and Falling, Fly

by Skyler White

  “I’m Reborn, right?” he whispered. “I’ll come back to you.”

  “You don’t believe that.” Olivia shook her head, black rivulets winding around her face. Dominic pushed a slender tendril behind her ear, allowing his fingers to trace the graceful sweep from fragile lobe to trembling chin. He raked the pad of her inviting lips, and she closed her fathomless eyes.

  He drew her face toward his. “I love you,” he whispered, his eyes clamped against the pain that choked him.

  “I love you,” he said again and kissed her soundlessly. He held her hard by the fragile slope of her waist. “I’m not leaving.”

  “Dominic!” She brought her lips to his. The delicate tips of her breasts touched his hammering chest. What he felt would strangle him, if he kissed her mouth again.

  “Olivia, I can face it all again, but I have to know I can find you. You have to be here when I come back. If I die knowing that the memory of you will resurface for me, that I can love you again, then I’m glad for my curse. But, Olivia, God, Olivia, if you die…” A tear slid between their cheeks, pressed together, and Dominic could not have said if it was hers or his. “You have to let me feed you. It’s the only way.”

  Olivia’s voice was choked. “Dominic, it may already be too late.”

  “It can’t be. I love you. Doesn’t that have to change something?” The sob that shook her was almost a word. “What did you say—loophole? What does that mean? Olivia, is there something special about blood that’s freely given? About love?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But there could be?”

  “I used to think so.”

  “Well let’s believe that now, okay? Let’s try,” he whispered.

  The howl of outraged vampires shook the garden, half a mile below.

  “Either you kill me or your sisters do, and at least if it’s you, you’ll be strong enough to fight them. And, Olivia, I’m coming back.”

  “Can you? Will you?”

  “I swear it.”

  Her black hair rained around them, enclosing them in a torrent of silk and silent beauty. Her kisses lit separate fires in him, behind his eyes, deep in his belly. They ignited and lingered, spread and engulfed him. And he let them rage. He withstood a firestorm of kisses on his cheeks and lips against the flat of chest. Her fingers ran molten up his arms and into his hair. Then Olivia was standing by the bed.

  “Olivia!” he cried.

  “I’m not leaving.” Her voice was flat. Dominic watched the shadows of the room play across and—horribly—through her. “I’ll stay with you and I’ll do what you ask, but I need something from you first.”

  Dominic pushed himself up on the bed. The sisters were stalking the lowest halls.

  “Anything.”

  “Make love to me.”

  “I thought you couldn’t…”

  “I don’t know if I can. But until today I couldn’t know pleasure. Before I… Before you…” Olivia peeled her pants off and stood before him naked. “I want to try.”

  Dominic climbed off the massive bed to stand silently beside her. He took her face between his hands and kissed her again, long and painful and slow. If he came back and found her gone, he would not be able to live. He would hole up in this grotesque hotel and spend the rest of his incarnations in madness.

  “You never felt pain before today either.”

  “No.”

  “It might…”

  The vampires were swarming the lobby now.

  “You just asked me to kill you.” Hysteria tinged her perfect voice. “You want me to drive my dull quills into your neck and drain your life from you in the remote hope that you’ll remember and find me again in however many years it takes you to reincarnate. You’re asking me to knowingly kill the only man—hell the only thing, mortal or divine—that I have ever loved. I want to feel this first.”

  If she faded into nothingness in his arms while he made love to her, he would live and die regretting without end what he could not change. But she had lived since the beginning of time, inspiring what she could not feel.

  Silently, he undressed. He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled her to him. He kissed her smooth belly and ran his greedy hands up to her high breasts and down her slender back beneath the gorgeous wings. He stroked her, wondering at the supple texture and smooth, lean form of her. His thumbs pushed up the rise of her thighs to circle the silky nest of black hair that crowned them. He looked up, but her eyes were closed, her body swaying. He pushed his fingers between her yielding thighs and felt the ocean softness of her. His cock ached.

  “Do I… ?” she whispered.

  He slid a finger against the warmth and darkness. “Yes.”

