by Skyler White
“Then what do you see that you think is not real?”
“Right now?” He looked around at the dark garden, sunlessly shining. “Nothing, really. But I’ve been taking my medicine.”
He meant it as a joke, but she didn’t smile. “Dominic, you want me. I can smell it.”
He nodded. “I know. I do. Out at the abbey, even at the nightclub, something about you speaks to me. Or would, I think, if I let myself listen. I have to keep stuffing cotton in my ears. It’s not easy.”
“I’m an angel, not a siren.”
“I know, but if I kissed you right now, and yes, I want to… If I kissed you, it would mean giving up on everything that’s held me together since the last time I was in this insane place. It’s more than just my work that would stop making sense. It’s me. I can’t want you in the way I want you.” He was choking, blind, staring at his hands on her thighs. He bowed his head.
“It’s a choice?”
“It has to be.” Her lips touched his hair as it fell over his eyes. If he opened them, her breasts would be all he could see. Even against his clamped-shut lids, their white perfection swam before him. He heard the rattle but didn’t recognize the sound until she had swallowed and tossed the pill bottle back into his bag.
“You shouldn’t have done that.” His voice was caked with despair and desire.
“I thought you wanted to heal me.”
“How many did you take?”
“I left you some.”
“You know that’s useless to me clinically.”
“I didn’t do it for you.” She stood up and walked away from him, noiseless across the dark grass. He sprawled against the tree trunk, exhausted and taut, relieved and aroused. If she suggested a swim now, he would be lost. But she stayed silent, and his thrashing mind began to steady.
“I think Gaehod will close the hotel,” she said at last.
“That isn’t what you want, is it?”
“No. My sisters will be angry.” Her voice was expressionless, her face marble.
“Vampires get angry?”
“Twice, to date. But it could be good for you. If Gaehod opens the hotel to the public, my sisters won’t be able to stay. I think you might convince some of them to follow you to Dublin.”
“I thought you said they’d never participate in a clinical trial?”
“You’ll need to set up a place for them to stay, with underground storage, and tell them the rest is a game, a novelty. Boredom is our contagious cancer.” She turned away from him, standing by the fruit tree branch he’d reached for only yesterday.
“I’m certain I could devise ways to make the tests interesting.” Dominic’s mind was sailing ahead. If he could get out of this damned hotel, back into a city with trains and bookstores, if he could confine the madness of vampires and curses to a laboratory and the daylight, he might yet fulfill his promises to Madalene and his obligations to Dysart. Maybe then he could wrap his head around what this pale, perfect woman did to his heart. His eyes ran up the slick columns of her legs and across the narrow expanse of her red-cased back and flowing hair. “Would you come, too?” he asked quietly.
“No.”
He stood up to take her by the shoulders and turn her to him. “Why are you helping me?”
“I want to.” She almost smiled. “That’s my choice.”
Touching her again was a mistake. The clear sanity of his Dublin plans blurred in the depth of her melting eyes. She closed them wearily.
“You’re tired, aren’t you?” he asked.
“No.”
“You look exhausted.”
“I haven’t eaten.” She swayed slightly and without thinking, Dominic pulled her tiny body to his. She leaned against his chest and inhaled. Her breath, as she released it, shook her in his steady arms. He wrapped her more closely against him.
“Olivia, why did you take that pill?”
“I was curious.” Her body, pliant but strong, molded against his, making an almost audible hum in his ears. Her slow hands traced his back from waist to shoulder. “I’ve never been curious before,” she whispered. Her fingers were learning the shapes and contours of him, pressing into tender places, he could barely hear her.
“Why haven’t you eaten?”
“Vampires can only feed on blood that wants or fears them.”
“You could have fed on me,” he whispered over the roar of desire in his ears. “I want you.”
She lifted her head from his chest to gaze at him. “I can smell it on you, so thick. But if you can choose, then so can I.”
