8

OVERTHROWN

Dominic found the bag where he had left it when he had fled the vampire sisters and their pale and perfect flesh in the bright darkness. The garden was quiet, its brilliant gloom forcing all colors into lurid against the muddy light. The black river flowed through the silence, and the fruit trees leaked their scent against it. Relieved but exhausted, Dominic dropped to the ground and unzipped his bag.

Everything was in place. He took a brown plastic bottle from a small locked case and swallowed a capsule. The AEDvIII.0’s effects appeared to last about forty-eight hours, an excellent burn rate. He had taken one before his trip to Pandemonium two nights ago. Except for that fucking snake, this formulation seemed effective in keeping the delusions at bay. He intended to go back to that tree and explore. He wanted to rule out animatronics. But no memories of distant times or women had haunted him even when, foolishly, he had taken Olivia’s cool hand in his, touched his face to her smooth temple, kissed her supple wrist.

Dominic slipped his laptop from its battered bag and settled himself against the same tree Sylvia had reclined beneath, her flawless breasts exposed to tempt him. Funny how they had not, but he knew he would not be so strong against Olivia if she pulled her buttons down. If she had turned toward him in the moonlight last night, in the ruined stones and caressing breeze, he would have kissed her. Her mouth, ripe and inviting, had opened for his finger, sucking, drawing a longing from him that tugged again between his legs, remembering.

Dominic steadied his back against the tree and fired up his machine. He would take a few quick notes on the efficacy of the AEDvIII.0s and then go upstairs to bed. He was too old to stay up all night and not feel it the next day. He blinked his eyes against a jungle vigil in complete silence, alert all night, his arthritic hand, curled unmoving around the shaft of an ancient spear. The pills should kick in soon. His computer chirped and, looking down, he chuckled in the stillness. Hell was online. He had mail.

Email seemed so far away, farther than an ocean and five time zones. Dysart and the Ps, the lab, the science, things he could measure on a screen, track on a graph, the weight of his clandestine alliance with Madalene, the damage she could still do. And the email was date-stamped April twentieth. He had forgotten how time elongated underground. He’d barely settled in. Barely unpacked. “Dear Ms. Wright,” Dominic typed, “I am in Hell on your behalf. Nagging is redundant.”

He deleted the email. How could he communicate anything across this gulf in time and power, reality and distance?

“Dear Ms. Wright, You sent me to Hell, same to you.”

He was almost tired enough to send that. He erased it instead. He was too politic in this lifetime. Where was the hunter?

Soundlessly waiting in the Bengali forest.

Dominic pressed the corners of his lids against the hard bone of his nose until chessboard vortices spiraled in front of him. He stared at the empty email reply window. He was exhausted. The flight, the drive, the hotel, the nightclub, the bike ride, the abbey, this unfamiliar ancient home, the garden, all conspired against him. He hoped Alyx would eat his oatmeal.

“Dear Ms. Wright,” he typed sleepily. “We can stop our search. I have formulated the answer by mistake.” Olivia’s boundless eyes swam against his burning lids. He groped for the feeling of her lips around his finger, the erotic pull of sliding into her mouth’s black welcome, the challenge of her eyes. She made him work, made him think. She was what he needed, if not what he had sought. “Everything is here…” he typed, eyes closed, “… very dangerous.” The grass was soft and the air hung warm and utterly still. There was no sound in the garden, no birds, and even the leaves and river were silent. His fingers slipped from the keys. He was drifting, seeking Olivia’s face again. The laptop fell sideways from his legs. He pushed an eye open to see the email was gone. He hadn’t meant to send that. He would need to send a follow-up to Madalene, but later. He was sliding, almost sleeping.

“Kiss me.”

Olivia stood, towering over him, one black, boot-clad foot on either side of his body. Dominic followed the lean curve up her thighs to the red corseted dip at her waist, and back over the swell of breasts to her face, looking down. She lowered herself over him and tucked her feet beneath her, legs spread across his hips, her hands on the tree trunk behind him. “Kiss me,” she said again.

“Why?”

“Because I know you want to.”

Her lips curled in a tempting half smile, mocking and tender, inches from his mouth. Without willing it, his hands caught at her hips, his thumbs resting in the soft places just within the bone, his fingers splayed over the giving rounded flesh. He gripped her. Beneath her straddling legs, his cock quickened. She leaned closer, pressing the weight of her body against him. Her breasts, soft in red velvet, brushed his chest. She tilted her head, her lips parted in invitation. Her breath came, soft and cool, against his scorched lips.

“No,” he whispered. He closed his burning eyes against the beauty and softness, felt her breasts and open legs, her parted lips almost touching his own. Yes, he wanted to.

“I want to ask you something,” she said, and settled herself, open-legged against him. “Open your eyes.”

He tore himself away from the pure sensation of her body near and open over him, unresponsive. Her lashes were dark against the white of her cheeks and the gray of her eyes ran deeper than the soundless river he had fled.

“There’s something about you I don’t understand,” the dark beauty mused, “and it’s been bothering me since I met you.”

“What’s that?” His hands still held her hips, could grind her open thighs against his iron cock.

