Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  ‘That’s interesting,’ thought Lan, disturbed, watching herself sleep peacefully on as blood clotted in her hair and poured thickly down her back. The darkness and the deep red color made her skin look even whiter…or maybe she was getting paler. She was. And all at once, Lan understood that it was her blood in the water, her life falling out. She could see death washing over her, decay creeping in. Her skin shrank on her bones, losing its luster, sagging as the flesh beneath withered. Her blood-damp hair dulled and began to fall out. Behind her in the bath, the red water bulged and grew upward, taking on Azrael’s form, crowned with the same gold mask that had somehow vanished from the shelf without her noticing. He reached for her, his claws carving gashes in her slack flesh as he caressed her, but there was no pain. He said her name. Her eyes, shriveled in their sockets, opened at the sound, tearing her out from this eerie dreaming distance and anchoring her at once in her dead flesh.

  Lan jerked awake with a scream and a splash, smacking her hand on the lip of the bath as she reached for a knife she hadn’t worn in a year, then swung around and screamed again, throwing herself backwards with enough force to knock her own feet out from under her.

  Azrael caught her, laughing, and held her until she steadied. “Forgive me. I thought it odd you didn’t answer, but I didn’t realize you were asleep.”

  “I was dead.” She looked down, clutching at her chest where her heart still pounded, only slightly reassured by the sight of her undecayed flesh, shining with water, just water. “I was dead.”

  “Hush, now. Are you sleeping still? What is this dreaming talk?”

  “I was…I…I’m bleeding,” she said numbly.

  He took her wrist and held it up so he could see her scraped knuckles for himself. Spray from the fountain thinned the blood welling up from the very shallow abrasions, creating scarlet ribbons twining down her arm.

  “It isn’t serious,” he told her. Like she needed to be told at all, much less by a man with open wounds and exposed bones.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, staring fixedly as blood beaded up and washed itself away.

  “Mm.” He held her arm beneath the fountain’s fall, nuzzling as he did so at her neck, brushing his rough lips across the thin skin beneath her ear. “I forgive you.”

  She pulled her hand out of the fountain long enough to see it was still bleeding and shoved it back under the fall.

  He straightened and in his considering silence, she could almost hear his frown. “Shall I send for a doctor?” he asked at last, his tone one of neutral concern.

  “No, I…I’m fine,” she said and turned toward him to put her arms around his neck where she didn’t have to see the blood. It shouldn’t bother her—it never had before—but nothing felt normal now. She smiled at him; even her smile felt like crying.

  He was not drawn in. “What is wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  His jaw clenched. He made an effort to gentle his expression, but his true feelings were clear; he hated it when she lied to him.

  His mood was turning aside after all and this was not what his last memory of her should be. In some desperation, Lan surged up on her tiptoes and kissed him. He let her…but he did not kiss her back.

  “Did you come here to talk?” she asked, stroking the back of his neck just above the jut of bone. His newest flesh was sensitive to touch, she’d learned; his body felt pleasure best where it had suffered the most pain. “I didn’t.”

  One corner of his mouth twisted in a smile. “You place me in a difficult position.”

  “Yeah?” She pushed him back and he let himself be pushed, until he reached the stairs and sat at her direction on the middle one. There she pressed close, licking drops of bathwater away from whatever skin presented itself as she made her way down his body. “What position is that?”

  “I can either allow you to have your way…where I freely admit my preference leans. Flesh, as I once told you, has its own priorities.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Her tongue traced the firm hills and valleys of his abdomen.

  “Or I can pursue the truth, where I suspect my best interests lie.”

  “Better than this?” She trapped his stiffening cock between her breasts and rubbed herself along its length.

  “An unfair comparison. What are you trying to do, Lan?” he asked softly, seriously.

