and Falling, Fly Read online

  “Yes.”

  “And yet Eve damned all women by doing something she’d been told not to—before she tasted of this tree. She had no knowledge of good and evil until she ate. She disobeyed without the ability to know disobedience was wrong.”

  “But you knew it was wrong.”

  “Yes.”

  “So why did you tempt her?”

  “I didn’t. I told her the fruit was knowledge, not poison. That’s all I ever said to Eve. ‘It won’t kill you.’ Curiosity killed the cat (and the pussy). Eve was damned for nothing less.” The snake wound higher up the tree, coiling again and again. “And yet my apples are still to blame for most of the suffering in your world.”

  “Oh?” Dominic reached into his pocket and extracted a bottle of pills. He knocked one into his broad palm and swallowed. “How do you figure?” he asked the helixed snake. Might as well enjoy the theater until the medicine kicks in.

  “You will always see the world in paired opposites now: male and female with their fig leaves, right and wrong with their swords. Ask yourself, would the story have ended differently if Eve had not blamed me?” The snake wound a seventh time around the tree. Eye to eye with Dominic, its flat head extended from the trunk in a new and breathing branch, it whispered, “What if Eve had answered, ‘I chose to eat this’?”

  Dominic glanced, with a vague sense of dread, at the hole beneath his feet. From its darkness, pushing upward, the snake’s tail protruded and rose. Shimmering and winding upward, it spiraled the tree, crisscrossing the glistening coils already wound there, reflecting itself on itself in infinite recursions. Dominic squeezed his eyes shut and opened them with only dim hope the apparition would be gone.

  “You humans walk so eagerly into tyrannies,” the snake mocked. “The thrall of addiction, of oppression, of victimization—‘I was tempted. I couldn’t help myself. It’s genetic.’ Or you hand your power over to other forces, kinder gods, and are controlled by your To-Do List, or your Childhood Trauma or your Chemical Imbalance. New gods for a new age.”

  “Listen,” Dominic growled, “if it weren’t for my fucked-up chemistry, we wouldn’t be talking.” The tail wound higher, sliding over and slipping under itself.

  “Eve swallowed not the simple split of good and evil, but duality itself,” the snake said. “So she and Adam saw the differences between all split things: man and woman, good and evil, god and human, and went scrabbling for fig leaves to cover them up.” The tail reached the head, and the snake flicked itself with tip and tongue slyly.

  Dominic shook his head and looked back through the garden, back toward the relatively less hallucinatory vampires. This snake was enough to make him miss those girls.

  “And that’s original sin, my friend,” the snake whispered, “the cleft in your mind that you can’t span. It’s elegant, really. No work from me required, to stretch you on the rack of paradox. And I—self-pleasuring, self-destroying—put my tail in my mouth, and suck, and swallow.”

  “Dominic?” Dominic wheeled violently away from the snake whose body seemed still to be winding and reflecting, pushing from below the tree, into and around itself. He wanted to hide.

  “Dominic?” called Olivia. “Where are you?”

  “I’m here.” Lord, what a state he was in.

  ———

  In the luminous gloom of the garden, the Reborn’s freckled whiteness stands stark against the browns and greens. He tears an apple savagely from the tree and glares at me like a hunted thing. But I am not hunting him. Not really. Gaehod asked me to keep an eye on him, that’s all.

  “You didn’t want to come down to the river?” I ask him. “Wash away your sins?”

  “I don’t believe in sin.”

  “Right. Are you going to eat that?”

  He looks at the apple, a red so deep it’s almost black, and tosses it lightly into the air. “Why, are you hungry?” He meets my eyes for the first time since I entered the garden.

  “Yes,” I say, because it’s true. He pitches the apple to me, harder than he needs to, but I catch it with ease.

  “I’ve already had one,” he says, voice held steady. “But I have seen people chewing different fruit from the same damn branch fly planes into buildings secure in what they ingested here. So thank you, no. I do not want another one of your damn apples.”

  I drop the apple into the pocket of my coat, black as an oil slick and as long, and walk up to Dominic under the tree.

