by Trisha Telep
She slips from the vaulted arcade of the museum and into the horticultural gardens of the Cuxa Cloister. She holds her champagne glass aloft, like she belongs there, but no one is around to see. It’s cold in Manhattan, and elsewhere bodies are tightly packed in a manic bid to stay warm and connected. Here, however, Ina freefalls into the darkness, with only torches to light her way as her heels clip-clop against 900-year-old Stine never meant to see the New World.
Russell is waiting where the note said he’d be, leaning against the rampart of the west terrace, with Fort Tryon Park dropping down the hill behind him and, beyond that, the Hudson. Ina’s first instinct upon sighting him is to flinch. He’s pretty in that unearthed way; a strong chin inherited from someone who may or may not have been strong and a physique built in front of mirrors, where grunting loudly and breaking a sweat while some pop tartlet’s video plays in the background means a good day’s work. He has done his work for the day, and showered since, but it’s the stench of his motives and thoughts and past deeds that helps Ina pinpoint him in the dark.
The scent is so strong, so perversely recognizable, that it takes a moment for her to notice the two women slumped on each side of him. Perfume and beer and desperation assail Ina as they both shift upon seeing her, and she can tell they just came from that twisting, gasping mass of humanity at the core of this city, which will soon pulse as one.
As if, she thinks, the entire world is one giant heartbeat pumping for her.
Russell laughs when Ina licks her lips. Clearly she has made the mistake of telling him in some previous ‘lifetime’ that in the eleventh hour every human she passes is a dusky red temptation. Thus the women.
“Ah, lovely Ina. Fucking ravishing . . .” His eyes trail her body like he knows it. “Though it looks as though you’ve been stealing kisses from nefarious places.”
Ina doesn’t smile, and his companions look disturbed that he should actually know her. Russell leans against ancient brick, enjoying the reaction. Ina imagines he’s said the same thing to her every year for the past eight. She both wishes she can remember and gives thanks that she can’t.
“Let’s go,” she says shortly. Even had she wanted to converse with him, she’d have trouble doing so. For the past three weeks she’s had trouble completing thoughts, much less sentences. She is now so distracted by the impending hour, so obsessed with crossing into the next, that she wants to jump from her own skin. Hunger and desire, her sharpest weapons, are now turned against her. She knows it was the same last year because she’d written it down in a pained, sharp scrawl.
Russell gifts her with an oily smile. “Come Ina. Stay awhile. Perhaps you’d like something to drink?”
He’s fucking with her. She’d written it down too. He will fuck with you. He always does.
Russell frowns when she doesn’t react, which would be enough to cause her to smile, but the shadow that cuts across the torchlight like a falling axe widens it on her face.
“The lady said move.”
The voice is silken death. It belongs to Alexander. And he is hers.
He is wide, shoulder to thigh, muscled beneath the denim, menacing even as he drops a light palm to her shoulder. Her memory of him may only reach back a dozen months, but she knows that touch anywhere, and can tell it’s the same for him. The heart always recognizes its twin, even when the mind is forced to forget. Ina looks up, watches the light flickering in his black hair like it’s kindling there. She likes to tease that the threading grey is as golden as the sun. It makes him snarl, which she loves.
Russell jolts upright and the women flanking him actually flee, probably unaware it’s a prey’s instinct causing them to do so. Russell recovers by sucking on the neck of a dark bottle, scowling at the departing women. They had stifled their screams, but the squeals and relieved giggles fly over the rampart walls once they deem themselves safe. There’s nothing more reassuring than the receding effects of adrenaline.
Meanwhile, Russell soaks in the alcohol like a sponge. A foul weak human with poisoned blood, he’s a natural disaster, but that’s why they chose him all those years ago, and it’s what makes him perfect for the task. That, and that he can be so easily bought.
Recovered from the jolt Alexander has given him, Russell jerks his head. With drink-induced bravado he leads them back through the gardens and along the covered walkway, past brightly lit rooms filled with music and laughter and medieval treasures a man such as Russell shouldn’t even be allowed to breathe upon. But Russell is ignorant of real treasure and more intent on slipping through the narrow stone arcade before them, then down the dark stairs and into the ageing park. Ina sidles up to Alexander once their soles hit the winter earth, and when he takes her hand she’s almost warmed.