  “Get your end away without drowning,” she replied, stubbornly smiling. “It’s harder than it looks. Hang on.” She took a deep breath and submerged herself fully, sucking in a mouthful of water and directing it in little jets all along the underside of his shaft before coming up for air. She stroked him in her fist as she looked up through damp tangles of her hair to see his unsmiling face gazing down at her. “I’ve never done it in the water before. Have you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?” She dunked under to hide from him again, taking him into her mouth, but could only manage two or three shallow passes before she had to come up again. “That’s too bad. I kind of liked the idea of you doing something with me for the first time.”

  His hand, which had been idly combing through her hair, suddenly stopped, then gripped her chin and forced her to meet his narrowed eyes. “What?”

  Startled, Lan repeated herself.

  “That isn’t what you said. You said, ‘for the last time.’”

  Heat flamed in her cheeks. Had she? She must have. His memory was infallible. “I haven’t been sleeping well,” she told him. “Sorry.”

  He did not look convinced. When Lan reached for him again, he caught her wrist.

  He was going to be like that.

  Stifling a sigh, Lan used his grip to help her climb his body, doing her best to be sexy and slippery instead of guilty and exhausted. She must have had some success at it too, because she could see his eyes flickering with every awkward, slithery movement. When she finally came even with him, face to face, his doubts, although not wholly displaced, were comfortably swallowed by desire.

  “You trouble me,” he said gravely.

  “Sorry to hear that.” She went to work nibbling on his jaw, flicking her tongue lightly at the extremely unpleasant edge of his open scars as she followed it down to his collarbone.

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Okay, I’m not.” She kissed the hollow of his throat, lapping at the water that had collected there and tasting mainly soap.

  “I’ve never seen you like this before. I don’t like it.”

  “You’ve seen me like this plenty,” she said and boldly took hold of his firm cock. “And you love it.”

  He searched her eyes, frowning. “Please talk to me.”

  She kissed him, forcing their mouths together although he did not resist, bruising her lips with the violence of her conquest.

  He put his hand on her chest and gently, insistently, pushed her away.

  They stared at each other. The fire hummed. The water laughed. He waited.

  “Don’t you want me?” she asked finally. Her voice cracked, damn it. She was not going to cry!

  “You know I do.”

  She moved to straddle him. He pushed her back.

  “What do you want, Lan? Will you not simply tell me? Would I not give you anything you desired?”

  “Almost.”

  He shook his head, his jaw tightening, but he didn’t push her away. He brought her closer, wiping droplets of water from her cheek, her lips, her chin. “Can you not be a little happy with your heart’s penultimate desire? Must it be the world? Come, I will give you whatsoever else you wish if you will only name it.”

  She put her arms around him and pressed her brow to his, pressed hard. “I want you to miss me when I’m gone. Not for a thousand years or a million, but all of them, until there’s no more way to count them. I want to give you the best night of your life and I want you to remember it forever.”

  “Do you mean that as a blessing or a curse?”

  She was too tired to think before she answered. She told the truth: �
��A bit of both, I reckon.”

  He nodded, puffing out a breath that could have been a laugh with a little more effort. “Done. I think I can safely swear that you have been, remain, and forevermore shall be the sweetest thorn that ever stabbed me. What else shall you have of me?”

  “You know what I want.”

  “And you have known from the first you will never have it, but this melancholy is new. Come, Lan.” He brushed his fingertips across her cheek. “I see the shine of tears hiding behind your eyes even now. What wound is this? Tell me. Let me mend it.”

  “I…” Her voice failed. She hugged on him, hiding from him in his arms, but he only waited and at last, she whispered, “I don’t want to die.”

  He stroked her hair, combing out damp tangles with his claws in several long, slow passes before he finally said, “Then you won’t.”

  “Don’t. That’s not what I…” She tried to move away, but he would not release her and she was forced to press herself even closer to avoid his searching gaze. “I’m tired. It’s making me stupid.”