  “What do you want then?” I whisper. He smells like fig leaves and denial.

  “I want not to be here anymore. I don’t want the weird light and the underground garden and the lunatic landlord. I don’t want your sister unbuttoning her shirt—”

  “Knowing what you don’t want is not the same as knowing what you do,” I remind him.

  He grimaces, and meets my eyes. His voice, when he speaks again, is stripped raw of its usual veneer of academia and irony. It is naked. “I don’t want to keep meeting new vampires. But I need a reasonably sized study group to make good on a promise I don’t want to have made for money I don’t want to have taken for research I don’t want to do.”

  Rage haunts the junctures of his handsome face. Even the colors of him battle one another. His red lashes bloody his blue eyes. Dark freckles bruise his golden skin deliciously.

  “Come on,” I say, “let’s get out of here.”

  7

  OVERTAKEN

  I could have changed into less conspicuous clothes, or boots with something less than a three-inch heel, but as I throw my sleek leg over the black body of the Harley and gun it, stiletto and latex seem just right, tight and cold. I ride the bike like the pale horse it has replaced, out from Hell’s underground garage at full speed. And the Reborn keeps up. He matches me turn for turn, skid for skid. So I fall in beside him, losing my vampire biker bitch in the steady, muzzled percussion of our harmonizing engines. We ride together into the lilacs and the rain.

  An hour out of Cashel, Dominic points at something through the trees. I catch a glimpse of walls and windows, of moon-raked sky where roof and glass should be. We pull off the road and push our bikes into the underbrush.

  A fence towers along the road, but I track Dominic as he walks away from the bikes, skirting the barricade. He finds a low metal gate and pushes it open. Spectral cows regard us darkly in the ashen April moonlight.

  He sets off purposefully toward the ruined church across the gray grass. “Come on,” he calls, unperturbed by the spotted cows whose whiteness leaves them grotesquely incomplete where the night swallows the black places in their hide.

  “Ireland has a relationship with her past almost as strange as I have with mine,” he says, his restless eyes roving the abbey’s decaying silhouette.

  “What are you talking about?” I snap. Dominic has relaxed on the ride and is comfortable in the field, ambling where I must pick my way, trying to distinguish cow pies from clover.

  “The whole island is spotted with derelict cottages and abandoned churches like this one. They sit in pastures as invisible to the Irish as a mother is to a teenage girl.” His smile is warm in the cool night, friendly and frank. He’s having fun. But we are approaching the clump of cows. They stand along the low stone wall that bounds the ruined abbey. There is a gate, but Dominic vaults the wall and turns to offer me a hand across it. I can leap ten vertical feet without a running start. It would rattle him right out of the complacent gallantry that holds out his waiting hand to me but, quite frankly, the cows rattle me, so I take his warm hand and step onto the wall.

  “Can’t they climb a fence this low?” I ask him.

  “The cows?” He grins up at me. “It’d be more like a clamber, but yeah.”

  He circles the church, studying the old stones carved by hands dead for hundreds of years. I listen to him in the dark walking over the damp grass. He comes back to where I’m standing on the wall and looks past me at the cows. “Of course,” he tells me in a casual drawl, “a motivated cow could jum
p that wall.”

  I leap down and wander away from him into what was once the central courtyard of the church. A row of Gothic arches opens onto the grassy space, lined on one side by a covered walkway tucked under the hulking stone. A crumbling bell tower stands in the far corner like a drunk’s party hat. Dominic prowls the ancient, sacred darknesses. I close my eyes and scent for his desire. It’s there, strong and warm in the cool Irish night.

  “How can you tell a motivated cow from one that isn’t?” I call after him.

  “A motivated cow is one that’s being chased.” His low voice comes from above me, and I look up to see him sitting in the threshold of a second-floor doorway.

  “Chased?”

  “Sure, by a coyote or a rancher. All the rest are resolutely unmotivated.” I can see the structures that once supported a wooden floor in the stone beneath him. Above him, roof scars tell the same story, of years of rain and roof taxes, of history and possibility. Ruined things, roofless to the dark, these walls can no longer be owned the way other beauties are.

