and Falling, Fly

by Skyler White

  Twist over twist, they tied his arms around her, and hers across him. They wrapped them thigh to thigh, breast to chest, bound together, frozen lovers battling, and left them in the tomb to die. My worshipper’s screaming did not wake her lover until the draught wore off. Terror, and then exhaustion, and then terrible thirst took them. And madness. And then death, the queen before the slave, who felt his lover’s body finally become still, then cold, then rigid and swelling. It took three days. I will take millennia and still not die. I will only fade. Into a ghost, a shade. Oh God—into a shadow!

  I am screaming again, bloodying my fists and knees and the soles of my feet against the stone slab over me. I must get out of here, away from that thing, this insistent darkness. The horror mounts and mounts and will not be denied. The shadow touches me, climbs over me, mindless, stupid, mute. It feathers across my breasts and elbows, seeps between me and the rock, against me, beneath my clothes. It insinuates itself between my toes and pushes down into my ears. I pound my head to shake it free, but it climbs between my hairs and pushes down my scalp. It slides over my closed eyes. It curls against my nostrils. It worms between my clamped thighs. Now I cannot scream or blink. It is poised against the hole in the center of my eyes. Why can I feel this? All the nights I slept with this black darkness and felt no fear. I asked for this. I asked for feeling.

  I have felt him touch me. I saw him see me. And I did not feed. The spriek tears my throat unbidden. They will hear it and laugh. My angels do not love me. They rushed to save my sister, but even in their urgency, in the terror of her bleeding cry, they stopped to bury me. Does it mean I matter to them more that they attended to my death before Ophelia’s? Does she matter to them at all? They will sharpen her broken teeth, grind down the jagged, bleeding edges with their own mouths, but they will drink from her while they do. Her blood matters to them. It’s as close as they get to love.

  I am cast out. Again. Damned and more damned, by God and now by family. I came here to be myself without apology, but even in Hell, I cannot be accepted.

  No. He cannot.

  I open my lips to say his name, and shadow licks them. This is how hope dies at last, thrashing wildly from stone to stone, on broken wings, in the dark, alone. My shadow touches me again, scrapes the smooth, closed place between my legs and digs at the hard center of my eyes. My shadow is the closest thing I will have to a legacy, the only thing I ever made. I feel its touch on my lips. I have tasted few things, and all on the blood of mortals. This is the taste of despair. I want to spit it out.

  If I had kissed Dominic in the garden, if I had bitten him in the abbey, I would not have this in my mouth. I cannot close my weak lips against it. My jaws unhinge. It runs into my mouth, against my throat, too heavy to hold closed against it. It weighs against my tongue, pushes behind my teeth, pours over my gums and down my cheeks, distending my lips, pushing, pouring until I can no longer hold my throat closed against it. Retching, I swallow.

  It is cold in me. It worms up from between my thighs, and down my throat, into my pupils, my nostrils, my ears. But it does not become me. It swallows me, but I am gulping, too. We flow into one another, and my starved body will no longer be denied. It eats and is eaten, desire and its disappointment, feeding. This will change me. And as my shadow’s dark weight envelops me at last, I know how.

  ———

  Dominic lay on his belly in the cool, black grass, seething. “Love? Love is the answer? Christ! If you think for a minute I’m going to buy that sophomoric bullsh—”

  He was flying backwards as the snake shot from its hole. Its massive weight landed heavily on his chest, writhing over the sprawled length of his battered body, and it thrust piercingly sharp teeth into the depths of his ear. Dominic shouted with pain and felt blood well from the deep tympanic puncture.

  “No!” the snake screeched soundlessly. “How do you make two into one? I just told you.”

  The horror of the writhing body’s crushing weight pushed Dominic toward panic. He was losing it. Losing his grip, his sanity. The enormity of his isolation and abandonment shook him. Had the snake’s bite poisoned him?

  “Fuck you!” he spat between clenched teeth, flat on his back.

  “Not me!” The snake’s roar twisted though the blood in his ear. It reared up from Dominic’s chest, its smooth, blunt head swaying over him, questioning.

  Did Dominic actually understand? He forced his eyes closed against the snake’s hypnotic dance.

