and Falling, Fly Read online

  “Hiya, honey.” A cocoa-skinned Amazon dances up to me. Her hair spirals in fat dreads across her muscular shoulders, and her low-slung jeans bump my hip bone. I should have keened my quills on Sylvia’s before she went to take her blood communion. Soon my edges will be too dull even to make the tiny cuts that go unnoticed, but tonight, my surgically fine nails slid up slender brown arms and draw the sweet, sweat-tinged droplets so subtly that the dancer, focused where our belt buckles grind, does not feel their acute caress.

  Her blood is slick. She has taken something. Another taste will tell me what. She turns me by the waist, grinding my compliant hips against her own, the forks of our legs spread like the webbing of fingers. Her long black lashes veil eyes that have not met mine. They could be brown or green. Her hair falls over her throat. I could push it back and kiss her neck, sample the slickness of pot or pills. Hell, I could puncture her and strike, feed properly and full, tear her supple body open with my dull quills. It will be the only way I have left, if I don’t keen them the next time I’m with my sisters. I’ll come back for her tomorrow night. Tonight, I’m already bored.

  But over the dancer’s dark, broad shoulder, I catch an intriguing glimpse of a face I recognize from the airport magazine’s “rock stars in rehab” cover. He’s wearing goggles and a filthy bathrobe belted with an orange extension cord. One scarred arm twists upward to drape across the muscular shoulder of the man I saw today in Hell’s front parlor. He shrugs the rock star’s frail arm off and nods to me. Do I know him? Even in the dark club, his health and strength make a jarring contrast to the withered singer. Only his eyes betray his place here, among the damned. He has lived and died and been reborn, lifetime after lifetime. In childhood, these cursed Reborn forget, but as adolescence dawns, their memories of every incarnation awaken. Poor bastards. I think it’s worse than being undead.

  The dancer’s grip on my waist tightens. Only her hips are moving now, and no longer to the tuneless music pulsing through us. Her eyes are not closed, but clamped, her hips not driving, but driven. A deep blood red seeps under her earthy skin. Brown stone nipples tent the fabric of her shirt. Perhaps, like my sister Vivian, I could possess the pleasure of mortals, summon their ecstasies, and command their orgasms. I pluck at a dark pebble with my hard fingers. The dancer’s startled cry is drowned in the torrent of music. But in her moment of wild-eyed surprise, I learn that they are green. She plunges below the surface again, pushing her body against mine. Her distended nipple sprouts hard between my twisting fingers.

  I can feel the Reborn watching me, and find him more interesting than the tuneless dancer. The faces of the Reborn change lifetime to lifetime, but mine, of course, is unchanging over millennia. If he knew me once, he will know me still, but I have seen too many for too long. Sometimes they all run red together. Without tightening or loosening the crush of my fingers, I begin to wind the fleshy bulb of the dancer’s breast, left and right. Her body surges against my stillness. If angelic flesh could bruise, her grip would hurt me, but she is oblivious to my pain or lack of it, mindless of me except where her fork grinds against my thigh. If I were as open as she, would this arouse me? Would we pleasure one another with the throbbing music in the pulsing crowd, our sex and hearts beating rhythm?

  But if I try to touch my scarlet lips to hers, the dancer will reject me. I could drop my hungry mouth to the generous rise of breast. That I would not be denied. She holds her breath, releasing it in sudden gasps. Her hips grind against me. The Reborn’s eyes have moved on. The dancer starts to shudder. I look into her face, suffused with heat and color, with blood, with life. Her mouth opens like Ophelia’s in spriek, but silent in orgasm. In its clutches, her graceful body contorts. Death agonies look the same and pass as quickly. And both are replaced with the same annihilated vacancy.

  I want to be so emptied.

  Alone again on the throbbing dance floor, I watch her rippling and scarless back stagger into the beating red stream of the living. Then I sense him. Behind me, coming closer, alone now, eyes on me. I wait, but he hesitates, a blockage in the artery that feeds the dance floor. I wind my serpentine way through the press of bodies toward the exit. He will follow. I slip through the doors. I could vanish now.