Still, right now Alexander reminds her of an ancient warrior, his gaze distant and trained on an unseen threat. He belongs in armour, palming shield and sword while he screams murderous intent to the skies. The only time that distant gaze melts into focus is when it’s turned upon her face, and this is what brings out Ina’s warrior side. That softening gaze makes her feel powerful as well, like she could crush a man with no more than a smile.
Russell keeps the lead all through the park, alternately swaying and swaggering as he steers them over the dormant heath and ivy clinging to the gently sloped hillside. A running monologue of curses and bullshit streams from his mouth like sewer water, which neither of them care to, or even can, concentrate on. They remain so silent that every few yards Russell has to look back to make sure they’re still there. Perhaps he’s hoping they’re not.
But despite his bluster and bravado, the path he carves towards the Hudson Parkway, where they first met, is unfailingly direct. It’s New Year’s Eve and he wants to be done with this dark chilling business, and get back to the light and warmth of those who age. The beer had made him boisterous and the night giddy, and he laughs too loudly in the silence of a park that has been abandoned for places that glitter and wink. It seems everyone in New York is indulging in the fantasy that tomorrow life somehow really will be different.
Ina smirks knowingly. For her, this is actually true, but even as the thought fans the embers of her hunger, she remains cynical. It’s hard to be expectant of a future when you never possess a memory beyond a dozen months. Still, to cynicism or not, there’s no way to stop that ticking clock, or to convince others that their hope for the future – now rising like impotent prayers in the empty night – is fragile, misplaced, unheard. Better to hope one simply lives through the night.
Ina grimaces as she swallows back blood-tinged saliva, her attention abruptly drawn to the artery in Russell’s neck. It pulses like cascading neon, beckoning and bright against the pitch-black park. He turns, thinks she’s smiling, and smiles back.
“Yo, Alex,” he calls, somehow knowing Alexander hates the grating of the single syllable on his foul tongue. “Your girl wants me.”
He laughs and laughs and Alexander grips Ina’s hand so hard he breaks the bones in her pinky finger. The pain gives her something to think about and takes the edge off her hunger, though it’s only a temporary solution, like putting a numbing ointment atop a fresh wound. But it’s her turn to calm Alexander now – thank God they alternate their little breakdowns; she thinks it’s one of the things that makes them so good together – and she keeps her tone light as they turn the final corner around an oak being strangled by ivy. The three of them slip under the recessed bridge like a series of dark tides. “Don’t you ever shower, Russell?”
“Wants me, Alex,” Russell sing-songs again, walking backwards and pretending to shoot at them with unloaded fingertips. “Bad.”
“Kindly retrieve the chains.” Alexander’s voice skirts beneath the bridge like wind-whipped gravel, and Ina shudders in pleasure. God, even his voice moves her. “Do her first.”
Russell is unhinged by the threadbare sound too, but he’s done this eight times before, and dismisses any threat of danger as he turns away, giggling something a
bout freaks and peep-shows and shit. His boots slap at the grime-caked concrete reminding Ina of flippers or clown shoes, and she snorts. She likes clowns. Alexander tightens his grip again and, though she quickly sobers, she doesn’t mind his small show of temper. He’s doing this for her, after all. For them.
So she thinks of Alexander’s footsteps instead of Russell’s, the light and assured way in which he walks through this world . . . beside her. She’s written before about how the sight of him always calms her, and it does that again as she gazes up to find him backlit in grey silhouette, a three-dimensional cut-out against a two-dimensional world. In artificial light he is unremarkable, if tall, and he comes from an age that valued a close shave at pate and neck, fortunate that it is fashionably classic. But in the dark, where he is at home, those smooth features blur into a block of unyielding stone.
Alexander follows his own whim; he is wearing rims he doesn’t really need and still sporting a light accent he adopted in his time spent in Louisiana before finding himself, and Ina, in New York. She only knows this because he was keeping record even then.
