Tristan had long ago inured herself to being so different from everyone else, but the more time she spent around Mira, the more her armor cracked. Soon she’d be naked, a turtle without a shell, ripe for the picking by all the vultures. She squirmed a little. “It’s a fairly foreign concept.”
“I don’t get it. You’re smart, pretty…”
“Now we both know you’re lying.”
“I’m not! Hasn’t anyone ever said that to you before?”
Tristan thought about it for a moment. A sense of obligation probably motivated Mami Treszka’s compliments, thanks to Zsofika. Jinny certainly didn’t feel the same duty toward her, and Momma saw in Tristan’s eyes someone she didn’t want to. “To be honest…I don’t think so.”
Mira enfolded Tristan’s hand in her own. Feverish, clammy, but the single most beautiful hand in the world. “So let’s start this over again the right way. Hi, I’m Mira Tesler. Nice to meet you.”
“I’m Tristan Marcsa.” She squeezed Mira’s fingers. She had to tell her. She had to give her the choice of staying or of doing the smart thing and running. “And likewise. Mira…I haven’t exactly been straightforward with you, either.”
“Look. There are probably a lot of things we haven’t said to each other that we should. But it’s nothing that can’t wait until tomorrow.”
“Mira, you don’t understand—”
“Right now, I don’t want to understand.” Mira pulled her off the couch and down the hall to her bedroom. She locked the door behind them.
Though pointe shoes and ballet slippers dangled from the back of the closet door, and leotards, tank tops, and sweatpants dominated the inside, Mira’s private sanctuary revealed her to be anything but the stereotypical ballerina. Bookshelves labored beneath the weight of hefty epic fantasy paperbacks, Tolkien to Martin and everything in between. Limited edition PVC statuettes of large-breasted anime characters and DC Comics superheroines lined the windowsill and the top of her dresser. Regardless of the circumstances, jealousy nibbled at her. She was no saint. She envied the ordinary life such things represented. Tristan eyed the bed, the IKEA-style black and white bubble-patterned comforter and matching pillowcases.
“Well,” Tristan said, “this was definitely not what I expected.”
“When you’re in and out of the hospital and in bed a lot, you need something to do. But that’s not why I brought you in here, you know.”
Yes, Mira’s intent should have been obvious. The other girls who had shared that bed probably figured it out before they ever set foot in the room. Unfortunately, Tristan had never been in the position of “obvious” before.
The knife.
“Be right back.” Tristan exited the bedroom before Mira responded. She slinked into the living room and shoved the knife under the couch. It would have to suffice until Mira went to class and Tristan scoured the apartment for a better hiding place. On her way back down the hall, she stepped into the washroom and flushed the toilet.
Mira awaited her on the edge of the bed. “I have to pee when I get nervous, too.”
“You’re not nervous now?”
Mira traced a fingertip over Tristan’s lips. “No,” she said and smothered her with a kiss. They tumbled onto the bed in a tangle of limbs, the comforter scrunched beneath them, their tongues cavorting in and out of one another’s mouths.
A pleasant tickle arose from between Tristan’s legs and spread through her limbs with alcoholic warmth. Where should I put my arms? Is it too soon to touch Mira where I want her to touch me?
“You’re trembling,” Mira whispered in her ear. “It’s okay. Just relax. I’ll take care of you, I promise.”
Tristan had dreamed of those words so many times, to have the burden lifted from her shoulders, however briefly. She tried to stop thinking. Instead, she lay back as Mira peeled off her clothes piece by piece. Her T-shirt and bra vanished into the pool of darkness on the floor. Fingertips drifted over bare skin; lips caressed erect nipples. Silence but for short staccato gasps. A tongue flicked over ripe flesh, blood pounding just below the surface, pulsing in a primordial song of ecstasy. Kisses on her throat like the flutter of tiny wings.
Her head swam. The air was viscous and cloudy. A potent scent of funereal flowers. Lilies?
