and Falling, Fly

by Skyler White

  He frees my hand and stalks off toward the wall and the cows. They have not moved, but I wish he would come away from them. Back to me. Need grips my belly. I should have fed before. Hunger is clouding my thoughts. I walk away from him across the yard, away from the rising smell of his desire, away from the cows.

  I duck into a darkness blacker than the night and mount the spiraling stone steps of the squat bell tower again. I climb beyond where I had sat before, to get above the terrible hunger his desire raises in me. I balance on the decrepit peak. My wingscars ache to stretch and unfurl, to hold the night in their divine embrace and soar.

  Falling wouldn’t hurt me, but it would be ugly. His scent carries on the teasing breeze. Only angels fall with grace.

  “What time do you guess it is?” he asks. He can’t see me.

  “Between late and early.” I walk back down to him.

  “Do you need to be back before dawn?”

  “No.” I step into the double archway of what must once have been a massive wooden door and he comes to me, away from the cows.

  “Olivia?”

  I turn away from him and pace the low, paved passageway where the moonlight does not penetrate. My hunger opens from a specific need to a wider well, plumbing me.

  “Olivia.” His voice is low, but reaches through all the dark, open places. “Dublin has a lab where I could do the kind of work I need to, to keep my funding, to advance my research. If the hotel closes down, do you think you might be able to talk any of your sisters into coming to Dublin? They wouldn’t have to do anything except let me examine their brains. No promise of a cure, no medicines, just spend a little time in the lab and let me get some baselines?”

  “They’re happy at the hotel.”

  “Are they? Are they happy there?”

  “Their suffering is familiar there,” I tell him. “They know the contours of that place, of their pain.”

  “Better the devil you know, eh?”

  “He’s like a father to me. The hotel is my home.”

  “I thought that star was home.” He touches my elbow. I had not heard him approach. He should not be able to surprise me. “The way you talked about that star, I could feel it.” My angelic hearing has never been surprised before. “Olivia, come to Dublin with me? I won’t ask you to participate in the research. We can get to know each other a little better, discover the city. I could use your help.”

  “Why are you so interested in vampires?”

  “I’m not. I mean, not specifically. I’m interested in understanding why you, why people like you, feel so apart from the rest of humanity, why we think of ourselves as so radically different, as cursed or damned or worse.”

  “What is worse than damnation?”

  “I don’t know. To have no God to damn you, maybe.” Something not-quite-fear bleeds into his scent. I breathe it in. Caution under manhood, sex, and suffering. I clamp my jaws against the quilling.

  “My sisters would have no reason to go to Dublin,” I tell him through my gripping teeth.

  “To help their sister?”

  “That’s no reason for them.”

  “To help themselves?”

  “They won’t believe you can. At least not beyond a good night’s feed.”

  “Or fuck,” he snorts. “I’ve never seen such a sexually aggressive psychotype.”

  I work the rage in me, to ease the eruption in my bones and gums. “We can’t fuck.”

  “What?”

  “We can’t fuck. A vampire’s sex is closed—monstrous, grotesque.”

  “Olivia.” His tender hands turn my body to him. He searches for my clouded eyes in the darkness. “Olivia, shame around sex is very common. It’s something people work through.”

  “I’m not ashamed.” My teeth are fully quilled. The scent of him drenches me. “I’m a virgin.”

  “They’re not mutually exclusive, you know.”

  “I’m made of stone. Impenetrable.” I’m grappling for anger again, struggling for anything but the pure volcanic hunger diving through all my veins to my aching lips.

  “Olivia, were you abused?”

  “I was damned.”

  “Olivia—”

  “You just won’t face reality, will you?” The anger finds me and I push the flood roiling over need. “I am damned. You are cursed. My sisters are angels thrown from Heaven. So while our psychotype may appear sexual, we’re really just aggressive. We hate what we cannot possess, so we find ways to borrow it. We make you want us, and we feed on your hunger. We are the angels of desire. We have none of our own.”

  “You have no desire?”

  “No.”