Yet while no bald evidence of discomfort plays across that stoic face. Ina sees he isn’t entirely settled. There’s a midnight knowledge of the deed to come lurking behind his eyes, a carnal flinch as Russell calls Ina forwards, though Alexander never even blinks.
Ina joins Russell at the midway point, where the darkness narrows into a span of only eight feet, the light from each end of the tunnel flickering like tapers losing fuel. It’s not a proper bridge, mostly meant for run-off from the park, but it’s solid and remote and this perfectly suits their purposes. She drops her handbag along the incline of the wall where shadows eat it whole, while flicking a cursory glance at the sacrifice, already there, slumped in the tunnel’s concave centre. It’s a woman and it has dull brown hair that’s muddy and matted, jagged fingernails and a bottom lip split from an unnecessary blow.
Ina slips her back to the wall, ignoring the way Russell feels her up on the way to manacling her wrists. She can’t help but bare fangs when he grinds against her, but Alexander, more controlled, glares at her. She swallows her fury and stares out over Russell’s greasy head. His foul breath billows up like a garlic cloud around her as he laughs. Garlic. Yeah, that’s really fucking funny.
Russell isn’t so far drunk on drugs and power that he forgets Alexander, unchained, at his back, and he doesn’t linger over Ina. She imagines he’ll come back once they’re both tightly secured. Ina’s knees had been caked with the alley’s dirt at her rebirth this year. The previous year, she’d written about semen in her hair. It’s thinking about this, and about all the indignities she can’t remember, that makes her start to shake.
Be strong, Ina tells herself, strong like Alexander. See how he seeks Russell’s gaze, his own expression carefully blank? See how compliant he is when his wrists are shackled at his side? There’s more strength in one of those beautiful hands than in Russell’s entire body, yet he has pulled it back, hidden it deep and done it for you. No, Alexander has the hardest, lowest task by far. The least Ina can do is tolerate Russell’s prodding fingers.
Finally Alexander is bound too and his iron chains clank gently as he tries their hold. Russell turns back to her with a glint like acid rain sparking in his eye, and he steps over the sacrifice like it’s part of this wasted alley. He can go away now, his job done, his financial life, his mortal life, secured for another year. He doesn’t need to stay for the rest, and indeed – even though they’re both shackled to chains that’ll only give three feet in any direction – it’d be safer for him to be long gone by then.
But Ina has a feeling Russell never leaves. She feels that he’s the freak he was giggling about under his breath earlier. 'the’s the one who likes his peep show.
“Tell me more about the build-up Ina. Tell me about how you can feel the year folding up around you –”
Folding up around me like a black silk scarf.
Oh, God. She’d told him about that. Ina swallows hard, a reflex unable to keep from glancing Alexander’s way. He is indiscernible against his wall, but she knows he isn’t happy. He hats surprises.
Russell nudges the sacrifice with a toe, but he only has eyes for Ina. In the dark, they are mere pinpricks, even with Ina’s strong sense of sight. “You’ll do anything for it, won’t you? Like some bitch in heat –”
“Fucking cliché.” The insult escapes as if on its own accord. She hates clichés, and this capacity to hate silly things is one of her weaknesses. Alexander hates nothing, therefore he cannot be moved to anger like this. He loves her, however, which Ina supposes makes her his weakness.
She hangs her head at her bad behaviour, but not before she sees Russell’s chin lower, the pinpricks tightening upon themselves. “Oh, because you bloodsuckers don’t deal in cliché? Shit.” Russell is pacing now, working up his mad, as they say in Louisiana. “You approached me, remember? No, of course you don’t.”
And the forgetting, at least, wasn’t cliché. No paperback or Hollywood flick had ever gotten that right. They just gloated over the compensation required to stay forever young, beautiful and strong. Odd that it wasn’t obvious. It makes perfect sense to Ina that mortals age under the weight of their memories – all they’ve done and, even more, what they haven’t. It is these regrets that make them old and wrinkled, wistful and bitter, that her death-day marches down upon her as their birthday’s do, wanted or not. However instead of waking each year to a new wrinkle, she wakes to a literal stranger in the mirror.