Mira hooked her fingers into the waistband of Tristan’s cheap underwear. She had bought them at Walgreen’s, and she prayed they wouldn’t rip. She lifted her hips and held her breath as Mira flung the underwear onto the floor, leaving Tristan’s body exposed.
Mira stood at the edge of the bed and undressed herself. If the world ended right outside the window, Tristan still would be incapable of wrenching her stare away from Mira’s body. The leotard had provided a decent preview, but now, free of spandex or wires and lace, her breasts beckoned Tristan to cup the perfect white mounds in her hands, to run her thumbs over the rosy nipples stiff from the room’s chill.
She quivered like a current of hot air as Mira wriggled out of her black panties—Victoria’s Secret, probably, with scalloped lace and a faux jewel just below the waistband. Mira had shaved her pubic hair into a thin, dark ribbon, while her legs and armpits looked as if they did not even possess hair follicles. Tristan squeezed her legs together a little, embarrassed by her full-blown bush and her unshaven limbs. Wasting time on landscaping had been so frivolous until then.
Mira stretched out beside her and parted Tristan’s legs with one hand. She drew lazy figure eights around her hipbones, over her thighs. Tristan closed her eyes. Mira gently pressed Tristan’s clit, which pulsated in time with her heart. She swirled her finger in circles, and Tristan arched her back, unable to speak or breathe or think or do anything except claw helplessly at the comforter. She’d never had the time or inclination to explore her own body in such a way; a kill always satisfied that urge, or so she’d thought. Little about the hunt compared to Mira’s touch. Nothing, in fact, compared to it at all.
She dug her nails into Mira’s skin, her moans muffled by a coronet of russet hair. An infinitely expanding burst of ecstasy, the beginning of a brand new universe, blasted through her body. Mira was the star at the center of the solar system, the sun that gave Tristan life. For all she tried to tell herself her feelings were mere chemical and biological reactions, only the death of time itself would pull her from Mira’s orbit.
Tristan laid her head against Mira’s chest. The rhythm of Mira’s heart pulsed against her cheek.
“It’s okay to be a virgin,” Mira said and chuckled. She enfolded Tristan in her arms as Tristan’s face heated up. “I assume you’ve never gone down on anyone.”
“Hence the “virgin” thing.”
“Do you want to try it?”
Just another skill to master. Looking at it that way made it far less intimidating. Sort of.
“Well…sure. I mean, I basically know what to do, I just…haven’t done it before.”
“It’s pretty easy. And I have a feeling you’re a quick learner.” Mira grinned and poked her tongue out between her teeth. “Ravish me.”
Tristan crouched between Mira’s legs and gazed in wonder at the swollen, shining lips before her. So many details she wanted to remember forever; the way Mira’s skin turned red, how she smelled like strawberries down there. Tristan bowed her head and offered a tentative lick of the damp, pink folds. The tang of Mira’s juices frolicked on her tongue. And sickness, too, in a sour undercurrent so subtle the typical person might mistake it as natural, if they tasted it at all. Mira gasped a little and lifted her hips. Tristan banished the worrying shadows from her mind and lapped at her with nothing less than the determination to make Mira come as hard as Mira had done for her.
Mira plunged her hands into Tristan’s curls and pushed her face down until all Tristan saw, tasted, or smelled was her. Tristan licked and swirled and sucked, her own pussy flooding with a ticklish heat again until it compelled her to slip a finger between her legs. They could do this all night. Or forever, in a rapturous ouroboros.
No.
“Jesus Christ,” Mira gasped. She slid her legs flat onto the bed. “Are you sure you haven’t done this before?”
“Positive.”
“Could’ve fooled me.” Mira laughed and burrowed under the comforter, where Tristan joined her. The heat radiating from their bodies formed a soothing, womblike nest, and all the worries Tristan shouldered in the world beyond those walls disappeared. “That was fuckin’ awesome, by the way.”
Tristan, lacking an appropriate response to such a compliment, simply smiled. Mira kissed her then settled into her pillow and closed her eyes. Beneath the scent of fresh sweat was the vanilla of handmade bath bombs from Lush, the kind that left glitter on the skin. Tristan used to smell it on the girls in high school all the time.
