and Falling, Fly

by Skyler White

  “He’s not the loophole,” Evelyn had mocked me, lounging on the Quarry’s backless sofa. “He can’t get you back upstairs.”

  “I know,” I told them. “I’m not trying to get there anymore.”

  It wasn’t until I said it that I knew it was true. But my sisters like it here. They like their numbness and the craving. They want to stay in L’Otel Matillide and I have now denied them.

  They begged me. “You must change the Reborn’s mind,” Vivian pleaded. “It should be easy enough. Men will do anything for love. Teach him he loves the hotel, does not want it exposed, will resign his position, will stay here with us. With you.”

  “I want no power over him,” I told them.

  “He has other desires,” Vivian said.

  Now Sylvia pushes me ahead of her into the glass coach. From Cinderella to the Witch of the North, this cursed, impenetrable transparency has carried women from safety into sex. I huddle on the red cushion and look away from the image of my baby sister, projected over every curved, interior glass, in the moment of spriek, choking on blood, collapsing against the inlaid black and white of the ballroom floor. Is Dominic there? Surely he’s gone to Gaehod by now.

  The glass sphere carries us to her.

  We will reach her soon, Sylvia’s seductive, Irish voice murmurs in my mind. She turns to me. “It’s a powerful desire, the desire not to die.”

  “But it is not love.”

  “We’re angels of desire, darling. The desire—the hunger—to eat, to own, to live, it doesn’t matter. It’s only desire. Only you ever said anything about love.”

  “I love him.”

  “That’s your funeral.”

  “I can’t die.”

  “A woman who is not desired is worse than dead. You will be invisible, unfeedable. Make him want to keep the hotel, and we will let you live.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can’t surrender desire’s power over him. It’s bigger than you are. Desire is advertising and industry, alcoholics, inventors, addicts, and mothers. Everyone, everything serves us.”

  “I have my own desires now.”

  “If you cannot make him want you, one of us can.”

  And suddenly I know what’s happened to Ophelia. “No, you can’t,” I tell them. I stand up in the swimming bubble. “She’s broken her teeth on his throat because he does not want or fear her.”

  I am unreasonably proud of this.

  “I fed Ophelia to him,” Sylvia growls. “I will drain him myself. I swear it.” My scarlet sister only whispers the oath, but I know she will do everything in her unearthly power to keep it.

  The glass bubble stops. I am rattling uncontrollably with fear and hunger now. We have made a detour. Not straight to Ophelia, who must be nearly void by now. We are on my floor. Sylvia and Vivian drag me into my own room. My red sarcophagus waits against the bare stone wall. I steady myself against the heavy carved posts of my bed, clutching its rich curtains for support. Vivian easily hefts the stone lid of my old crypt aside.

  “Get in!” she commands.

  I don’t move. I can’t. Terror freezes me. Vivian sweeps me into her cold arms like an infant and drops me into the hollowed belly of carved stone. I land with a sickening crush of wing and bone. Shivering convulses me. Shuddering obscenely in every joint, I will not give them the satisfaction of begging for mercy. They have none.

  The red stone grinds closed above me.

  Without the strength to shift it, without the quills to feed, I will stay here, eaten by my hunger, until I fade so thin I can move through stone and walls and, mad, invisible, and mouthless, roam Earth endlessly, never satisfied, more than damned.

  ———

  Dominic’s hands looked grotesquely large holding Ophelia’s delicate head. When all the idiocy was over, he would have to figure out how the blood-delivery device worked and why it had malfunctioned. It created a dangerous choking hazard. He would write the manufacturer.

  “Can you take these teeth out?” he asked. Ophelia shook her head. Dominic reached cautiously into her mouth to feel where the connections were.

  “Holy shit!” He tore his hand away and almost dropped her head. The blood was real. Some of it at least. He had felt the hot arterial pulse against his probing fingers. If even a portion of the flood that poured unstinting from her delicate mouth and down his wrist into a spreading pool on the inlaid floor, if even part of that was real, this little girl would bleed out in his arms before anyone got there. She didn’t need pretend sisters in fake vampire clothes. She needed paramedics and several units of plasma.

  “Ophelia, I’ve got to slow the bleeding down. I’m going to reach in your mouth again and try to apply some pressure. Can you show me where you’re bleeding from? These teeth you broke, are they surgically implanted? Can you guide my fingers?”