“My body conforms to desire. If a man likes tall girls, I get a little taller—couple inches, no big thing. If a woman likes tiny breasts, mine shrink. If he likes a full ass, mine swells. All that matters is that they want me.” Dominic willed himself not to look down. “It’s never such a dramatic change that it makes me unrecognizable one fig to the next, but their desire distorts me, molds me to their tastes.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah. But here’s the thing”—Olivia leaned in again, her perfect lips against the unshaved roughness of his jaw, her voice a welcome invasion—“with you, I have not changed at all. So either you think I’m perfect just the way I am”—her lower lip grazed his earlobe—“or you do not desire me.”

Dominic slid his hands from her hips to her narrow waist, fighting the urge to crush her body against his hammering chest, to wrap his arms around her slender torso and pull her hard against him. She sat back from him a little and looked into his face. “And I honestly can’t imagine either is possible.”

His hands felt huge on her lithe waist. He did want her, wanted her ferociously, but he owed her the reason he could not tell her so. “Olivia, I—”

How could he explain his madness, make her understand what he could not accept?

“Standing out at the abbey with you last night, I felt… I can’t want you that way. It would deny everything I believe in. My work would stop making sense. I couldn’t love you and keep my job. I’m a neuroscientist. You have to understand. It’s who I am.”

He slid his hands up the smooth cloth that encased her, feeling the long column of her back with shaking fingers, holding the curve of her with the palm of his hands. “Olivia, you…” He was making a mess of this. Why couldn’t what he felt be illustrated in an elegant wave graph? “When I look at you, I don’t see an available woman, desirable or otherwise. I see someone in pain, enslaved by their illness, driven by compulsion or delusion, someone who isn’t free to choose me.”

“Free?”

“Right.”

“And do you think that you are free?”

“I’m trying to be.”

She moved so swiftly he barely saw what she lunged for. She hung his pill bottle between them. “This is freedom?”

“That is medicine.”

“What does it do?”

“I don’t know yet. I hope it may curb delusion.”

“Yours or mine?”

“Mine.”

“Can you still see me?”

He smiled grimly. If she noticed the aching erection she straddled, she gave no indication. On her slim thighs, his hands, large and freckled, stroked the soft fabric covering her perfect legs. “I don’t think for a moment that you’re a hallucination of mine. My fantasy lovers are all”—he glanced into her quizzical eyes and grinned—“much more compliant.”

“Then what do you see that you think is not real?”

“Right now?” He looked around at the dark garden, sunlessly shining. “Nothing, really. But I’ve been taking my medicine.”

He meant it as a joke, but she didn’t smile. “Dominic, you want me. I can smell it.”

He nodded. “I know. I do. Out at the abbey, even at the nightclub, something about you speaks to me. Or would, I think, if I let myself listen. I have to keep stuffing cotton in my ears. It’s not easy.”

“I’m an angel, not a siren.”

“I know, but if I kissed you right now, and yes, I want to… If I kissed you, it would mean giving up on everything that’s held me together since the last time I was in this insane place. It’s more than just my work that would stop making sense. It’s me. I can’t want you in the way I want you.” He was choking, blind, staring at his hands on her thighs. He bowed his head.

“It’s a choice?”

“It has to be.” Her lips touched his hair as it fell over his eyes. If he opened them, her breasts would be all he could see. Even against his clamped-shut lids, their white perfection swam before him. He heard the rattle but didn’t recognize the sound until she had swallowed and tossed the pill bottle back into his bag.

“You shouldn’t have done that.” His voice was caked with despair and desire.

“I thought you wanted to heal me.”

“How many did you take?”

“I left you some.”

“You know that’s useless to me clinically.”

“I didn’t do it for you.” She stood up and walked away from him, noiseless across the dark grass. He sprawled against the tree trunk, exhausted and taut, relieved and aroused. If she suggested a swim now, he would be lost. But she stayed silent, and his thrashing mind began to steady.

“I think Gaehod will close the hotel,” she said at last.

“That isn’t what you want, is it?”

“No. My sisters will be angry.” Her voice was expressionless, her face marble.

“Vampires get angry?”

“Twice, to date. But it could be good for you. If Gaehod opens the hotel to the public, my sisters won’t be able to stay. I think you might convince some of them to follow you to Dublin.”

“I thought you said they’d never participate in a clinical trial?”

“You’ll need to set up a place for them to stay, with underground storage, and tell them the rest is a game, a novelty. Boredom is our contagious cancer.” She turned away from him, standing by the fruit tree branch he’d reached for only yesterday.

“I’m certain I could devise ways to make the tests interesting.” Dominic’s mind was sailing ahead. If he could get out of this damned hotel, back into a city with trains and bookstores, if he could confine the madness of vampires and curses to a laboratory and the daylight, he might yet fulfill his promises to Madalene and his obligations to Dysart. Maybe then he could wrap his head around what this pale, perfect woman did to his heart. His eyes ran up the slick columns of her legs and across the narrow expanse of her red-cased back and flowing hair. “Would you come, too?” he asked quietly.

“No.”

He stood up to take her by the shoulders and turn her to him. “Why are you helping me?”

“I want to.” She almost smiled. “That’s my choice.”

Touching her again was a mistake. The clear sanity of his Dublin plans blurred in the depth of her melting eyes. She closed them wearily.

“You’re tired, aren’t you?” he asked.

“No.”

“You look exhausted.”

“I haven’t eaten.” She swayed slightly and without thinking, Dominic pulled her tiny body to his. She leaned against his chest and inhaled. Her breath, as she released it, shook her in his steady arms. He wrapped her more closely against him.