He took her face in his hands, cradling it, fingers in her hair again, his thumbs on the porcelain richness of cheekbones. Her lips, so tempting, trembled. She was hurting, and he was slowly starting to understand. “You chose not to?”
“Hunger is the only thing a vampire feels, a yawning emptiness, that drinking does not fill, but numbs. It’s like a gash you can’t suture, but inject with lidocaine. I didn’t feed on you last night, and the emptiness got bigger than I have ever known. But without your desire to numb me, something new started to happen. I think I have started to feel my self, under my hunger.” Her tidal eyes held his, her voice the only sound in the garden’s dead world. “Under my roaring hunger for you to want me, under my shrieking need for your blood to keep me warm, I’ve started to hear”—his thumbs grazed her cheek—“the whisper of my own desire.” Her body, so alive against his, made his dull thighs and shoulders, his blunt chest and belly ache.
“I want you,” he whispered.
“And I want you.” Her lips scarcely moved with the whisper of surprise and discovery. Her fingers clung to his back, her body held to his, but it was her eyes he could not bear to leave in the blue light of tearshed and blood. He rubbed the balls of his thumbs against the twin wet places on her cheeks.
She closed her eyes, a pained furrow between her perfect brows. “I have only eaten choices,” she murmured, silent as prayer. His thumb touched her swollen lips feeling, more than hearing, her words. They ran in torrents through him. “I have always taken. When I make the tiny cuts with my teeth or nails that go unnoticed, when I drive my teeth on those who flee me, I steal.” The supple flesh pursed under his reluctant touch. “It is why Gaehod chose the sign he has. A kiss must be given.”
“You asked me to kiss you.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Ask me again.” His voice was raw with his hunger.
———
Beauty does not belong to me. It comes with damnation. My flawless body stands against his mortal one, bathed in our desire. If I do not walk away from him now, he will kiss me. Gaehod will not close the hotel. My deathless sisters will be pleased. If I open my aching mouth to his hunger, I could drown my agony on his need. He will feel me strike, and my raw quills, unkeened for weeks through indifference, would hurt him. But he is brave and will stand it. I slip from his hungry, seeking fingers on my cheeks and lips, and walk away.
“Olivia!”
I do not turn back.
“Olivia?”
“Come with me,” I say. But I do not turn back to look for him until I have pushed the gates of the garden wide. He stops to gather his things, the computer on the grass, the pill bottle, a notebook. I wait for him, dizzy with freedom or need.
There is one thing I must understand.
“Where are we going?” The bag hangs across his strong chest, his broad shoulders easy under its weight, his bright blue eyes burning wild in the garden light. He has not shaved since the last time I led him out of this garden to the bikes and our night drive. Bronze stubble roughens his face, clouded with sex and doubt. But striding toward me, he looks fierce and elemental, a force of desire and rage beaten against powers stronger and darker than he sees or can understand.
I want to discover, once and for all, what happens when he looks at me.
He walks wordlessly beside me down the silent halls. We pass black metal and vaulted wooden doors. When I stop before a dull g
ray one, he only waits as I push my flawless fingers into the narrow seam beside the lock, and slide an elongating nail between the jam and tumblers. He holds the door. The smaller, dank hallway smells of mold and earthworms, of cellars, graves, and abandoned wells.
“I keep forgetting we’re underground,” he whispers.
The corridor ends abruptly, rounding a curved wall, to deposit us at the foot of a cavernous space. It is dark and airless, nothing like the chill humidity of the grand hall. It soars dustless, limitless and black.
“The gas will come on when we take the floor,” I tell him. I hold his hand, warm and human, and step into the void. The ceiling ignites in blinding banks of flame, but I keep walking. When I stop, and when he can see again, we stand in the center of a vast Art Deco ballroom whose inlaid black-and-white floor sweeps away in dizzying patterns on every side. The ceiling soars stories up, supported by colossal carved titans whose rippling bodies of living stone bear the weight of the entire hotel above them on strong, blind backs. On every wall, broken only by white columns, mirrors reflect us back to our dazzled eyes.
