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 jump 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 stones 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.”

He frees my hand and stalks off toward the wall and the cows. They have not moved, but I wish he would come away from them. Back to me. Need grips my belly. I should have fed before. Hunger is clouding my thoughts. I walk away from him across the yard, away from the rising smell of his desire, away from the cows.

I duck into a darkness blacker than the night and mount the spiraling stone steps of the squat bell tower again. I climb beyond where I had sat before, to get above the terrible hunger his desire raises in me. I balance on the decrepit peak. My wingscars ache to stretch and unfurl, to hold the night in their divine embrace and soar.

Falling wouldn’t hurt me, but it would be ugly. His scent carries on the teasing breeze. Only angels fall with grace.

“What time do you guess it is?” he asks. He can’t see me.

“Between late and early.” I walk back down to him.

“Do you need to be back before dawn?”

“No.” I step into the double archway of what must once have been a massive wooden door and he comes to me, away from the cows.

“Olivia?”

I turn away from him and pace the low, paved passageway where the moonlight does not penetrate. My hunger opens from a specific need to a wider well, plumbing me.

“Olivia.” His voice is low, but reaches through all the dark, open places. “Dublin has a lab where I could do the kind of work I need to, to keep my funding, to advance my research. If the hotel closes down, do you think you might be able to talk any of your sisters into coming to Dublin? They wouldn’t have to do anything except let me examine their brains. No promise of a cure, no medicines, just spend a little time in the lab and let me get some baselines?”

“They’re happy at the hotel.”

“Are they? Are they happy there?”

“Their suffering is familiar there,” I tell him. “They know the contours of that place, of their pain.”

“Better the devil you know, eh?”

“He’s like a father to me. The hotel is my home.”

“I thought that star was home.” He touches my elbow. I had not heard him approach. He should not be able to surprise me. “The way you talked about that star, I could feel it.” My angelic hearing has never been surprised before. “Olivia, come to Dublin with me? I won’t ask you to participate in the research. We can get to know each other a little better, discover the city. I could use your help.”

“Why are you so interested in vampires?”

“I’m not. I mean, not specifically. I’m interested in understanding why you, why people like you, feel so apart from the rest of humanity, why we think of ourselves as so radically different, as cursed or damned or worse.”

“What is worse than damnation?”

“I don’t know. To have no God to damn you, maybe.” Something not-quite-fear bleeds into his scent. I breathe it in. Caution under manhood, sex, and suffering. I clamp my jaws against the quilling.

“My sisters would have no reason to go to Dublin,” I tell him through my gripping teeth.

“To help their sister?”

“That’s no reason for them.”

“To help themselves?”

“They won’t believe you can. At least not beyond a good night’s feed.”

“Or fuck,” he snorts. “I’ve never seen such a sexually aggressive psychotype.”

I work the rage in me, to ease the eruption in my bones and gums. “We can’t fuck.”

“What?”

“We can’t fuck. A vampire’s sex is closed—monstrous, grotesque.”

“Olivia.” His tender hands turn my body to him. He searches for my clouded eyes in the darkness. “Olivia, shame around sex is very common. It’s something people work through.”

“I’m not ashamed.” My teeth are fully quilled. The scent of him drenches me. “I’m a virgin.”

“They’re not mutually exclusive, you know.”

“I’m made of stone. Impenetrable.” I’m grappling for anger again, struggling for anything but the pure volcanic hunger diving through all my veins to my aching lips.

“Olivia, were you abused?”

“I was damned.”

“Olivia—”

“You just won’t face reality, will you?” The anger finds me and I push the flood roiling over need. “I am damned. You are cursed. My sisters are angels thrown from Heaven. So while our psychotype may appear sexual, we’re really just aggressive. We hate what we cannot possess, so we find ways to borrow it. We make you want us, and we feed on your hunger. We are the angels of desire. We have none of our own.”

“You have no desire?”

“No.”

“But you get hungry, don’t you?”

“You have no idea.” The feeding edges force through the pliant flesh of my mouth. I’m almost choking on them. “But that’s not desire, it’s craving. It’s inescapable. It becomes irresistible. Everything but the impulse to feed dies in you, and you’re eating before you know you’ve struck. That’s how Sylvia killed her fig last night.”

“Her what?”

“Never mind.”

“Did she actually kill a real person?” Horror now, in the heady mix of smells. Almost disgust. I suck it in to poison myself. “What kind of ridiculous fantasy role-playing does Gaehod provide for down there?”

“Sylvie didn’t mean to kill her. I think she loved the girl.”

“God!”

“That’s what she thought.”

