and Falling, Fly

by Skyler White

  “We’re cursed, my darling,” she purrs against my shoulder, tempting our unsubtle onlookers with glimmers of vampire lesbian kitsch. “We can never get what we want.” Her hand runs over the hills of my lap. “Our daddy told us no.” She thrusts her lower lip into an alluring pout and scans the club’s front room.

  It’s red as a new bruise, and crammed with kids burning time and tobacco, waiting for the band my pale blond sister, and now I, the raven, have come to see. “If Adam could have loved me after I told him the truth, if I had showed him the wingscars, told him the curse…”

  “Why isn’t it enough that he wanted you?”

  “He didn’t want me,” I tell her. “He couldn’t even see me.”

  “He saw the outlines of you; that’s enough for men. They fill in the rest with their own desires.” Evelyn waggles her fingers at a skinny tattooed kid across the room. A chain runs from his thick wrist to a choker-mounted D-ring worn by one of the club’s few mortal females. “He wants me,” Evie whispers to me. “He wants to possess me. Don’t you just love that?” She giggles. “I love being wanted. I love the joke. I am desire. They all want me. But I’m the one who takes them.” Evelyn’s laugh is shockingly carefree in a room heavy with shouldered darkness. “I drink them in, possess them, and they never know it, drunk on their hunger and their dreams of possession. What fools.”

  “You hate them,” I say.

  “They’re so blind and their desires are so strong—of course I hate them. Don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you should.” Evelyn flips her hair back from her bare shoulders. “It makes it easier to kill them.”

  “I don’t kill.”

  “Ever? Really? I thought that devil had claimed all my sisters.” Evelyn pats my black latex leg again. “Cheer up. Maybe tonight’s your lucky night. You look primed for it.”

  She cocks her head and listens to the protracted shouts from the far room. “That’s the end of their set, the bastards. I’m glad they’re done. The next band is worth seeing though. I’m hunting their singer.” I can barely hear my sister, but Evelyn isn’t talking to me, just telling tonight’s events on time’s black rosary beads. Evie has never visited the Quarry. She’s poacher to her blighted core.

  Her lips touch my neck, just below the ear. “Why do you suffer so much in search of your loophole,” she whispers, “when it may not exist at all?” Her fingers are in my hair. Her voice is in my head. Why do you think you can trick God out of the curse he put on us all? she psycasts into my mind.

  “I only want impossible things,” I whisper back to her inclined ear.

  “What you need is a drink.” Evelyn springs up and pulls me to standing without making space for me. Our marble bodies come together hard, and she closes her lips on mine in a deep display kiss for her no-longer discreetly peeking audience.

  But she kisses me almost gently. She does it for them, the gawkers, but she keeps her feeding teeth sheathed. Although our secret edges are so keen only the quills of our sisters can hone them, she does not use me for this now. It is the most generous thing she has offered. I take it.

  “Now,” she whispers, “let’s get you that drink.”

  My skin crawls with the eyes creeping over it, but Evelyn tugs me deeper into the ocean of black-clad, kohl-rimmed, multiple-pierced, barely suppressed rage. Two boys lean their narrow backs against the fetid corridor that links the cramped front room to the packed performance pit and platform. The boys’ delicate wrists are bare of the paper bracelets that mine sport to show I am of age to buy alcohol. Yeah, twenty-one and some zeros.

  In the corridor between the red room and the stage space, smoke-stained mirrors reflect us—blurred amalgams of the desires pinned to us. Our white skin glows weirdly in the hallway’s electric black lights. Evie winks at one of the boys. He looks left, then right, to see who the tall, large-breasted (ah, even larger-breasted) woman is looking at. Nonplussed, he frowns at her and points at himself. Evie licks her lips. He elbows his scrawny friend. His knees look unstable.

  Still holding my hand, Evie approaches the boys. The club won’t admit kids under eighteen—this could be their first time. He straightens up, wipes his white hands on his filthy jeans, and glances around and back at the stunning women advancing. Even reshaped by his desire, Evie is taller than the boy. She releases my hand to slide her long fingers up his skinny face, depositing me before his dumbstruck friend.

