and Falling, Fly

by Skyler White

  “I am desire.” I say. “Desire is never easy.”

  He drops his proud forehead to mine, resting the weight of his head against me. His warrior’s eyes squeeze closed, and his breathing fills the space between us.

  “Desire is suffering,” I whisper.

  He swallows hard. “Then I am desire, too.”

  His hands clasp behind my head and he presses his face against my hair. His naked voice is raw. “Tell me what to do.”

  I shudder in his arms, and press my sensitive cheek against the grit of his. The tips of my breasts are alive, acute, beneath my confining corset. But pleasure courses down from them, between my legs, into my receptive belly. I could laugh or sob with the sensation. He turns his rough mouth against my delicate cheek, and the heat and softness of his whispering lips makes me cling to his back with immortal fingers.

  “What do you want?” he asks me.

  “I want my hunger not to hurt you.”

  “I don’t care if it does,” he says.

  And then his lips touch mine. The light feather of his breath sends torrents through me. He whispers “Kiss me” against the sensitive flesh that whispers back “I cannot.” But his lips open over mine. I hold to his hard back against the heat and hunger to open my mouth beneath his. I want to.

  “I would believe in angels to kiss you,” he whispers.

  “That is not who you are.”

  “No.”

  But the tender question of his tongue tips my starving lips with need, traces a line of raging heat around their swollen hunger. His mouth is slowly gathering mine beneath it in a kiss that takes my resolution with my strength. New pleasure, first desire, his lips lingering over mine, his body strong and hungry, mine runs liquid under it.

  “I can love what I don’t understand.” He is almost pleading. I could open my lips and kiss him.

  “Most mortals fear it,” I say.

  “I am immortal then.”

  And he looks it, eyes flaming into mine, hard jaw proud and hungry for me. One kiss. This is not the garden. I will not feed. I could allow myself one kiss, and it will be good-bye. Who he is cannot believe what I am.

  Yes.

  His lips are an adoring rage on mine, demanding and giving beauty and terrible hunger. I would choke on my cruel teeth to keep from hurting him, but I cry out when his fingers find the wingscars on my back. The tips of my warming breasts rake against his chest. Drenched in sensation, I wring a pure smile from the mouth that claims mine. It fills me. The soft curve of his beautiful lips cradles the soaring sense of myself expanding, swelling to fill the pure white ballroom, shining back in the ocean of mirrors, everything reflected back, and back again. Breaking in waves over us standing, holding to each other’s body, each other’s lips. Angels before the fall, love without sin, completion, perfection, joy.

  This is not the garden.

  Sylvia’s psycast is ice in my mind.

  How dare you fuck this up?

  I close my eyes against my outraged sisters, circling me, to hold Dominic timeless away from them reflected in every mirrored wall, surrounding us. He hasn’t noticed them.

  Gaehod had us to tea.

  His lips whisper a kiss that grows to screaming, open-mouthed, hard and searching, claimed and claiming. And I return the kiss, knowing my sisters advance. Knowing they see I do not feed. Knowing they will kill me for this.

  We are going to try you for treason.

  If the fall is to this man, I can love descent. But he will be broken by it, taken, unfinished, ruined, and in pain.

  “Come with us.” I can’t see which of the rows of Sylvias is real in her phalanxed reflection.

  “I will,” I say, but turn my back to her. I bite deeply into my lower lip, and fill my mouth with ichor.

  “Olivia?” Dominic’s worried eyes are searching mine.

  “It’s all right,” I whisper to him. “I need to go with my sisters now.” I kiss omnipotence and strength into his lips and tell him, “You’ve got to get out of here! The minute I leave, go to Gaehod and tell him to get you out. They will kill you. Swear to me you’ll get away.”

  “All right.”

  “I have to go now.” I kiss him a final time in a communion of scoured souls.

  “I don’t want to lose you,” he says.

  “I was already lost.”

  “No.” He pulls me closer, and my sisters’ footsteps quicken.

  “Stop believing that. It’s a choice, remember? Every belief is something we’ve chosen.”