  He bowed his head to kiss her over the dark curls and stopped. Her sisters were climbing the stairs. And she was fading. A blue shadow, eerily like letters, played against the taut clear white of her flesh. Sylvia screamed, cursing him in the torn-open door of his downstairs room.

  Dominic took Olivia’s waist in his hands, guided her to the bed, and pulled the curtains shut around them. Her face was pale, but when he kissed her, waves of desire poured from her against him. She wanted him, was alive to him, was giving and open and ready for him. Dominic was shaking. Whether from terror or desire he didn’t know, but he wanted her. He wanted to love her, to feel her, to drive his body into her, to lose himself in her, and find himself.

  “I love you,” he whispered.

  The room shuddered with the thundering of the last hallway door torn from its hinges. Between Dominic’s hands, Olivia’s shimmering face showed no sign of anything beyond an enveloping pleasure. Could she not hear her sisters? Her tender mouth pulled his in invitation when he kissed it, and her pale, beautiful legs opened. Trembling, he pushed his cock between her yielding thighs. If she was afraid, she did not show it.

  “I love you,” she answered and closed her oceanic eyes.

  Dominic raised his body back from the woman he knew he loved and with a groaning, convulsive thrust, gathered all his force, and drove his throat against her open mouth.

  ———

  An arterial burst of footsteps ricochets across elongating time. I drink his flight, taste my sisters’ pulse. Dominic, impaled on my blunt quills, lies motionless across me. His living blood presses into my teeth’s hollow cores and down the back of my gulping throat. I do not want this. I do not want the ragged, leaking place in his skin, slippery and warm against my lips. I do not want Dominic sacrificed for such a wild and distant chance. But my feeding teeth are buried, and it would be easier to hold my breath to suffocation than refuse the pouring of his life into my parched mouth. My limbs, of their own accord, twist over his, pull his powerful body closer. I hold him, sucking. Killing him.

  “Olivia!” Sylvia screams down the distant hallway, her voice an indistinct roar in the distortion of his blood pounding in my ears. Already my vision is darkening, sights as old as I am taking shape, tumbling into the blood dreams. I glimpse earthen walls, clay amphorae stacked and marked with indented tiny triangles. A mother’s black eyes and strong, long nose. A whisper that rasps and growls. I drink in the oiled beard and brows of a proud brother, older, and revered. I see his handsome, dark throat brutally severed, then the brilliant flash of the dripping blade before young eyes. Then I see only the deep red I must stop draining. Dominic died young his first lifetime.

  Through the darkness, I urge my sisters to hurry. They will tear him from my teeth. Perhaps in time to save his life. But they are hunting him by scent, tracking his steps searching for me. It will still bring them here, but not directly. He did not know my room.

  I see eyes again in the red darkness—cold and yellow. I feel terror seeping and taste the keen ache of unmoving muscles. He stalks the feral eyes with other men in an impenetrable jungle night. Many of them died that hunt, but he is welcomed home to a grass-thatched hut and straw mat. A woman reclines upon it, her legs around his hips. Then her face again, washed in sweat. But there now—ne
stling against her breast—cradles a tiny head. His first child. Love dripping, and then drowning in a screaming agony of vomitus and blood. So much more painful than the sudden sword. Heartbreak drenches me.

  I cannot stop drinking the endless blood dreams.

  A mother’s eyes swim though the red. They brim with love and close in death. Her lifeless face sinks into the rich stream and coils into parchment, rolled and tidy, resting on marble. He loved them, not as fiercely as the death-stolen mother, but that lifetime’s loves were never that strong again—the devoted practice of medicine, a cool passion for thought, and the narrow hips of boys.

  Through the reddening, his past slides again toward death, and I battle to slow my hard, convulsive pulls of hunger. My sisters are coming. Their footsteps in the closer hall are slower than his pulse, but more relentless. Their feet, his heart, drums, or horse hooves echo inside stone. A woman above him, her head thrown back. I taste sex. Warrior, be thou summoned. Her body initiates him. Warrior, be thou safe returned. A splintering blow shatters bone and prevents it.

  Then wives—too many wives—and children with sweet liquid eyes who bow their faces to the ground.

  A father, two masters—one artist, one owner.

  A friend on horseback coils a lasso with nimble hands.