“Olivia, why did you take that pill?”

“I was curious.” Her body, pliant but strong, molded against his, making an almost audible hum in his ears. Her slow hands traced his back from waist to shoulder. “I’ve never been curious before,” she whispered. Her fingers were learning the shapes and contours of him, pressing into tender places, he could barely hear her.

“Why haven’t you eaten?”

“Vampires can only feed on blood that wants or fears them.”

“You could have fed on me,” he whispered over the roar of desire in his ears. “I want you.”

She lifted her head from his chest to gaze at him. “I can smell it on you, so thick. But if you can choose, then so can I.”

He took her face in his hands, cradling it, fingers in her hair again, his thumbs on the porcelain richness of cheekbones. Her lips, so tempting, trembled. She was hurting, and he was slowly starting to understand. “You chose not to?”

“Hunger is the only thing a vampire feels, a yawning emptiness, that drinking does not fill, but numbs. It’s like a gash you can’t suture, but inject with lidocaine. I didn’t feed on you last night, and the emptiness got bigger than I have ever known. But without your desire to numb me, something new started to happen. I think I have started to feel my self, under my hunger.” Her tidal eyes held his, her voice the only sound in the garden’s dead world. “Under my roaring hunger for you to want me, under my shrieking need for your blood to keep me warm, I’ve started to hear”—his thumbs grazed her cheek—“the whisper of my own desire.” Her body, so alive against his, made his dull thighs and shoulders, his blunt chest and belly ache.

“I want you,” he whispered.

“And I want you.” Her lips scarcely moved with the whisper of surprise and discovery. Her fingers clung to his back, her body held to his, but it was her eyes he could not bear to leave in the blue light of tearshed and blood. He rubbed the balls of his thumbs against the twin wet places on her cheeks.

She closed her eyes, a pained furrow between her perfect brows. “I have only eaten choices,” she murmured, silent as prayer. His thumb touched her swollen lips feeling, more than hearing, her words. They ran in torrents through him. “I have always taken. When I make the tiny cuts with my teeth or nails that go unnoticed, when I drive my teeth on those who flee me, I steal.” The supple flesh pursed under his reluctant touch. “It is why Gaehod chose the sign he has. A kiss must be given.”

“You asked me to kiss you.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Ask me again.” His voice was raw with his hunger.

———

Beauty does not belong to me. It comes with damnation. My flawless body stands against his mortal one, bathed in our desire. If I do not walk away from him now, he will kiss me. Gaehod will not close the hotel. My deathless sisters will be pleased. If I open my aching mouth to his hunger, I could drown my agony on his need. He will feel me strike, and my raw quills, unkeened for weeks through indifference, would hurt him. But he is brave and will stand it. I slip from his hungry, seeking fingers on my cheeks and lips, and walk away.

“Olivia!”

I do not turn back.

“Olivia?”

“Come with me,” I say. But I do not turn back to look for him until I have pushed the gates of the garden wide. He stops to gather his things, the computer on the grass, the pill bottle, a notebook. I wait for him, dizzy with freedom or need.

There is one thing I must understand.

“Where are we going?” The bag hangs across his strong chest, his broad shoulders easy under its weight, his bright blue eyes burning wild in the garden light. He has not shaved since the last time I led him out of this garden to the bikes and our night drive. Bronze stubble roughens his face, clouded with sex and doubt. But striding toward me, he looks fierce and elemental, a force of desire and rage beaten against powers stronger and darker than he sees or can understand.

I want to discover, once and for all, what happens when he looks at me.

He walks wordlessly beside me down the silent halls. We pass black metal and vaulted wooden doors. When I stop before a dull gray one, he only waits as I push my flawless fingers into the narrow seam beside the lock, and slide an elongating nail between the jam and tumblers. He holds the door. The smaller, dank hallway smells of mold and earthworms, of cellars, graves, and abandoned wells.

“I keep forgetting we’re underground,” he whispers.

The corridor ends abruptly, rounding a curved wall, to deposit us at the foot of a cavernous space. It is dark and airless, nothing like the chill humidity of the grand hall. It soars dustless, limitless and black.

“The gas will come on when we take the floor,” I tell him. I hold his hand, warm and human, and step into the void. The ceiling ignites in blinding banks of flame, but I keep walking. When I stop, and when he can see again, we stand in the center of a vast Art Deco ballroom whose inlaid black-and-white floor sweeps away in dizzying patterns on every side. The ceiling soars stories up, supported by colossal carved titans whose rippling bodies of living stone bear the weight of the entire hotel above them on strong, blind backs. On every wall, broken only by white columns, mirrors reflect us back to our dazzled eyes.

I leave Dominic standing and walk to touch the old, cold silver surface. Looking at me from the glass is a woman I have never seen. Familiar, yes, like the myriad faces I have seen when those who want me gaze on me. But different somehow, and purely my own. This is my native face. Then I see him. He stands where I left him, pale and still. His artist’s lips make a hard, thin line, of anger or fear.

“Why can’t I see you?” His voice is a cold hammer.

“I’m here.” I turn from the mirror to face him. His logical eyes search the glass behind me.

“What the fuck!” His broad hands are balled into fists and his fierce teeth are set. “I can see you standing right there in front of the mirror, but I can’t see you in it.” I turn back to the glass. I smile at my reflection, and it returns the grin with a look of barely contained joy. It’s all I can do not to laugh.