  “Is it?” Sylvia and Vivian each have me by an elbow now, almost carrying me toward the door. If I struggle they will lift me, and I don’t want to frighten him. He must think I am walking away. He bends to pick his bag up from the ground and the beauty in the gesture breaks through the strange, hard fingers in my now-feeling flesh, the new sensation of bruises and nail bites. I could savor even these if his grace bending and slinging the bag across his hard man’s chest did not tear at me even more strongly.

  He stands uncertain. He wants to call after me, but does not think he has the right. He watches me go, tasting doubt, eyes questioning. “Why did she kiss me?” he wonders. “Did she feel what I did? Do I love her?”

  If I could answer, if he could hear me psycast: I am with you still. Your angel. Your love. But reason deafens him, and the noise of vampire shoes on the inlaid dance floor, and then in the concrete hallway, rounding away from where he stands. I catch a final glimpse of him, walking toward the mirrors once more, to try to understand.

  ———

  Dominic checked again behind the mirrors. Nothing. No projector he could see hung from the ceiling above, nor was the glass warped. It simply didn’t make sense. He made a complete and careful circuit of the room before he noticed her—a pale, diminutive thing—trailing black gauze and diaphanous lace. She, at least, looked the same in the mirror as on the periphery of the dance floor, where she lingered, watching him. Dominic nodded to her, and went to gather his decrepit shoulder bag. He would go back to his room. Olivia could find him there when she finished whatever ridiculousness she had to with her friends. He wanted to see her again, touch her again. Kiss her.

  “I’m Ophelia.”

  “Hi.” Dominic extended his hand to the girl who now stood beside him. She seemed taller than she had been, standing by the door. Ophelia shook his hand with an amused smile.

  “You’re very formal for a man my sister’s been making love to.”

  “She kissed me. That’s it,” Dominic said, ridiculously defensive.

  “Ah, but a kiss to mortals is the first volley of romance, with its promise of love and sex and babies—the kiss of life.” She stood too close to him, smiling. “For us, of course, a kiss is the first taste of something else, and can promise only the possible, distant child of death.” In a grotesque, childish gesture, Ophelia stuck the two pale middle fingers of her tiny right hand into her puckered, scarlet mouth and sucked them, staring. She had Olivia’s matte gray eyes, flat and deep. Perhaps they really were sisters.

  “No,” he told her. “No, there was no vampire weirdness. She didn’t try to bite me. She didn’t even try to kiss me. I kissed her.”

  “We saw.”

  “You were watching us?” Dominic asked. The ghostly girl began to pace a slow circle around him. Dominic stood perplexed in the center of the dance floor’s complicated, radiating pattern.

  “Yes. You shouldn’t have done that. Ollie shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Why?” Dominic demanded. “Is dating against the rules at the Hotel of the Damned?”

  “Dating is its own curse.”

  Dominic throttled a laugh with a cough. That, at least, mapped to his experience.

  “Why did Olivia have to leave with the rest of them? Why did you stay?”

  “I stayed because I saw something in the mirror.” The girl kept circling.

  “What?”

  “I’m not going to tell you. But yes, that is why Olivia had to leave.”


  “Because I kissed her?”

  “Because this is not the garden.” Ophelia slid her cool shoulder against Dominic’s back like a cat. “She’s dangerously weak, you know. You could have helped her.”

  It irritated Dominic not to be able to see Ophelia, to look her in the eyes while he talked to her, to be forced to keep craning his head over one shoulder then the next as she paced circles around him. “Olivia has taken an antipsychotic. It may have cut into some of the conditioned thinking you and your so-called sisters have instilled in her.”

  “You gave her medicine?” Ophelia bristled.

  “Is that against the rules, too? Are you afraid she might see clearly for long enough to get free of you?” Impatience defeated Dominic’s sense of obligation to be charming for one of Olivia’s friends. He wanted to grab his laptop bag and get out of the elaborate, airless, and distorting ballroom.

  “Vampires can only metabolize blood. She’s in no danger. Not from your pills, anyway.”

  “What do you mean? Is she in danger from something else?”

  “There is always danger.”

  “To Olivia?”

  “To her. And from her.”

