and Falling, Fly

by Skyler White

  “Adam, wait a minute—”

  “No, don’t make me stop. There’s something I need to say.” His mouth, anticipating, is delicious. I hate to shove truth into it, but he must taste before he speaks.

  “Just a minute, Adam. Please.”

  “I love you, Olivia. I want us to be together.” He is still fumbling, still reaching.

  “We can never be together.” I say. “Not the way you mean it.”

  “Why not?” His easy smile clouds over.

  “I can’t have sex,” I whisper.

  “You’re just frightened.” But he takes his hand from its pocket—empty. “It’s because you’re innocent.”

  “I’m anything but innocent. I’m bad—wicked.”

  “Honey, don’t say that.” He reaches for my hand and strokes it. “You’re not wicked; you’re everything I’ve ever wanted in a woman.”

  As if those two things were ever mutually exclusive.

  “I don’t understand why you don’t have more confidence. Look at you, you’ve got it all: a great body, great job, a great guy…” He makes a funny little gesture toward himself, the rational man comforting the emotional female.

  “I’m cursed,” I tell him, “ruined, destroyed…”

  “Don’t be silly, Olivia. You’re a beautiful woman.”

  “I’m not! I’m not a woman at all. I…”

  Oh, crap.

  The terror rises acrid and fast. I hear horror shrieking in his mind the single word transvestite.

  Fuck, men are stupid. “No, Adam, stop. Adam, look at me! You know that’s not what I mean.” His heart thunders blood through him. I have to stop the panic.

  “Adam, I-I’m a vampire.”

  Adam is blank. He gazes, unseeing, into his plate where his forgotten food is cooling. It will be thrown away untouched. “Why do I always fall for the crazy girls?” he mutters to his ribs.

  His wine glass reflects an inverted table, a reverse Olivia, an upside-down world in its yellow-white orb. “God, there must be something wrong with me. I thought you were different. You’re so pretty, so classically beautiful, I thought… Is this an eating disorder thing?”

  “Adam—”

  “You’re not a vampire. That’s stupid. I’ve never even had a hickey from you. If anything, you avoid my neck.”

  “I don’t have to feed that way. I can get everything I need just kissing you. My teeth have quills—my nails, too—tiny, sharp, hollow spines that you don’t even feel when they harvest—”

  “Do you mean you’ve already—”

  Bad idea to go into feeding practices right away.

  “We’re angels, actually,” I scramble, hoping he’ll find some beauty in the lineage. “All vampires are—fallen angels.” I should shut up now. But the knot of disgust between his brows is deepening, and I want to keep talking until it unties. “Our parents were expelled from Heaven for something horrendous, and…”

  “What?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “No, damn it, what are you saying? Can you please stop being crazy for just one minute and let me think this through? Of course you’re not a vampire.”

  “Adam, shhh!”

  “You’re not an angel either. I just can’t accept this.”

  He can’t. Acceptance requires despair, and Adam isn’t the despairing sort. It’s a feature that attracted me to him, perversely—his dogged confidence.

  “I loved you…”

  “Adam, you can’t love what you don’t know.”

  “I know you!” His voice climbs too loud.

  “No,” I whisper, raging. It is, after all, all I’ve ever wanted. And all I have always been denied. “You don’t know me!”

  “Bullshit. Tell me something about you I don’t know.”

  “Do you know what would happen if I picked up a knife and opened my arm with it?” I lean forward, trying to anchor his wheeling eyes to mine. “It wouldn’t hurt. I can’t feel.” I am reckless with disappointment. “Before an ambulance could get here, the bleeding would stop and the opening would start to close. I would heal completely in less than ten minutes.”

  “That’s disgusting!”

  Why do moderns respond to miracles this way?

  “I can’t have sex. I can’t die,” I dive on. “I don’t cast a shadow, not that you ever noticed. And when I’m alone, I can’t see myself in mirrors. I have no idea what I look like without someone else’s eyes on me.”

  It isn’t working. I’m scrambling down the precipice, but his grip is slipping and my eagerness to reach him showers rocks on his upturned face.