“I can see myself,” I tell him.

“I can see myself, too, but only me. Why can’t I see you? Is it a trick? Some insane game of Gaehod’s? Goddamn it, that old man won’t quit fucking with my mind.” He looks about to tear it from his skull, dropping his bag in the center of the floor and driving the heels of his hands against his raging eyes. He strides to the mirror and cups his hands, peering into the reflecting surface. Then he yanks a pocketknife from his jeans and flips open the blade. He scratches the mirror’s surface and swears.

I wander, half dreaming, happy, back to the room’s center and gaze at my true reflection, turning slowly to see myself in a infinite line of smaller selves, each blessedly identical. He glances at me and back at the mirrors. “It’s some kind of stupid trick,” he mutters, pressing his furrowed face against the plaster to peer behind the glass. He turns to me and scrubs his violent eyes again, leaning his taut back against the mirrored wall, facing mirrors on the other side, but looking at me. He shakes his head. “I don’t understand,” he says.

“You’re not used to that, are you?”

“To not being able to understand what I see? No. I’m not. I’m a logical man. I figure things out.”

“Have you figured me out?” I ask him.

“You’re a person, not a thing. And no, I haven’t. I don’t even try with women. They don’t make sense.”

“And now this room doesn’t make sense?” I am teasing him. It’s unfair, but I am in the mirror and feel millennia younger—lighthearted and giddy. He slams his hand against the glass. The massive pane ripples, waves in a frozen pond, but does not shatter, and Dominic hugs his hand against his chest.

“Fuck,” he says sheepishly. “That was stupid. Sorry I startled you.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No.” He walks right to me. “You nailed it, you know. I have to stop trying to make things make sense down here. None of it does, not even that it is here, a room this size, underground. The rules of the real world don’t apply.” He half grins and takes my small wrists in his large hands. “I have rules I make and rules I follow, rules I expect the world to play by, and rules I know it won’t. I have rules about women and about falling in love. Like one of nature’s laws, you can’t break it, you can only break yourself against it. But no rules work here. I’m falling and there’s no gravity. I’m reflecting and there’s no image.”

But I cannot hear him. His strong hands encircle my wrists. I see them in the mirror. I feel them on my flesh.

“Touch my face,” I whisper.

His hands slide up my arms, and I close my eyes to drink in the sensation.

My body has sensation.

“Olivia.” He shakes me gently by the shoulders he’s holding. “Olivia? Are you okay? You’re really pale.”

I am the Undead, of course I’m pale! I feel like laughing. I’m pale and dizzy, and a thousand other things no angel can be. He touched and I felt. I sway in his strong hands.

“You really need to eat, don’t you? You missed breakfast. I don’t know about those pills on an empty stomach either. Are you faint?”

I touch his jaw. Against my fingertips, the stubble is rough and masculine. I trace his hard cheekbone where the skin is taut and smooth. Manhood and strength tingle up my fingers and across my bones.

I can feel him.

“Olivia?” His hands slide to my waist and their descent radiates from my skin into the core of me. “What’s happening?”

“I can feel you,” I whisper.

“I don’t understand.” He makes his voice soft, like mine.

It will overwhelm me, the weight of his hands on my waist, the sheer heat of his body close to mine, the drenching smell of his desire and the unfamiliar scent of my own. I breathe in deeply.

Yes. I want. I can smell my desire. I have never wanted. I touch his softening mouth with uncertain fingers. I want him. The inviting flesh of his lips is giving and soft after the roughness of his jaw, and I run questioning fingers over it until he shudders.

“I can see you, here in my arms,” he whispers. “I can feel you touching me, but when I look,” his strong brows contract and his fingers dig into my waist. I moan to feel their hard demand, to feel him touching me. “But when I look into all the mirrors on all the walls, you’re not there. I just see my empty hands holding nothing.”

“I can see me.”

“I’m having a seizure.” He bows his head, defeat heavy on him,

“I must be getting worse. I have never had this kind of fully consciousness doubling before.”

“It has to be enough that I can see me.” I push my fingers harder against his inviting lips to feel the sudden barricade of teeth. I push between them, and he bites me lightly. “Let it be enough,” I ask him. He turns his face from me and my fingers slip from between his lips.

“Am I losing my mind?” he whispers.

“You’re asking me?” I mean it lightly, lost in the texture of his skin, trailing my nerve-rich fingertips from his jaw to where the stubble grows more sparsely, where the sinews of his throat stand out in stark relief. His throat. I feel the pulse, his hypnotic thrusting blood beneath it.

With something like a sob, he gathers me against him, against the heat and rhythm of his chest, within the circle of his arms and strength, against the hard unmoving of his legs and belly, and holds me tightly. “I feel like I’m losing my grip on everything,” he whispers into my hair.

“Maybe you never had it.” I’m drinking the smells and touch of him, the warmth and sounds, air in his breath, blood in his heart, enveloping me.

“I want to do everything wrong.” His voice is harsh and low in my hair. “I want to walk through those mirrors. I want to jump from the balconies. I want to be out-of-my-head crazy, raving, speaking in tongues. I want to give up on science. I want to allow irrationality and cruelty to win. Olivia—” He takes my head between his strong hands and turns my face up to his. His fearless, blue eyes dive into me. “I want you.”