  “You’re tired,” he agreed, still stroking her hair. “It’s making you honest. Lan, I do not say I will raise you up tonight. I would not, even if you asked me. I will have you and cherish you all the years of your life, but you have my word on it. I will never let you die.”

  “But you can’t make me live.”

  “Lan,” he said, more a growl than a sigh.

  “It’s not the same and you know it! That’s why you wouldn’t trade for it, even when I said I was willing. That’s why you won’t do it tonight, even if I ask! Because you know better than anyone, you can make me love you, but you’d always know it wasn’t—”

  He dug his fingers into her hair and pulled her hard against his mouth, silencing her with his kiss. Her pliancy, her silence, only seemed to provoke him to greater ferocity. He took what she willingly gave, dominated what she freely surrendered. One hand dropped to squeeze with bruising force at her thigh, yanking her leg around his waist. In answer, she lifted the other and laced them behind him, rolling her hips lightly against the chill hardness of his erection.

  He refused to be placated. Snarling into her mouth, he lifted her, jostled her into position, and drove himself home in one powerful motion. She lost her grip on him immediately, but didn’t fall; in the water, she was nearly weightless. One hand at her hip was enough to support her even through the fury of his thrusts. The other stayed knotted in her hair, forcing her to meet his hungry mouth. Waves broke over the tiles as he made her ride him harder and faster, washing out as far as the stuttering fire, splashing up between them with every wet slap of their bodies.

  He had always been passionate, but never violent. It should have frightened her, but she could feel nothing but a heartsick throb of sorrow and the purely physical rush of her body’s responses. Nothing was going the way she’d planned, but events were set in motion and she couldn’t stop them now.

  He broke his brutal kiss to watch her cum, his eyes blindingly bright, hot with triumph. His own climax seemed almost an afterthought, a careless shrug at the end of a particularly effective argument. He set her on her feet, sharp teeth bared in a savage smile, and said, “It wasn’t real.”

  She blinked, disoriented, trapped between her body’s heightened sensation and the dark storm of her thoughts. “What?”

  “That is what you were about to tell me, is it not? I can make you love me, but I would always know it wasn’t real. And why? Because you arrogantly assume that life and love are one and indivisible. The soul must die, you think, and flesh cools and whatever happens after that must be of my own devising.” He advanced on her, pushing her back along the side of the bath with the intensity of his stare alone until she bumped the corner. His hand darted out, seizing her sex; his thumb teased at her clit; his fingers parted her, pierced her. He smiled, feeling the immediate, hungry grip of her body.

  “This is the nature of flesh,” he told her, almost purring. “It does not rationalize its desires. It asks no permission, considers no consequence. It only feels, be it warm or cool.” He lifted her up on his hand, fingers pumping harder, bringing her still-humming nerves to a second explosive peak almost instantly. He set her down again, not as gently as before, causing mini-waves to ripple outward and come sloshing back even bigger than before. “This is flesh,” he said again. “And if flesh can teach you nothing else, child, it will teach you that life is not love.”

  “Neither is sex.”

  His smug smile faded.

  “I may not be as old as you, but even I know that much. And I know that sex, when it’s just about bodies and not people, isn’t that great. And you know it too.”

  “Do I.”

  “I can prove it.”

  He uttered a humorless challenge of a laugh and rolled one hand through the air before folding his arms over his naked chest.

  “If you could pick my next words, what would they be? Fuck me? Or I love you?”

  His lips thinned in a smile. “Fuck me,” he said. “And I would choose them again and again, were not the limits of your mortal flesh a factor.”

  She merely nodded, unsurprised and a little impatient. “And if you couldn’t pick them, what would you want them to be?”

  His smile faded, then grew back cold. “Is this your latest offer, diplomat? You offer to say these things if only I would take back my hungering dead?”

  “You’re not getting it. This has nothing to do with what I’d actually say or even what I want to say. It’s about what you want to hear and why.”

