by Trisha Telep
Christie sighed as pleasure flowed through her. In spite of his scars, his body was beautiful. Long and lean and well muscled. His skin was warm and taut beneath her questing fingertips. She ran her hands over his broad shoulders, his chest, his belly, loving the way he quivered at her touch. She had never known such pleasure, such wonder. She moaned as his body merged with hers. He was a gentle lover, his touch almost reverent, his words soft, poetic, filled with an aching tenderness that tugged at her heart. She prayed he would not ask her to stay longer, knew she could not bear to tell him no.
Sated and content, she fell asleep in his arms.
He watched her all through the night. Their last night. And as he did so, he knew he could not bear to tell her goodbye, could not abide the pain of parting, of watching her walk out of his life. So, in the dark of the night, while she slept, he dressed her, then carried her out of the theatre, his heart aching with every step.
Christie woke to the warmth of the sun shining on her face. Opening her eyes, she squinted against the brightness she had not seen in weeks.
Sitting up, she glanced round, surprised to fins herself lying on her bed in her hotel room with no recollection of how she had got there. Had it all been a dream?
She lifted her hand to her neck and felt the sring of tears when her fingertips encountered two tiny wounds. It hadn’t been a dream.
“Oh, Erik,” she murmured, “couldn’t you at least have let me say goodbye?”
She had her answer with the asking. He had left her before she could leave him.
She grieved to leave him, but how could she stay? Her life was in the States. She taught kinder garden in an upscale school in Boston, she had a family in the city, lifelong friends, a home of her own. Erik had no life outside the bowels of the Opera House. He had no friends or family, no home other than his underground lair. How could they have a life together? She could not live in his world and he could not live in hers.
With a sigh, she went into the bathroom to shower and dress. Thank goodness she had paid for her room in advance, she thought, and then frowned. How had Erik known where she was staying?
Leaving her room, she went downstairs for breakfast. She had another three weeks of vacation. Determined to see as much of Paris as she could, she went sightseeing. She visited The Arc de Triomphe, which had been built to honour the men and women who had died fighting for France. She visited the Eiffel Tower. She toured Notre Dame, which had taken 170 years to build, walked around The Pantheon, which had been built as a church by Louis XV, but was now the final resting place of such notable French thinkers as Rousseau, Voltaire, Hugo and Zola, as well as scientists Pierre and Marie Curie. Amazing places, all of them, but no matter where she was, Christie’s thoughts were on Erik. With every moment apart, the realization grew that she had fallen in love with him – with his kindness, his tenderness, the sound of his voice, his rare smiles and laughter.
Though they had never spoken the words, she was certain that he loved her in return. But was love enough? Could she go on without him? Did she want to?
She went to the theatre that night and every night for the next week, hoping he would seek her out. She scanned the balconies, the dark corners, the shadows, but there was no sign of him.
On her last night in Paris, she hid in one of the bathrooms in the theatre again, then spent two hours wandering the corridors trying to find the door that led to his lair. She called his name, but to no avail.
She spent a miserable night sleeping in one of the seats. In the morning, she asked a startled member of the cleaning crew to let her out.
Defeated, she returned to the hotel, Packed her bags and took the next flight home. She moped for days, her heart heavy with despair.
Christie was glad when school started. She’d spent the week before getting her classroom ready eager for the new year, eager for anything to take her mind off her Phantom. But even the excitement of a new year failed to lift her spirits.
Her steps were heavy when she returned home after the first day of school. She had once found joy in teaching. Where had it gone?
She was unlocking the front door when she felt a rush of wind and then, to her astonishment, Erik appeared beside her.
“Christie.” Just her name, but it held a wealth of emotion. “Erik! How did you find me?”
“Your blood,” he murmured, his dark gaze searching her face. “It led me to you.”
“I didn’t think you ever left the opera house.”
“I would risk anything to see you again.”
“I missed you too,” she said and, taking him by the hand. She drew him into the house and shut the door. “I tried to find you.”