Rage and incomprehension dance over his warrior’s face, slipping into the familiar hollows. I watch him struggle for mastery. “Olivia, surely you can see that the hotel is not a good place to be. It’s unhealthy. You know that, right? That’s why you’ve never been here before now, isn’t it? Look, Gaehod is thinking seriously of shutting down the place, sending everyone home. If he’s killing people, for Christ’s sake, it shouldn’t be too hard to see why. He’s asked me to help convince people. Olivia, would you…”

“No.” My anger is gone. It has abandoned me fast as love and has left me as exhausted. “I’m tired of trying to pass for human in the surface world,” I tell him. “I love the hotel. I’ve come home to take off the mask.”

“You’ve come home to wear the costume. Look at you”—he chuckles—“touring the Irish countryside in knee-high boots and leather pants.”

I slide from his strong fingers effortlessly.

“Olivia, I’m sorry, it was a joke.”

I am striding into the grassy courtyard and through the towering door-shaped hole. I could pierce his skull with my nails.

“Olivia, that was cruel of me. I didn’t mean it.”

The cows regard me silently as I near the low wall.

“Olivia, stop. I’m sorry.”

If I continue my purposeful walk in this direction, will it look like chasing to the cows?

I face him. Feeding full-tooth on this desirable, stupid man would approach pleasure, he has me so enraged. Just his shock would be delicious.

“What makes you think you have any influence with the old man?” I demand.

“He asked my opinion.”

“About whether to shut down the hotel?”

“Yeah. It’s not something he’s planning on doing right away. He’s just mulling over the idea.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Nothing, really. That I thought his affection for some of the hotel’s guests kept him from seeing the real nature behind their reasons for being there.”

My laugh is a bark, and the cows shift their weight in the black grass behind me. They’ve stopped eating. I move without a sound away from them.

“Olivia, I am sorry. Look, it’s got to be getting near morning. Let’s head back. They’ll be serving breakfast by the time we get there. I just realized I’m starving. I say stupid things when I’m hungry.”

I pull the apple from my coat pocket. “Here.” I raise it in the waning light. The moon is setting, but the sun does not yet bleach the sky. I could throw it to him, but I simply hold it, offering it to him, if he will come and take from me.

He closes the distance between us, smiling. Innocent, he comes to take Eve’s apple. I keen the nails on the hand that holds it. He thinks it is a peace offering, held between us.

I draw my quilled nails down his long fingers as they curl around it.

“Ow!” He palms the apple into his other hand to see the bloodied slash.

My quills are too dull, the opening too wide.

“I must have caught myself on the edge of your nail,” he shrugs and sucks the cut.

My veins seethe in constricting agony. His scent hangs fresh and thick in the air between us, and my harvest runs, live and sticky, down two fingers of my frozen hand. I writhe with aching for it. And because I am angry and done hiding, done with being desirable before all else, I mimic him. I put my stained fingers in my scarlet mouth and suck.

“You did that on purpose.” He stuffs the cut finger into the back pocket of his jeans.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to.” His powerful taste lingers behind my lips. Not enough. I want to close my eyes and savor. “I didn’t mean for you to feel it,” I tell him. “My quills are dull. I need my sisters to keen them, but I hate asking.”

“You don’t seem to mind just taking.” He shoots me a rueful grin and bites into the apple.

“If I had asked you, would you have given me permission? If I had told you, out here in the quiet night, if I had whispered to you that I need your blood to feed me, would you have given it?”

He says nothing. I reach behind his muscular back and take his hand at the wrist. It slides from his pocket and I bring it, American lint and masculinity, to my lips. “Am I the succubus?” I whisper. “Gorgeous insatiable lust, tempting in the night?” I push the red snake of my tongue between my lips and draw it up the shaft of his straight finger. “Do I come to you from underneath, full of desire for you?” I balance the tip of his finger on the curl of my pointed tongue. “No, I am the opposite. The desire that fills me is from you, not for you. It’s your want that satisfies me. But if you want, you can be denied.” I touch my teeth to his rounded fingertip and close my lips around it. “To desire is to give your power away.”

“So you protect yourself from rejection by denying that there’s anything you want?” He’s following my words and not my lips. I hold his wide finger in the soft, pursed cushion of my perfect mouth and suck. It stops his breath. The blood, no longer flowing, is salt and earth on my parched tongue. I long to open the cut again.

Letting his flesh blur my words, I answer him. “I am what is desired, not who desires.”

His passionate eyes, dancing between my lips and my eyes, are keenly alert to the deliberate eroticism of the gesture, but also on the challenging trail of diagnosis. He sees patterns, not people. I suck more firmly, drawing the length of his hard finger into the empty womb of my mouth, the welcoming wet of my tongue against his hungry flesh.

The apple falls from his free hand. “If I want you, does that give you power over me?” His voice is thick and I wind my seducing tongue around his finger, sucking. He wants me. I can taste it.

“You believe that my attraction to you gives you power over me?” he repeats, his thoughts struggling to stay above his rising lust. He puts a finger beneath my chin and tips my face up to his. His captive finger, sliding from my crimson lips, glistens between us, only its tip still my mouth’s prisoner. “Is the vampire fetish really a power one?” His blue eyes search my face. “Do vampires drink blood as a symbol for taking vitality, of taking my power into you?”