He glances up into the mirror. The sound is strangled, a cry, a desperation. “I want to give up on everything I believe in, everything I know, everything I’ve served. I want to give it away. Give it to you. Olivia, why can’t I see you in the mirror?”

“You can see me in your hands,” I tell him. He holds my face in his powerful fingers, his trembling body inches from me, pain in his hard jaw and brows. “Close your eyes,” I whisper.

With his eyes shut, he looks innocent, and I touch his lids to watch them flinch. “It’s my fault,” I whisper. “I’m not real. Vampires do strange things with mirrors. Things I didn’t know.” I run my hands down the unyielding cords of his hard and scarless back.

The sensation that stabs through me as my breasts touch his chest forces a gasp from me. He opens his eyes in alarm. “I have always fed on man’s desire,” I tell him. “I have drunk desire and fear to keep me numb from the terrible gaping emptiness that is my damnation inside me. My emptiness, my numbness, my hunger, for your mortal desire, your sensation, your blood to feed me. Mirrors never showed me who I was, because I never knew.”

“If I knew you better could I see you?”

“To know and to see are not the same.”

“I don’t understand.” His fingers tighten on me in his confusion, hurting me, and I laugh with the joy of feeling that small pain. This is what hurt feels like, this hard insistence of bones.

“And how could you know me better, anyway, if you can’t see me?” I ask him.

“You could tell me.”

“Would you believe me?”

“I think I could, if you asked me to.” His face shows only courage in the pain he feels—in the face of his world falling in.

“It would be easier to believe I took your pill and we are both sane.”

“Nothing about you is easy,” he says.

“Damnation is easy.”

“You are not damned.”

“Illness is easy.”

“You are not ill.”

“I am desire.” I say. “Desire is never easy.”

He drops his proud forehead to mine, resting the weight of his head against me. His warrior’s eyes squeeze closed, and his breathing fills the space between us.

“Desire is suffering,” I whisper.

He swallows hard. “Then I am desire, too.”

His hands clasp behind my head and he presses his face against my hair. His naked voice is raw. “Tell me what to do.”

I shudder in his arms, and press my sensitive cheek against the grit of his. The tips of my breasts are alive, acute, beneath my confining corset. But pleasure courses down from them, between my legs, into my receptive belly. I could laugh or sob with the sensation. He turns his rough mouth against my delicate cheek, and the heat and softness of his whispering lips makes me cling to his back with immortal fingers.

“What do you want?” he asks me.

“I want my hunger not to hurt you.”

“I don’t care if it does,” he says.

And then his lips touch mine. The light feather of his breath sends torrents through me. He whispers “Kiss me” against the sensitive flesh that whispers back “I cannot.” But his lips open over mine. I hold to his hard back against the heat and hunger to open my mouth beneath his. I want to.

“I would believe in angels to kiss you,” he whispers.

“That is not who you are.”

“No.”

But the tender question of his tongue tips my starving lips with need, traces a line of raging heat around their swollen hunger. His mouth is slowly gathering mine beneath it in a kiss that takes my resolution with my strength. New pleasure, first desire, his lips lingering over mine, his body strong and hungry, mine runs liquid under it.

“I can love what I don’t understand.” He is almost pleading. I could open my lips and kiss him.

“Most mortals fear it,” I say.

“I am immortal then.”

And he looks it, eyes flaming into mine, hard jaw proud and hungry for me. One kiss. This is not the garden. I will not feed. I could allow myself one kiss, and it will be good-bye. Who he is cannot believe what I am.

Yes.

His lips are an adoring rage on mine, demanding and giving beauty and terrible hunger. I would choke on my cruel teeth to keep from hurting him, but I cry out when his fingers find the wingscars on my back. The tips of my warming breasts rake against his chest. Drenched in sensation, I wring a pure smile from the mouth that claims mine. It fills me. The soft curve of his beautiful lips cradles the soaring sense of myself expanding, swelling to fill the pure white ballroom, shining back in the ocean of mirrors, everything reflected back, and back again. Breaking in waves over us standing, holding to each other’s body, each other’s lips. Angels before the fall, love without sin, completion, perfection, joy.

This is not the garden.

Sylvia’s psycast is ice in my mind.

How dare you fuck this up?

I close my eyes against my outraged sisters, circling me, to hold Dominic timeless away from them reflected in every mirrored wall, surrounding us. He hasn’t noticed them.

Gaehod had us to tea.

His lips whisper a kiss that grows to screaming, open-mouthed, hard and searching, claimed and claiming. And I return the kiss, knowing my sisters advance. Knowing they see I do not feed. Knowing they will kill me for this.

We are going to try you for treason.

If the fall is to this man, I can love descent. But he will be broken by it, taken, unfinished, ruined, and in pain.

“Come with us.” I can’t see which of the rows of Sylvias is real in her phalanxed reflection.

“I will,” I say, but turn my back to her. I bite deeply into my lower lip, and fill my mouth with ichor.

“Olivia?” Dominic’s worried eyes are searching mine.

“It’s all right,” I whisper to him. “I need to go with my sisters now.” I kiss omnipotence and strength into his lips and tell him, “You’ve got to get out of here! The minute I leave, go to Gaehod and tell him to get you out. They will kill you. Swear to me you’ll get away.”

“All right.”

“I have to go now.” I kiss him a final time in a communion of scoured souls.