  But no. I catch the door as the Reborn pushes it open, motionless. Unprepared to stop, he collides with me in confusion. I clamp his strong body to mine.

  “Never hunt a hunter,” I whisper low against the pulsing warmth of his throat. Motionless on the threshold, I hold the door open and his hard body imprisoned against mine. He tries to disentangle himself and, rather than make the point that my one arm could restrain him, I release both door and man, and stride away.

  “Olivia!”

  Now he has surprised me. “Did the old man tell you my name?” I ask.

  “No, but I registered tonight. ‘Olivia’ was the newest name above mine.” He shrugs, lifting muscular shoulders. “I guessed.” He wears a buttoned shirt and a tie over his military torso, but he has an artist’s lips. What a strange jigsaw.

  “Are you a vampire?” he asks.

  I roll my eyes and walk away, but he falls into confident step beside me.

  “You have totally screwed up the protocol, you know,” I tell him.

  “Sorry.”

  “The rules are very clear.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He isn’t defiant, just indifferent.

  “You’re never to ask an angel’s name, or use it without her permission.”

  “Yeah.”

  Cheeky! The cursed are usually obedient. What makes this Reborn bold? I grace him with my most seductive smile and turn into one of the ground-floor entrances to the spiral hall that curls upward to the glass skylight thirteen stories over our heads.

  “Try again,” I say.

  One corner of his handsome mouth twitches up, but he stuffs his hands into his pockets. “Greetings, angel, my name is—”

  “I haven’t announced myself yet.”

  “Okay, okay.” He winks with an audacious grin. “Greetings, fellow guest. My name is Dominic O’Shaunnessy.”

  “Greetings.”

  He waits only a second. “You didn’t give your name in return.”

  “I don’t have to,” I tell him. “I outrank you.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “Guess again.”

  He laughs, and I find I like the sound. It seems to come from deep in his broad chest, rusty perhaps, but rich. A frown scores the strong planes of his face. “But you said I can’t guess.” He could be ferocious, but he’s playing.

  “Correct.” I give a demure nod.

  “Okay. So I ask the next question?” He clears his throat fussily. “How art thou damned?”

  “I am Undead.”

  “I am Reborn.” But his jaw grips when he says it. I wonder why.

  “I am Olivia.”

  “Yeah. I already knew that.” We both laugh. “Hello, Olivia.”

  “Hello, Dominic.”

  “You can call me D or D.O. if you want to. That’s what I’m used to.”

  “Don’t call me Ollie. I hate that.”

  We are nearing the first door in the hallway. I have access all the way up, but he will not, so I lean my elbows on the railing and look down over the floor of the Grand Reception Hall of the Hotel of the Damned.

  “And to answer your original question: Yes, I am a vampire.”

  How strange to say it, to hear the words hang in the air between me and a mortal man without the taste of terror in my throat or his blood in my memory—to speak the truth without hope of salvation, or fear of failure.

  He stands beside me, his large hands wrapped loosely around the railing. His index and pinky fingers curl toward the middle of his hand, accustomed to tucking into fists, but the flesh is dappled and smooth, dusted with fine copper hair that glints in the dim light of the corridor. I glimpse tattoo blue beneath the cuff and wonder how he’s marked his body. Do the rich blue lines run over his hard chest, down his bicep an
d across the elbow of his other arm?

  “I drew it on myself with Sharpie when I was seventeen,” he answers my exploring eyes, “and walked to the tattoo place. It was part of a pre-Roman British mania I was going through at the time.”

  “The old woad markings…”

  He shrugs. “At the time, it meant something about my approaching manhood. Childish of me, really.”

  He seems as ancient as I am. Most of the Reborn never leave the hotel, once they remember their way back. I understand their unwillingness to experience yet again the heartbreak of living, dying, loving, and parting, knowing what will happen, having lived it all before. But he is old for reawakening, and has just today checked in.