Mira’s breathing slowed into the cadence of sleep. Her lower lip pooched out in an adorable pout. Tristan nestled closer to her, her breasts against Mira’s and their heartbeats imprinting a serene pattern upon one another. She prayed she might somehow siphon away Mira’s illness. If her own body healed itself so quickly, maybe a way existed to transfer that power to someone else. Maybe all Mira had to do was…
No. How could I even think about dragging her into this, more than she already is? How could I ask her to feed off me?
Because I’d do anything to save her.
Tristan lifted Mira’s flaccid hand to her lips and kissed each knuckle. She circled her fingertips around Mira’s nipples, traced the delicate curves of her ribs as moonlight filtering between the blinds poured silver onto her skin. She had known it would happen as soon as she spotted Mira on the dance floor. That she would throw everything away, forsake the rest of the human race for an ultimately unattainable fantasy, and do it all for the one thing a Hunter was to deprogram herself from experiencing. Instead, she banished the weapons, the magic, the demons and psychopaths, from her consciousness because at that very moment, she’d done the unthinkable.
She had fallen in love.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Blessing climbed the rickety stairs that sagged under her weight and pushed open the door. The nave above glowed with a disarming amount of streetlight from its huge windows. Despite piles of wood on the floor and the absence of pews, the structure itself was a breathtaking beauty of columns and pointed ribbed arches, faded murals of saints painted on crumbling walls behind the bricks marking the altar and, in the highest windows above it, stained glass as vibrant as the day of its last congregation. Behind her, overlooking the nave, a wooden organ waited in the lonely stillness of decay for someone to awaken the music within.
Ladders and other tools had been abandoned mid-reconstruction. Letting such a majestic cathedral just sit there and rot was blasphemy, for Blessing felt God’s presence in every pane of glass, every brick and board. She cleared a space on the floor and sat down.
What emerged from the basement was not Anasztaizia—at least, not as Blessing recognized her. Perhaps due to her own awakening, as Anasztaizia had put it, or perhaps the gray and emaciated teenager walking in a defeated shuffle behind her, but the shroud lifted from Blessing’s eyes. Whatever the cause, the ineffable horror of Anasztaizia’s true face seared an image into Blessing’s mind no passage of time would ever expunge.
Curses were evil. The abuse inflicted on her was evil. She reclaimed the word, turned it back on the weak and imagined them choking on it, on their attempts to subjugate her with their false virtue. But what stood at the altar was more glorious and terrible than even words, with all their inherent power, might convey. Anasztaizia existed beyond mortal language.
The stench came first; an unmistakable odor of meat left out to spoil in the sun, layered with feces and topped by the syrupy smell of coagulated blood. Blessing’s stomach pitched, and she stopped inhaling through her nose before she vomited. Fluid leaked from the corners of Anasztaizia’s open mouth and from her nose, even from her ears and the alarming black eyes that ogled her intended prey with feral cruelty. Blisters dotted her face and arms. Where they had burst, they left behind spots of exposed muscle or even bone. With her shriveled lips pulled back, the tiny bladed teeth gleamed in the light, and her tongue lolled in and out of her mouth, tasting the scent of human in the air. Her hands moved in a chain of sensuous circles over her belly, her desire to feed laden with the universal principles of life, death, and sex. A triumphant Kali in white fur.
She pushed the naked boy toward the stack of bricks. Her fingernails were elongated, a bird’s talons. Blessing scuttled back in a crab walk as Anasztaizia’s mouth twisted into a nightmarish grin.
“You see now, don’t you? Then you are ready. I will take his breath when you have finished drinking.”
The child was either enthralled or too beaten to fight. There was no light in his sunken eyes. He knelt down without instruction and held his arm over a chalice Anasztaizia placed upon the makeshift altar. “‘For the life of the flesh is in the blood,’” she said to him, “‘and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh atonement for the soul.’”
“Why a child?” Blessing said at last.
“To spare him the pain of living in this abomination. Because children are the closest to God, and I am the means by which He calls them home.”