“I don’t want to lose you,” he says.

“I was already lost.”

“No.” He pulls me closer, and my sisters’ footsteps quicken.

“Stop believing that. It’s a choice, remember? Every belief is something we’ve chosen.”

“Is it?” Sylvia and Vivian each have me by an elbow now, almost carrying me toward the door. If I struggle they will lift me, and I don’t want to frighten him. He must think I am walking away. He bends to pick his bag up from the ground and the beauty in the gesture breaks through the strange, hard fingers in my now-feeling flesh, the new sensation of bruises and nail bites. I could savor even these if his grace bending and slinging the bag across his hard man’s chest did not tear at me even more strongly.

He stands uncertain. He wants to call after me, but does not think he has the right. He watches me go, tasting doubt, eyes questioning. “Why did she kiss me?” he wonders. “Did she feel what I did? Do I love her?”

If I could answer, if he could hear me psycast: I am with you still. Your angel. Your love. But reason deafens him, and the noise of vampire shoes on the inlaid dance floor, and then in the concrete hallway, rounding away from where he stands. I catch a final glimpse of him, walking toward the mirrors once more, to try to understand.

———

Dominic checked again behind the mirrors. Nothing. No projector he could see hung from the ceiling above, nor was the glass warped. It simply didn’t make sense. He made a complete and careful circuit of the room before he noticed her—a pale, diminutive thing—trailing black gauze and diaphanous lace. She, at least, looked the same in the mirror as on the periphery of the dance floor, where she lingered, watching him. Dominic nodded to her, and went to gather his decrepit shoulder bag. He would go back to his room. Olivia could find him there when she finished whatever ridiculousness she had to with her friends. He wanted to see her again, touch her again. Kiss her.

“I’m Ophelia.”

“Hi.” Dominic extended his hand to the girl who now stood beside him. She seemed taller than she had been, standing by the door. Ophelia shook his hand with an amused smile.

“You’re very formal for a man my sister’s been making love to.”

“She kissed me. That’s it,” Dominic said, ridiculously defensive.

“Ah, but a kiss to mortals is the first volley of romance, with its promise of love and sex and babies—the kiss of life.” She stood too close to him, smiling. “For us, of course, a kiss is the first taste of something else, and can promise only the possible, distant child of death.” In a grotesque, childish gesture, Ophelia stuck the two pale middle fingers of her tiny right hand into her puckered, scarlet mouth and sucked them, staring. She had Olivia’s matte gray eyes, flat and deep. Perhaps they really were sisters.

“No,” he told her. “No, there was no vampire weirdness. She didn’t try to bite me. She didn’t even try to kiss me. I kissed her.”

“We saw.”

“You were watching us?” Dominic asked. The ghostly girl began to pace a slow circle around him. Dominic stood perplexed in the center of the dance floor’s complicated, radiating pattern.

“Yes. You shouldn’t have done that. Ollie shouldn’t have done that.”

“Why?” Dominic demanded. “Is dating against the rules at the Hotel of the Damned?”

“Dating is its own curse.”

Dominic throttled a laugh with a cough. That, at least, mapped to his experience.

“Why did Olivia have to leave with the rest of them? Why did you stay?”

“I stayed because I saw something in the mirror.” The girl kept circling.

“What?”

“I’m not going to tell you. But yes, that is why Olivia had to leave.”

“Because I kissed her?”

“Because this is not the garden.” Ophelia slid her cool shoulder against Dominic’s back like a cat. “She’s dangerously weak, you know. You could have helped her.”

It irritated Dominic not to be able to see Ophelia, to look her in the eyes while he talked to her, to be forced to keep craning his head over one shoulder then the next as she paced circles around him. “Olivia has taken an antipsychotic. It may have cut into some of the conditioned thinking you and your so-called sisters have instilled in her.”

“You gave her medicine?” Ophelia bristled.

“Is that against the rules, too? Are you afraid she might see clearly for long enough to get free of you?” Impatience defeated Dominic’s sense of obligation to be charming for one of Olivia’s friends. He wanted to grab his laptop bag and get out of the elaborate, airless, and distorting ballroom.

“Vampires can only metabolize blood. She’s in no danger. Not from your pills, anyway.”

“What do you mean? Is she in danger from something else?”

“There is always danger.”

“To Olivia?”

“To her. And from her.”

“What are you talking about?” Dominic rounded on Ophelia, catching her delicate shoulders to hold her still.

She swayed her enticing hips and smiled at him. “We’re going to kill her,” she whispered, singsong.

Dominic towered over the tiny vampire. His fingers curled into hard fists at his sides to keep from shaking her. “What do you mean you’re going to kill her?”

“I can smell how much you want her,” Ophelia sang.

Dominic’s voice was a growl. “What do you mean you’re going to kill her?”

“Your blood is full of desire and very powerful.” Ophelia’s delicate, pale fingers reached for his shoulder, but he violently shrugged her hand away. He was a scientist, a rational man, but the noise he made was animal. Ophelia watched him, a dreamy smile on her childish lips. “Do you want me?” she whispered.

“I’m asking you, for the last time,” Dominic ground through clenched teeth, “what you meant when you said you were going to kill Olivia. You don’t mean literally.”

“Angels are literal by nature.”

This time he did grab her. She gave no indication that he hurt her. He didn’t mean to, but he had to understand. “Where did they take her?” he demanded.