“We drink blood to live.” I tell him. His strong hands cup my face, but I flog my anger to keep his hungry scent from overflowing. “I drink living blood because I have none of my own. Because I’m tangled in a nasty web of interconnectedness that binds me to strangers for what I eat and my family for how I do.”

He holds my face, concern and tenderness in his mortal eyes. “I think everyone feels that way, the dependence on others, and the connection to other living things.”

For all his cleverness and his clinical detachment, the smell of his irrational desire grows steadily with his hands slipping into my hair, his yearning eyes holding mine—another blind mortal who has confused physical form with moral content. “Hell, even quantum physics will tell you that the observer and the observed can’t be totally unaffected by each other,” he murmurs. Desire drains the choice from him. Our lips are almost touching. “Even space and time are connected, right?” I push a piece of hair away from his drowning eyes. “There’s even a nomenclature—‘quantum nonlocality’—which seems to show us that, on some deep level of reality, even the speed of light doesn’t limit connections between wildly separate events.” His lips touch mine, and a hard blood-hunger stabs my fingers and teeth and heart. In seconds, I will strike.

Choice is all you ever own. He whispers my name against my inviting mouth. I step back from him. Choice, and the knowledge that hangs from its bough.

“I’m okay with the connections,” I tell him. “Everything that touches me belongs to me.”

“So it is about power, isn’t it?” He keeps his hands on my arms.

I could kill him here. I could drink and bathe myself in his intense desire. It would be days before anyone knew. He touches his forehead to mine, bending to look into my eyes. “Did you have a very authoritarian father?”

I laugh. “He only wanted me to love him,” I say, but I can’t hold his questioning eyes. I turn away from him and pick up the apple he dropped. “Love him with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind, and all my strength,” I say, looking away from him to the abbey.

“That sounds really difficult,” he says to my shiny black back.

“That was just his first commandment,” I say. “It was the second one that was really a bitch.”

“Olivia,” he reaches for my hand, but finds the apple. He takes it and throws it hard away from us. I turn to watch it fly. It tumbles up into the night and lands precisely between the eyes of a cow. I gasp, but the cow does not move.

“What will it do?” I whisper.

“It’s thinking,” he whispers back, an infuriating smile staining his warm voice. “It’s thinking ‘Ow! What happened?’ ” I stifle a giggle at his witless cow voice. The creature bends its head and snuffs in the grass. “Now it’s thinking ‘Can I eat that?’ ” The beast raises its ghostly head, chewing.

“What’s it thinking now?”

“Nothing. It’s eating.”

“Does it know what hit it?”

“It’s forgotten.”

“Do cows believe apples just fall out of the sky in the middle of a field?”

“They’re not very smart.”

“Let’s go back,” I say, stepping over the wall and walking past the stupid cows toward our bikes. Dominic follows me because I am beautiful. And the cows, because they are true believers, stand still.

———

Dominic sank into a plush wingback and gazed through the glass dome soaring stories overhead into the dull dawn sky. The metallic hail of ball bearings absorbing his weight on the chair would summon one of the wheeling brass carts to his side in minutes. Deserted at this ungodly hour, Hell’s lobby was almost indistinguishable from any luxury hotel’s. Clusters of overstuffed chairs and artfully placed trees in massive pots defined discreet seating alcoves. Were it not for the complex pattern of energy-harvesting canals in the floor and the flame-licked walls, he could be back in California waiting for Madalene Wright to summon him for a status report. And he would be able to give her good news.

Dominic leaned back into the welcoming comfort of the chair and allowed a secret smile to radiate across his face. It reached into the tight hinges of his jaw and spread an unfamiliar warmth across the muscles of his neck and back. Olivia’s perfect face drifted before his closed eyes, and he lingered over his memory of it, her oceanic eyes, gray and stormy, her slender shoulders of milky satin over sculptured strength. He was falling in love with her. He opened his eyes and stared straight through the distant dome into the Irish dawn. He was in love with her.

A brass tray, spinning on its single wheel, pulled up beside his chair. Dominic unclipped the notepad and pen from its polished surface and hesitated. He could write for a menu and one would be sent, or he could conjure from his own imagination anything he wanted for breakfast. He thought a minute and wrote “oatmeal, coffee, eggs, yogurt,” and closed his eyes again to find the tidal tug of Olivia’s face circulating through him.

He caressed the memory of her icy fingers gripped in his, recalled the lunar paleness of her high cheekbones when her flawless face turned up to him. Permitting himself, sleepy, to swim in memory of the most desirable woman he had ever seen, he was still not slipping into seizure. No slippery events slithered into his recollections of Olivia that had not occurred on the black abbey grounds. Her alluring smile, holding out the apple, the erotic shudder of her velvet lips around his finger. These were his most perilous waters, the thoughts most likely to trigger the unwelcome faces of wives whose names drove yawning gulfs of longing and grief into him. But he was happy. Bordering on euphoric.

