Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy

by Stephen Morris

  Rearing up again, she forgot to keep her hands on the bed in front of her and raked the air before her for an instant before collapsing in the most intense, exhausting physical culmination she had ever experienced. In that instant, though, she opened her eyes and saw not fingers but hooves cutting the air before her face. Then, as she blinked—unsure she had actually seen hooves—she fell onto the bed and clutched the folds of the coverlet. As she lay there, face down, her lungs heaving and gasping for air, the whisk continued to rain upon her buttocks, but more slowly, becoming more gentle and then—at last? Alas!—stopping altogether.

  George ran his hands over her now-so-tender, stinging skin. His hands, though not callused, felt almost as rough as sandpaper on her flogged flesh. He caressed the skin again, and then—whack!—slapped that same tender skin as an irate father would spank his daughter who had been about to step off a sidewalk into traffic.

  Magdalena turned her head slightly, peering at George through the knotted tangles of her hair, and smiled.

  “You must gather your wits, Magdalena!” the priest commanded. “You must take the staff to Elizabeth at the Astronomical Clock.”

  The last session of the day had concluded and Alessandro was back in his hotel room after dinner. He had given his presentation that morning to maintain the appearance of normalcy and seen Elizabeth in the audience. She had raised a good point or two in the discussion following, but he had avoided speaking to her privately by dawdling over his file folders and talking with his fellow panel members.

  “What a relief!” He was glad that Elizabeth had gone to the morning coffee break, unsure that he would be able to hide his true feelings from her. Now that he knew who and what she was, her allure, which he had been drawn to from their first meeting, had curdled. On the other hand, was it more dangerous to let on he knew the truth by avoiding her? Either way, his cold shoulder had no doubt alerted Elizabeth that he, if no one else, was a threat to her and George and Magdalena. He hoped that Sean’s nephews in Waterford would soon act on the e-mail Sean had sent them. Until they built the cairn of stones on her grave, the only way he could think of to protect himself from the Dearg-due was to keep the Infant of Prague medal nearby.

  “If it shows her true self, it might also be able to keep her away,” he reasoned, emptying his pockets onto the night table beside the bed. He changed his trousers and stepped into the bathroom to wash his face before going down to the lobby to wait until it was time to set out for the Powder Tower. He was too nervous to stay upstairs in his room alone.

  A quiet knock on the door caught his attention. Taking a towel to dry his face and hands, he stepped to the door and opened it, expecting to see Theo or one of the others. “Couldn’t wait alone, either?” he asked as the door swung open.

  “No, I couldn’t.” Elizabeth stood in the hall outside. “I’ve been missing you all day.” She stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. Alessandro heard the lock click shut. She folded her arms behind her back and smiled at him. “I waited for you at the coffee break after your paper but you were busy with the other members of the panel, and then we just seemed to keep missing each other. But here we are now.” She glanced down and then up again, her eyes meeting his. She smiled.

  Alessandro struggled to think quickly but found it difficult to organize his thoughts. The delicate fragrance of Elizabeth’s perfume, the shimmering cascade of her deep red hair against her fair alabaster skin, the light in her eyes all beguiled him. The attraction he had felt for her from the first shivered up his spine. He reached out to touch her cheek. She tilted her head slightly and closed her eyes, running the tip of her tongue along her lips.

  “No!” He snatched his hand from her face. He couldn’t bring himself to touch her. Not now, now that he knew. But before. Before he knew. He had wanted nothing but the chance to touch her face, caress her cheek, kiss her and thrill to be kissed by her in return. Why hadn’t she come to his room like this before, on that night that now seemed so long ago?

  “No? Why?” Elizabeth opened her eyes and looked at him. She burst into a grin. “Do you have a girlfriend at home?” she teased. She touched his cheek. Her fingertips ran lightly along his ear and down his jaw. He could feel everything inside him heave towards her, his body yearning for more. He tilted his head back and closed his eyes, struggling to find the words to send her away.