  A blond wife-to-be running, and black blisters creeping over infant flesh he loves, as I have never loved skin and bone and blood.

  An old man with terrible teeth and a doughnut, a ridiculous sweep of black, and my own desire-blinded eyes. No! My fingers reach to touch his copper hair, tuck a fallen piece behind his ear. I tear his throat away.

  Gasping, swallowing, I lie against Dominic’s limp body, his face still as a frozen stream, its freckles like leaves caught in early winter ice that would collapse if you put your heel upon it. Tears gather behind my eyes and surface. A sob comes as a low groan in the moment that the broken door to my room is torn away. I swallow the sound, too, and wrap my wings around my only and unbreathing, pulseless love.

  ———

  Dominic poured into the insistent pulsing pull of Olivia’s power over him, losing himself in her. Her swallowing matched the beat of his hammering heart, and he listened to the liquid sounds of them together. Singing, his heart set the tempo, her hunger gave the harmony. It rose, and slowed. His pulse followed her lead, dancing against her lithe body, until he didn’t know whether it was his heart or her mouth that moved his blood through him.

  Even with his eyes open, he couldn’t see. He was blind, and the urgent sounds of her sisters drowned in the aching beat of their bodies’ shared pulse. All he could hear, all he could feel, was her. He was dying. Consciousness pulled away from the edges of him, exposing fathomless memories of love and suffering and loss. Why were they still there—the wives and children, and the other deaths? Delusional, even now, damn him.

  What happens in the visual cortex when it is depleted of oxygen-carrying blood? When people refer to lives flashing before their eyes, were they witnessing a final electrical discharge, the simultaneous firing of every collapsing synapse? Buried memories rose from neurological graves to flow with his slackening pulse out of him and into her.

  He wished he could see her. Love lapped at him, washed him with a heat that didn’t warm him. He smelled ash. A particulate, scentless sensation filled his nostrils when he inhaled, but he clung to the warmth of Olivia’s cold mouth on his throat. He remembered her in the ruined abbey, the way she had reached for the hair that fell in his face. She needed him. Needed this. That was all that mattered.

  His breath was coming slower. Awareness shrank away from the cold peripheries. He had never been young. The loss of every love had weighed him down, but now he was light at least, the free-floating, tiny pieces of him dissipating.

  He was loved.

  He would be remembered, as he had always remembered.

  He watched himself, the lover, float away from himself, the beloved. How could he say good-bye to himself when the extinguished cinders weighed nothing at all?

  Consciousness cowered in the last places of breathing, the mind away from the brain, the self from the other, shrinking, reaching, yearning—not for the light—but for the ashes. He slid up the face of oblivion, falling faster than gravity, upward with the ashes.

  Dominic stood up into the silence. There was no sky. The ashes had no air to float into, only the deepening quiet of an unbeating heart and an undrinking mouth, still softer and at one with the silence, without sensation.

  She was gone.

  He must remember her.

  His body was gone.

  He must remember.

  Everything had gone into a silence made of ash. He must…

  He was gone, and yet somewhere, he was there. His thoughts remained to note the memory motes dancing away. Remember! Memory makes us immortal. Like angels, immortal. Like ashes, what is left of what is burned. Remember. Time and thought flame out. Awareness out, and memory.

  11

  THE FACE OF THE VOID

  The scream is a hideous crawling horror that paints my room in rage.

  My sisters have come.

  “The bitch broke out of her crypt!” Sylvia howls.

  “How could she have had the strength?” Ophelia sounds near to fainting herself.

  “The Reborn came to her rescue,” Sylvia snaps, and I hear my smallest sister’s unsupported body slump to the ground.

  Vivian is scornful. “He could not have shifted the stone,” she says.

  “What else explains it?” Sylvia paces wildly, her stilettos beating a ferocious tattoo against my floor. “He got away from us. He went to the garden. We tracked his scent here, and we find her coffin opened. I will kill him myself!”

  “Shut up,” Vivian commands. “Where is his scent?”

  From within my curtained bed, I scent the air with my hungry sisters. Even with my body pressed to his, there is no smell of blood from Dominic. I have drunk it.