Dominic touched his fingers to the carotid pulse below his jaw. It beat steadily, his breathing regular. No indication of abnormal mania. His mind was clear. But he was in love. Love lit up the caudate nucleus, primed dopamine receptors, and triggered seizures. But there he sat, with just the elevated energy, focused attention, and increased reward-winning motivation of a man catapulted into Heaven by a woman’s eyes. His latest pills were working!

Dominic resisted the urge to leap onto the ebony table behind his chair, throw his head back, and howl in triumph. He hadn’t had a seizure since the snake in the buried garden. And he wasn’t convinced that insidious creature had been a proper seizure. There had been no taste aura, no sense of déjà vu, or memory. It had been more hallucinatory than engramic. Full-blown immersive hallucinations would destroy the promise of the AEDvIII.0s, and Dominic intended to be vigilant against any similar experience, but he suspected the serpent had more to do with where he was than what he was taking. No, there was good reason for optimism.

If he was right—and he needed to be more certain first—if the AEDvIII.0s were really as effective as he suspected, convincing Gaehod to close this madhouse would be a much simpler effort. With the hotel closed and Olivia in agreement with him, he would certainly be able to convince her vampire sisters to participate in a drug trial. Madalene would be beyond pleased. Dysart would have to forgive him for keeping his experimentations secret. He would get tenure, and marry Olivia.

The excitement coursing through him made it impossible for Dominic to stay in his comfortable chair. He got up and paced the lobby, marveling at the cobweb of energy-capture channels in the floor. L’Otel Matillide was certainly a miracle of engineering. Dominic stopped before a strange, empty hearth made of three massive stones and cocked his head at the cantilevered hallway above him, tracing the graceful metal struts with his eye. He had to make sure he got at least an afternoon of photography in before Gaehod closed the place down. There was so much to document. Or perhaps the old man would convert the place to a real hotel. The naked gas flame walls would never pass code. Not even in Ireland. But the rest… Dominic rested a hand on the cozy green wingback by the fireplace and smiled.

The four brass columns formed when Olivia’s spiraling elevator walls folded in on themselves caught Dominic’s eye, and he wandered over to investigate their construction. Still marveling at Hell’s vast beauty, he tripped over a pile of filthy rags and hair dumped against one of the bright pillars.

“When you’re quite done gazing about you in delight and surprise like fucking Harry Potter, you might help me up. Or maybe you’d like to kick me again?”

“Sorry, Alyx. Didn’t see you.”

“No, how could you, being all starry-eyed and shit.”

“Sorry,” Dominic said again, and wiped the idiot grin off his face. “I just ordered some breakfast. Want to join me? You should eat something.”

Alyx raised a scarred arm. Dominic grasped the tumble of bathrobe and bones by the wrist and pulled. To his surprise, Alyx peeled up from the ground and landed across his chest with a muffled grunt. Dominic hadn’t meant to pick the man up, but he weighed less than a child. He returned to his vacated chair, deposited the rock star, and sat down across from him.

“So what’s got your handsome head in the clouds, oh you great god of reason and science?” Alyx asked.

Dominic stretched his legs out before him, leaning into the chair’s soft embrace. “I was just wondering what this place would be like if Gaehod opened it to the public.”

“It’d die.”

“Do you think so?”

“It’s what happens to anything when it stops being used and starts being saved.”

“I bet UNESCO would designate it a world heritage site.”

“Have to be dead before you can be preserved.” Alyx tugged his bathrobe closed, clinching the shoelace harder around his skinny waist. “What are you trying to shut down Hell for anyway?”

“How do you know about that?”

“You just don’t fucking listen, do you? I already told you. That bastard up there, in all his chaos and mechanical bits, and books, and tea, is just fucking sitting on the goddamn inlet to the memepool we’re all drowning in. He’s the Typhoid Mary of ideas, the ultimate replicator. If he thinks it, we all know it. Without knowing how we know it. It just gets into the water.”

“Alyx, that’s really not possible.”

“I know you’re the poster child for the Hell-closure faction.”

“You make it sound like a war. Gaehod’s just thinking over his options.”

“Bullshit. It is a war. And you’re the enemy general.”

“I’m not. I’ve just been putting together a proposal.”

“It’ll be the Israelites and the fucking Philistines, down to a battle of chosen champions, one per side, to the death.”

“It’ll be a PowerPoint presentation.”

“Trial by combat.”

“Me versus Gaehod?”

“Can you really be that stupid?” Laughing shook Alyx until the danger he would tumble out of his chair forced him silent. “Guess I’ve got no worries about being turned out of my home if you don’t even know who you’re fighting.” Still gulping back giggles, Alyx struggled nearly upright in his chair. “Hey,” he asked Dominic, “you still looking for victims?”