  I leave him sitting there. I have seen hope’s self-immolation too many times to sift through Adam’s ashes.

  Eden Sushi occupies the last building on the block, and I disappear around the corner as Adam explodes through the restaurant doors. I strike unbreakable angelic nails into the mortar and scale the bricks’ rough face on talons and heels.

  “Olivia! Come back here!” Adam yells into the night, blond and vulnerable beneath me, “I want to talk to you.”

  Shout yourself hoarse calling for your angel, but don’t lift up your eyes to see.

  “Olivia! Where are you?”

  My skirt billows on the black breeze, the proud, scarlet flag of tattered desire. I step back from the roof edge and from hope, listening for the pulse of my pale city beneath its ugly electric skin. But I can only hear my sisters’ howling hunger.

  “Come on, Michael!” Adam pleads with the bartender who followed us out to say we’re no longer welcome within. “I won’t make a scene. Dude, you know me!”

  But I am already gone.

  I should go to my sisters, but not tonight. Tonight, I will be the bogeyman, a thing half seen, the sudden shiver crawling, ranging fast and silent through your night, my glorious daybreak. Tonight, I will hunt with Adam’s rage on ruined shoes, and I will feed full-tooth.

  Desire denied consumes.

  ———

  Dominic frowned at the smudgy ovals his wet socks left on the sparkling kitchen floor, and listened. No sound came from his mercifully deserted town house. Margery must have finished her cleaning and left while he was still out running. Dominic smiled. He’d done an extra five kilometers in that exact hope. And in advance atonement for the icy slices of porcine heaven he unpeeled and dropped into an ancient cast-iron fry pan. High cholesterol ran on his dad’s side, making six fat strips of bacon contraindicated as an afternoon snack, but Dominic prodded his indulgence with a fork and grinned. He’d end up like Dysart if he wasn’t careful—hand-fed death in small bites by overeager postdocs.

  He inhaled deeply, waiting on the knot that the smell of tree smoke and plenty always untied in him. Anger let go in his chest, and he leaned against the spotless countertop to stretch his calf muscles. The bacon’s smell was working, and that mattered more than understanding why this scent always carried him back to a wide-hipped woman by a massive wood stove. He smiled at the image of her, back turned, singing to herself while he, four years old—five maybe—sat at a flour-sprinkled table with hot rolls in an old pan, waiting for breakfast, dressed for church.

  The familiar clatter of his housekeeper descending the stairs jostled him from his scent-dream. Dominic bowed his head. She had not left after all. “Dr. D?” Margery yodeled. “You makin’ bacon again?” Dominic grasped an ankle to stretch out his quads, and nodded to the wild-haired woman standing, capable hands on ample hips, in the doorway of his kitchen while his two cats, Hubel and Weisel, circled her ankles.

  “Honestly,” Margery pronounced, “I don’t know why you won’t use a treadmill on a day like this. You’re soaked through. I’ll tend the bacon, you sit down. Or go shower. I’ll have those rashers and some nice eggs with toast ready by the time you’re cleaned up.”

  “Sit down yourself, Mrs. L. There’s enough here for both of us.”

  Margery regarded him through narrowed eyes while the kitties went straight to their dishes. “Things bad at t
he lab today?”

  “No actually, it was a good day.”

  On his twenty-first birthday, Dominic sold a stash of Civil War- era gold, paid off his parents’ mortgage, and bought this modest town house for cash. Margery, excessively well-paid to come in and clean once a week, represented the singular exception to Dominic’s six subsequent years of monklike austerity.

  “I’m going to California next month,” he said.

  “And you’re not happy about that?”

  “Not particularly, no.”

  “That explains it.” Margery nodded her red ringlets.

  “Explains what?”

  His housekeeper took her usual seat at the little kitchen table, still nodding her head. Dominic refilled the cats’ water. “You only make bacon when you’re upset,” she said. “Otherwise it’s those dreadful boil-in-the-bag dinners.”

