and Falling, Fly

by Skyler White

  “Do you mock us?” Vivian’s voice is taut as a corset string, strung between metal eyes.

  Alyx pats the bedspread beside him. “Come on, ladies.”

  I step cautiously around the bentwood table by my door.

  He’s stalling us!

  Trying to keep us here—

  Hoping to deter us—

  To buy time for that Reborn to escape!

  My sisters’ thoughts seethe like a miasma of swallowed rage around my transparent ankles. They turn blazing eyes through me to the decayed rock star sprawled against the elegant, understated crewelwork of my silk coverlet, red on red. He winks at them lewdly. “There’s enough of me to go around. Come on, girls, wouldn’t be the first time, if you know what I mean.”

  Sylvia’s cry is terrible. My sisters close in on Alyx and I slip away through the shattered door with the lifeless body of my love. I have only one thought, one hope, but it is stained with blood. I run the few steps across the corridor as swiftly as I can with Dominic’s body still sheathed in my wings, and crash through the railing into the open space above the lobby.

  We fall.

  My wings unfurl. They stretch. The void beneath them catches their muscular curve, and our tumbling descent slows. I lock the muscles of my back and flex. It contracts my wings, and they beat against the empty space.

  Again.

  And we are no longer falling. I circle the air above the milling damned. They stare, pointing upward at the bloodied man, lost in the unbreathing sleep of angels, whose body seems wrapped around a phantom lover. His arms are draped across an empty space, legs caught by invisible ankles. So this, I hear one think, is what my soul does on those perfect nights. I knew it traveled.

  But I am flying straight up now. Up and up toward the spiral of Hell’s starlit dome, ascending into Heaven. The glass shatters and rains soundlessly down behind us, and I fly with him into the night.

  ———

  A moment separated itself from nothingness in lonely, horrible isolation. Dominic braced himself. Stay just one. But another came behind it, stringing ash links on a chain, dragging him from oblivion. Wait! There is something buried there. Something he must return to. Or from.

  But it was gone. Everything was gone. He was dead, and time rushed at him in torrents. He had no strength to shield his face from the minutes hailing into his open eyes. Wait. Remember.

  The angel’s eyes were bottomless as love. He struggled to reach them, and she put her red lips against his—like fire—but he kissed her, and closed his eyes to feel her mouth again. Stay here and now, nowhere and timeless. Dead, with lips on an angel’s. Wait.

  He pulled his breathless mouth away. “Olivia?” he whispered. Her depthless eyes met his again. He took her winged shoulders in hands he didn’t know were his until they touched her. “Olivia, why are you here?”

  “I love you,” she said.

  “I died.”

  “I know. I killed you.”

  Her exquisite head dropped against his silent chest, and Dominic wrapped unsteady arms around her, quaking against the painful, waking bone and sinew of his body. His limbs convulsed violently. Olivia clung to him, waking his stomach and thighs where she pressed against them, too.

  “Dominic, what’s happening?”

  “I’m slipping.” Life was pulling on him, irresistible as sleep. He smiled. “I’m going back. I’ll find you again soon. Wait for me.”

  “Dominic, no!” Her pale fingers ran across his face, down his arms in trails of flame against his skin, kindling him.

  “I won’t remember at first, but by eighteen, I should be back to you, back in Ireland.”

  A sob wracked her, and Dominic turned her face to kiss her once again. Her lips trembled beneath him, making him want to kiss her more strongly, more deeply, to smooth her tremors with the necessary force of it. She hiccupped.

  It was a funny, human sound in his lifeless mouth, and he forced himself to pull away from her lips. “Olivia, I know it seems like a long time, but it will pass quickly. Nothing compared to how long you’ve been alive.” He pushed two crystal tears away from her brimming eyes with his ashen thumb. “And when I find you again, I promise, I’ll make it up to you. We’ll make love, finally. We will—”

  “You don’t understand.”

  She closed her boundless eyes against him, pushing a new rivulet of tears down the smooth plane of her cheeks as he stroked them. Every touch of her body, every kiss, pressed him back toward living, and yet he could not let her go.