“Research participants?”

“Whatever.”

“I am, but honestly, Alyx, I think you need sleep and food more than medicine. That and to stop medicating yourself.”

“I wasn’t talking about me, you dick. I know you can’t help me. I’m looking for the Reset button.”

“Alyx—”

“Cause David’s sister’s walking this way.”

“What?”

“You are the dumbest motherfucker I ever met. And I’ve known plenty of people up to their assholes in denial. But you, my friend, have got your eyes about sewn closed.”

From behind Dominic, a stunningly tall, muscular woman in vampire-black fetish wear swept past.

“Hello, Vivian,” Alyx managed to squeak out before the woman leapt onto the arms of his velvet chair. Silver buckles glinted down her rippling back. She had undergone extensive back surgery, Dominic noted, but seemed agile enough now. She lowered herself in a predatory crouch over Alyx’s wasted body and grasped his head, one gloved hand in his long, thin hair, one gripping his jaw. She lifted the man by his face to her mouth and kissed him.

Dominic looked away from the rock star’s opening bathrobe, returning to his studious examination of the miraculous architecture of Hell’s front parlor. He had actually distracted himself when he heard Vivian spring down from her perch over Alyx. He was paler, but smiling.

“Dominic, this is Vivian, one of Olivia’s sisters.”

Dominic stood to shake hands with the striking blonde.

“Eyes, Alyx!” Vivian barked.

Dominic glanced at the collapsed rock star, who made no attempt to conceal his lecherous study of Vivian’s high breasts. Dominic valiantly kept his eyes from the black-and-red-iron-cross latex pasties barely covering the prominent tips of the exposed flesh escaping her tightly cinched corset. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, hand out.

Vivian shook her spiked white hair and laughed. She grasped his hand with surprising strength and yanked his wrist so forcefully Dominic nearly fell into her. She sniffed at his wrists and released his hand.

“Have you seen her?” she hissed. “We’re supposed to meet Gaehod for tea.”

“Olivia? Not in the last half-hour. You might look in the kitchen. She said she was hungry.”

Vivian’s glance toward Dominic dripped distain.

“Hey, Vee—” Alyx called, but she turned on her steel stiletto and stalked out of the lobby. “I think she kinda likes me,” Alyx murmured.

Dominic sat back down. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. She does that sometimes. Just walks up and kisses me.”

“Does she ever talk to you?”

“No. But it’s me. What’s to say?”

Like a riderless unicycle, another service tray wheeled up beside Dominic’s chair bearing a pure white porcelain teapot with matching sugar dish and creamer. Dominic fixed himself a heavily sweetened cup and dismissed the tray with a gentle push.

“I’d imagine you’ve got some pretty good stories,” he said, taking a long sip.

“What? From the rock star days?” Alyx snorted and rolled over in his chair. “Tales of drugs and debauchery? Cautionary stories about sex and drugs? About pride before destruction?”

“What kind of music did you play?”

“Straight-on, hard-driving rock and roll. None of that nasal whiner shit the pussies in their jackets and Vans make now. I was a fuckup from the get-go.”

“But you were good at it.”

“Good at being a fuckup? It’s all I know, bro.”

“No. I meant at singing.”

“Hell yeah. But it broke me. You’ve got no idea, man, what it’s like to stand up there every night and let it hit you. All the kids out there, all their ugly faces, all of them screaming every goddamn word you wrote. It comes at you like a train, and you send it back to them. They put their hands up. Like they’re gonna throw their souls at you. And you gotta catch it or it’s all these souls just raining down around you. You gotta catch every one and channel it back. Your body just rattles with it for hours after, all that attention driven through you. All that energy… All that…”

“Love?” Dominic asked.

Alyx shrugged. “That’s what they think anyway. They yell it at you, ‘I love you, Alyx.’ Even the dudes. But they say ‘man,’ instead of my name. And I’ll tell you something else. Those fuckers will eat you alive. I mean really. They want to own you. You need body-guards and shit to keep them away.” Alyx shook his head. “Nah. That’s not love.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. They want you to see them. Every goddamned one of them. And you can’t.”

“But you touch them.”

“Just the ones with the really great tits.” Alyx chortled into his robe.

“No,” Dominic said. “I mean your music, your voice—it must have touched them, or they wouldn’t feel that way about you. I mean, even if it isn’t love, it’s something. You’ve made them feel something.”

“Yeah? My songs weren’t great art, you know. Mostly about girls and being angry.”

“But they worked.”

“This some lame-ass shrink trick to make me feel better about my sorry-ass life?”

“Did it work?”

“Fuck. It’s just a line: ‘You touched people, man.’ Doesn’t make me any less a fuckup.”

“How things look depends on where you sit sometimes.”

“So I should just sit in a happy chair and see my life as being this great, meaningful thing? Like I mattered?”