  “You get pretty close, don’t you?” The serpent’s sibilant voice whispered in Dominic’s mind as much as in his bleeding ear. “Touching heaven and gutter, orgasm-blind seeing self and other? Your recreational re-creating of creation procreates. Sex apes God, and creates life.”

  “And pushes us into duality again,” Dominic whispered.

  “Very good!” The snake dropped his head, its forked, black tongue flickering over Dominic’s bare chest. “Two made one makes a third, a child, who will be both yours and his own,” it hissed.

  “So now even sex is a symbol?”

  The sinuous snake danced, overtly erotic, across Dominic’s chest, but his mind clung to the intellectual puzzle the snake had dangled.

  “Terribly elegant, don’t you think?” it whispered. “Powerful, and designed to get your attention.” The snake’s flickering tongue tormented the flesh of his bare chest, still pinned under the undulating coils, one loop of which now spiraled sensually between his legs. “Sex is the clearest instruction you’ll ever get from God.”

  Dominic shook his head and wiped the blood from his ear. “That sounds like something the devil would say.”

  “And yet you came to me to have your questions answered, when you could have turned the other way.”

  “I thought you might tell me the truth.”

  “So I have.”

  “Your key to the secret wisdom of the universe is sex? You advise I go find someone to fuck, and all will be revealed?” But even as the words left him, Dominic knew that encoded instructions were often misread. He pondered the neurotoxicity of snake venom, feeling giddy with understanding.

  “The advancement of knowledge, your fondest desire, eh? But no, I don’t give advice, just knowledge.” The snake slowed its helixed coiling up the tree. “To question what you think you know, not in light of new information, but in order to bring new information to light, knowing it will ignite and blind you, takes real courage. You have won a friend in me. I’ll tell you a secret as a prize.”

  “Thank you. I’d shake your hand, but, you know.”

  The snake stopped his spiraling and touched the tip of his midnight tail to its lipless mouth. “It’s enough for me that you were willing. It’s been a long time since anyone has given me their ear.”

  “Van Gogh? Romans, countrymen? Besides, I’m hoping that maybe, if I can learn from you now, you won’t sneak up and bite me in the future.”

  “No. But I promised you a prize, so I’ll add some information to your wisdom. Your angel is dying.”

  “Olivia?”

  The snake stabbed his blunt tail into his lipless mouth and swallowed and swallowed. Terror swam up Dominic, but he knew it would be useless to try and squeeze more information from the snake; its mouth was already full.

  ———

  I swim in darkness. Eyes opened, eyes closed, it makes not a fucking fig of difference. I cannot see. Nothing to see. No one sees me. Around me, inside me, the night of my ageless sarcophagus has swallowed and penetrated me. It pushed itself inside me and pulled me into it until we are one.

  I am always falling, but a strange new beauty clings to this descent. I am drowning and do not care to swim. Flying down, hair streaming into tragedy, I could almost welcome the familiar sensation of the plunge, through air and water, through stone and despair and into perfect love. The impact forces a sob from me.

  Strange sensation—like a backwards swallow.

  I am crying—angels don’t cry—I am crying for the beauty of falling, for
the night that holds me, and for the darkness I hold. For the stone, that cold and unforgiving womb of earth that traps me in what is real, in rock and bone, in death and love, all dead to me, the Undead.

  All I have left of living is recollection. In memory, I trace the smooth planes of Dominic’s face and the hard lines that scored it in the ballroom before he kissed me. Every place our bodies touched throbs again with cushioned stabs in the darkness. I close my eyes. In the warmth of memory, his kiss stretches, curling fresh fingers of pleasure into my imperfect flesh. It elongates, and I notice, for the first time, his teeth’s brief grind of desperation before he kissed me, as if they seized and tore away some final veil between my mouth and his surrender.

  He caught my shoulders first, to cushion the crashing of his hard body into mine, to not hurt me, to pull me to him without stopping. His strong hands grasped and clutched my body closer, nearer, until he gentled them enough to take my face. In the cold stone, I hear the shudder of his steadying inhalation. His stone-blue eyes pierced mine, dove in hard, then skimmed my face. Had he been frightened? Washed in sensation, I sway in his fierce arms and whisper his name, “Dominic.”