  “But you get hungry, don’t you?”

  “You have no idea.” The feeding edges force through the pliant flesh of my mouth. I’m almost choking on them. “But that’s not desire, it’s craving. It’s inescapable. It becomes irresistible. Everything but the impulse to feed dies in you, and you’re eating before you know you’ve struck. That’s how Sylvia killed her fig last night.”

  “Her what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Did she actually kill a real person?” Horror now, in the heady mix of smells. Almost disgust. I suck it in to poison myself. “What kind of ridiculous fantasy role-playing does Gaehod provide for down there?”

  “Sylvie didn’t mean to kill her. I think she loved the girl.”

  “God!”

  “That’s what she thought.”

  Rage and incomprehension dance over his warrior’s face, slipping into the familiar hollows. I watch him struggle for mastery. “Olivia, surely you can see that the hotel is not a good place to be. It’s unhealthy. You know that, right? That’s why you’ve never been here before now, isn’t it? Look, Gaehod is thinking seriously of shutting down the place, sending everyone home. If he’s killing people, for Christ’s sake, it shouldn’t be too hard to see why. He’s asked me to help convince people. Olivia, would you…”

  “No.” My anger is gone. It has abandoned me fast as love and has left me as exhausted. “I’m tired of trying to pass for human in the surface world,” I tell him. “I love the hotel. I’ve come home to take off the mask.”

  “You’ve come home to wear the costume. Look at you”—he chuckles—“touring the Irish countryside in knee-high boots and leather pants.”

  I slide from his strong fingers effortlessly.

  “Olivia, I’m sorry, it was a joke.”

  I am striding into the grassy courtyard and through the towering door-shaped hole. I could pierce his skull with my nails.

  “Olivia, that was cruel of me. I didn’t mean it.”

  The cows regard me silently as I near the low wall.

  “Olivia, stop. I’m sorry.”

  If I continue my purposeful walk in this direction, will it look like chasing to the cows?

  I face him. Feeding full-tooth on this desirable, stupid man would approach pleasure, he has me so enraged. Just his shock would be delicious.

  “What makes you think you have any influence with the old man?” I demand.

  “He asked my opinion.”

  “About whether to shut down the hotel?”

  “Yeah. It’s not something he’s planning on doing right away. He’s just mulling over the idea.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing, really. That I thought his affection for some of the hotel’s guests kept him from seeing the real nature behind their reasons for being there.”

  My laugh is a bark, and the cows shift their weight in the black grass behind me. They’ve stopped eating. I move without a sound away from them.

  “Olivia, I am sorry. Look, it’s got to be getting near morning. Let’s head back. They’ll be serving breakfast by the time we get there. I just realized I’m starving. I say stupid things when I’m hungry.”

  I pull the apple from my coat pocket. “Here.” I raise it in the waning light. The moon is setting, but the sun does not yet bleach the sky. I could throw it to hi
m, but I simply hold it, offering it to him, if he will come and take from me.

  He closes the distance between us, smiling. Innocent, he comes to take Eve’s apple. I keen the nails on the hand that holds it. He thinks it is a peace offering, held between us.

  I draw my quilled nails down his long fingers as they curl around it.

  “Ow!” He palms the apple into his other hand to see the bloodied slash.

  My quills are too dull, the opening too wide.

  “I must have caught myself on the edge of your nail,” he shrugs and sucks the cut.

  My veins seethe in constricting agony. His scent hangs fresh and thick in the air between us, and my harvest runs, live and sticky, down two fingers of my frozen hand. I writhe with aching for it. And because I am angry and done hiding, done with being desirable before all else, I mimic him. I put my stained fingers in my scarlet mouth and suck.

  “You did that on purpose.” He stuffs the cut finger into the back pocket of his jeans.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wanted to.” His powerful taste lingers behind my lips. Not enough. I want to close my eyes and savor. “I didn’t mean for you to feel it,” I tell him. “My quills are dull. I need my sisters to keen them, but I hate asking.”

  “You don’t seem to mind just taking.” He shoots me a rueful grin and bites into the apple.