  He would return, in a new body, a new beginning. He was willing. All his life—all his lives—he had fought it, but now he was willing. He would go back, face the piecemeal agony at adolescence, the grueling, slow remembering, the irrational puzzle coming together, and he would find her again. He could face anything for her, with her, his angel.

  He took her encompassing mouth with his again. He wanted to stay as long as he could, to comfort and reassure her, but he had to taste her mouth again. She opened perfectly to his kiss, a deep softness in her yielding to his insistent lips and tongue. Would making love to her here, in the aching in-between, drive him more quickly back into the endless cycle, faster back to his next rebirth? He should stop, but desire overwhelmed him. Her mouth welcomed his, not hungry, but sustaining; not forbidden, but divine.

  She pulled her lips away. “Dominic, if you can’t find me down there, I’ll be here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you can’t find me at the hotel—”

  A woman’s voice, distant and muffled, cried out in pain. “Mother,” he whispered. Olivia closed her azure eyes.

  “I’m an angel now,” she said. “Full angel. I can’t—”

  But Dominic stopped Olivia’s mouth. He kissed her against a strangled sob in his throat, and in his ears. He had died too late to save her. The woman wailed again. Was he that close to return?

  “I won’t be there,” Olivia whispered. “I’m invisible there. I don’t know if I can find you here, in the between, every time you die, but if I can, I will. Dominic, I love you.”

  Her hair was impossibly soft. “I’ll come back and find you here,” he promised.

  Hospital noises drilled at his ears. A man’s voice now, calm and rhythmic. He was slipping.

  Pure horror tinged Olivia’s pale face. “Dominic, you mustn’t suicide. I know what happens to Reborn suicides, it’s too terrible to bear.”

  Dominic ran shaking hands down the strong column of her back and bowed his head. He nuzzled her throat and spread his fingers across her back as if he could contain her. No, he wouldn’t kill himself. He carried lives and heartbreaks, and experienced the terrible pattern of life and loss repeating now, but as a teen, it had come back in bits and pieces. It had been terrible. It was still. But to remember it all—the impossibility of escape, the inevitability of suffering—before birth, before speech? It destroyed the mind it housed and the shell-shocked children were all born mad. No, even to return to her, he would not begin his own end. She shuddered in his arms, and he pressed a lingering kiss on her delicate collarbone.

  Pain seared across his face and chest, a terrible constricting agony, and he found his fingers back on her angelic face, tracing her brows, pushing into her hair.

  “Olivia…” It was all he could manage. Her body clung to him, her fingers strong in the muscles of his arms, her supple legs wrapping his. To kiss her would push him farther from her, but what could he do but kiss her? He took her mouth again and again, almost savagely, and with each spasm that wracked him, felt her open more.

  “Olivia, if you want me to stay with you here, I have to stop. It’s pulling me away.”

  She gave a little sob, and he crushed her against his body. “I can feel you,” she whispered. “I thought I would be beyond physical sensation here… pleasure, pain… but it’s more acute, more intense.”

  “Does it hurt you?” he whispered.

  “No.”

  He was grateful she didn
’t ask him the same, because the pain for him was intense. Every place her body touched, he was branded by flame. Still, he kissed her and wrapped his searing arms around her. He braced himself against the tearing pain, to welcome the angel he loved, and would happily suffer to hold.

  Light pressed blood-red against his open eyes. He was losing her face, vision slipping into a crimson and underwater glow. He gasped and clutched her harder, her breasts tender brands against the flesh of his chest. He caught one in his hand, and she cried out as though he’d slapped her.

  The sound came muffled through the ashes in his ears. He dropped his hand lower, seeking between her legs. They opened readily and he stroked her. She took his mouth again, and he inhaled.

  “He’s choking!”

  A man’s face peered down. Dominic clamped his eyes closed, gasping, but Olivia was gone.

  “Hello, son,” the man said.

  Dominic squinted into the hovering face, the brimming eyes and terrible teeth.