“Why not?”

“ ’Cause it’s bullshit.”

“So you’d rather have a fifth of Jack?”

“Fuck, yeah.”

“Because that’s more real?”

“Fuck you. I know you’re fucked up, same as me.”

“No, I’m fucked up different.”

“Whatever. You’ve just got better drugs.”

Dominic leapt to his feet. Adrenaline stung his palms and feet.

“Shit, dude,” Alyx said. “What’s got you by the throat?”

“My bag.” Dominic’s mind raced backwards through time. Not at the abbey. Not at the tree. The river. “Fucking Lethe,” he whispered.

“What?”

“My laptop,” he explained. “I’ve been making my damn diary entries in the journal Gaehod gave me, but all my work, my lab notes. My latest batch of—” He turned back to Alyx, bruised and ghostly in the armchair. “For Christ’s sake, when my breakfast gets here, eat it, okay? I have to go.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“Okay,” Dominic said, and set off at a dead run. It was a pace he knew Alyx couldn’t match at all, but he was still surprised, turning over his shoulder, to realize the rock star hadn’t budged. Dominic ran, uncertain he remembered the way back to the garden, desperate to get there. He had traveled all over the world, into dangerous places and exalted ones, and never once forgotten that bag. And it had never mattered more. That bag held the last few AEDvIII.0 capsules and their chemical formula. Its loss would be apocalyptic.

———

The hotel sounds like the house of war—silent as divorce and dissolution—thundering soundlessly with what’s left unsaid. I stand in the old man’s doorway.

“Did you tell the new Reborn that you might close Hell?” I demand.

“Yes.” Gaehod beams down at me from his unsteady perch, seated atop a teetering stepladder in a butler’s long starched apron.

“Is that true?”

“That I might disband the hotel? Yes.” Gaehod plucks another book from the towering shelves that line his chaotic study and adds the tome to the precarious stack balanced on his up-drawn knees.

“You can’t!” I struggle not to scream.

“I was thinking I might open it to the public.”

“That’s the same thing as closing it,” I cry. “That will ruin it!”

“Archeologists could excavate it, bring the past into the light.”

“We will all die! We can only survive underground. Gaehod, I need this place!”

He beams warmth down on me. “Have you found something here that pleases you, my dear? I am so glad! I would love for you to tell me about it, but first, come help me a moment won’t you?”

“No! I haven’t found anything here that pleases me.” My voice makes a detestable shrill. “I’ve only found things that irritate or depress me.” I stride across the litter of the old man’s office—mounds of books, towers of letters. “I came here to escape. I came to learn from my sisters how to be the proper kind of damned—cool, cynical, aloof—but I find even they are not free from tyrannical hope. Each of them is trapped in helpless quests for something. They believe. They still believe. And as long as belief clings to desire, there is no escape from hope.”

Gaehod nods cautiously to avoid toppling his precious books. “Hope cannot be sheared as swift as wings.”

I grasp the rails of his delicate ladder, forcing him to steady books with one hand, and his diminutive body against the bookcase with the other. “I haven’t found what I’m looking for, damn it, because what I want is an end to searching.” I shake the steps beneath him.

“Get a grip on yourself, my dear!”

“Why? I have a grip on you.”

“Impossible.”

I give the ladder a vicious rattle.

“Self-possession is freedom.” Gaehod smiles, clasping toppling books against his narrow chest.

“Everyone has something to clutch,” I rage. “Vivian claims the pleasure of her victims. Ophelia wants to be possessed. Sylvia is possessed—or was until she killed the girl. Blood communion for Sylvia, blood sacrifice for Vivian, blood brothers for Ophelia. You and your damnable books. I want out of this hell of blood and possession! ”

“I think Dominic feels much the same way. Which is why he is encouraging me to close the place down.”

“I’ll kill him,” I say. And I mean it. I would enjoy that.

“Why?”

“I don’t want to hide who I am.” I climb the ladder toward him. “I don’t want the reciprocal pretend love of my sisters who only listen so they can talk, who only kiss so they’ll be kissed. I don’t want to only use and be used.” I am standing one rung below him. The ornate, carved ladder shudders and pitches under our combined weight.

“And you are ready to kill, which you have never done, not in the name of something you desire, but only for what you do not want?” Gaehod is calm on his reeling ladder.

I claim the last rung between us and face him squarely. “It is only over what is unwanted that battles are ever waged.” My height more than makes up for the difference in our positions on the sea-sick ladder. He presses the top third of his toppling tower of books into my unready hands. “Do you want to serve your sisters?” he asks.

“What’s the difference between serving them and being used by them?” I am balancing, hands full of books.

“The same as between holding a belief and having an idea.”

I climb down the ladder backwards.

“These are all cookbooks.” I say.

“I, for example, have the idea that L’Otel is no longer necessary.”

“What the hell are you doing with cookbooks, Gaehod?”