  “If I had asked you, would you have given me permission? If I had told you, out here in the quiet night, if I had whispered to you that I need your blood to feed me, would you have given it?”

  He says nothing. I reach behind his muscular back and take his hand at the wrist. It slides from his pocket and I bring it, American lint and masculinity, to my lips. “Am I the succubus?” I whisper. “Gorgeous insatiable lust, tempting in the night?” I push the red snake of my tongue between my lips and draw it up the shaft of his straight finger. “Do I come to you from underneath, full of desire for you?” I balance the tip of his finger on the curl of my pointed tongue. “No, I am the opposite. The desire that fills me is from you, not for you. It’s your want that satisfies me. But if you want, you can be denied.” I touch my teeth to his rounded fingertip and close my lips around it. “To desire is to give your power away.”

  “So you protect yourself from rejection by denying that there’s anything you want?” He’s following my words and not my lips. I hold his wide finger in the soft, pursed cushion of my perfect mouth and suck. It stops his breath. The blood, no longer flowing, is salt and earth on my parched tongue. I long to open the cut again.

  Letting his flesh blur my words, I answer him. “I am what is desired, not who desires.”

  His passionate eyes, dancing between my lips and my eyes, are keenly alert to the deliberate eroticism of the gesture, but also on the challenging trail of diagnosis. He sees patterns, not people. I suck more firmly, drawing the length of his hard finger into the empty womb of my mouth, the welcoming wet of my tongue against his hungry flesh.

  The apple falls from his free hand. “If I want you, does that give you power over me?” His voice is thick and I wind my seducing tongue around his finger, sucking. He wants me. I can taste it.

  “You believe that my attraction to you gives you power over me?” he repeats, his thoughts struggling to stay above his rising lust. He puts a finger beneath my chin and tips my face up to his. His captive finger, sliding from my crimson lips, glistens between us, only its tip still my mouth’s prisoner. “Is the vampire fetish really a power one?” His blue eyes search my face. “Do vampires drink blood as a symbol for taking vitality, of taking my power into you?”

  “We drink blood to live.” I tell him. His strong hands cup my face, but I flog my anger to keep his hungry scent from overflowing. “I drink living blood because I have none of my own. Because I’m tangled in a nasty web of interconnectedness that binds me to strangers for what I eat and my family for how I do.”

  He holds my face, concern and tenderness in his mortal eyes. “I think everyone feels that way, the dependence on others, and the connection to other living things.”

  For all his cleverness and his clinical detachment, the smell of his irrational desire grows steadily with his hands slipping into my hair, his yearning eyes holding mine—another blind mortal who has confused physical form with moral content. “Hell, even quantum physics will tell you that the observer and the observed can’t be totally unaffected by each other,” he murmurs. Desire drains the choice from him. Our lips are almost touching. “Even space and time are connected, right?” I push a piece of hair away from his drowning eyes. “There’s even a nomenclature—‘quantum nonlocality’—which seems to show us that, on some deep level of reality, even the speed of light doesn’t limit connections between wildly separate events.” His lips touch mine, and a hard blood-hunger stabs my fingers and teeth and heart. In seconds, I will strike.

  Choice is all you ever own. He whispers my name against my inviting mouth. I step back from him. Choice, and the knowledge that hangs from its bough.

  “I’m okay with the connections,” I tell him. “Everything that touches me belongs to me.”

  “So it is about power, isn’t it?” He keeps his hands on my arms.

  I could kill him here. I could drink and bathe myself in his intense desire. It would be days before anyone knew. He touches his forehead to mine, bending to look into my eyes. “Did you have a very authoritarian father?”

  I laugh. “He only wanted me to love him,” I say, but I can’t hold his questioning eyes. I turn away from him and pick up the apple he dropped. “Love him with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind, and all my strength,” I say, looking away from him to the abbey.

  “That sounds really difficult,” he says to my shiny black back.

  “That was just his first commandment,” I say. “It was the second one that was really a bitch.”

