she wanted to take into the future. All traces of the distress that had caused her to run alone and frightened into the night, to want to lose herself in gin, had faded. Maud was her future, and she would seize every living, breathing moment.
*
The next morning, after a few hours of sleep more peaceful than she thought possible, Ada, now respectably attired complete with bonnet, shawl, and gloves, walked to St Mary’s churchyard. She skirted the slums rather than passing through them, and instead of gin from a whore, she bought blooms from a flower seller. She took sweet peas to bid farewell, and rosemary to remember. She climbed the stone steps into the churchyard, glancing briefly at the square tower, a honey-sweetened grey in the sunlight which glinted from the stained glass of the intricate windows and filtered down into the shadows of the churchyard.
Ada went straight to the pointed white headstone. There were Christabel’s name and the dates of her short life. Tears pricked Ada’s eyes again. But then something arrested her vision. Stars of blue in the grass. Ada smiled.
Forget-me-nots.
“She remembers you, Christabel. Sleep. Wait for her.” She barely whispered the words. “And I will love my Maud. Because of you.”
The Others
Nell Stark and Trinity Tam
Most people didn’t update their last will and testament before leaving for a Saturday-night soiree. Then again, most people believed that vampires and wereshifters were creatures of myth and movie. Sometimes, Olivia missed the luxury of ignorance. She knew all too well what dangers walked the streets undetected. Had it not been for the intervention of providence on a night much like this not so long ago, she would have been one of them.
Not that she was a bigot. She had friends among the Others. She had even fallen in love with two of them. Technically, her romantic interest in Abby and Alexa had begun before they’d been turned, but there was no denying the fact that the grace and power they’d inherited as shifters made them even more attractive.
There was also no denying that were-women spelled trouble. Abby had walked away from their relationship after only a few months, and Alexa had never truly been attainable to begin with. Olivia needed to fall for a nice, human girl without any feline bones in her closet. Someone normal and dependable, someone who grew metaphorical claws once a month instead of literal ones.
Yeah. Right.
She pulled up the collar on her pea coat as a gust of cold air brought tears to her eyes. Even a Manhattan native never quite grew accustomed to the chill of a skyscraper-lined wind tunnel. The address her contact had provided was a few blocks east of the downtown financial district, and not for the first time, Olivia marveled at the ability of the Others to conduct even the most sordid of activities right under the nose of City Hall.
The Red Circuit party was by all accounts a barbaric affair, its time and location changed each weekend. Olivia’s contact had refused to give her any information about who was in charge or the channels through which news was spread. Alexa had told her a little about what to expect: the deadly “dogfights” between wereshifters, the vampires’ brutal “raffle” to drain a homeless human dry, the sadomasochistic “record” to see how many lashes a shifter could endure before their inner beast rebelled against the torment.
At once repulsed and morbidly curious, Olivia would probably have been drawn to the Circuit even if she hadn’t had business there. But tonight, she needed to stay focused. Her sole purpose was to establish credibility in the underbelly of the shifter community by scoring a large order of drugs. If she played her cards right, this would be the first step on a long road toward apprehending and convicting Christopher Blaine, a front-running presidential candidate who secretly owed his allegiance to a powerful werewolf alpha bent on eradicating vampires and enslaving humanity.
Olivia didn’t much care for vampires, but she had no intention of sitting idly by while Blaine siphoned illegal drug money into his campaign. Especially when a deadly virus transmitted by those drugs had nearly killed Abby last year. Physically, Abby had recovered. Emotionally, she had grown more and more distant before finally turning her back on their burgeoning relationship. Desperate to know why her tune had changed so quickly, Olivia had tailed her into the Poconos, where Abby had pulled over at a scenic overlook, walked into the woods, and transformed into a large cat.
Abby had never returned any of her calls. When Olivia had finally shown up on her doorstep, the building superintendent had informed her that Abby had moved out of state. She was gone, but Blaine’s dirty work was still on the streets.
Olivia shook her head to dispel the memory as she paused before the address she’d committed to memory. The door opened into a dimly lit hallway that bent almost immediately at a ninety-degree angle. It was impossible to tell who—or what—lurked around the bend, and she swallowed hard around the unusual tightness in her throat. She was a cop after all—she didn’t get nervous on an op. Except this wasn’t just any op. She thumbed off the safety on her firearm as she moved forward. Every muscle in her body grew taut as she forced herself to step around the blind corner.
Twenty feet away a dark-haired woman stood before a large wooden door. Despite the chill of the corridor, she wore only a white tank top and jeans. Legs splayed, heavily tattooed arms crossed beneath her breasts, she was simultaneously sensual and menacing.
The gatekeeper smirked at Olivia’s wary approach. “You’re new.”
Olivia bristled at her patronizing tone, forcing herself to remain silent. When she stopped a few feet away, the gatekeeper leaned forward and inhaled deeply.
“Only human.” Her eyes narrowed. “But you’ve been palling around with a few of us recently.” She cocked her head. “Tell me, what do you hope to find behind this door?”
Olivia knew she couldn’t pass herself off as a party girl looking for a good time. “Business.”
The gatekeeper stared hard at her for one fraught moment before moving aside to
tap in a code at the keypad next to the door. “Pleasure is much more fun.”
Olivia had no doubt what would happen to her if she misstepped. Death was only one option, and worse fates were easily imaginable. Without another word, she crossed the threshold into an atrium that ended in a downward-sloping staircase. The low pulse of a far-off beat set the walls to throbbing. To her left was a coat rack, to her right a small booth presided over by a muscle-bound man. He beckoned to her.
“Your sidearm.”
With a sigh, Olivia unstrapped her weapon and turned it over to him in exchange for a small token. She had known this would happen, but that didn’t mean she had to like it. Determined not to let the loss of the gun undermine her self-confidence, she squared her shoulders and began the descent. With each step, the thunder of the music grew louder, engulfing her like a riptide, sucking her down.
At the bottom of the stairs another corridor opened onto a large rectangular chamber, nearly filled to capacity and pungent with the scent of sweat-permeated air. The partiers writhed in time to the music, some emulating the professional—and naked—dancers who displayed themselves on a stage at the far end of the room. A makeshift bar had been set up along the right wall opposite an archway through which patrons came and went frequently.