  It was true. To deliberately trigger a memory-like seizure for the warmth and serenity it brought was stupid, but hardly the riskiest game Dominic played with his bizarre affliction. He’d done it before, trying to rule out temporal lobe epilepsies, but they generated no abnormal electrical activity. In the EEGs and fMRIs, his brain lit up exactly the same as when he remembered first grade.

  “I wish you’d let me cook for you.” Margery went on, propping her feet up on Dominic’s chair. “I’ve got plenty of time on my day here. You barely move things one week to the next. I could whip up a few meals for you. They’d cook while I clean, and you’d have a hot dinner waiting when you come home, with more in the freezer for the week ahead.”

  Dominic drained the bacon fat meticulously into the emptied cat food tin he fished from the trash. “I pay you for the day, Mrs. L. You could just leave when you’re done. You don’t need to stay until I get home.”

  “You say that every week, but I hate to think of you coming back to an empty house.”

  “Really, I don’t mind.”

  “You say that every week, too. But I have the time. Or I could start tidying the basement?”

  “No.” Dominic put two more pieces of bread in the toaster. “No. Thank you.”

  “It just seemed a shame to leave you here alone, today being Valentine’s and all.”

  “Is it? Oh yeah, I saw Ghita in the student union. She had hearts all over her shirt…” Tension coiled again between his teeth and ears. “No. That’s not right. What’s her name? Jessica. I saw Jessica.”

  “Well, I’m sure it’s hard to keep students straight in your mind. You’ve got so many in those introductory psychology classes.”

  Dominic cut with more force than strictly necessary into a tomato. He had explained to Margery too many times that he didn’t teach psychology, just the neuroanatomy portion of an interdisciplinary psych course.

  “So, no special plans for tonight, Doctor?”

  “Not unless you consider sharing a perfect BLT with the best housekeeper in Cambridge special?” Dominic winked and put the plates on the table. “Coke or Guinness, Mrs. L?”

  Margery blushed an alarming pink beneath her dyed-orange hair. “Oh, beer, I think, don’t you?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Dominic sank his teeth through the cool layers of bread, lettuce, and tomato to the brown, hot crackle of bacon. If Margery had left while he was out running, as he’d asked her to, he would have eaten his bacon from a bare fork by the stove, or thrown it out—it was really all about the smell—but either would have earned him a proper meal cooked from scratch if she had seen him.

  “I could run out and pick us up a bottle of wine for dinner?” Her normal color had still not returned. Dominic considered the possibility of menopause, but Margery was only a few years older than he.

  “I wouldn’t know what to pair with bacon,” he grinned.

  “Dominic, this isn’t dinner, surely?”

  “I have a lot of work to do…”

  “And you’re planning to gobble this up and go back down to whatever it is you do in that awful basement of yours, aren’t you?” Dominic glanced toward the locked door. “On Valentine’s Day! I swear, sometimes I think you keep your heart down there.”

  Dominic laughed. “Now Mrs. L, you know you’re my only love.” She flushed again, and Dominic carried both their empty plates to the sink.

  “Your heel’s bleeding.”

  Dominic craned his neck over a shoulder to see the brilliant red staining his white running socks.

  “I’ll get you that calendula I bought.”

  “I’m not sure it works,” Dominic rinsed the plates. “Wish I had a blister on my other foot, too, for a control.” Margery shook her head, but allowed Dominic to steer her to the front door and help her into her winter coat. “The house looks wonderful, Margery. Thank you.”

  “Well it’s not hard to keep it clean when you don’t seem to use but the bed, the bathroom, and the microwave.”

  “How can you say that after my gourmet masterpiece tonight?”

  “I’m just saying you could use a woman around, is all.”

  “Are you ever bothered by night sweats, Mrs. L?”

  Margery shot him a puzzled glance. “No. Why?”

  “Nothing. Just wondering.” Dominic’s jaw tightened uncomfortably. “Good night, Margery.”

  From the correct side of his front door at last, Margery’s bright unblinking eyes studied him. “You just can’t wait to get back to your work, can you?”