  From the bell tower’s spiraling staircase, I step onto the flat top of a first-story wall and walk to the ragged edge where the stones are gone and an empty space connects my portion of wall to the rest. I sit down, across the void from Dominic.

  “Have you been here before?” I ask him

  “No. But the first time I came to Ireland, I drove around a lot. I wasn’t sure where the hotel was. I had to feel my way across the country.” He’s quiet for a while. “But I’m connected to it somehow,” he says, almost to himself.

  “I’ve never lived in Ireland,” I tell him.

  The night is unnaturally still, no wind or birds break the silence, and his deep voice reaches me across the empty sanctuary.

  “This and a couple of other countries, I have a fascination for, mostly made of bad fantasy movies, I guess. I imagined a life in Ireland long ago in which”—he chuckles—“God, this is embarrassing, in which I was some sort of pagan warrior. It’s very vivid, in places, this imagining, and when I was younger, I could almost be homesick for it. For the time, the language, for the land itself, the way my body feels in Ireland. For a woman I loved. A woman I made up, I guess.”

  “Tell me the story?” I turn sideways on the wall to stretch out onto my scarred back. The stones, flat to receive the roof timbers, are cold but not uncomfortable and the moonlight floods into my flawless face. I close my eyes.

  “She was the priestess. A healer. A woman not my wife.”

  “But you were in love with her?”

  “It was an adolescent fantasy. I was forever falling in love with these made-up women.”

  “What about real women?”

  “Not in this lifetime.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s just an expression.” He laughs, but it’s a bitter sound. “No. I have never been in love. What about you?”

  “Hundreds of times.” In the empty space that slopes from beyond my stilettos, I can almost see the stones that are gone. I stare into the edge of rock and nothingness, the boundary between what was and what might be, between the past and the lost.

  I want to see my wall from the ground. I leap down, the billow of my coat crackling like flame. The emptiness is more alive to me than the dead stones, and the wall more interesting where it is not, where anything could have been or could now be. I step into the gap. “Come here,” I whisper.

  Dominic hits the ground behind me. His pale skin is made for this Irish darkness. Whatever soul in him is reborn from place to place, his body comes, through generations, from this land. He is beautiful in it, and not afraid of me, the ancient evil curse in the black unknown, the vampire.

  “Do you want to know what it feels like?” I ask him. “Love?”

  “Olivia, I don’t—”

  “Walk through that doorway and stand opposite me.”

  I wait. He does.

  “Now look up,” I tell him. He raises his handsome face to the high moon, exposing the long pale of his dappled throat to the cool night. “Do you see the triple arch of that window?” I ask him, unable to follow his gaze up, riveted to the strong, subtle lines of vein and muscle in his neck.

  “Yes. It looks like it held stained glass once.”

  “Probably,” I say. “See how the stonework is different from the surrounding wall?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Look through it at the sky.”

  “Okay.”

  Okay.

  “Pick out a star.”

  “Any star?”

  “Yes, just pick one, but don’t forget which one it is.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now look at it. Really look hard,” I tell him. “Imagine that star is your home. It is where you were born: Eden before the apple. The perfect place. There you were held in the loving embrace of childhood, innocent and free, with no difference between what you want and need, and all your needs met. It is Heaven. Imagine it.” I wait. “You can love that star, can’t you?”

  “As an ideal? As an abstract concept? Sure.”

  “Good.”

  He stands straight and fearless in the night, his beautiful body relaxed but powerful even so. It holds something of the warrior’s lithe wariness still, even completely unconcerned for his safety.

  I walk around behind him. “I’ve picked a star, too,” I say, “but I want you to tell me about yours first. Describe it for me.” I turn my reluctant eyes from his moon-kissed flesh to Heaven.

  “It’s small, and very far away, between two brighter stars.”

  “Are you looking through the center pane?” I ask him.

  “Yes.”

  “I am, too. Go on.”