I leave Dominic standing and walk to touch the old, cold silver surface. Looking at me from the glass is a woman I have never seen. Familiar, yes, like the myriad faces I have seen when those who want me gaze on me. But different somehow, and purely my own. This is my native face. Then I see him. He stands where I left him, pale and still. His artist’s lips make a hard, thin line, of anger or fear.
“Why can’t I see you?” His voice is a cold hammer.
“I’m here.” I turn from the mirror to face him. His logical eyes search the glass behind me.
“What the fuck!” His broad hands are balled into fists and his fierce teeth are set. “I can see you standing right there in front of the mirror, but I can’t see you in it.” I turn back to the glass. I smile at my reflection, and it returns the grin with a look of barely contained joy. It’s all I can do not to laugh.
“I can see myself,” I tell him.
“I can see myself, too, but only me. Why can’t I see you? Is it a trick? Some insane game of Gaehod’s? Goddamn it, that old man won’t quit fucking with my mind.” He looks about to tear it from his skull, dropping his bag in the center of the floor and driving the heels of his hands against his raging eyes. He strides to the mirror and cups his hands, peering into the reflecting surface. Then he yanks a pocketknife from his jeans and flips open the blade. He scratches the mirror’s surface and swears.
I wander, half dreaming, happy, back to the room’s center and gaze at my true reflection, turning slowly to see myself in a infinite line of smaller selves, each blessedly identical. He glances at me and back at the mirrors. “It’s some kind of stupid trick,” he mutters, pressing his furrowed face against the plaster to peer behind the glass. He turns to me and scrubs his violent eyes again, leaning his taut back against the mirrored wall, facing mirrors on the other side, but looking at me. He shakes his head. “I don’t understand,” he says.
“You’re not used to that, are you?”
“To not being able to understand what I see? No. I’m not. I’m a logical man. I figure things out.”
“Have you figured me out?” I ask him.
“You’re a person, not a thing. And no, I haven’t. I don’t even try with women. They don’t make sense.”
“And now this room doesn’t make sense?” I am teasing him. It’s unfair, but I am in the mirror and feel millennia younger—lighthearted and giddy. He slams his hand against the glass. The massive pane ripples, waves in a frozen pond, but does not shatter, and Dominic hugs his hand against his chest.
“Fuck,” he says sheepishly. “That was stupid. Sorry I startled you.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No.” He walks right to me. “You nailed it, you know. I have to stop trying to make things make sense down here. None of it does, not even that it is here, a room this size, underground. The rules of the real world don’t apply.” He half grins and takes my small wrists in his large hands. “I have rules I make and rules I follow, rules I expect the world to play by, and rules I know it won’t. I have rules about women and about falling in love. Like one of nature’s laws, you can’t break it, you can only break yourself against it. But no rules work here. I’m falling and there’s no gravity. I’m reflecting and there’s no image.”
But I cannot hear him. His strong hands encircle my wrists. I see them in the mirror. I feel them on my flesh.
“Touch my face,” I whisper.
His hands slide up my arms, and I close my eyes to drink in the sensation.
My body has sensation.
“Olivia.” He shakes me gently by the shoulders he’s holding. “Olivia? Are you okay? You’re really pale.”
I am the Undead, of course I’m pale! I feel like laughing. I’m pale and dizzy, and a thousand other things no angel can be. He touched and I felt. I sway in his strong hands.
“You really need to eat, don’t you? You missed breakfast. I don’t know about those pills on an empty stomach either. Are you faint?”
I touch his jaw. Against my fingertips, the stubble is rough and masculine. I trace his hard cheekbone where the skin is taut and smooth. Manhood and strength tingle up my fingers and across my bones.
I can feel him.
“Olivia?” His hands slide to my waist and their descent radiates from my skin into the core of me. “What’s happening?”
“I can feel you,” I whisper.