  “Is it so crazy that I enjoy what I do?”

  “It’ll make you crazy.” Margery turned away and cautiously climbed down the town house’s icy front steps, grumbling, “Staying in every night, denying yourself all life’s pleasures, no dinner, no love…”

  “Drive carefully,” Dominic called after her. Then he locked the door, shrugged off his coat, and trotted down the basement stairs. Margery had it exactly backwards. Dominic’s irregular hours had nothing to do with self-denial, and everything to do with love. He walked briskly through his small darkroom and unlocked the door in its back wall. To a curious man, every mystery was a challenge, every puzzle was a dare. Dominic worked all night because he relished the contest.

  Because he loved to win.

  Whether he was crazy or not was a different question. And the hunt for its answer was more than his passion or his work; it was a pitched battle to the death. Dominic slid into the worn chair behind his microscope and booted up his laptop. His crusade against the mysteries of the true final frontier—the human brain—had made his body a secret battlefield. And no less than Nature itself, or God, as his opponent.

  2

  WHAT YOU HUNT

  As human morality trended away from slavery and caste, a few vampires began to question our hunting practices. Modern forensic science persuaded more of us that it was too dangerous to feed full-tooth from strangers. Thus Sylvia, our Irish sister, founded a series of clubs to protect us—the beautiful, incestuous children of angels thrown from Heaven—from a similar expulsion from the world of men. The Quarries offer ethical consumerism and identity protection in exchange for eight thousand dollars and our once-potent solitude. I wonder what we’ll find to fear next.

  I wash up on Manhattan’s most exclusive doorstep before twilight on Saint Patrick’s Day, beneath a snot-colored sky. The New York Quarry is introducing a new redhead in honor of the occasion, but after a month of hunting rogue, I don’t give a fig for novelty. I have come here to play it safe. I am weary, and seeking a familiar sin.

  I slip the small brass key around my wrist into the club’s blood-red door whose matte black letters absorb all the sparkle of the city’s light. The door swings silently inward, and I step into a small reception room. It is comforting, at least, to be out of the electricity again.

  A young man stands behind a desk bathed in unsteady candlelight. “Welcome,” he whispers, and with reverent hands presents a velvet-lined box to me. I take the ring from it and slip it over my right thumb. I turn its jewel to face him. He tenses, watching the band spin. The swirl of my damnation, like sm
oke in a bottle, clouds the red stone black. Why must our most basic rites be embroidered thus? Why can’t I still draw a curved line in the dust and be known?

  The boy milks the retractable spike into a silver vial and wipes away the excess with a Kleenex. I am not meant to see him slip the tissue into the pocket of his tailored coat. “Okay, then.” He smiles too brightly. “The Quarry debuts a fresh fig at midnight, so in addition to the standard agreement, there’s a proviso page to sign, okay?”

  He smells like the outside, like grass, or dill, fresh and green, with a deep masculine red beneath, the too-cheerful smell of blood and fucking. I hate him and his sunshine smells in my night city. He disappears behind his desk, and pops back up holding several printed pages, which he tidies and stacks before me. He twists his head at an unhealthy angle to read aloud the page facing me.

  “While there is no additional fee for freshness”—I could help his neck to twist around a bit farther; vertebrae break quietly—“society members are reminded that evasion skills are learned over time.” He holds out a black fountain pen. “Initial please.”

  I inscribe an ornate O where he points.

  “I understand that there are initiate connoisseurs,” he whispers, “but for what you pay, I’m sure you want at least an hour of pursuit to work up an appetite.” He leans over the desk with a conspiratorial wink, and my fingers twitch to snatch the flicking lashes and rip. “No guarantees with the new recruits! Last month, Evelyn caught a debut male in ten minutes.” He shakes his head sadly. “That one didn’t return.”

  I should go see Evelyn. Maybe she could cheer me.

  He turns over another page of small type and blank lines. “This document allows us to auto-deduct the eight thousand dollars per hunt from the credit card you have on file, plus any fines that you incur. Initial please. Thank you.”