  Although they have not changed in size or shape, I am keenly aware of my high breasts and perfect skin. I turn to him, softening my body and my smile. “Why were you and your buddy stalking me in the club? It doesn’t look like your kind of place,” I tease him.

  “My buddy? Oh, Alyx. No, he’s not really my friend, just someone I met here.”

  “He’s famous, you know, in the surface world. The magazines all say he’s in rehab.”

  “He needs it.”

  “Was he the one tracking me, then?”

  “No. That was me. I mean, I wasn’t either, but more than he was. I saw you arrive. I wanted to meet you.”

  “Did you?” I steal a peek at him, his handsome head lowered, eyes down. He looks weary, but his profile is strong. I could love that face with its fierce red brows and hard jaw, or at least love to taste it.

  “Yeah.” Earnest eyes meet mine. I slide a hand into the crook of his elbow and snuggle up against the mortal warmth of his muscular arm. I match my steps to his when we start walking again.

  “Let me guess,” I tease. “You were stalking me because you’ve always had fantasies about vampires. You want to offer yourself to me, want to feel me strike into your lovely throat with my wicked fangs and feed.”

  The sweet, dark chuckle rumbles against my fingers coiled around his strong arm. “No, nothing like that.”

  “I’ve got it! You want me to turn you, to make you immortal. I can’t do that, you know. Hate to disappoint a fan, but it’s just legend—contagion by the Other. Vampires are born, not made. My sisters and I are all Desire’s fallen angels. There are no more up there to come tumbling down. Sorry, kiddo.”

  “Nope.” He grins. “I’m not looking for immortality, although that would pose an interesting challenge to the so-called curse of being reborn, wouldn’t it?”

  “Give it up,” I say with more venom than I intend. “There’re no loopholes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I touch the metal plate beside the doors and they swing open on silent pneumatic hinges. Dominic walks beside me through them. “I came back here, to Gaehod’s hotel, because I have spent the last several thousand years searching for a way out, and I’m tired. I had hoped that in mankind I might find a key to my own salvation. I thought—in God’s divine do-over after his creation of angels didn’t work out as planned—I might discover my own second chance. I believed humanity might save the angels. But you can’t. I’ve come back here to become undead on the inside, too, to give up futile hope, and with it, suffering.”

  He’s quiet a while, then turns his clear, deep eyes on me. He looks like I must when I scent for desire or fear the first time. “What if hope is not futile?” he asks me.

  “That’s such a human response!”

  Bending to match his height to mine, he takes my shoulders in his large hands. His brilliant blue eyes blaze with surprising passion. “I believe I can help you,” he says.

  “Men always do.”

  A tiny muscle flinches in his jaw with impatience or humor.

  “Will you let me try?” He is fighting for composure, trying not to frighten me with his urgency, but the intensity of his beautiful face stirs something in me. Sincerity is a rare delicacy on the twisted, ironic lips of the twenty-first century. My deep teeth throb to taste it.

  His lips do not move when mine brush them, so I kiss him again, more softly—slowly—the very lightness of my kiss a provocation. And it works. His hands grasp my shoulders to pull my yielding body against his powerful frame. The immobile strength of his chest is trembling, and he takes my lips in his, once and hard. Under his demanding mouth, mine opens to take his seeking tongue within. The smell of his pure masculine desire drenches me. Deep emptiness pulses in my gums.

  His hands are hard on my shoulders. His brilliant eyes have mine again. “We can’t do this,” he says, voice choked. “I can’t do this. I want to help you. I really do. And I think I can. But I can’t get involved with you personally if I’m going to be working with you professionally. It’s unethical. It’s a bad idea. It’s… it just doesn’t work.”

  “But it feels good,” I whisper.

  “Bad ideas always do.” He’s looking away.

  My kiss has rattled him, and his confusion and desire spread from his lips to me. I, who cannot feel pain or pleasure… I am tasting something new. I turn and walk away, but he falls into step easily beside me. We walk a long time in silence, spiraling up.