“Here, love, take the next stack from me,” he says as soon as I touch down. I climb the ladder and retrieve another portion of the books that threaten, at every movement, to unbalance the old man and send him, his heavy books, and his light ladder clattering to the ground.

“The surface world has grown very tolerant, from what I understand.” Gaehod piles the slim Twenty-Four Rose Petal Cakes for Weddings and the massive Traditional Cross-Quarter Feasts onto my precarious stack.

I deposit them with the others and sink into the worn pink chair by Gaehod’s smoky fireplace. “Not tolerant, really,” I tell him. “It accepts a broader range of beautiful, but it still loathes ugly.”

“And love?” Gaehod lifts another book from the towering shelves. A low pneumatic moan registers the energy released.

“Adultery is still rampant, but now they tell each other.” I tuck my legs up into the chair’s thin embrace, willing to spill some of my collected vitriol on humanity in general since I can’t pour it over one man in particular. “Having mistaken the ideal of fidelity for an achievable goal and being therefore bitterly disappointed, today’s modern couple settles for cold reality. They show themselves to one another, naked in fluorescent light, every vein and pimple exploited. It’s ugly. I miss the eras when every woman strove for beauty and thought herself the only secret sinner in a room. Shame is sexier than truth. Exhibitionism is not honesty.”

“And evil?”

“Nope. They’re still perfectly okay with evil as long as it looks good.”

Gaehod grunts and climbs down at last. “All frosting and no cake. Would you like some?”

“What?”

“Anything, a little snack? You look famished.”

“I have not fed.”

“No?” He regards me shrewdly. It embarrasses me, for him to see me needy. “Do you want Dominic?”

“What, for a snack?” My laugh rings too harsh.

“We were talking about what you did not want. I would like to understand what you do.” Ever the innkeeper, the old man drops another square of peat onto the fire and pushes the kettle into the flames.

“He wants me,” I say.

“Naturally.”

“He can’t see me. Desire blinds men.”

“Really? I think it rather sharpens my eyes.” He regards me again, steadily. “I think I see you very clearly,” he says, sitting cautiously into the armchair on the fire’s other side.

“But you don’t want me.” Weariness almost swallows my voice. I must feed, and soon.

“I want your happiness, your enjoyment of my hotel, your pleasure in my company.”

“Yes, you love without desire for possession,” I say, “but what does that kind of love cost you, Gaehod?”

“It’s true.” He chuckles and rolls down his sleeves from the garters which have held them above his delicate elbows. “It’s very painful. Sometimes I want to check out of my own hotel.” He looks terribly old to me, pulled into his tattered chair. “Who knows”—he buttons his cuffs—“perhaps young Dominic is right. Disbanding the hotel would certainly be easier.”

“But it’s not what you want.”

“Do you know what I want?”

“I’ve heard the stories of how you made this place, created our entire network, carved this hole. You made it all out of your desire.”

“It was more than my desire.” The kettle starts to rumble and Gaehod turns his penetrating eyes away from me to tend it. “I know tea can’t feed you, but would you like a cup?”

I nod.

“I remember when I could go months without the taste of it,” I tell him. “I could sacrifice, suffer, and be willing to dissolve into nothing but my own need, believing that love would save me. For eternity, I have believed that each new time would be the time I would find my way back up.”

Gaehod nods and pulls himself to standing. “And did you ever reach the heavens?” He stretches on tiptoe for a pale blue canister high on a sagging shelf.

“Sometimes, for a moment, but I always fell back down.” I reach the tea tin for him.

“Perhaps that’s all we get—the glimpses.”

“I’d rather knife out my eyes and keep them with my wings,” I tell him. But the ferocity exhausts me. I sink back into the frowsy pink chair, dizzy.

Gaehod pries the lid from the tea with a butter knife and inserts his long, pointed nose into the jar. He closes his eyes over the scent, and his voice, when it comes again, is twisted to nasal by the muffling metal. “That might be easier.”

“Easy is what I’m after,” I say. “I want numb. I want my sisters to sharpen my edges. I want to feed. I want desire without choice.”

“That’s not desire, that’s craving.”

“Then I shall be the angel of craving. I never had any desires of my own anyway.”

“My dear.” Gaehod spoons a measure of coiled dry leaves into a red clay pot. “You have no lack of desire.” In goes another spoonful. “You’re filled to the brim with it.” And another. “They spill out over your lashes and your gums.” Another and another spoonful of tea drop into the pot. “What you lack”—he clamps the lid—“is experience with choice.”

“Gaehod, I’m damned. Choice has been taken from me.”

“Quite the contrary, I think.” He hands me the pot and sits back down. “But we’ll have to see, I guess. Dominic is a persuasive young man. Very confident. And I am an old man, full of doubt.”

“But you know so much.” I wave my pale hand at the whole chaotic wealth of Gaehod’s library and writings, of the papers stacked on the floor and the books piled on the shelves, of the years collecting and studying.