“I know.”
“Why did you hide from me?”
He shrugged; an elegant shifting of one shoulder. “I thought it best to let you go, but I realized my life has no meaning without you. And so I came here, to ask you to be my Christine for always. Will you share my love, Christie, be part of my life?”
She knew what he was asking. Being a vampire had once seemed repulsive; now it would open the door to an eternity with the man she loved.
With a nod, she went into his embrace. No words were necessary. Gazing up into his dark eyes, she canted her head to the side, granting him access to her throat.
Murmuring her name, the Phantom enfolded his Christine in his arms and, with one sweet kiss, he joined their lives together, forever.
The Day of the Dead
Karen Chance
“I’m looking for my brother,” the girl repeated, for the third time. Her accent was terrible, New Jersey meets Mexico City, making her difficult to understand, but Tomas doubted that that was the problem. The largely male crowd in the small cantina weren’t interested in the gaba with the sob story, even one who was tall and slim, with slanting hazel eyes and long black hair.
Japanese ancestry, Tomas decided, or maybe Korean. There might be some Italian too, based on the slight wave in her hair and the Roman nose, which was a little too prominent for her slender face. She was arresting, rather than pretty, the kind of woman you’d remember, although her outfit would probably have ensured that anyway. He approved of the light cargo pants and the short leather jacket. But the shotgun she wore on a strap slung over her shoulder and the handgun at her waist took away from the effect.
“He’s nineteen,” she continued stubbornly. “Black hair, brown eyes, six foot two –”
The bartender suddenly snapped to attention, but he wasn’t looking at her. His hand slid under the counter to rest on the shotgun he kept there. Tomas hadn’t seen it, but he’d smelled the old gun oil and faint powder traces as soon as he’d walked in. But the man who slammed in through the door was merely human.
“Hijole, Alcazar!” the bartender shouted, as the room exploded in yells of abuse. “What do you mean, bursting in here like that? Do you want to get shot?”
The man shook his head, looking faintly green under the cantina’s bare bulbs. “I thought I heard something behind me,” he said shakily, joining a few friends at an already overcrowded table. “On the way back from the cemetery.”
“You shouldn’t have been there so late,” one of his friends reproached, sliding him a drink. “Not tonight.”
“I lost track of time. I was visiting Elia’s grave and–”
“¡Aguas! You will do your daughter no good by joining her!”
There was frightened muttering for a moment, and several patrons stopped fingering their weapons to actually draw them. Tomas had the distinct impression that the next time the door opened, whoever stood there was likely to get shot. Tension was running far too high for good sense.
Then the bartender suddenly let out a laugh, and slid another round onto the men’s table. “I wouldn’t worry,” he said heartily. “From what I hear, even your Consuela doesn’t want you. Why would the monsters?”
The room erupted into relieved laughter as the man, his fright forgotten, stood up to angrily defend his manhood. “S
he ran off with some wealthy bastard,” he said, shooting Tomas an evil look.
Tomas calmly sipped mescal out of a reused Coca-Cola bottle and didn’t respond. But he wished for about the hundredth time that he’d given a little more thought to blending in. His reflection in the chipped mirror behind the bar, while not Anglo, stood out as much as the girl’s. The high cheekbones and straight black hair of his Incan mother had mixed with the golden skin and European features of his Spanish father, resulting in a combination that many people seemed to find attractive. He’d always found it an inconvenient reminder of the domination of one half of his ancestry by the other: the conquest of a continent written on his face.
He couldn’t honestly blame the locals for mistaking him for a wealthy city dweller, despite the fact that he’d been born into a village even poorer than this one and was currently completely broke. He’d picked up his outfit, a dark blue suit and pale grey tie, at an airport shop at JFK. He’d needed a disguise, and the suit, along with a leather briefcase and a quick session with a pocket knife in front of a men’s room mirror, had changed him from a laid-back college student with a ponytail to a 30-something businessman in a hurry.