The tiny girl shrugged. She made her eyes into large, innocent gray blanks in her pale, heart-shaped face. “The hotel’s a big place. They could have taken Ollie to the Quarry. Or to Sylvie’s room. Or the crypts.”

“Do you know where they took her?”

“You could have me, you know.”

“I don’t want you.”

“No. You want Olivia. I can see it in the mirror.”

“What?”

“I look like her.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I do to me.” The girl gazed wistfully at her own reflection.

“Ophelia, I need to find Olivia. I’ll talk to the others and explain, but it’s time to get her out of this crazy place.”

“You? Take Ollie out of here?” Ophelia’s laugh reverberated like shattering glass. It bounced off the high ceilings and the distant walls, against the inlaid wood and plaster and mirrors. “You can’t find your own way out. How could you take a failing vampire?”

“You admit it, don’t you?” Dominic tried not to shout. “Olivia has stopped playing your game. She’s a failed vampire. She’s simply a woman, as difficult and complicated as that is. She’s not pretending to some divine, immortal status any more. You and the rest of them are scared shitless that if she can stop, you might, too. And you can, I think. Maybe. I could try you all on the medicine she took. But I have to get to her before anyone does anything stupid.”

“Stupid?”

“Without thinking it through.”

“Angels have nothing to do with thought.”

“No, of course not!” Dominic rounded on her. “It’s all faith with angels, isn’t it? Stupid, blind, ignorant faith. The kind of superstitious not-looking-at-things that gave us witch burnings and insisted on a geocentric universe three hundred years after Copernicus!”

“Goodness, you’re a passionate man.”

“I’m not. Not really.” Dominic took a steadying breath. “I’m a rational man, but I’m worried about Olivia. I want to see her. I need you to tell me where she is.”

“Mmm, and I need you,” Ophelia licked her blood-red lips, gliding up to him. “Let’s work something out, shall we?”

“What?” Dominic pinched his searing eyes against the bridge of his nose, incredulous. “If I let you pretend to drink my blood, or whatever kinkiness you want, you’ll tell me where they’ve taken Olivia?”

“I will take you.”

“Take me to her?”

“No.” Ophelia’s arms climbed like tendrils around him. “I will have you.”

“I don’t think so.” Dominic untangled her winding arms from his waist, but they twined like water plants around his wrists, tracing his arm’s snaking tattoos to his shoulders, pressing her cool, firm body to his. “I’m going to Gaehod,” His voice was a chained roar. “Move. I don’t want to hurt you.”

He noted the wooden dance floor gave just a little when his back slammed onto it, but not nearly enough. He lay still, gasping.

“Do you want me?” Ophelia, tiny and pale, stood motionless over him.

“No.”

“Then you will fear me.”

Dominic picked himself up gingerly. “Why, because you know jujitsu? I don’t think so.”

He hit the ground again. It was no softer the second time.

“Olivia!” He shouted her name, and it careened from wall to glass to ceiling to floor, echoing thunderously.

“She can’t hear you.”

Dominic sat up. “I’m going to her.”

Ophelia landed on his chest, her light body coiled over his, her cool lips against his ear. “Do you know what happens when an immortal cannot feed? When a vampire’s quills are too dull to puncture, and her sisters will not keen the edges for her?”

Dominic held himself motionless beneath the black-draped body spread like a bat against his chest. He needed her to say where Olivia had been taken, why she was in danger. Ophelia’s tongue trailed from his ear to his jaw.

“Vampires cannot die. We fade. We lose substance, become invisible, formless. Without her sisters, a vampire is a hungry ghost of unmeetable needs.”

For an instant, Dominic’s vision blurred. Ophelia’s eyes became surreal cesspits, black and bottomless. Her face spiraled in, a hallucinatory implosion whose mouth made a void, an icy, empty cosmic hole that swallowed time and light. Dominic shuddered.

Ophelia struck.

Her jaws flexed, Dominic glimpsed fantastically long fangs protruding from her rosebud mouth. Delicate fingers clutched his jaw to expose his throat. Her scream was brief but shrill, a cry before biting. She snapped her dark head back, whiplashed up, and slammed down on his naked flesh. Twin blunt pains stabbed his throat. His body convulsed in rage and disgust and he threw her from him. She sprawled across the inlaid floor and Dominic sprang to standing, horrified.

Ophelia curled into a puddle of black gauze. Her dainty hand clamped over her stained mouth. Hideous gulping sounds came from behind her pale palm, and scarlet streams ran between her fragile fingers. Dominic staggered back from her. She was choking. Blood poured in torrents from her, across her shuddering shoulders, down into her deep décolleté, staining breast and dress. He was a doctor, but he wanted to run. He leaned over the spill seeping onto the floor, and touched her heaving back gently.

“Ophelia, are you choking on your teeth? Where are you hurt?” Dominic sat on his heels and plucked at her fragile wrist. “Can you take your hand away? I need to find where you’re bleeding from.” She gulped frantically. Her wild, racing eyes darted over him, the room, the blood that ran down her porcelain wrists and arms. Dominic pried her dripping hand away.

Two terrible, ragged, broken incisors poured blood into her brimming mouth. Was she choking on the detached tips? The prosthetic teeth she had apparently broken on his throat must be attached, somewhere, to a bladder. Ingenious, really. Functioning properly, the pressure of her strike would trigger them to “bleed” against his skin for her to suck. It must be a large reservoir though, to pour out so much blood that she was in danger of drowning on it.