  He stares at me, and then at Evie, and does not blink. Evie closes her mouth to nibble at the boy’s virgin lips in soft, sucking kisses, while his friend just gapes before me. They are both immobilized. Evie runs her hands down her fig’s narrow shoulders to take his work-roughened hands. She carries them by their wrists to her high, swollen breasts. It connects a wire to a battery. His hands, mouth, and body convulse to wild activity. He gropes her breasts, presses his gangly body against hers, and thrusts his tongue into her mouth.

  Across from me, his wide-eyed friend manages to produce, “Urm. Hi?”

  I can smell the cheap meat his mother feeds him. The hinges of Evie’s jaw stretch. The razor edge is out; she is feeding.

  “I, ah…” The boy makes an awkward gesture toward Evelyn. “I like your friend.”

  My sinuous sister is twined around the boy, her gray eyes closed. I watch her swallow. “She likes yours,” I say.

  The oils of hamburger and crispy fish glisten blue over acne boils, and in his lank hair, but under it, his blood, a delicate hammer where vein crosses bone, pulses sweet and virginal. “What’s your name?” I ask him.

  “Jake. Jacob.”

  To a man-child already schooled in the indignity and dearth of dating and possession amongst the disposed, sexy older women who appear out of nowhere to proposition him must seem like a godsend. So I ask, “Do you believe in God?”

  The unfortunate gapes and stammers. Finally he shakes his head mutely, no.

  Why would he? God doesn’t really send women like me.

  He really doesn’t.

  “You’re not going to… ?” Jake shrugs toward his ravenous friend wound over Evie’s sculpted form.

  “No.”

  He had not hoped, but still, I can almost hear the door shut within him. He looks—not crushed, not even disappointed. He looks like a condemned man who hears the prison gate slam—unwelcome, inevitable. I step against his gently shaking body and touch my flawless cheek against his ruined one. “Did you think I was your loophole?” I whisper.

  His brown eyes are sunken from poor nutrition, and desperate out of both habit and need, but in their darkness I see hope glint. I am his way out. He nods. His coarse, cautious hands touch my slender waist. Deep in my gums, my feeding quills throb.

  Evelyn’s fingers snake through mine. She shakes out her blond hair and unpeels the hungry child from her body.

  “See?” she says, pulling me from Jacob, “don’t you feel better after a drink?”

  Evelyn has impeccable timing.

  She leads me away from the two lost boys into the stage hall at the moment the crowd erupts in a thundering roar. It is answered from the darkened stage by a bass drum concussion. Again, and then again. The pounding pummels me. Speakers stacked high as bell towers force rhythm against my blasted chest and up through the soles of my feet. I close my eyes and pretend it is a native pulse, not the kick drum, beating my ribs. We are pulled forward with the screaming surge driving toward the stage.

  The singer, perched on a speaker bulwark, stretches his arms over the crowd, whose inarticulate howls he goads on like Hell’s cheerleader. “Make some fucking noise!” he screams. They bawl back at him, mouths splayed, fingers raised in devil’s horns or clenched into fists. They punch or prod at the stage. The singer shouts back, “Louder!”

  In pockets around us, the bizarre ritual of mosh pits opens the crowd in rings of stylized violence. Shaved, pierced, sweat-drenched, and suddenly shirtless men barrel their way to the perimeter. They stand, forming the circle, arms cross
ed over chests, preening biceps, waiting their turn within.

  I study the man my sister hunts. His unnatural voice claws my bones like memory, alternately a shrill shriek and base growl, but it won’t change the shape of anything. Maybe no voice still can. I close my eyes to feel it grate. He might well nurse a demon seed within him. He knows he is not innocent, but for all his accessories, I know he is not evil. He is, at worst, a minor imp.

  In the press of people and the stifle of desire, rage squeezes. The sounds and pressures rake my marrow, scratching Adam’s sincerity and faith to bleeding inside me. Evie is right. I am primed to kill. My faith in loopholes is only a poorly buried attempt at supernatural sleight of hand. I had cloaked Adam in my hope, but men no longer wrestle angels, and the cheap magician’s cape falls to the dust. No man will ever know me, actually and biblically. God never blinks.

  I turn to leave, but Evelyn is snaking through the mass again, leading me deeper against the pulse of sound. We stop behind a man whose colossal height eclipses the singer and invites fights. Bodies surge stage-ward and drive Evelyn against his massive back. He turns, fists balled. His black scowl reveals a true demonic lineage, but when he finds only a lithe blonde rippling under leather, the grimace vanishes. Evelyn has scented fresh prey.