“I don’t understand.” He makes his voice soft, like mine.
It will overwhelm me, the weight of his hands on my waist, the sheer heat of his body close to mine, the drenching smell of his desire and the unfamiliar scent of my own. I breathe in deeply.
Yes. I want. I can smell my desire. I have never wanted. I touch his softening mouth with uncertain fingers. I want him. The inviting flesh of his lips is giving and soft after the roughness of his jaw, and I run questioning fingers over it until he shudders.
“I can see you, here in my arms,” he whispers. “I can feel you touching me, but when I look,” his strong brows contract and his fingers dig into my waist. I moan to feel their hard demand, to feel him touching me. “But when I look into all the mirrors on all the walls, you’re not there. I just see my empty hands holding nothing.”
“I can see me.”
“I’m having a seizure.” He bows his head, defeat heavy on him,
“I must be getting worse. I have never had this kind of fully consciousness doubling before.”
“It has to be enough that I can see me.” I push my fingers harder against his inviting lips to feel the sudden barricade of teeth. I push between them, and he bites me lightly. “Let it be enough,” I ask him. He turns his face from me and my fingers slip from between his lips.
“Am I losing my mind?” he whispers.
“You’re asking me?” I mean it lightly, lost in the texture of his skin, trailing my nerve-rich fingertips from his jaw to where the stubble grows more sparsely, where the sinews of his throat stand out in stark relief. His throat. I feel the pulse, his hypnotic thrusting blood beneath it.
With something like a sob, he gathers me against him, against the heat and rhythm of his chest, within the circle of his arms and strength, against the hard unmoving of his legs and belly, and holds me tightly. “I feel like I’m losing my grip on everything,” he whispers into my hair.
“Maybe you never had it.” I’m drinking the smells and touch of him, the warmth and sounds, air in his breath, blood in his heart, enveloping me.
“I want to do everything wrong.” His voice is harsh and low in my hair. “I want to walk through those mirrors. I want to jump from the balconies. I want to be out-of-my-head crazy, raving, speaking in tongues. I want to give up on science. I want to allow irrationality and cruelty to win. Olivia—” He takes my head between his strong hands and turns my face up to his. His fearless, blue eyes dive into me. “I want you.”
He glances up into the mirror. The s
ound is strangled, a cry, a desperation. “I want to give up on everything I believe in, everything I know, everything I’ve served. I want to give it away. Give it to you. Olivia, why can’t I see you in the mirror?”
“You can see me in your hands,” I tell him. He holds my face in his powerful fingers, his trembling body inches from me, pain in his hard jaw and brows. “Close your eyes,” I whisper.
With his eyes shut, he looks innocent, and I touch his lids to watch them flinch. “It’s my fault,” I whisper. “I’m not real. Vampires do strange things with mirrors. Things I didn’t know.” I run my hands down the unyielding cords of his hard and scarless back.
The sensation that stabs through me as my breasts touch his chest forces a gasp from me. He opens his eyes in alarm. “I have always fed on man’s desire,” I tell him. “I have drunk desire and fear to keep me numb from the terrible gaping emptiness that is my damnation inside me. My emptiness, my numbness, my hunger, for your mortal desire, your sensation, your blood to feed me. Mirrors never showed me who I was, because I never knew.”
“If I knew you better could I see you?”
“To know and to see are not the same.”
“I don’t understand.” His fingers tighten on me in his confusion, hurting me, and I laugh with the joy of feeling that small pain. This is what hurt feels like, this hard insistence of bones.
“And how could you know me better, anyway, if you can’t see me?” I ask him.
“You could tell me.”
“Would you believe me?”
“I think I could, if you asked me to.” His face shows only courage in the pain he feels—in the face of his world falling in.
“It would be easier to believe I took your pill and we are both sane.”
“Nothing about you is easy,” he says.
“Damnation is easy.”
“You are not damned.”
“Illness is easy.”
“You are not ill.”