  “Olivia, I’m a medical doctor. I work with brain chemistry and medicines. I believe I can help you escape the hell you’re in. There are treatments, therapies. You could get well, be happy. Live a normal life. I want to offer you the hope that things can get better.”

  I round on him, furious. “I don’t want your hope! I came back here today with my last hope. Tonight, I realized that even my cynical sisters quest helplessly after something. Even they cannot be free from the tyrannies of hope. Hope is the unthinking, unseeing master of unending hell. I have my own. Don’t offer me yours!”

  We have reached the top of the spiral and stand on the final circle of balcony beneath the domed glass. Above us, the Irish sky towers black and starless.

  Dominic’s voice is meltingly tender. “What if you’re right? What if hope is the master of Hell? What if something in your own mind, in your own hopes, or fears, or ideas, is the cause of your suffering? What if you are not damned?”

  “If I am not damned, what am I?”

  “A woman in pain.”

  “An ordinary woman?”

  “There is nothing ordinary in any woman’s pain.”

  “A mortal woman?”

  “Would that be so terrible?”

  My laugh is almost a howl. “I take no pleasure in food, but I still eat,” I tell him. “I have no joy in life, but I live. Does that sound like an ordinary woman? I am the Undead. The Hollow. I am Numb. I am the sacred, stuffed into the profane. My body, made like yours of vile mud and ash, cannot contain all of who I am, and yet I am nothing at all. I am timeless, spaceless, crammed into time and space. I am the unspeakable made into a single word. I am a true violation of Truth.”

  He dares not look at me. “I used to feel that way.” His voice is low with the weight of things never before said. “When I was a kid, I started having dreams of women. Most boys do, about that age, but mine were of women I had whole stories for. From all over history. The first time I had sex, I almost went out of my head. Not just the way it felt, but the images I saw—other faces, other beds, whole lifetimes.”

  Even his desire, strong in the air between us, smells bittersweet. I swallow hard against the rising quills dripping hunger, and something else as well.

  “For a while, the memories came flooding back so fast I couldn’t keep anything straight,” he tells me. “Then I remembered this place, the hotel, coming here in other lifetimes, and how to find it again. I came back. Here, there are diaries that look to be hundreds of years old, of lives that I remember. I remember my children, how much I loved them, how they died in front of me or watched me die. I tried to track the lineage of one son born before the Second World War, but I was black, and the records are bad. I felt”—he gropes for an unfamiliar word—“helpless.”

  “But they aren’t memories,” he continues, so det
ermined he sounds angry. “They’re delusions that behave like memories. Seizures in the memory parts of my brain. I’m learning to stop them. I’m getting close to a treatment.”

  “Your quest has become your treatment, not the other way around.” I shrug. “Even the search for a quest can heal you mortals.”

  “No, it’s more than that. I no longer accept the idea that I’m cursed. It’s ridiculous. I was a child and I made up a story. You probably did something similar. I universalized my experience. Comprehending my mortality changed me, that’s all.”

  “But the lineage of myth runs on. I saw a Persephone on the airplane.”

  “I don’t believe in any of that—gods, titans, angels, curses—none of it.” His eyes, earnest and hungry, search my face.

  “That’s some power trip you’re on,” I say. “I may be a victim of God’s ideas, but you have made God the victim of yours.”

  He takes a step toward me, reaching for my hands. “I want to help you.”

  “I don’t need help.” I pull my quilled nails away from him.

  “You’re unhappy.”

  “I would rather be a damned angel than a sick human. Besides, you’re unhappy, too.”

  He drops my eyes.

  “Physician, heal thyself,” I mock him.

  His head is bowed and he seems to be studying my fingers, still held in his. “God, I hate this place,” he whispers.

  “Then why did you come back?”

  “I had to.”

  “Then you’re not as free as you claim,” I say. “If God cannot compel you, what does?”

  “My work.”

  “Ah, Mammon. He’s an uncle of mine.” I pull my hands away and walk the edge of the balcony. I can sense his eyes on me. His solitary shadow stains the wall across from us.