  But she shook her ringletted head again. Careful to keep one hand on the nape of her neck, holding her forward to prevent choking, Dominic pushed a finger into Ophelia’s mouth, feeling for the source of blood. It really did seem to be coming from the teeth themselves. He touched the jagged surface and pushed gently.

  “Son of a bitch!” He jerked his hand away again. The broken places in her mouth were wickedly sharp. His own blood mingled with Ophelia’s, real and fake. She might have further cut her tongue on the fractured edges, and he couldn’t apply adequate pressure without tearing himself to hamburger.

  “Ophelia?”

  She turned swimming eyes to him. Fear stood in stark blue smears down her face. Blood had gotten into her gray eyes, and it pooled in their corners and clumped her lashes.

  “Ophelia!” He needed her attention, and she was going into shock. “I have to stand up and take off my shirt so I can use it to put pressure on your teeth. You have to keep your head forward, okay? You can’t lie back, or try to scream again. Do you understand?”

  She nodded, and Dominic sprang to his feet tearing off his linen shirt. He pulled his cotton undershirt over his head and balled it into a pad. He bent back to Ophelia, aware of the brilliant red stains on the knees and cuffs of his pants and of the blood that soaked into his shoes.

  “Open your mouth.”

  He pushed the T-shirt up against the broken places in the little vampire’s mouth. “Can you breathe through your nose? Good. Try to bite down. Gently. Good. You’re doing fine.”

  “Ophelia!”

  Dominic turned on his knees, crouched over her, to spot the vampire who had bared her breasts for him by the river. She and several other tall, gorgeous women swept around the corner and onto the dance floor.

  “Sylvia,” he called to her. “I need you to find a phone and get medical help. Ophelia is losing blood rapidly. She can’t stay conscious much longer.”

  Sylvia knelt beside Dominic and took Ophelia’s tiny body from his hands. She turned the pale girl’s face to hers and pulled Dominic’s T-shirt from between the pale and shivering lips. Ophelia gurgled in her limp throat as her head lolled back on Sylvia’s cradling arm.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Dominic reached for Ophelia again, but found his arms pinioned behind his back. “She will drown on her blood!”

  These svelte women knew their martial arts. He could not move his arms. Sylvia bent over Ophelia to kiss her bleeding, open mouth. Dominic struggled briefly, weak and slippery in the spilling blood, but soon stopped.

  The red streams that poured from Ophelia’s lips, even with Sylvia’s lascivious mouth clamped over them, had slowed. Dumbfounded, Dominic watched the elegant redhead holding Ophelia’s delicate face between her strong hands. She seemed to be almost biting into the gaping, bloody hole of her sister’s mouth. But the grinding kiss was working.

  Soft lips brushed Dominic’s ear, and the hard fingers on his arms softened. A voice he did not recognize whispered, “Sylvie is keening the edges. It will seal them, and they’ll regrow.”

  Dominic sat back on his heels in the gruesome mess. Sylvia bit and sucked at her pale sister,
whose body slowly relaxed under the assault. The blood running from between the women’s mouths slowed to a trickle. Ophelia’s breathing steadied, but she was still shaking, and clearly in shock.

  Sylvia lifted her stained mouth from her unconscious sister’s. “Help me clean her!” she cried. The other women dropped to their knees around Ophelia’s body. A full-hipped redhead, whose heavy breasts swayed as she crawled, slipped from behind Dominic to join her sisters. He stretched his released arms. Sylvia resumed kissing Ophelia’s slack mouth while the women on either side took Ophelia’s fingers between their lips and sucked each blood-drenched digit. Ophelia moaned, and another sister straddled her narrow hips to deftly unfasten the closures at the side of her velvet bodice, revealing bloodstained breasts to suck. Dominic watched uncomprehending, then stood quietly. Sylvia met his interrogating eyes.

  “Stay, won’t you? Our sister will be hungry when she wakes.” Sylvia ran predator’s eyes over Dominic’s shirtless chest, taking in the bare, muscled torso, the smooth, twining tattoo lines, and the blood drying in savage designs against his skin. She licked her smeared lips, a feverish flush climbing in her pale cheeks. But Ophelia moaned and Sylvia dropped her lips to her sister’s once more, kissing and sucking, hollowing her cheeks with the strength of the kisses.