““This abomination.” The world?”
“I will tell you a secret. God did not create the world. It was a mistake borne of an angel’s sorrow. It is a miserable place because grief gave it life. Your friend will tell you this is wrong, but I tell you I wish only to spare others the suffering I have endured. It is an atrocity I must cleanse, for it was never meant to exist.”
“But how? How can you kill so many?”
“It is why I will transform, why I will be indestructible. To purify the world is to find my destiny as a perfecti. I will make others, they will make others, and we will pave the way for Sophia to return and put an end to her creation. Drink.” Anasztaizia held the boy’s arm and with her free hand drew her fingernail vertically along the pale blue ribbon visible beneath his tissue-paper skin. Blood brimmed up, a harsh red welt of color against this black and white facsimile of a child.
Blessing had known hunger before, but what howled into life within her were not the muscular contractions of a missed meal. It was the craving, the unconditional necessity, of life itself and the awareness that nothing less satisfied it.
“Hurry, before the wound closes. He does not even understand what’s happening. You won’t hurt him. Go on.” Anasztaizia lifted the child’s blood-streaked arm. Blessing crawled to him. He reeked of piss, and dust had mixed with sweat to form a crust on his skin. His unfocused eyes gaped past her. She hoped Anasztaizia had given him something nice to think of.
Blessing clenched the boy’s wrist and pressed her lips to the wound, his flesh as salty and dry as beef jerky. Her tongue tingled at the first drop of blood, and the rest of her body followed in a crescendo of rapture. Her heartbeat grew stronger, pumping energy to her weak limbs. The boy tightened his arm and sucked in a small gasp of air, a sound of pleasure more than pain.
Do you think Tristan could give you this? Has anything else in the world ever made you feel so alive?
It had not.
“Do not drink too much,” Anasztaizia said, her voice far away, “or you will kill him.”
The frenzied beating of his pulse against Blessing’s lips was less a warning than an invitation. She grudgingly let his arm drop, the memory of blood dancing on her tongue. It transformed her already. To settle for the sickening gruel of criminals any longer, polluted as it was with disease, drugs, and alcohol, was to deny an integral part of her. She could not change what she was.
Anasztaizia
gathered the boy into her arms. There was something almost maternal about the way she cradled him, something that alluded to the woman she never became.
“My turn.” She issued a silent command to rise. Even after unfurling himself from a slump, he was at least two inches shorter than her. She pulled him into an intimate embrace, and Blessing’s cheeks flushed with voyeuristic shame. Each gesture was as slow and tender as a lover’s, Blessing’s presence an intrusion on the most private of moments.
Her eyes stayed open as she pressed her mouth to the boy’s. How very like a kiss it was. How strangely similar the yearnings for food and sex, so often taken by coercion.
Her mouth parted, and so did his. His body betrayed his desire for her in both obvious and subtle ways, and again Blessing fought the urge to turn away. He was naked; he was entranced. His scrotum tightened, and his engorged penis arose like a strange pink banana growing from his groin. Blessing watched in fascination, for her experience with that appendage began and ended in its use as a weapon. But it did not belong to a fat, rich, cocaine-snorting witch hunter, and no one could hurt her anymore.
It was obvious he did not see the horrific things hidden within Anasztaizia’s eyes. The girl as she must have been in life, then: clad in sumptuous gowns, her brunette hair plaited with ribbons and flowers, her pale skin flawless. The desire of so many had they the fortune to catch a glimpse of her, for her father had kept her away in the tower so long. And then the man who claimed her for his own, the man with dark hair and pale skin—
Blessing did not speak, because she did not want to break Anasztaizia’s spell, but she acknowledged her secret, her truth, and their bond flowed more deeply even than Blessing’s connection to Tristan. The agony of violation, the betrayal by family, Anasztaizia had endured it all. In her most vulnerable state, she allowed Blessing a glimpse into her psyche, and there Blessing saw herself. Kindred spirits; sisters born of sorrow.
Those of My Kind Page 17
