by Trisha Telep
Ina grits her teeth, holding in the now-strained silence. Far off, a chorus of cries is swept along in the wind like summer stalk, but it is Russell’s scream that blooms like a thick stem with thorns. A smile widens Ina’s face, stretching it, though her teeth are still clenched tight. The razors are sewn in every silken fold, every pocket. And while the scream is gratifying, it’s the scent of his elixir, fouled though it is, that causes her appetite to rear. Suddenly a film is lifted before her eyes, like she’s wearing a gauzy veil, and the entire world is instantly reduced to a two-toned wash of soothing sepia.
Alexander shifts into view and Ina gazes at him for clarity. Indeed he smiles back steadily, completely in control. She loves that about him, and is wishing she could take a long, refreshing sip from that calmness when she is slapped.
“Fucking whore.”
Fucking idiot. Russell leaves blood smeared on her cheek. She feels the smile on her face alter. A lone man’s premature holler fills the sky. Without willing it, Ina leans forwards, testing. Her restraints hold, but Russell backs from the strike zone, suddenly, careful to keep her in view. Goddamn straight.
She hisses.
The sacrifice screams in sepia.
“Where is it?” Russell tries to sound like he is still in control.
“I have it.” And though the words were whispered, it is Alexander’s warrior cry.
Russell’s eyes widen but it’s too late. Even the realization of death is a future event he won’t live to see. Just like the New Year that will soon chime in the sky. The abrupt way life abandons him is jarring, but fascinating, like a pile-up on the freeway. Pain firecrackers across his gaze, then falls and fades and disappears.
The sacrifice shrieks when Russell’s larynx lands at its feet, then it scrambles backwards until its bonds catch. Ina thinks it should be grateful it gets to watch the man’s demise, and she thinks of kicking it into silence, but its cries join the other, more joyful ones now hanging prettily in the city sky, and Ina doesn’t think anyone will know the difference.
Besides, she knows she can’t touch it without latching on, and Ina must share. Sharing its blood is what will connect her to Alexander. It is the last blood of the year, and the first of the new, which allows them to recognize one another when all else is forgotten. Alexander – clever, bold, imperturbable – thought of it years ago.
“Careful,” Ina warns, because she can see that Russell is long gone and Alexander is still tearing the torso. She hopes it’s in anger and not need. Russell’s blood may be bitter, but subtlety fades when they gorge. Tonight, of all nights, the blood has to be sweet. “You don’t want too much.”
If Ina’s heart could beat, it would be racing at the sight of that beloved dark head lowered over that rotted shell. She’d read an article this year that proved even the mortal scientists had realized that transfusions could affect personality. She half expects Alexander to glance up at her with Russell’s low gleam sparkling in his own eye and mutter, “Shut up, bitch,” before draining the man dry. That fear is what’s kept them from daring this before.
But Alexander does stop, tossing the husk aside with such force its bones crunch wetly against the curved concrete. Then he wipes a sleeve over his mouth, holds up Russell’s watch and smiles like a kid on Christmas morning. If possible, she falls more in love with him in that minute. It is the last.
Laughter bubbles up inside of Ina as Alexander cuffs himself to the wall with real shackles, pushing the ones he planted there before aside. The pure, clean blood has to be calling him, racing as it is in the sacrifice’s veins, tied in silky red ribbons to those futile screams, but he is tranquil self-assurance.
“Tell me again about the first day we met,” she says, once he’s settled across from her.
“In which lifetime?” he whispers. The sound rumbles like velvet thunder, the voice of the gods, reverberating in her chest.
Ina sends a sigh skittering back, shaky and vulnerable. “The only one that matters.”
“OK,” But his voice is suddenly wounded with regret.
He doesn’t want to forget.
The sacrifice doesn’t want to die.
Want, Ina thinks, has nothing to so with it.
“What time was it?” she encourages softly.
Now that beautiful, stained, marble mouth twitches. “You were there. You know what time.”