That, Ina thinks, she can handle. But Alexander as stranger? She looks over to where he is draped shapelessly in shadows. That she cannot.
Meanwhile, the ignorantly ageing Russell is still ranting in front of her. “You need me, you bloodless husk. You need me to set all this up, find a sacrifice, chain both you fuckers apart in order to keep you together. And you’ll do exactly what I say if you want to get it.”
“Remember your humanity,” Ina warns, though she’s chained like the bitch he compared her to.
“Remember the ‘man’ in that humanity, whore.” He is fast with his words. His mind could have gotten him far if he’d been a lawyer or a doctor or a comedian, and not a lazy, second-rate crook skilled only at turning his own luck bad. “I know all your homicidal secrets. Bite me and you’re lost to each other in the next lifetime. And for ever.” He has reassured himself at least, and he stands before her, straight-spined, in a practised pose, and within reach. “Now, tell me what it feels like right now. How you lose control and start licking and sucking everything in sight.”
If he were anyone else, she might, because this isn’t it at all. Simple lust can’t describe the way emotions are suddenly spun like silk, the textures soft, but so multi-layered and startling that when Ina finally feels the weight of them she wants to weep. It is this awakening need to feel that is the true hunger, and Ina becomes so addled that she even puts food in her mouth. (Her favourite chocolate on the tip of her tongue, its contrast and silkiness as it melts to coat the back of her throat. It is lovely all the way up until she pukes.) She eats this unnecessary subsistence, sightless and slightly manic, until colour suddenly blooms on her tongue. She looks down to find her finger in her mouth, her blood on the tip. Her blood, but no matter. Hunger soars like a bird of prey in flight.
But explaining nuance to Russell would be like reciting algebra to a dog. Besides, he’s right. He holds the keys to their fate, which probably explains his hard-on. He’s the fucker who demands they meet on the very last night, when decisions must be quick and absolute, and when he has someone more powerful than he’ll ever be by the metaphorical balls. It is the only time of year – and probably in his pitiful short human life – when he knows he can squeeze.
“Hope you took good notes this year, Ina, baby.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“What? Ina?” he asks, with oily innocence. “But it’s your name, isn’t it?”
He tilts his head.
His hair greased to perfection, doesn’t alter, but the move exposes his neck. “Or is it?”
Alexander jerks his head once. Ina bites back her reply.
“’Dear diary’,” Russell mimes a cursive hand in the icy air. “’Please don’t let me forget my true love after I suck the life out of my last victim of the year. Please let us stay together for ever. I really like the way he fang-fucks me.’”
“Fuck you,” Ina says before she can stop herself.
“Now there’s an idea.” Russell smiles crookedly. “But not a very novel one.”
An admission now that they are both shackled and he knows she’ll soon forget. He looks at his watch and pushes a button so the face lights up, then flashes her the time. Two minutes to midnight. In other parts of the city, party-goers are swilling drinks with bubbles, wearing shiny hats, hoping the mania they feel now will be a strong enough tide to ferry them across the threshold of the new year.
“But I have a better idea this year. Why don’t you let me read that little book you pass back and forth? I want to see what you remember. I want to see how you remember. It’s in there isn’t it?”
He points to Ina’s bag. He knows they must have it close. Their own belongings are the first things that call to them upon their rebirth, so it’s important to keep it all together and keep it near. That’s how it works. Find Russell, the fleshy guide who will bind them, ensuring they stay where they are and share in the same blood without killing one other. Then bring along the written guide so they may find themselves after and, finally rediscover each other. Russell clearly knows all this, though again, Ina doesn’t recall telling him.
“Don’t touch it,” Ina warns as he does just that. He leans low and, when he rises again, he swings the bag side to side in the air, laughing and nearly stepping on the sacrifice that currently divides, but will soon reunite. Alexander and her.
Russell is rummaging around inside the handbag now. It is packed as Ina instructed three years ago. She is only surprised it has taken him this long to think of it. “Where is it, you bloodthirsty bitch?”