  ———

  Alyx looks like shit. He is folded behind the exploded door to my apartment, limbs bent at bad angles, bits missing. Not that I ever saw him look well. Still, death makes every face a mockery. My avenging sisters have gone. I listen for the sound of their hungers, but the hotel is quiet. I can’t hear Gaehod, but I never could. I’ve come back to the hotel to find him.

  My bedroom is a war zone. The heavy stone sarcophagus lid is shattered, and chunks of rock lie everywhere—radical, natural shapes amongst the ridiculous, ornate carvings and silly Spartan lines. The curtains torn from my bed pepper the floor with gears and uncoiled springs, and the wardrobe doors lie splintered where Sylvia threw them. There’s nothing here I need. My wings flex tight against my back. I had thought I would grab a shirt, but I square my shoulders to lift my naked breasts high. I’ll go bare-breasted to Gaehod. I will stand before him, quill my angel’s wings, and plead. Every moment pulls Dominic farther from me.

  “I always knew you had great tits.”

  I freeze. I scent nothing.

  “Who’s there?” I demand, loathing the quaver in my voice.

  “Yo.”

  Alyx is lying right above me, his narrow back resting against the ceiling, staring with considerable fondness at my bare breasts.

  “Eyes, Alyx.”

  His soft, brown eyes meet mine reluctantly. He looks younger than I remember, but real and solid, and floating down to stand beside me.

  “What the fuck?” I ask him.

  He shrugs, looking at his abandoned body behind the door. “Jesus, I was skinny. Why didn’t anybody make me eat?”

  I pick up his broken body and carry it to the bed. His left eye is swollen closed, ringed with a purple so deep it looks black near his nose. I push a pillow under his rolling head. His nose is flattened to the right side of his face, and he’s missing his two left front teeth. The oddly pristine right side of his face looks only mildly surprised. It is anything but peaceful, and unsettling even to me, no stranger to death’s sculpting fingers. I arrange his stiff limbs as properly as I can, although I leave the left arm spayed out to the side. I could push it down, but the sound would be too much for him. He leans against my tomb, watching me.

  “Ophelia,” he says quietly, nodding at his corpse.

  I pick the heavy drapes from the floor and toss them over the bed’s broken rails to shield the poor, broken body from his eyes. I need to reach Gaehod, but I can’t leave Alyx here, alone with his ruined body.

  “Ophelia did this to you?”

  “Yup. I was having a drink in the lobby and Dominic blew in, acting crazy, looking for you. He said you were in trouble. Then Vivian and the vamp girls went by about ten minutes later. I figured they were hunting him. I wasn’t going to let that happen. But fuck, man. I’m useless. What am I going to do against a pack of pissedoff vampire bitches?”

  “You came up here after them? Alone?”

  “Yeah. Not that it mattered. Fuckers didn’t know where D was, either. He wasn’t here, so I tried to keep them from leaving. Vee just picked me up and hurled me. I don’t weigh much, I know, but damn… Anyway, the glass dome in the lobby exploded, and they all left to see what the fuck—except Ophelia.”

  “She was too weak to follow them.”

  “Weak? That bitch broke my arm with one hand! She crawled over to where I was trying to get up after being chucked across the fucking room and”—Alyx give me a wry grin—“had her way with me.”

  “She drained you to get her strength back.”

  “She seemed strong enough.”

  “But she hurt you before she drank?”

  Alyx shrugs, but I am sure of it. Ophelia is famous for the fines she pays to the Quarry in damages. She would have tortured him any way that didn’t waste blood.

  “Hey, if I was into S&M, it would have been great.”

  “But you’re okay now?” I ask him. “I mean you’re not still in any kind of pain, right?”

  “I feel great. Better than I have in years.” He shoots me a wry grin. “Wouldn’t mind a drink, though.”

  “No booze in Heaven, I don’t guess,” I say.

  “Hang on, are you dead, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And Dominic?” I catch the masked despair in his eyes.

  I just nod. And Alyx looks hollow, truly dead for the first time. He sags.

  “I came back here to find Gaehod,” I say. “Maybe he’ll think of something.” But Alyx is staring at his mangled corpse on my bed, shaking his head.