But she needs to know he still knows and, seeing her want laid bare, Alexander sobers instantly. “It was just past midnight, but it wasn’t this cold. The night had fallen softly, as if the sun was dragging its heels as it was pushed from the sky –”
“The fucker.”
His smile was brief. He was used to her: her language, the cadence, the way new words ran across that old tongue. “Then I saw you.”
“Saw me where?” she said coyly. He indulges her. He knows coy is reserved solely for him.
“Chained where you are now, of course.” His voice was proprietary; he was the one to discover her. He also knows she secretly wishes cats didn’t fear her, that she sometimes makes herself sick on fruit juice for reasons she can’t name and that she has dreams which place her across the Atlantic – ones that cause her to wake screaming. “The darkness was just one long stroke between us. It slid over my chest –”
“My breasts,” Which she caresses for him.
“And down my belly –” His fingertips play over it.
“Igniting the hunger,” she whispers, eyes trailing downwards.
The hunger is the worst. No one apart from Alexander can understand the irony that spikes in those final moments, the fear that giving in means giving up. That if she sips and lives she might lose the only one who makes her want to live at all. She knows it’s not true, that the forgetting will erase even that want and that the throbbing in her veins now is merely the elixir of the last blood calling to her, but as she feels fogginess cloud her clear mind, she panics. She looks down and discovers her knuckles are bleeding. She’s been wrenching them against her restraints without realizing it. The blood starts a rapid-fire reaction. Her jaw throbs, her mouth waters and her gums itch, eliciting a groan.
A movement distracts Ina and she suddenly remembers they have an audience. She shifts, eyes the warm body eyeing her and recalls – probably for the last time – the sacrifice who’d ushered in this year. He hadn’t been as young as this one is, but he’d been sweet and hopeful and alone. All requirements, and all guaranteed to be met with Russell choosing the sacrifices.
So it’s been perfect and, in the end, Ina liked to think the boy had been grateful to be part of something as large and meaningful as everlasting love. His blood infused them with new life, but their purpose gave him a life beyond the flesh.
Ina gazes down at this year’s sacrifice, wanting it to know its fortune in being chosen. The overwhelming wonder of little miracles couples with the late hour and her hunger, to bring tears to her eyes. She hisses her joy. Alexander responds, his elation deepening his growls. But the sacrifice screams louder at the sight of their fangs and Ina’s giddiness is snuffed by annoyance.
So as the sepia fades to black and the old year and life is rubbed out by the new, Ina holds on long enough to allow Alexander to lunge first. Even though numbness whips along her limbs to freeze her core, her love for him is so great she allows him to break the skin. She doesn’t know if it’s the buzzing in her ears that drums out the screams or if they just suddenly stop. All she knows is physical satisfaction and profound relief as she surges forwards and – together – they drain the sacrifice dry.
They tell Ina she is impatient and impulsive and she grunts because it’s dead on. Alexander is supposed to be cool-headed and implacable, and if that’s true she could see why she would love him. She watches him read, the way his brow draws down, deepening his features. Then he looks up and shrugs, an almost embarrassed smile touching his lips, touching her. Ina’s heart dips, the first plummet. That smile says he might be willing to believe . . . if she is.
> She offers a tentative one in return.
“This is how you’ll learn to love me,” he told her the first time he handed her the guide. She reads about this account apparently written while her limbs are intertwined and he’s living deep inside her, a warm coal waiting to be stirred to life.
They had written it all down before meeting with Russell, what they’d done and why, and that they’d have to find someone new to help them in this year’s end. It reads like fiction to Ina and she can tell it does for Alexander as well, which must be why they left little clues in the text, breadcrumbs only known to them.