  “What are you talking about?” Dominic rounded on Ophelia, catching her delicate shoulders to hold her still.

  She swayed her enticing hips and smiled at him. “We’re going to kill her,” she whispered, singsong.

  Dominic towered over the tiny vampire. His fingers curled into hard fists at his sides to keep from shaking her. “What do you mean you’re going to kill her?”

  “I can smell how much you want her,” Ophelia sang.

  Dominic’s voice was a growl. “What do you mean you’re going to kill her?”

  “Your blood is full of desire and very powerful.” Ophelia’s delicate, pale fingers reached for his shoulder, but he violently shrugged her hand away. He was a scientist, a rational man, but the noise he made was animal. Ophelia watched him, a dreamy smile on her childish lips. “Do you want me?” she whispered.

  “I’m asking you, for the last time,” Dominic ground through clenched teeth, “what you meant when you said you were going to kill Olivia. You don’t mean literally.”

  “Angels are literal by nature.”

  This time he did grab her. She gave no indication that he hurt her. He didn’t mean to, but he had to understand. “Where did they take her?” he demanded.

  The tiny girl shrugged. She made her eyes into large, innocent gray blanks in her pale, heart-shaped face. “The hotel’s a big place. They could have taken Ollie to the Quarry. Or to Sylvie’s room. Or the crypts.”

  “Do you know where they took her?”

  “You could have me, you know.”

  “I don’t want you.”

  “No. You want Olivia. I can see it in the mirror.”

  “What?”

  “I look like her.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I do to me.” The girl gazed wistfully at her own reflection.

  “Ophelia, I need to find Olivia. I’ll talk to the others and explain, but it’s time to get her out of this crazy place.”

  “You? Take Ollie out of here?” Ophelia’s laugh reverberated like shattering glass. It bounced off the high ceilings and the distant walls, against the inlaid wood and plaster and mirrors. “You can’t find your own way out. How could you take a failing vampire?”

  “You admit it, don’t you?” Dominic tried not to shout. “Olivia has stopped playing your game. She’s a failed vampire. She’s simply a woman, as difficult and complicated as that is. She’s not pretending to some divine, immortal status any more. You and the rest of them are scared shitless that if she can stop, you might, too. And you can, I think. Maybe. I could try you all on the medicine she took. But I have to get to her before anyone does anything stupid.”

  “Stupid?”

  “Without thinking it through.”

  “Angels have nothing to do with thought.”

  “No, of course not!” Dominic rounded on her. “It’s all faith with angels, isn’t it? Stupid, blind, ignorant faith. The kind of superstitious not-looking-at-things that gave us witch burnings and insisted on a geocentric universe three hundred years after Copernicus!”

  “Goodness, you’re a passionate man.”

  “I’m not. Not really.” Dominic took a steadying breath. “I’m a rational man, but I’m worried about Olivia. I want to see her. I need you to tell me where she is.”

  “Mmm, and I need you,” Ophelia licked her blood-red lips, gliding up to him. “Let’s work something out, shall we?”

  “What?” Dominic pinched his searing eyes against the bridge of his nose, incredulous. “If I let you pretend to drink my blood, or whatever kinkiness you want, you’ll tell me where they’ve taken Olivia?”

  “I will take you.”

  “Take me to her?”

  “No.” Ophelia’s arms climbed like tendrils around him. “I will have you.”

  “I don’t think so.” Dominic untangled her winding arms from his waist, but they twined like water plants around his wrists, tracing his arm’s snaking tattoos to his shoulders, pressing her cool, firm body to his. “I’m going to Gaehod,” His voice was a chained roar. “Move. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  He noted the wooden dance floor gave just a little when his back slammed onto it, but not nearly enough. He lay still, gasping.

  “Do you want me?” Ophelia, tiny and pale, stood motionless over him.

  “No.”

  “Then you will fear me.”

  Dominic picked himself up gingerly. “Why, because you know jujitsu? I don’t think so.”

  He hit the ground again. It was no softer the second time.

  “Olivia!” He shouted her name, and it careened from wall to glass to ceiling to floor, echoing thunderously.

  “She can’t hear you.”

  Dominic sat up. “I’m going to her.”