  Dominic slowly backed away from Ophelia’s body sprawled in the blood she had spilled over the white and black floor. Kissing, sucking mouths and unbuttoning, caressing fingers danced over her pale body in a sticky tango of hunger and healing. She was moaning freely now, writhing against the floor and the feeding. Dominic shook his head. These girls would fuck a pack of cigarettes. What had seemed to him to be a perfectly obvious medical emergency was, for them, an invitation to a bacchanal. A statuesque blonde Dominic had never seen unbuttoned her shirt and reached behind her back for the clasp of her bra.

  Dominic pulled off his blood-soaked shoes. The blonde’s freshly exposed white flesh was already striped with blood. Her pale fingers, riding the generous swell of breast and nipple, looked almost as if she drew the blood from her own flesh rather than painting it on from the floor. Sylvia moved aside, and Dominic glimpsed Ophelia’s pale, but finally unbleeding, mouth. The blonde leaned over her inert sister and touched a delicate, blood-beaded nipple to Ophelia’s parted lips. Dominic watched the pale violet underside of Ophelia’s tongue extend to lap, and the relieved smile that spread from Sylvia to the other sisters.

  As if on cue, two more began to undress. Dominic took a soundless step away. The sisters lifted Ophelia’s limp hands to their exposed breasts or throats or vulnerable thighs, and everywhere her fingers touched, long streaks of blood trailed her fingernails. Silently, slowly, Dominic backed away. Olivia had told him to leave, to go to Gaehod. Now he understood why. But Ophelia had said Olivia was in danger, and he needed to see her first. He had to know she was okay. They could go together to Gaehod.

  Dominic stood in the hallway and swore violently. He had left his laptop bag and shoes in the ballroom. He was shirtless, and left a red trail of bare footprints on the cold stone floor. His jeans were stained, and his bare chest and arms were streaked in drying scarlet. His only way of reaching Madalene or Dysart—all his slim connections to the safe surface world—were in that bag. His medicine, his laptop, his notes, and all his work, soaking in Ophelia’s blood.

  Dominic looked up the stairs, in the direction of Gaehod, his eccentric teas, and his unflappable calm. Did that old man have any sense of the lethal kinkiness he harbored? Dominic looked left, down the stairs, toward the weird underground garden with the self-devouring snake and its apples. Dominic wiped his bloody hands on his jeans and held them out in front of him. All he had to hold on to was doubt. It would have to be enough. Dominic turned left. He knew what he had to do.

  9

  IN DARK

  Every angel has a shadow; she keeps it buried with her wings. Its blackness is our oldest home. For millennia, I have slept in this hollow stone that mimics a cave, but when the sliding rock closes out light and hope above me, I feel fear for the first time. I am closed in my red tomb with my new senses. I feel where I have always slept. I feel the presence of what I have hidden, and the absence of light, the grinding crumble of my severed wings beneath me, and the deeper black of my crouching, hiding shadow.

  Only a hundred and fifty years ago, I brought this sarcophagus with me to the New World by boat in a mysterious, heavy crate—an archeological find unearthed from ancient Greece—at least that’s what I told the vessel’s curious Victorians. I miss that era of talented amateurs busy cataloging beetles in systems as complex as the layers of lace and bone, fabric and leather they swathed themselves within. Interest in the natural world must never extend to their own bodies. The mysteries closest to home remained furthest from known. I fed, on that leisurely Atlantic passage, my maiden voyage, dressed in widow’s weeds, from a husband and his wife in a sweet tangle of stolen silences and secret glances. Now, in my final, eyeless silence, I reach back for the comfort of that weak web, my closest to love.

  Lady Anoria had become too fond, it seems, of a certain English princess. The scandal, had it ever been known, would have clouded the unsetting sun, and so the pale young lady had been married, quickly but well, and dispatched to the Americas before the princess, who would have stopped it, learned they had been discovered.

  I met Lady Anoria’s fresh husband on the first cold, starry night afloat while he walked the creaking wooden deck to smoke. I smelled his fear, even wreathed in its tobacco, and I hunted him. He had been seated beside me at the captain’s table in the best salon, the mysterious European widow and the English duke. His new wife, he had apologized, was ill, but the table got on famously without her. Every man at it, except the duke, had wanted me.