  “It gives the illusion of twinkling, even more brightly than the other stars around it.” His voice is low and warm, layered in secrets like spy’s or a priest’s.

  “Yes,” I whisper.

  “And it has a light yellow cast to it.”

  “Mine, too.”

  “It’s not the highest star I can see through the opening of the window.”

  “No, but there’s just something about it, right?”

  “Yeah. I’m not even sure why I picked it.”

  I step closer to him, to his capable shoulders and warming scent in the chill dark.

  “The two stars near it are faint, too, and around them there’s almost a ring of blackness. No other stars at all nearby,” he says, standing motionless, looking up. His breath is slow and peaceful. Even the smell of him is growing subtle in the night.

  “But it seems to make a triangle with the other two, right?” I slip from behind to beside him, standing close to the animal heat of his living body.

  “Yes,” he says. I touch my temple to his. “Can you tell which one I’m seeing?”

  “Yes,” I say. “It was the one I picked, too. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  I am lying. He smells of stone and wind. Of the ground we stand on, and the bikes we rode here. I inhale deeply, barely touching him, drinking in the warmth of his temple against mine and the slightly cooler back of his masculine hand where it brushes mine until it reaches out. He takes my cold fingers, wrapping them together in his own. The brass key around my wrist slides between our hollowed palms. The light of all the stars shines into our upturned eyes.

  “Love is this feeling.” I whisper so low it is almost only in his mind. “Believe we both desire to possess that star for ourselves and to share it with each other. Believe that.”

  “Is it true?”

  “Beliefs are what you know without choosing to. Just believe.”

  He closes his midnight blue eyes and leans imperceptibly against me. “I don’t know if I can do that.” His voice is so low my angelic hearing must tense to catch each word. “Have you ever been to Glendalough?” he asks at last, so softly.

  “No.”

  “The first time I came to Ireland, I spent a day there. Its bell tower was my favorite thing from that trip.”

  Darker st
ones than the ones before us rise in an almost window-less spire before my eyes. What the fuck? Reborns can’t psycast. But I am seeing things not here. I separate my temple from his, but he doesn’t notice.

  “It’s seven stories high, a sacred number, the sum of four—the perfection of the physical world—four cardinal directions, four elements, four corners in a square, plus three—the perfection of the spiritual world as embodied in the Trinity.” He shifts his weight, but his hand stays warm around my fingers. He likes to teach. The smell of him swells my deep gums in aching pockets. “But I think I like this tumbling church better. It’s a broken, lost, annihilated cosmos, where cathedral walls fall away into nothingness.”

  I move back a little from the smell of him, but the hunger pushes down my throat all the same. “Yeah, I like this nameless church with its poor three-story tower more,” he says. “And I like the missing places here more than what remains upright there.” He shakes his head to clear it and turns a wry grin on me. “How screwed up is that? Wabi-sabi. The beauty of broken things.” He raises his hand—and mine still enveloped in it—and bows his head over my folded wrist. His warm human lips touch my flesh. My body cannot feel the nuances of his kiss, but the beauty of the gesture wrings my soul. I strangle a gasp.

  “Thank you,” he says, still holding my small hand in both of his.

  Hunger gallops over me.

  In the moon’s naked light, all the places where his face wears rage are stripped to an ancient, bare pain. His eyes pierce me. “Thank you,” he says again. “I needed to get away.” His beautiful lips curl into a soft smile before he presses them against the knuckle of my thumb. A hard, motionless shiver radiates from that point through the deep bones in me. My nails quill against my crushed fingers, but he’s looking right into me, warmth and memory in his night-blue eyes.

  “A week ago,” he says, his deep voice rippling into me, “I was eating doughnuts in Cambridge with uninterrupted days in the lab ahead of me as far as I could see. Now I’m back where I swore I’d never be, indentured to a funding source, doing fieldwork, a tenant in a loony bin.” Hunger climbs my chest and claws down to my breasts. “It’s been an intense couple of days. It feels really good to be out of there. Out here. With you.”