  “You never said anything about a girlfriend before,” Elizabeth chided him gently. “But she never needs to know, does she? I don’t mind. It will just be our secret. A conference fling. Maybe something to enjoy again at another conference sometime, but I won’t insist on following you home or making a nuisance of myself.” She leaned towards his neck and ran the tip of her tongue across his throat, just above the collar of his shirt.

  Fireworks of ecstasy exploded inside Alessandro’s head. He stumbled back across the small room and then across the bed, his arms splayed. “Get away from her!” his rational thoughts screamed. His visceral, animal thoughts ordered him to stay where he was. Never before had he been so conscious of two such clearly distinct voices in his head arguing for supremacy over his behavior. He felt unable to respond, neither pushing Elizabeth away nor taking her in his arms.

  Elizabeth looked at him there, his back on the bed and his feet on the floor. She winked. He felt a grin blossom across his face and he reached his arms toward her. She lifted her skirt a few inches and climbed atop him, her thighs straddling his hips. Her knees rested on the bed beside his waist. He cupped his hands around her lower legs and pulled them tight against him. She smiled and then they both burst out laughing. She stretched her torso over his, placing her hands on the bedcover next to his ears and leaned towards his face. She closed her eyes and ran the tip of her tongue along his lips.

  Alessandro sighed, ripples of rapture radiating throughout his body from the touch of her tongue. He ran his hands along her legs, feeling her skin. Where their skin touched, he felt alive. More alive than he had ever thought possible. He pulled her legs tight against him, his mouth hanging open and aching to brush her lips with his. He strained to close his mouth against hers. He closed his eyes to shut out the distractions of sight and focus his attention on the physical sensations that assailed his body. The delicate scent of Elizabeth’s perfume made his head swim.

  “Stop!” a voice barked in his head, cracking with urgency and fear.

  “Go ahead,” another voice urged in a more soothing tone. “Relax. Explore. What is there to fear?”

  “To fear?” cried the first voice. “Only—“

  “Only nothing.” The second voice wrapped itself around Alessandro’s brain and extended its tentacles through his arms and legs. Blood pounded through his veins madly. He gasped for breath and felt his hips rising to meet hers. His toes curled with delirium. “Only enjoy it for what it is,” the voice in his head cooed.

  “What more could you want?” Was it the voice in his head that Alessandro heard or was Elizabeth whispering in his ear? He could feel her lips brush his ear, her breath caress his neck, her hair trail across his throat. He let go of her legs, intending to unbutton his shirt, but she leaned down closer to his torso, resting her weight on him. Rather than disturb her proximity, he swung his hands towards hers behind his head. He wanted to hold her by the wrists, slip his fingers between hers, run his fingertips along her arms…

  He miscalculated how close he was to the edge of the bed and swept his hands across the top of the nightstand. He knocked the phone askew and sent everything he had emptied from his pockets there onto the floor. He jerked his arms back toward his sides as he and Elizabeth laughed at his clumsiness. She nibbled his earlobe. He gasped with excitement and pressed his eyes shut. He pressed his hips against hers more firmly, much more firmly. Both of his fists clenched the folds of the coverlet with eager anticipation of what must soon follow.

  Something hard in the creases of the bedcover touched the thumb of one hand. Perhaps a coin from the nightstand had fallen on the
bed rather than the floor? His lungs heaved to gather enough air as he ached to grind his hips into Elizabeth’s. He gasped and dropped the bedcover from his fingers only to seize it again much more forcefully. The coin pressed tightly against his palm. His tongue yearned to stroke Elizabeth’s throat and reached towards the flesh he knew must be right above his lips.

  But his tongue was confused. It felt like it had found not Elizabeth’s taut, delicate flesh but tough, leathery folds of some other kind of skin. Did Elizabeth’s dress have a leather collar that he hadn’t noticed before? The scent of her perfume seemed to vanish as well. Had he simply become accustomed to it? Another scent, not unlike the metallic scent of a bleeding cut, wafted through the air. His eyes were reluctant to open. His lips did not want to part from whatever article of Elizabeth’s clothing that his tongue had found. He was dizzy with excitement and confusion. He forced his eyes to open in order to orient himself in relation to Elizabeth’s body and find her flesh.