  ———

  Eternity is forever, but humanity is infinitely fresh. Made and remade new, each life born unique. Every mortal heart, even the hard and broken ones, beat blessed, while my immortal hope lies dirty underfoot in the spilled beer and roach ends. The concert is over.

  Wait, Evelyn psycasts, seeing me turn to go. She dangles from the blunt elbow of her muscle-bound fig.

  I will wait with you, my sister, I reply, and we will feed together. Eternity drinks the moment.

  Evelyn rolls her gunmetal eyes. Rock on Nosferatu, she psycasts back at me. “The singer will send somebody out to find us and bring us backstage,” she shouts, too squeamish to risk contamination from my black mood by further touching my mind. She gestures toward the unsmiling immobile force beside her. “I’m taking Thor here, and I need you to come keep the singer occupied until I’m done with this one, okay?”

  Without pleasure, Sister, I stubbornly push into her mind.

  Evelyn grins and shrugs. “It’s this or go mad from boredom.”

  Can we go mad? I ask, but a pudgy troll-like man with a lanyard is approaching.

  “We’re angels, my darling, perfect in every way. Madness is unattractive. Smile!”

  She inclines her perfect head and whispers to the roadie. His squinty eyes dart to the towering column of compressed rage who wears my sister on his elbow like a hoop from a pierced lobe. The pig-troll shrugs. If the gorgeous blonde he was sent to fetch wants to bring that bruiser with her, who is he to stand in her way? He is not made for courage or independent thought.

  I am, but I follow Evelyn anyway, across the sticky floor, through a locked door, and down a fire escape to two buses parked behind the club. The troll, with unbreedlike flourish, taps a secret knock on the first bus. The glass and metal doors fold back and Evelyn, Goliath, and I step into the band’s enclosed ecosystem.

  Between the low-hanging canopy of smoke and the undergrowth of cigarette butts and Doritos, half a dozen sweaty and exhausted men lean like fallen trees against parallel rows of upholstered benches. The singer wears synthetic fangs and a silver ring in his nose, but he is beautiful, with eyes that dip gracefully downward at the nose. A black fae sprite more than demon, I decide. He extends his tongue and waggles it in greeting.

  Evelyn reaches into her pocket and extracts a silver flask.

  “Absinthe, fellows?”

  She is greeted with a cheer that even I join. This once-illegal, herbal liquor offers vampires our only intoxication and suddenly, terribly, I want to lose myself in its licorice caress. Anticipation bites the back of my throat. How had Evie secreted her antique flask past the metal detectors at the entrance? I don’t care. I only want to taste it in their blood.

  Evelyn produces slotted silver spoons from her thigh-high boots and the full theater of the vampire’s intoxicant unfurls. The bassist finds glasses, but the timid drummer, unwilling to partake of something so storied and so strange, retreats to the second bus.

  We balance diamond-shaped sugar blocks on the holes of flat-bladed spoons and trickle water over them until the absinthe louches, a pale, milky green. Evie raises her cup to me, the brass key, which hangs by a hair-fine cord from her wrist, clinks against the glass. We drink, but it is wasted on us. Not yet, not this way.

  The secret rhythm bangs against the bus doors again. “Anyone want to go eat?”

  Evelyn and I exchange a secret smile. Yes, thank you. But inside the bus, men are standing and moving. The pairings are obvious: me with the singer, Evelyn with the behemoth. The remaining band and crew, amid jeers and punches, exit for the all-night diner.

  Evelyn doesn’t know about my month of rogue hunts, or she might not trust me so. She pours another glass for the singer I am meant to toy with until she wants to feed, and one for me, but not for herself or the hulking man next to her.

  His heavy brows collide with confusion. “Hey—” he begins, but Evie turns on the narrow sofa wedged lengthwise into the bus, and kisses him hard, jaw flexing. He pulls away, hands on her small shoulders, all the lines of his harsh face replaced by a bruised look of wonder. Then the hunger catches him and the deep lines hatchet his face again. His strong body twists her under him, clapping her against his powerful chest, kissing her with force and rage and terrible need. Evelyn pulls at his shirt and he sits back to shrug it off. He begins to say something, to make a confession, to ask her name, but she pulls her own shirt over her head and he is lost again at the sight.