  I was not curious about him then, strolling on the chill deck alone, only killing time before another gentleman appeared to feed. But when I scented his fear, I fainted. It was my favorite trick in those decorous days, before ambulances and needles, to stagger weakly, already so pale, and swoon. A gentleman would take my tender arm to steady me, and my quilled nails could slip between his gloved hand and cuff. So I fainted on the ship’s promenade and the duke dutifully rushed to my aid, happy for the unfamiliar certainty of action. Gentlemen materialized from the refined night and helped him carry me upstairs.

  They placed me on the divan in his stateroom, but when the duchess emerged from her boudoir, pale, tear-stained, and surprised, the gentlemen withdrew. Lady Anoria sat beside me and took my limp hand. I would kill for that touch to reach me now, where I am truly faint, but desperately alone. One was never alone then.

  “Constantine, she’s bleeding. There’s blood under her nails!”

  Fuck.

  “I’ll fetch a basin and a cloth,” he offered. “You should perhaps loosen her stays?” Feminine fingers touched the tight, high buttons at my throat, my body limp on the velvet chaise.

  I smelled it on her wrist.

  The scent is unmistakable. I opened my eyes. The new duchess was pale with grief, but a naturally rosy girl with blue eyes that were made to sparkle more than weep. From the pall of grief, a blush of simple desire rose, then shame. Poor thing. I moved my lips soundlessly.

  “No, don’t talk. You’re too weak.” She inclined her perfect head to the prostrate stranger on her couch. “I can’t hear you.”

  “Closer,” I gasped.

  “Constantine, she’s waking, bring brandy!” But she did lean closer, and I breathed in the woozy smell of feminine desire.

  I have smelled my own today, and still I love the scent. It was too uncommon in those days. I had tasted only woman’s fear for years. The men swam with repressed desires though, and I had fed well on the dark-wood and button-shoe generation. But not on this, this ocean smell while we’re at sea. Not since the French convent, and my last darling’s visions and desire, sweet and red. Lady Anoria shook my shoulders gently and pressed her dewy cheek against my invalid’s parched lips. What I had
pretended then, I am in earnest now. I touch my dry tongue to my cracking lips in the blackness and reach to feel Anoria again.

  “Can I send for someone? Can you tell me your name?” she implored.

  I sighed into the fragile curl of ear and inhaled the precious scent. The taste of it would be exquisite in her blood, so many tendrils red beneath the white ridge and lobe. My feeding edges raked the virginal skin. “Angel,” I whispered, “an angel.”

  Duke Constantine was right to fear me.

  Now, in my own deep terror, I reach again to savor Anoria’s slow confession, mixed with tears I had lapped away. My darling’s timid explorations with the princess were quickly surpassed. I fed from her soft throat, while Constantine paced and smoked. His new wife grew healthier, pale but smiling. She took the air, long strolls, arm in arm with her new friend. He should be heartened.

  The voyage would have been tedious without a diversion, and I found the girl endlessly diverting. Such innocence tasted truly strange to me, and liberating. The spoiled child of privilege, and still somewhat ashamed, Anoria let me touch and remained untouched, savoring the heady mix of fear with desire. I taught her woman’s pleasure, desire’s death, and brought her to that dying again and again, with abandon, and with hunger, and with finally what she swore was love.

  I began to linger with my duchess, to allow her duke to find us drowsing in their wide, white bed, just to smell the fear on him. I would take his hand to taste it, too, sometimes. And thus I brought my ancient tomb from the Old World to the new, drunk on tides of desire and fear that reversed the tastes of an age where ladies feared and men desired, and illness filled the void that ambition and need left bare.

  That Lady Anoria believed she loved me added dimension to my shipboard entertainment but, as the journey neared its end, it troubled me. I can always disappear. I can sink into the invisible eternal that mortals swim within and never see. Ask a fish what water is. Humans are more blind. I can always disappear, but the one-ton block of ancient red history, my past, my tomb that now imprisons me, would stay behind. Anoria could track me through my past into my future in the New World, and that must not be. I needed to get off the ship unremarked, but not unseen.