  He screamed. It was not Elizabeth he saw above him, stretched across his body. A ghastly hand clamped over his mouth to muffle his cry. The smell of blood and putrefying flesh struck his nostrils. He could taste the stench in his mouth. The cadaverous face of the other-Elizabeth, the Dearg-due, leered above him. No longer the luscious lips he had yearned for but grim folds of skin stretched into a grin around the skeletal mouth. The cascade of red hair that had so captivated him with its bounce and sheen was nowhere to be seen. Instead, wisps of hair peered from a hood rising over her head from the drapery of a red shroud wrapped loosely about her torso. Those ponderous breasts he remembered from his vision on the bridge swung in horrible mimicry of lust and passion.

  “Why do I see her like this?” His brain struggled to understand what was happening. He shifted beneath her on the bed, attempting to dislodge her from him, but she kept astride him, keeping one hand across his mouth and seizing one of his arms with her free hand, pinning him on the bed. He raised his one free hand, still clenched in a fist, to knock her aside. She batted his hand away with the side of her head, her eyes in the sockets of her skull still seeming to burn with desire in the midst of her rage. He swung again, thinking to open his hand and slap her face, when he realized that he still clenched the coin against his palm.

  “Coin?” he asked himself. “No, it must be…” He brought his fist to his face as if to tear her claws away from his mouth, but pushed the object in his fist to the edge of his finger to see what it was. The medal of the Infant of Prague emerged between his thumb and forefinger. “What can I do with this? Will it do more than show me the truth about her?” With a roar of defiant rage, he threw himself into her face and pushed the religious medal against her forehead.

  “Sweet Jaysis!” A crowd of a half-dozen teenagers stumbled, laughing and singing off-key, out of a pub onto Great George’s Street as several men standing around the door laughed. The door swung shut behind the exiting drinkers, but the sound of the traditional Irish music trio in the bar could clearly be heard through the windows. “We’ve been thrown outta better pubs than this one, haven’t we, Colm?” exclaimed one of the young men, leaning against Colm’s shoulder.

  “That we have, Donal! That we have!” Colm wrapped his arm around his younger brother’s shoulders and the two boys giggled, Colm wiping the tears of laughter from his eyes with the back of his free hand.

  “But sure Jaysis we haven’t been thrown outta this pub, either!” exclaimed their friend Michael. “You’re feckin’ daft, Colm—and feckin’ drunk on top o’ bein’ daft!” The friends burst into renewed gales of laughter, including Colm, as they turned left on a dark street toward Waterford’s historic district on the southeast coast of Ireland. The River Suir, a few short blocks behind them, ran parallel to Great George’s Street, which was exceptionally empty, even for August. The bar behind them was still full of townsfolk, happily drinking and singing traditional Irish folksongs with the trio on the small stage, but the streets were empty. Most of the local students were gone for the last weeks of summer, as were many townsfolk. Those still in the area and not already home were inside one of the many bars and clubs of Waterford, with no intention of leaving until the establishments closed. It was, in truth, unusual for Colm, Donal, Michael and the rest to be leaving a pub early.

  They burst back into their slightly off-key singing, repeating the long drinking song the band had led the barful of people in a short time before.

  “Ho, ro, the rattlin’ bog,

  The bog down in the valley-o!

  Ho, ro, the rattlin’ bog,

  The bog down in the valley-o!

  Now in that bog there was a tree,

  a rare tree and a rattlin’ tree…

  Now on that tree there was a branch,

  a rare branch and a rattlin’ branch…”

  Their voices carried through the darkness as they sang the next dozen verses of the song until they reached the last chorus:

  “Ho, ro, the rattlin’ bog,

  The bog down in the valley-o!

  Ho, ro, the rattlin’ bog,

  The bog down in the valley-o!”