  I slide my ruined fingertips against my lips. The shiver of his passion, kissing me, trembles deeper now against my swallowed shadow. My body is taut as the strings of a lute, stretched so that even an artless touch can make the humming vibrations heard. He kissed me then, and the resonance of his hard mouth calls my hesitating fingers to strum clumsily against my shuddering flesh now. His beautiful lips barely brushed mine first, but that had been too much tenderness, and his next desperate kiss brought his mouth and tongue hard and seeking.

  Careful, in my private darkness, I touch my new fingers to the soft velvet encasing my living flesh. I trace the memory of his strong, steadfast body against me. His demanding kiss opened my lips, my face in his trembling hands. I rub the crown of my full breasts beneath the silken cloth. His sweet tongue coursed through me, marking the keen height of my breasts, but I cannot find the same center of pleasure within them now. The fabric mutes my touch.

  The stone’s coldness against my twisting arm adds a chill shiver in the cramped black when I reach to find the back zip. I pull it down, and the boned and tailored vest jumps free. I had never noticed how hard it holds my body in. My freed flesh feels vulnerable without its borrowed hide, more responsive—open and exposed. I run my raw hands over my warm belly and across my breasts in a rush of pleasure just to be released.

  Then I find his seeking mouth in memory again. I kissed just the softest lower lip then, and he made a little sound, a stifled groan, and opened his mouth to me. Turning his copper head, he brought our tongues and lips, mouths and bodies still closer, and my fingers dust the places where our bodies touched. The caress both surfaces the pleasure, and sends it diving to my core.

  Some buried heart—long-dead or never animate—flutter-pulses deep below my waist. The wonder of it sends my eyes searching open in the darkness. Remember! His strong arms wrapped around me, pulling my body hard against his. My fingers pass again over the peaks of my new and naked breasts. His starving kiss plunges into me, and against my gulping shock and joy, true feeling runs through me, dancing over and behind my shuddering breasts.

  Fear starts to prick in my throat with the drenching pleasure, too powerful, unknown, and unfathomable. My legs shudder with my breathing, staggerings of air. The new inverted liquid peak between my softening thighs reaches deeper into me. I whisper “Dominic,” my lips soaked in the swirling scent of pure potent feminine desire.

  Impossible.

  I taste the dark air again.

  But it is. My own desire. My teeth and nails are blunt. I keen the edges and feel—not my own—but my shadow’s breaking through.

  With shadow’s black, sharp teeth, I sink untested quills into my flesh. The first taste wracks me, sob and swallow, but desire fills my starving mouth. Scent tumbles into the sterile space, and sensation breaks in lapping shudders. I taste the fingers of the driver from Dublin, automotive oil and beer, and Irish cigarettes. Sweeter now than before, full of flavor and a strange new taste. I suck again. The tiny taste I had from Dominic the night I offered him an apple and cut his bold fingers with my dull blades. “Dominic,” I whisper again. He is safe on his way to Dublin now.

  Drenching, worming newness comes in the tastes I have tasted, in the drinking I have drunk. This is pleasure, washing, illuminating. I taste strength and dawning power, and the bitter taste of my shadow mingled with what I have made and what I have taken, the blood of men and angels.

  The blood comes slower to my shadow’s feeding teeth. I withdraw the slender edges and feel them fold deep against my own quills, secret in my gums. I lick the broken place on my arm to savor the last sweet seeping from the closing holes, and the bruisey ache in the flesh beneath my tongue. Sensation eddies and a soft smile floats across my lips, atop my breasts, and in the secret place shadow has left between my legs.

  Desire, be silent. Run down my throat. I remind myself of its fading. Savor, and the taste of tea. I swim in perfection.

  ———

  Dominic scrubbed his poisoned ear, impatient with the tickle of blood from the snake’s bite. His hand came away sticky and red. Shirtless and shoeless, with blood on his hands and on his feet and chest, he looked around the dim garden wildly. Where was Olivia? Hell was vast. She could be anywhere within it.