  Ophelia landed on his chest, her light body coiled over his, her cool lips against his ear. “Do you know what happens when an immortal cannot feed? When a vampire’s quills are too dull to puncture, and her sisters will not keen the edges for her?”

  Dominic held himself motionless beneath the black-draped body spread like a bat against his chest. He needed her to say where Olivia had been taken, why she was in danger. Ophelia’s tongue trailed from his ear to his jaw.

  “Vampires cannot die. We fade. We lose substance, become invisible, formless. Without her sisters, a vampire is a hungry ghost of unmeetable needs.”

  For an instant, Dominic’s vision blurred. Ophelia’s eyes became surreal cesspits, black and bottomless. Her face spiraled in, a hallucinatory implosion whose mouth made a void, an icy, empty cosmic hole that swallowed time and light. Dominic shuddered.

  Ophelia struck.

  Her jaws flexed, Dominic glimpsed fantastically long fangs protruding from her rosebud mouth. Delicate fingers clutched his jaw to expose his throat. Her scream was brief but shrill, a cry before biting. She snapped her dark head back, whiplashed up, and slammed down on his naked flesh. Twin blunt pains stabbed his throat. His body convulsed in rage and disgust and he threw her from him. She sprawled across the inlaid floor and Dominic sprang to standing, horrified.

  Ophelia curled into a puddle of black gauze. Her dainty hand clamped over her stained mouth. Hideous gulping sounds came from behind her pale palm, and scarlet streams ran between her fragile fingers. Dominic staggered back from her. She was choking. Blood poured in torrents from her, across her shuddering shoulders, down into her deep décolleté, staining breast and dress. He was a doctor, but he wanted to run. He leaned over the spill seeping onto the floor, and touched her heaving back gently.

  “Ophelia, are you choking on your teeth? Where are you hurt?” Dominic sat on his heels and plucked at her fragile wrist. “Can you take your hand away? I need to find where you’re bleeding from.” She gulped frantically. Her wild, racing eyes darted over him, the room, the blood th
at ran down her porcelain wrists and arms. Dominic pried her dripping hand away.

  Two terrible, ragged, broken incisors poured blood into her brimming mouth. Was she choking on the detached tips? The prosthetic teeth she had apparently broken on his throat must be attached, somewhere, to a bladder. Ingenious, really. Functioning properly, the pressure of her strike would trigger them to “bleed” against his skin for her to suck. It must be a large reservoir though, to pour out so much blood that she was in danger of drowning on it.

  “Hold your head forward so the blood doesn’t choke you,” he cautioned, pulling Ophelia to her knees. But she shook herself free of his hands, and threw back her small head. Blood gurgled in her throat and overflowed her lips. She would drown herself in that position if she stayed there long.

  She screamed. Head back, her tiny body twisted, her bleeding mouth forced inexplicably wide. Even the fractured bits of her false teeth seemed to shiver with the effort the long shriek tore from her. Pain shot through Dominic. He clutched his exploding ears. Ophelia gagged on the inhale, writhing. He caught her by the shoulders and forced her over at the waist. He would not watch a girl drown on stage blood before his eyes.

  “Keep bent forward!” he commanded the crumpled thing. “I’ll go for help.”

  “They’ll come,” she panted.

  “What?”

  “My sisters. They are coming.”

  ———

  My sisters held me, wrists bound, in the Quarry’s lush darkness, but I was distracted from their questions and the threats against my life by the fascination of pain. The thin, rough twine on my tender flesh captured my attention. It hurt me, and I kept losing my thoughts in its invading cry. How do mortals speak and answer? Does not every hunger, every injury intrude upon them? I had offered but little in my own defense at trial. I am condemned. Again.

  Now running jumbles everything. My hands are tied and yanked forward at Sylvia’s urgent pace. I am weakening, but even I still taste the red horror of Ophelia’s spriek. I stumble on the stairs. Pain is new, and I like it steadily less as it grows familiar. I trot after my swift sisters, struggling to remember what they have said to me since they took me from Dominic. Dominic whom I kissed without feeding. Dominic whom I have scarcely tasted.