  “Fuck him,” Vivian spits. “Wherever he is, he’s dead. There’s no scent. What we need to do is find Ollie.”

  My wardrobe doors smash against the wall with a splintering crack.

  Sylvia swears again. Hard footsteps stride toward my bed. Through my transparent wings, I see Vivian’s blood-red fingertips penetrate the seam between the drapes and rend the curtains in a violent storm of falling velvet and the tiny brass rain of gears.

  Sylvia, Vivian, and even Ophelia, swaying slightly, gaze down at Dominic, wrapped in my wings.

  “God damn him!” Vivian whispers.

  “He’s gone!” Ophelia wails.

  I stare into the rigid faces of my sisters who look—blindly—through me and through Dominic in my arms. Ophelia collapses again.

  “Where the hell is Ollie?” Sylvia demands.

  “Listen,” Vivian orders, “even if she drained the Reborn, she can’t have got far. She was too damn weak.”

  I examine their keen faces, each of my sisters listening to catch the sound of my desire. I smile beneath their eyes. They will not hear me. I am full angel now—without desire—soundless and invisible.

  “Come here, you crazy bitches! I’ll kill every one of you!” The half shriek, half aria reverberates from my splintered doorway.

  My sisters turn from me to glance dispassionately at Alyx standing, uncharacteristically erect, brandishing a broken table leg by the shattered hinges of my door. His hair is a wild tangle in his face, and his cool, ironic eyes roll wildly around the room, crazed—but sober. They pass over the bed, blind as my sisters’ are to Dominic and me motionless upon it.

  Vivian laughs. “Alyx, what are you wearing?”

  He shrugs his skinny shoulders, wearing leather pants belted with an obscenely wrought diamond-crusted buckle and rock star boots. “It was all I had. Now fuck off. All of you.”

  “Oh no, a drunken rock star arrives to ruin all our plans,” Vivian sneers. “Go away, Alyx.”

  “Wooden stake,” he counters, brandishing the splint
ered table piece at her. He looks ridiculous, mad, brandishing the ruined furniture, a man who could never face his own, prepared to take on all the demons of Hell.

  Vivian walks up to him and scents the air for his desire. Noiselessly, from the bed, I do the same. If Alyx is still himself enough to want her, or sane enough to fear any of my almighty sisters, Vee, standing with her pale face against his stubbled cheek, will sink her teeth into his throat and silence him in four long swallows. Vivian is full of rage, and he is undernourished.

  But I can glean no scent from him.

  “What have you done with D?” he demands, meeting Vivian’s puzzled gaze.

  “Funny you should ask.” She smiles. “We’re hunting him, too.”

  “He wanted to help you guys. But you couldn’t see past your next meal, could you? If you’ve killed him, I swear to God, I’ll make you regret it.”

  “He doesn’t want me,” Vivian murmured. “He doesn’t fear me, either.”

  “He will,” Ophelia whispered from the floor. “I will make him.”

  My ravenous sisters crowd around Alyx, scenting the air and running their fingers across the acute planes of his wasted body. Vivian’s long fingers unfasten his ridiculous belt buckle, and Ophelia sucks hard on two of his fingers. He looks dazed. Hatred he could fight, but what chance does he stand against desire? If he believes—even for a moment—that just one of them wants him, he will be lost. Vivian makes a low moan against his throat, tracing the fertile line between his ear and collarbone with her tongue.

  I stand and gather Dominic against me.

  With wary eyes on Alyx and my sisters swarming over him, cooing and licking, I take a silent step. If they move just a little from Alyx at the door, I will simply walk through it and away. Alyx’s grip on the table leg is slackening. He shakes himself like a dog, flinging off sensation’s soaking torrent. “You girls wanna have a little party, do you?” he leers. But there’s no scent of desire on him. He saunters toward my bed, his back to me. I hold Dominic close against my body. And we slip the other way.

  “Why don’t ya’ll come over here with me? Take a load off.” Alyx steps over the broken curtain rod, its tiny gears at last spun down, and falls onto my bed. I take another step toward the door, with Dominic’s limp body, tattoo-lined, blood-streaked, and cold in my arms. I’m desperate to flee, to take him out of here, but I must not make a sound.