  “How fucking typical,” he says bitterly. “I wasted my life, and now I’ve wasted my death. If I could have stopped them—”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I tell him, but he doesn’t hear me. I sit down beside him on my destroyed tomb. “Alyx, I was here. With Dominic.” I have his attention now. “Dominic found me in my crypt. Broke the lid open with his head. My sisters couldn’t see him, because I hid him with my wings. I’m invisible to the living.”

  “And to the Undead, apparently.”

  I laugh. “Yeah, apparently. You are the reason I was able to carry Dominic out of here. They all closed in around you, and I walked out the door and flew away with him.”

  “Jesus…”

  “You saved him. Us, actually.”

  Half a smile twists his beautiful lips. He looks at me clearly through cloudy eyes. “Where did you take him?”

  “To Dublin. To the hospital there.”

  Alyx makes a low whistle. “You gave up the bet then? The hotel’s gonna close?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” I say. I hate the idea of not having this place. I need it. The world needs it, no matter what Gaehod says about modernity and acceptance. I hang my head. How will Dominic ever find me now, when he remembers?

  “Can they save him?”

  “The hospital? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I believed they could when I took him there, but then I saw him here, where we are, he was being pulled away.” I swallow against the tears. “I think he died,” I say. “In fact, I think he might have been reborn already, reincarnated. I don’t know. That’s why I need to talk to Gaehod.”

  “You saw Dominic here? In this room?”

  “No, here, in Heaven.” Alyx looks so defeated that pity curls itself around my waist. “It’s overrated, don’t you think?” I elbow him gently. “I remember Paradise being different before.”

  “I don’t think we’re in Heaven,” he says.

  “We’re dead.”

  “I know, but seriously, it’s me. What are the odds?”

  “Maybe your final act of self-sacrifice redeemed you. That was a pretty noble thing you did.”

  Alyx snorts with derision. “I don’t think so.”

  But it doesn’t seem like much of a heaven. “Where do you think we are?” I ask him.

  “I dunno. Limbo, the Beyond. We’re just out there, man.”

  I’m sitting on the edge of my sarcophagus beside him, but he’s looking down at the floor between his sh
iny boots. His hands on the red stone are white beneath the bloodstains, and I rub away a flaking coil that winds around his wrist with my finger. “I need to find Gaehod,” I tell him. “Do you want to come with me? We can ask him where the fuck we are and what we’re supposed to do now.”

  Alyx shakes his head. “No. I know what I’m supposed to do now.”

  I glance over at his ruined body on my cursed bed, and feel afraid for him. Mortals are so frail, so temporary, so… mortal. Gaehod translates mortals as dying ones, and so they are. And so they are afraid.

  “Will you come with me?” he asks, not looking at me.

  I start to say I can’t, that I have to find Gaehod in time, but… okay, if I’m honest, true immortal that I am, the one thing I’ve got plenty of is time. Dominic is dead. And even though it would help me to know what will happen to him now, there’s nothing I can do with the knowledge. And Alyx is alone for the first time, the way I have always been.

  “Sure,” I say. “Where are we going?”

  He stands, and I follow, past his poor body, through my shattered door, and into a dank and silent cave. Our backs are to the cave mouth, and we walk away from it, from the high moon and shivering treetops, to grope our way deeper in. The ground is craggy and sloped, and before too long we start to smell a faint, sweet smoke rising from deep cracks in the ground beneath us. We’re in Delphi.

  “You must be looking for the oracle,” I whisper to Alyx.

  His grin is crooked and he slips his hand into mine. “Just all my life,” he says.

  We step across a wide fissure and almost trip over a little three-legged stool.

  “Oracle?” Alyx calls into the still blackness.

  “Pythia!” I shout, but only echoes come back to us.

  Alyx sits down heavily on the empty stool. “Figures,” he grunts. “I didn’t tell you, but before you showed up, I tried to leave your room and ended up in this fucking horrible hot desert with a burning bush that wouldn’t talk to me either.”