He’d eluded his pursuers, but with no money he’d been forced to use a highly illegal suggestion on the clerk. Since then, he’d lost track of how many times he’d done something similar, using his abilities to fog the minds of airline employees, customs agents and the taxi driver who had conveyed him 100 miles to this tiny village clinging to the side of a mountain. Every incident had been a serious infraction of the law, but what did that matter? If any of his kind caught up with him, he was dead anyway. He just wished he’d thought to find something else to wear after landing in Guadalajara. There weren’t a lot of locals in 1,200-dollar suits.
Tomas couldn’t see the outfit that made him stand out like a sore thumb, because an altar to the souls of the dead had been placed in front of the mirror. Hand carved wooden skeletons in a variety of poses sat haphazardly on the multi-tiered edifice, each representing one of the bartender’s family members who was gone but not forgotten. One hairless skull seemed to grin at him; its tiny hand wrapped around an even tinier bottle of Dos Equis – presumably the man’s favourite drink. A regular-sized bottle stood nearby, a special treat for the spirit that would come to visit this night. It was El Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead.
A particularly fitting time, Tomas thought, for a vampire to return home.
At least resentment of the city slicker gave the men something to talk about other than their fear. They didn’t relax, being too busy shooting suspicious glances his way, but most of them let go of their weapons. Which is why everyone jumped when a shot exploded against the cracked plaster ceiling.
It was the girl, standing in the middle of the cantina, gun in hand, ignoring the dozen barrels suddenly focused on her head. “My brother,” she repeated, pointing the gun at the bartender, who had lost his forced joviality. “Where is he?”
“Put your weapon down, señorita. You have no enemies here,” he said, eyeing her with understandable concern. “And I told you already. No one has seen him.”
“His car is parked in the cemetery. The rental papers have his name on them. And the front seat has his handprint – in blood.”
She threw the papers on the bar, but neither they nor her speech seemed to impress the bartender. “Perhaps, but as I told you, this is a small town. If he had been here, someone would know.”
The glasses on the shelf behind him suddenly exploded, one by one, like a line of firecrackers. The gun remained in the girl’s hand, but she hadn’t used it. Tomas slowly set his drink back down.
“Someone here does know. And that someone had better tell me. Now.” Her eyes took in the bar, where most of the men’s weapons were still pointed at her. That fact didn’t seem to worry her nearly as much as it should have.
“I saw a stranger.” The voice piped up from a table near the door, and a short, stocky man, dressed in the local farmer’s uniform of faded jeans, cotton work shirt and straw hat, stood up. “He was taking photographs of the cemetery, out by the graves.”
“He’s a reporter,” the girl agreed. “He was doing a story on . . . something . . . but said he’d meet me here.”
“I told him to go away,” the man said. “This is a day for the dead and their families. We didn’t want him there.”
“But he didn’t leave. His car is still there!”
The man shrugged and sat back down. “He said he was going to photograph the church, and I saw him walking towards town. That’s all I know.”
“The church is the white building I saw driving in?”
“Yes.” The bartender spoke before the man could. “I can show you, if you like.” He motioned for the boy who’d been running in and out all night from the back, clearing off tables and wiping down the bar. “Paolo can take over for me here.”
“You’re going out?”
“But it’s almost dark!”
“Are you mad?”
The voices spoke up from all directions, but the bartender shrugged them off. He brought out the shotgun and patted fondly. “Ocho ochenta. It’s only a short way. And no one should go anywhere alone tonight.”
The murmuring didn’t die down, but no one attempted to stop him. Tomas watched them leave, the bartender solicitously opening the door for the girl. His broad smile never wavered, and something about it made Tomas’ instincts itch. He gave them a couple of minutes, then slid off his stool and followed.