  “Olivia,” he reaches for my hand, but finds the apple. He takes it and throws it hard away from us. I turn to watch it fly. It tumbles up into the night and lands precisely between the eyes of a cow. I gasp, but the cow does not move.

  “What will it do?” I whisper.

  “It’s thinking,” he whispers back, an infuriating smile staining his warm voice. “It’s thinking ‘Ow! What happened?’ ” I stifle a giggle at his witless cow voice. The creature bends its head and snuffs in the grass. “Now it’s thinking ‘Can I eat that?’ ” The beast raises its ghostly head, chewing.

  “What’s it thinking now?”

  “Nothing. It’s eating.”

  “Does it know what hit it?”

  “It’s forgotten.”

  “Do cows believe apples just fall out of the sky in the middle of a field?”

  “They’re not very smart.”

  “Let’s go back,” I say, stepping over the wall and walking past the stupid cows toward our bikes. Dominic follows me because I am beautiful. And the cows, because they are true believers, stand still.

  ———

  Dominic sank into a plush wingback and gazed through the glass dome soaring stories overhead into the dull dawn sky. The metallic hail of ball bearings absorbing his weight on the chair would summon one of the wheeling brass carts to his side in minutes. Deserted at this ungodly hour, Hell’s lobby was almost indistinguishable from any luxury hotel’s. Clusters of overstuffed chairs and artfully placed trees in massive pots defined discreet seating alcoves. Were it not for the complex pattern of energy-harvesting canals in the floor and the flame-licked walls, he could be back in California waiting for Madalene Wright to summon him for a status report. And he would be able to give her good news.

  Dominic leaned back into the welcoming comfort of the chair and allowed a secret smile to radiate across his face. It reached into the tight hinges of his jaw and spread an unfamiliar warmth across the muscles of his neck and back. Olivia’s perfect face drifted before his closed eyes, and he lingered over his memory of it, her oceanic eyes, gray and stormy, her slender sh
oulders of milky satin over sculptured strength. He was falling in love with her. He opened his eyes and stared straight through the distant dome into the Irish dawn. He was in love with her.

  A brass tray, spinning on its single wheel, pulled up beside his chair. Dominic unclipped the notepad and pen from its polished surface and hesitated. He could write for a menu and one would be sent, or he could conjure from his own imagination anything he wanted for breakfast. He thought a minute and wrote “oatmeal, coffee, eggs, yogurt,” and closed his eyes again to find the tidal tug of Olivia’s face circulating through him.

  He caressed the memory of her icy fingers gripped in his, recalled the lunar paleness of her high cheekbones when her flawless face turned up to him. Permitting himself, sleepy, to swim in memory of the most desirable woman he had ever seen, he was still not slipping into seizure. No slippery events slithered into his recollections of Olivia that had not occurred on the black abbey grounds. Her alluring smile, holding out the apple, the erotic shudder of her velvet lips around his finger. These were his most perilous waters, the thoughts most likely to trigger the unwelcome faces of wives whose names drove yawning gulfs of longing and grief into him. But he was happy. Bordering on euphoric.

  Dominic touched his fingers to the carotid pulse below his jaw. It beat steadily, his breathing regular. No indication of abnormal mania. His mind was clear. But he was in love. Love lit up the caudate nucleus, primed dopamine receptors, and triggered seizures. But there he sat, with just the elevated energy, focused attention, and increased reward-winning motivation of a man catapulted into Heaven by a woman’s eyes. His latest pills were working!

  Dominic resisted the urge to leap onto the ebony table behind his chair, throw his head back, and howl in triumph. He hadn’t had a seizure since the snake in the buried garden. And he wasn’t convinced that insidious creature had been a proper seizure. There had been no taste aura, no sense of déjà vu, or memory. It had been more hallucinatory than engramic. Full-blown immersive hallucinations would destroy the promise of the AEDvIII.0s, and Dominic intended to be vigilant against any similar experience, but he suspected the serpent had more to do with where he was than what he was taking. No, there was good reason for optimism.