  “Poor bastard,” the singer says. His beautiful sapphire eyes run over Evelyn, bare-breasted and mauled. “She’s going to eat him alive.”

  I can’t help smiling. “You have no idea.”

  “So,” he asks me, eyes still on my delicious sister, “who the hell are you?”

  “I am the eternally damned.” I grace him with a benign smile. “Mine is a tortured soul, cursed by God through my immortal parents for a grave sin on their part.”

  “Cheerio!” he toasts, handing me my glass and raising his to it. “What did ol’ mum-n-dad do to the Godman?”

  “They seduced him.”

  I have all his attention now.

  “A kinky trinity?”

  “Indeed.” I nod gravely, although the smile tugs hard.

  The singer snorts. “Yeah, that father-son-and-ghost thing never struck me as the model of mental health!”

  At this, I laugh outright. “The original family values!” “Tossed out of Eden, were you?”

  “I have been denied any direct union with my God.”

  “Bastard,” he says.

  From the sofa, my sister cries out her impatience with her consort’s attention to her breasts, and drags his hungry mouth back to her own.

  The singer takes my limp hand. In mockery of a courtly gesture I had not realized I missed, he brushes my white knuckles with soft lips. He meets my eyes, running a pink tongue across his perfect teeth. “Mmmm,” he murmurs, “brimstone.”

  Vampires have no scent and no taste to our bodies, but this makes me giggle anyway.

  “And will you taste of fire?” I whisper. My deep feeding teeth pulse, and I turn his hand in mine to take the tips his fingers in my scarlet mouth.

  “I taste like sin,” he growls with the deep voice he sings in.

  He tastes human, salt sweat and blood. I run my tongue over his rounded fingers, flicking at the callused places, hard from guitar strings. But the razors break through and, without fully intending it, I pierce the delicate web between his index and middle finger. He flinches, but I can’t help the reflex to suck hard where I taste blood. He yanks his hand away.

  “You don’t like to be bitten?” I am wide-eyed innocence.

  “I will give you my throat, Lady, if you will
give me yours.”

  It is a game for him, but he plays it well.

  I pull my black hair away from my neck and raise my chin. The white length of my angelic throat shines exposed for him, and he bows his black-and-blue dreadlocks over my marble flesh. His kisses are surprisingly tender and deep, and utterly sincere. I let him kiss my neck, open the brass buttons of my velvet vest, and claim my swollen breasts in his hungry hands.

  Then I kiss him.

  He smells of liquor and desire, and I struggle to savor only his human kiss. His lips, warm and eager, close over mine, grow bolder, probe deeper until, with a little shudder, my drinking quills erupt. Now, as I kiss him, and as he kisses me harder and deeper back, microscopic serrations slit his lips and tongue. The clean green of absinthe clings in his mouth, and I suck at it for the wormwood and the iron, the mingled herbal and metallic threads in blood.

  Biting deeper into his absinthe-numb lips, I lose any knowledge of where his agile hands travel over my less-sensate body. There is only his mouth. Then only his pulse, dragging time slower. The blood dreams begin to trickle, swift peeks of memory, not deep, because I do not strike into him full-tooth, but fascinating glimpses—audiences and guitars. His rich taste is tainted with a welter of forbidden flavors and ideas, and I draw deeply from his mouth, craving the red strength, seeking the green high.

  A masculine strangling noise tears my attention. Evelyn’s fig is ashen. Some primal fear has awakened him, stretched prone beneath her, tiny puncture marks on his thick throat. Evelyn slides her nimble hand between his legs, and works her strong fingers over his cock in rhythm with her mouth sucking his again. The fallen colossus groans and pushes his hips against the wringing fingers. Evelyn has taken quite a lot from her first fig. She will want mine soon.

  The singer turns my face back to him, away from my feasting sister.

  “Where were we?”

  “We were comparing our damnations,” I say.

  He nods. “My damnation is darkest when I am not angry or afraid, when I cannot feel God damning or the devils tempting. Then, I am only pain.” Despite the flippant delivery, it is the first pure truth he has spoken.