“I already love you,” is what she reports herself as saying, and she can imagine that, even as she scents lovemaking on the turning pages, even as she knows it is probably deliberate. She’s betting that would be her idea. Get to the mind through the nose, the body, the instinct, the appetites. In spite of all they forget, their own core personalities remain constant and, while she may not know another soul in this world – she may have to fight to re-know this Alexander year after year - she knows herself well. She is selfish, stubborn, temperamental, insatiable and – if what she reads here is true – always uncaring about anything else when Alexander is in her arms. She looks up. He is biting clean through his lip. It’s a mannerism she thinks she can learn to love.
Realistically, though, the attributes listed are true of most of their kind. It’s why they move and live alone, and run solo. Unions aren’t unheard of, of course, but when you have to begin your life anew at the dawn of each year – something none of them have to be told, something they each feel as plainly as the turn of the planets – it’s best to refrain from unnecessary attachments. But Ina and Alexander have apparently found necessity in keeping record, not only of their own liaison, but of the others as well. Daniel and Marcus, for example, who have also found one another year after year. It’s written down in black and white, at the place in the guide that they’ve marked for themselves at the beginning.
While Ina can’t be sure of Alexander yet, she knows this is a good approach to take with her. She is more willing to listen and believe a story about someone else’s happily-ever-after than she is about her own.
Ever is a long time.
Daniel and Marcus have somehow managed to find one another year after year without a guide. But then, Alexander reports, at the beginning of last year, Daniel moved from town before they could reacquaint, and the guide tracks Marcus’ resulting deterioration. It says in February he begins a manic quest to collect every blood type, which he hangs in a silver vial shaped like a cross around his neck. In March, he runs out of blood types and stops going out all together. By May he is drinking milk and Clorox and even liquefied vegetables just to taste something new.
Have they a need then, even in their ignorant forevers, to partner up? When you’ve tasted it all and there’s nothing new on earth, is true love really what they thirst for in a life without end?
Ina considers this as she walks with this beloved stranger along the streets of Washington Heights, silent and as if they have a destination in mind. They attract little attention from the giddy pockets of people still drinking and yelling in the frigid night. Their heads are bowed over their book, this written lifeline into the past, and they take turns reading.
In the fall just past, Ina consented to Alexander’s absence for two whole weeks – something she’d apparently never allowed before. The plan was to lure Daniel back to town with Alexander as bait, set up an accidental introduction between Marcus and him and let chemistry take over from there. It is Alexander’s soft spot for the idea of true love that does Ina in. The romance of his temporarily putting aside his love so two others might experience it makes her want to turn and immediately start memorizing his features. But Alexander is still reading, and the last word written on the Daniel and Marcus saga is that Ina and Alexander are invited to brunch with the couple the following week. They, too now share their sacrificial kill.
It is the most romantic thing she has ever heard.
Ina is hungry again by the time they finish their walk, but eating is a personal thing and, despite the way they woke, the idea of Alexander watching unnerves her. Instead, they return in silence to the apartment they share. The number has been written in bold black lettering in the guide. Ina recognises the handwriting as her own. Keys are pinned to their underclothes.
Except it isn’t an apartment. It is an abandoned Asian restaurant; lettering like smashed spiders sprawled across the walls, spices baked into the plaster. It looks deserted from the outside, is boarded up and reinforced by steel on the inside, and the appearance of dilapidation continues until a corner rounds out the view, provided anyone would wish to stop, reconsider and peer in. Alexander and Ina take the corner soundlessly, which makes her gasp stand out like an exclamation point in a poetic stanza.
The kitchen has been made into a library, with wall-to-wall shelves of shining oak, custom carved by a carpenter’s hand with built-in lighting, and packed from ceiling to floor. History books, memoirs, true crime – all hardcover, all pristine – some so old they’d make curators weep. There is only one chair in the room, an oversized leather monstrosity with a giant ottoman parked in front, a handmade cashmere throw at the back and a side table at each arm. She knows which table is hers. There is a small Indian box, marble with inlays of mother-of-pearl and gold, and an unmarked bottle scented with sandalwood and white tea, things she instinctively loves.