  Whoops and squeals and hearty laughter convulsed the group as they fell against each other, tangled in the words and notes as well as the camaraderie of each other’s feet and arms. They slumped against a building, unable to sort themselves out, some of them slipping down wall until they were sitting on the sidewalk. The drunken hilarity slowly gave way to wheezing and giggles. Pulling themselves away from the wall at last, they extricated their various limbs and stood.

  “What was it that you were trying to say about your Uncle Sean, back inside the bar?” asked Daria when they had caught their breaths again. “I couldn’t hear it much, over the music and the singing and the what-all. Why is it that we are leaving the bar already?” She checked her watch. “It’s hardly more than half-ten!”

  “Because,” Donal twisted his head around in Daria’s direction, “dear old Uncle Sean is off to a conference in Prague this week and forgot to take his slides for a lecture he is giving in the morning, and sent us, me and my brother Colm, that is, an e-mail asking us to take a few photos and e-mail them to him so he can make some feckin’ transparencies for the overhead projector! Isn’t that the God’s honest truth of it, Colm?” Donal asked his brother. Colm smirked and nodded, with exaggerated solemnity. Both boys, in their late teens, as were the others in their group, spewed a mist of ale and spit into the air as they were struck again by the ridiculous nature of their uncle’s request.

  “By Jaysis!” exclaimed Anabelle and Eamonn, who had been standing directly in front of Colm and belatedly ducked to one side to avoid the explosion that rained onto them. “Watch where you are spittin’, Colm!” But they were guffawing as they objected to Colm’s behavior.

  “Pictures of what?” Michael wanted to know. “All you said back in the bar was that we needed to take these photographs for your uncle before we got too feckin’ drunk to remember to take them.”

  “Or before you got too drunk to remember how to work the digital camera!” added Daria, provoking a new round of laughter from the companions.

  With some effort, Donal pulled himself away from his brother’s shoulder and tried to walk a few steps. “Drunk? Who’s to say that I am drunk?” he demanded to know. He tripped on the cobblestones and collided with Annabel and her boyfriend, Eamonn, who caught him before he bloodied his nose on the street.

  “I’m to say, so I am!” retorted Donal. “I am man enough to know and to admit when I am drunk, Colm! And you should be as well, as ’tis no shame for a true and honest Irishman to know when it is that he is too drunk to remember to take his feckin’ uncle’s photos!” More laughter ricocheted in the darkness off the buildings lining the narrow streets.

  “But photos of what?” Michael demanded again to be told. “Photos of feckin’ what?”

  “Photos of a vampire grave,” muttered Donal, his arms still supported by Eamonn on one side and Annabel on the other.

&nbs
p; His words were met by stunned silence, which was shattered by Daria’s outburst of hysterical laughter.

  “A feckin’ vampire grave?” she repeated, shrieking at the top of her lungs. She bent double, unable to keep walking from the laughter that racked her body. The others joined in the laughter, staring at Colm and waiting for a more detailed explanation of Donal’s words.

  “It’s the Dearg-due,” Donal elaborated, but that name meant nothing to most of these friends. Only Michael recognized the term.

  “The Dearg-due?” he asked. “She’s that vampire-woman that only kills men, right?”

  “Only kills men? Now, that’s the kind of vampire-woman we could be friends with, Annabel and I!” Daria gasped to catch her breath and wipe the tears that now streamed from her eyes. “I mean, we would never need to feel that we was in danger, now would we? It would only be our feckin’ daft male friends that would need to be on the lookout to protect themselves, now wouldn’t they?” She and Annabel exchanged grins and rolled their eyes at the men around them.

  “What vampire grave is here in Waterford?” Eamonn wanted to know. “It must be pretty well hidden, or wouldn’t we have all heard about it before now?”

  “She’s buried… well, according to my family… oh, the hell with it,” stammered Donal. He pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket. “I printed the e-mail that Uncle Sean sent us, so that we could be sure to follow his feckin’ directions. Here, read it yourself!” He thrust the paper at Eamonn. He shook the paper until it fell more-or-less open and peered at it.