There was little light, with the sky already dark overhead, the last orange-red rays of the sun boiling away to the west. But his eyes worked better in the dark and, in any case, he could have found his way blindfolded. The village looked much the same as it had for the last three millennia. Many of its people could trace their ancestry back to the days when the Mayan Empire sent tax collectors here, to reap the benefits of the same plots these farmers still worked. The 500-year-old village where he’d grown up in what was now Peru seemed a young upstart by comparison. It was gone now, bulldozed to make way for a housing development on the rapidly expanding outskirts of Cuzco. But although he hadn’t been back here in almost a century, nothing seemed to have changed.
A trail of bright yellow petals led the way to a small church with crumbling stone steps overlooking the jungle that floated like green clouds against the mountains of the Oaxaca. The church was still draped with the flor de muertos, garlands of marigolds, from the morning service. He went in to find the same old wooden crucifix on the alter, surrounded by flickering votive candles and facing rows of empty pews. He edged around it and paused by the back door, where the sweet, pungent smell of incense mingled with the damp, musty odour of the jungle. Beyond it, out in the twilight, he caught a whiff of the girl’s perfume.
The church faced the red earth of the town’s only street, but behind it the jungle washed up almost to the steps, except for the area where a small cemetery spilled down the hillside. It had never been moved despite each summer storm threatening to wash the bodies out of their shallow graves and into the valley below. Tomas picked his way down a marigold-strewn path to the cemetery gate, pausing beside a statue of La Calaca. The skeleton lady was holding a placard with her usual warning. ‘TODAY ME, TOMORROW YOU’. In many such villages, families stayed all night at the graves of their dead, waiting to welcome the spirits that returned to partake of their offerings. But not in this one. Only four people stood among the flower-decked crosses and scattered graves, and only two of them were alive.
There was little light left, other than a few burning votives here and there, shining among the graves. But Tomas didn’t need it to recognize the new additions. The wind was blowing towards him and it carried their scents clearly: Rico and Miguel, two thugs in the employ of the monster he’d travelled 1,000 miles to kill.
“I saw her. She shattered them with some kind of spell.” The bartender was talking, while Rico held onto the girl.
“Why car
ry all this?” Miguel held one of the girl’s guns negligently in one hand, with the rest tucked into his belt. “If she’s so powerful?”
“I’m telling you, she’s some kind of witch,” the bartender said stubbornly. “The mage I sent you this morning was her brother. She came looking for him.”
“Where did you take him?” the girl demanded, her voice full of cold, brittle anger.
Everyone ignore her. “Her aura feels strange,” Miguel said, running a hand an inch or so above her body. “Not human, but not exactly mage either.”
“What are you girl?” Rico demanded his breath in her face. She didn’t flinch, despite the fact that she had to be able to see his fangs at that range. If she hadn’t known what the villagers feared before, she certainly did now.
“Tell me what you’ve done with my brother or I’ll show you.” She sounded no more concerned about her predicament than she had at the bar. Tomas couldn’t tell if that was bravado or stupidity, but he was leaning towards the latter. Her heart rate had barely sped up, despite the obvious danger.
“What about me?” the bartender demanded. “You said if I brought you the mage, I was safe. I want my nephew’s safety in exchange for this one.”
“That will depend,” Rico said, jerking her close, “on what she can do. You had better hope one of them is what the master wants, or we’ll be taking out the price for our inconvenience in your blood.”
Tomas didn’t move, didn’t breath, a lifetime’s habit keeping him so still that a small bird lit on a tree branch right in front of his face. But inside, he was reeling. It wasn’t the cavalier kidnapping that surprised him. The men’s master, a vampire named Alejandro, had been organizing hunts on the Day of the Dead for as long as Tomas had known him. While families across Mexico were busily collecting delicacies for the dead – chocolate for mole, fresh eggs for the pan de muerto, cigarettes and mescal – Alejandro was collecting treats of his own. Strong, smart, cunning – they’d all had some advantage that made them attractive prey. Assembled together, they were always told the same thing: last until morning or escape beyond the borders of Alejandro’s lands and win your freedom. They were given flashlights, weapons and maps showing the extent of the ten-mile square area he claimed. Then, at midnight, they were released.