  Dominic racked his memory for everything Ophelia had told him about the way angels die. If she faded to the point where she could no longer feed, he could never get her back. Delusional or not, she was in real danger. He wanted to shield her from the macabre weirdness of her sisters and the hotel. Delusion and reality didn’t matter—maybe they were the same—hell, maybe he really was what Gaehod said. It didn’t matter. Finding Olivia was everything.

  Dominic ran through the distorting garden light, almost hoping it was all real. He could give her all of himself that way, and find her again lifetime after lifetime. He could bear the endless returning, if he could find her in it. But he had to find her in this present first. The blood oozing in his throbbing ear was maddening. He bounded up the stairs from the garden, wiping his bloody hands on his jeans. At the top, he shoved his finger in his bleeding ear.

  “Dominic.”

  It was Olivia’s voice. He whipped around, looking behind him. Nobody. He closed his damaged ear again with a stained and tentative hand. Where was her voice? Dominic strode down the hallway, listening. Silence. Again he plugged his ear and heard her angelic voice, but more distant. He ran the other direction, down the stairs back toward the wide, barless gates. At the threshold, he stopped again and listened.

  “Dominic.”

  She sounded weak—but closer. Dominic ran down the corridor, across the stained floor where his bare feet had tracked blood from the ballroom. He hesitated at that doorway. He heard Ophelia moaning, but not Olivia again.

  “Dominic!” Sylvia’s voice cut through him. “You owe my sister blood! Come feed Ophelia of your free will, or I shall bring you to her dead.”

  How the hell could he hear Olivia with that bitch screaming at him?

  Dominic plugged the bleeding ear again and listened.

  “I want.” Olivia’s voice was faint but constant.

  Dominic ran. He ran full-tilt, following the disembodied voice of a dying angel in his punctured ear, ready to lay down his life for her desire.

  10

  DEATH

  “I want,” I whisper, like a bell pounding the hours in me. “I want. I want. I want.”

  I want Dominic. And freedom. I want to do things I have done and not noticed. I want to be things I have dreamed and not seen. I want to live. I want without reason, unseen, and by myself alone. “I want. I want. I want.” Tolling rhythmic as a bass drum, or a heartbeat.

  I want things I cannot have, and the longing aches, vibrating through every shivering sinew stretched on my mortal powerless-ness to realize divine desire. I want out
. Angels might be what is wanted and not what wants, but I know with certainty that I want the fuck out of my coffin. I want to stand up again.

  Weighed down by my mingled bone and shadow, I reach slowly for the stone slab above me and push. With all of my old strength and new desire, I press up against the roof of my coffin. The stone is rough and dusty against my too-soft fingers. And too heavy.

  “Help?” I whisper to the silent blackness wound around and through me.

  I need help.

  My angelic body is invincible, and my arms sculpted perfection in pure marble, but my back is a woman’s still, strong to carry and to bear weight that would break the arms of men. The idea comes like a sob, unbidden and almost too late. I twist onto my belly, brace my torn hands and knees, and set my spine against the stone. I press.

  I hear the cold mass grind. Blood from my back pricks sticky against the rock. I scramble in the dark for something soft to pad it, cramming whatever my groping hands find between my yielding flesh and the unfeeling stone. I throw myself against it again, pushing hard away with the full strength of arms, legs, and back, groaning. Move. It must. It has to. I have to. There is nothing more.

  ———

  Dominic’s chest, blood-streaked and bare, strained against the air he gulped, hands on knees, doubled over in the grand foyer, ringed with a timid floss of cultured confusion. The only sound in the abruptly silenced space was the rasp of his raw panting and the pounding of his heart.

  “He does it for the exercise.”

  Dominic blinked and rubbed trickling sweat away from his eyes. The crowd turned from him to Alyx, sprawled inelegantly in the same high, wingbacked chair, Dominic’s untouched breakfast balanced on an impatient, spinning tray beside him.

  Dominic shook his head. “Find Olivia,” he gasped.

  Alyx gathered the flaps of his bathrobe around himself and tugged at the silk necktie belting it. He lurched to his feet.

  “Dude, you look like shit.”