  “And you think I want to hear these hollow oaths so desperately that I would give over all my victory? You think I find your honeyed lies so much more precious than your honest flesh?” He thrust his face at her, his eyes blazing and fangs exposed. “I don’t need your words and I’ve had your body. I will not lay down my hungering dead for a promise of either.”

  Lan sighed and waded past him, out of the bath. Each shallow step took more and more effort to climb, as if her failure were waiting for her at the top with a weight all its own.

  “You’ve no right to be angry,” he said at her back.

  “I’m not. Just disappointed.”

  “That I would not be trapped?”

  “That you think that’s what I was doing.”

  She heard a soft slap and rasp behind her—the unmistakable sound of Azrael rubbing at his scars. For a moment, she thought he might call her back, but in the end, he simply got out of the water.

  “We’ll speak later,” he said curtly, picking his wet clothes off the floor and dressing in them. “After you’ve slept.”

  She tried one last time. “There won’t always be a later.”

  “Yes!” he snapped. “Always! There will not always be mercy, there will not always be compromise, but there will always be time and I can give it to whomever I please, whether they desire to receive it or not! So go to bed, Lan, and we will talk later!”

  He left, slamming the door behind him hard enough to make the bed curtains flutter.

  Lan took the coverlet off the foot of the bed and wrapped herself in it. She sat down, watching the firelight shine over the many little lakes left on the floor.

  After a while, she reached under the mattress and brought out her hidden treasures. She smoothed the paper out over her thigh and read the words that stranger in the library had written like she’d never seen them before: You will never understand until you lose someone you love. She put it on the bed beside her and picked up the knife.

  She held it.

  Eventually, she looked at it. The handle was decorated with a pattern of roses and vines. The blade was fat and rounded, too short for the length of the hilt. Pretty, but not very functional.

  Hesitantly, she drew the blade along the inside of her arm. It dimpled the skin, nothing more.

  She sat.

  After an endless, unmeasureable span of time, she gripped the handle tightly, took a deep breath and pulled the blade across her
arm in a quick jerk. Strangely, she saw the blood before she felt the pain. It poured out of her so much faster than she expected. Alarmed, she dropped the knife and clapped a corner of the coverlet over the wound, only now feeling the pain. When she lifted the coverlet a minute later, she could see the pale lips of the wet wound gape for an instant before fresh blood spilled out. Her stomach flipped over queasily and clenched into a cold knot.

  Pushing the coverlet back (but not taking it off; she could do this, but only if she didn’t have to see), she picked up the knife and made another little cut. She decided it didn’t really hurt that much. Like a bee-sting, it was more the throbbing heat that followed than the actual injury. She made a neat ladder of cuts, trying to make each a little deeper than the one before, then covered the whole thing over with the blanket and watched the grey fabric turn black.

  It was too late to pretend she could just stop now. She couldn’t hide what she had done and besides, her note was already written. Time to stop mucking around and just do it.

  She wished Azrael kept a bottle or two in the bedroom. Maybe this would be easier if she was tight.

  “Live and learn,” she muttered, then realized what she’d said. She laughed a little. Cried a lot. Then picked up the knife and placed the blade against the side of her throat.

  ‘You might save the world with one good blow,’ she thought. His words. His voice in her mind. And maybe it was even true. In that moment, it was almost as if she leaned back out of her body and watched, as of a film projected into the room. She could see herself, an Eater (she looked a lot like her mother), raised up and shambling in hungry discontent back and forth across the floor (so much like her mother), with old blood staining her body and her hair still damp from the bath. She could see Azrael open the door, see his eyes go wide and bright, see his mouth behind the mask gape in a silent howl of grief…or maybe he wouldn’t. The film skipped and ran itself back and now he was opening the door again. He waved his hand, just as he had done for his Children that night in the dining hall, and the Eater she had become dropped like meat to the ground to be cleared away by his attentive chamberlain. He might mourn her and certainly he would remember her, but there would always be another dolly come along to comfort him.