There is something else she instinctively turns towards – the large, commercial refrigerator, the stainless steel walk-in door softened by a curtain of wood and glass beads that jangle like wind chimes as Ina passes through. The walls inside are softened with diaphanous panels, a swirl of colour like the frothy ends of pastel clouds. The floor is littered with silken pillows, batik sheets and shawls with fringing like moth’s wings. The door locks from the inside.
Ina returns to the kitchen, lets her eyes wander over the volumes of history books, and wonders if she’ll recognize the actions of the few females within. It shouldn’t matter. The past is dead and one should live in the moment. It is what it is, all you have is the now: clichés, but valid because they were all true. They were also the golden rules of their race. If Ina’s personal history is inscribed in the makeshift book Alexander is loath to put down, these hated prosaisms are etched on her soul. She is grateful for the eternal life she’s been given, the youth and vitality that are the rights of immortals, but what she wouldn’t give or pay for just one true memory of a lifetime already lived. Yet living requires forgetting, and because Ina clings to life like an infant to the breast, she can handle wondering about herself.
But she looks over at Alexander, unconsciously running his thumb along the leather cover of their guide, along a soft spot already showing there, and suddenly knows she doesn’t want to wonder with him too.
“If we didn’t have this guide, this would be unimaginable.” She means the apartment, the shared life, the planning of the sacrifice year after year . . . all of it.
“And that’s why we do it. We knew we’d need the proof of the thing.” Even though proof enough was in their mingled scents, covering every square inch or that kitchen. It smelled to Ina like perfect madness.
“But knowing nothing more than you do now, do you think we’d have felt the lack, like Marcus?”
A frown mars that perfect brow for a long moment as Alexander thinks hard, considering the depth of emotion that would have to exist for a creature such as himself to feel such a thing, to care so deeply. He finally nods. More importantly, he says, he wants to remember. He believes the memories lie like stakes in the pockets of those who hunt them, no less dangerous for being hidden. Perhaps more so.
And Ina? Alexander looks at her with an expression she’s already beginning to recognize – one brow cocked in challenge while his chin lowers shyly – and he asks the unanswerable. What , of importance, does she believe?
Ina is silent for so long, light threatens the
sky.
Ina believes truth lies in the blood.
Long ago, in a time when the streets of New York were filled with cobbled streets, horse shit layering them, soapboxes cornering them, dice games hidden among them, she was a factory girl with roughened hands and a back that was beginning to bend. She remembers this clearly, this and the way the entire world seemed intent on reaffirming she was no one special – from the foreman who would palm and pinch her for 14 hours straight, to the important men in carriages who ignored the pale, hunched girl trodding home in the gutter. Then there was the gaggle of urchins waiting for her care when she got back home, none of them her own. The experience of her short mortal life are seared in her grey matter like an anchor into humanity and are the only ones she would willingly cut loose.
But beneath the grime and helplessness and the resentment only beginning to form, her blood was sweet. Or sweet enough to attract one more monstrosity into her life. She never saw him coming, and had barely felt his arm wrap around her body before the twin needles pierced her, causing her to jerk with rigour. But, in spite of the pain, that unknown immortal did not let one drop hit the pressed dirt beneath her cheek, and despite the long, insistent tugs on her life, she’d been aware that this marked her as special enough.
After that, there was nothing. There is this morning. There is this stranger she supposedly loves. Alexander, standing across from her with a shyly raised brow.
The irony between the lack and poverty and pain, which she can remember, and the love and joy and acceptance that she cannot, makes her want to curl into herself. The only thing that stops her is the miracle of what she and this kindred stranger seem to have done. They’ve created a net for themselves, something that suspends them not only above humanity, but above the rest of their kind. They live in their own universe. How many couples, immortal or not, are able to claim the same? Ina thinks most simply go through the motions, doing what and who they’ve always done simply because momentum and habit carries them that way. She believes most spouses, wouldn’t be able to answer in the affirmative if asked if they’d choose their partner again today. Now. This minute and moment. This second. This life.