“Knowledge is only the beginning, my dear. Every fool knows things.”

“A fool knows things by mistake, without choosing what he knows.”

Gaehod moves the whistling kettle from the fire, but makes no move to pour its water into the pot I’m holding. “Dominic says that he can bring proof to knowledge. I am not so sure I can offer the same for what I think I know. Perhaps the new magic is stronger.”

“The new magic isn’t magic,” I tell him. “It leaves magic out. And that is why the old ways win. Don’t do this to me, Gaehod. If you destroy the hotel, you’ll take away the only place I have to bury my hope. I don’t want to be strapped to a corpse for all eternity. Gaehod, all I’m asking for is a grave.”

“Anything can be a grave.”

He says nothing else, watching the escaping steam rise from the open throat of the cooling kettle. I search the wayward tendrils for inspiration—for persuasion—I have to make him change his mind. I turn the knife around.

“We still need you,” I say. “And it’s not just us, not just the ancient stained. This new millennia is damned in new ways. They need you even more than we did. We, at least, understood our damnation. They think it’s all bad chemistry or worse luck.”

“Dominic says the contemporary damned have everything they need in the surface world.”

“Except redemption.”

“They don’t seem to be looking for that.”

“They wouldn’t know where! Nobody reads the old texts, nobody knows their own lineage. You should be reaching out to them, not shuttering our gates! They need us.”

“Stories, not science?”

“Yes!”

“Myth, not medicine?”

“Look,” I say, “we throw magic in the face of logic, and magic wins. Irrational desire still thrives in reasonable minds. Desire for money has scientists swearing cigarettes don’t cause cancer. Desire for God makes teachers spout Intelligent Design. Desire trumps reason every time. The mind has no chance without the body. I can prove it.”

Gaehod still says nothing, but turns his deep eyes from the fire to me.

“Test me!” I beg.

“Yes,” he says at last. “I can put this burden on you, since you have asked.”

I start to thank him, to revel in victory, but his delicate face bears no trace of fondness for the first time in the hundreds of years I have known him. It terrifies me.

“The test must be for you both,” he says. “He wants to study you. You want to devour him.”

“I win,” I say lightly. “We eat before we understand.”

“Dominic will ask you to go to Dublin for neurological testing,” Gaehod says at last. “If you go, if you even enter the hospital there, modernity wins and I will open the hotel to the public, and publish all our pasts.”

I clamp my lips so hard against a grin that I taste ichor. Don’t go to Dublin. Refuse to be examined. There has never been an easier trial.

“However,” the grim old man continues, “if you’re right, if Dominic surrenders to desire, we will not only continue underground, but will also begin a new program of outreach for the twenty-first century’s undiscovered damned.”

“I broke his skin this morning. He has already fallen.”

“No.” Gaehod’s crystal eyes are cold and distant. “You may freely eat of every willing guest in my hotel, but of Dominic’s blood you shall not taste, for in the day that you drink from him, one of you will surely die.”

I am angry. “If he did not want or fear me, I could not pierce his flesh. How else do you expect me to prove his desire?”

“He must kiss you in the garden.”

“You want me to kiss him, but not feed, hungry as you know I am?” Dominic is right. The old man is nuts.

“Sometimes to deny a craving—just because it is craving—is enough for strength.”

“I’m not Sylvia,” I shout. “I never get lost in the flood. I hate that they want me!” I am on my feet, towering over him.

“Then bring me his kiss. It will mark him for me.”

“Kiss him, but don’t dare ask for what I need. Sounds like every marriage I have ever seen.”

“Be kissed.” Gaehod stands slowly and takes the teapot from my clawed hands. “He’s in the garden now.”

“I will starve into shadow before I see your beautiful hotel opened to the undamned.” I spin on my still-muddy heel and stalk across the wreckage to the door. “It doesn’t matter what Dominic knows. Without desire, knowledge has no meaning. All meaning comes from down here. Without it, there are only facts and death. More than wanted, I will be believed,” I shout at the old man, my hand on the door.

“Belief is a choice.” He pours steaming water into the red teapot.

“He will choose me,” I whisper. And I leave him there.

I know it will hurt to feel Dominic’s lips again and not taste him. I remember them in the moonlight last night, and how they tempted me, but I have not kissed him since the first night when we left Pandemonium to walk the spiral hall. I have always hesitated to hurt him. Curious.

I will find him in the garden. He will kiss me. I will not taste him. My sisters will know I have saved the hotel and keen my secret teeth for me. I will go to the Quarry and hunt and feed full-tooth. Then, I think, I may find Dominic again. He will be disappointed that Hell will not close. Perhaps I will comfort him. But now, I must catch up with him before he leaves the garden, or my home and my family, my hunger, and my last hope for hopelessness—for acceptance—will be swallowed by my own demand that Gaehod test me.