“Hold your head forward so the blood doesn’t choke you,” he cautioned, pulling Ophelia to her knees. But she shook herself free of his hands, and threw back her small head. Blood gurgled in her throat and overflowed her lips. She would drown herself in that position if she stayed there long.

She screamed. Head back, her tiny body twisted, her bleeding mouth forced inexplicably wide. Even the fractured bits of her false teeth seemed to shiver with the effort the long shriek tore from her. Pain shot through Dominic. He clutched his exploding ears. Ophelia gagged on the inhale, writhing. He caught her by the shoulders and forced her over at the waist. He would not watch a girl drown on stage blood before his eyes.

“Keep bent forward!” he commanded the crumpled thing. “I’ll go for help.”

“They’ll come,” she panted.

“What?”

“My sisters. They are coming.”

———

My sisters held me, wrists bound, in the Quarry’s lush darkness, but I was distracted from their questions and the threats against my life by the fascination of pain. The thin, rough twine on my tender flesh captured my attention. It hurt me, and I kept losing my thoughts in its invading cry. How do mortals speak and answer? Does not every hunger, every injury intrude upon them? I had offered but little in my own defense at trial. I am condemned. Again.

Now running jumbles everything. My hands are tied and yanked forward at Sylvia’s urgent pace. I am weakening, but even I still taste the red horror of Ophelia’s spriek. I stumble on the stairs. Pain is new, and I like it steadily less as it grows familiar. I trot after my swift sisters, struggling to remember what they have said to me since they took me from Dominic. Dominic whom I kissed without feeding. Dominic whom I have scarcely tasted.

“He’s not the loophole,” Evelyn had mocked me, lounging on the Quarry’s backless sofa. “He can’t get you back upstairs.”

“I know,” I told them. “I’m not trying to get there anymore.”

It wasn’t until I said it that I knew it was true. But my sisters like it here. They like their numbness and the craving. They want to stay in L’Otel Matillide and I have now denied them.

They begged me. “You must change the Reborn’s mind,” Vivian pleaded. “It should be easy enough. Men will do anything for love. Teach him he loves the hotel, does not want it exposed, will resign his position, will stay here with us. With you.”

“I want no power over him,” I told them.

“He has other desires,” Vivian said.

Now Sylvia pushes me ahead of her into the glass coach. From Cinderella to the Witch of the North, this cursed, impenetrable transparency has carried women from safety into sex. I huddle on the red cushion and look away from the image of my baby sister, projected over every curved, interior glass, in the moment of spriek, choking on blood, collapsing against the inlaid black and white of the ballroom floor. Is Dominic there? Surely he’s gone to Gaehod by now.

The glass sphere carries us to her.

We will reach her soon, Sylvia’s seductive, Irish voice murmurs in my mind. She turns to me. “It’s a powerful desire, the desire not to die.”

“But it is not love.”

“We’re angels of desire, darling. The desire—the hunger—to eat, to own, to live, it doesn’t matter. It’s only desire. Only you ever said anything about love.”

“I love him.”

“That’s your funeral.”

“I can’t die.”

“A woman who is not desired is worse than dead. You will be invisible, unfeedable. Make him want to keep the hotel, and we will let you live.”

“I can’t.”

“You can’t surrender desire’s power over him. It’s bigger than you are. Desire is advertising and industry, alcoholics, inventors, addicts, and mothers. Everyone, everything serves us.”

“I have my own desires now.”

“If you cannot make him want you, one of us can.”

And suddenly I know what’s happened to Ophelia. “No, you can’t,” I tell them. I stand up in the swimming bubble. “She’s broken her teeth on his throat because he does not want or fear her.”

I am unreasonably proud of this.

“I fed Ophelia to him,” Sylvia growls. “I will drain him myself. I swear it.” My scarlet sister only whispers the oath, but I know she will do everything in her unearthly power to keep it.

The glass bubble stops. I am rattling uncontrollably with fear and hunger now. We have made a detour. Not straight to Ophelia, who must be nearly void by now. We are on my floor. Sylvia and Vivian drag me into my own room. My red sarcophagus waits against the bare stone wall. I steady myself against the heavy carved posts of my bed, clutching its rich curtains for support. Vivian easily hefts the stone lid of my old crypt aside.

“Get in!” she commands.

I don’t move. I can’t. Terror freezes me. Vivian sweeps me into her cold arms like an infant and drops me into the hollowed belly of carved stone. I land with a sickening crush of wing and bone. Shivering convulses me. Shuddering obscenely in every joint, I will not give them the satisfaction of begging for mercy. They have none.

The red stone grinds closed above me.

Without the strength to shift it, without the quills to feed, I will stay here, eaten by my hunger, until I fade so thin I can move through stone and walls and, mad, invisible, and mouthless, roam Earth endlessly, never satisfied, more than damned.

———

Dominic’s hands looked grotesquely large holding Ophelia’s delicate head. When all the idiocy was over, he would have to figure out how the blood-delivery device worked and why it had malfunctioned. It created a dangerous choking hazard. He would write the manufacturer.

“Can you take these teeth out?” he asked. Ophelia shook her head. Dominic reached cautiously into her mouth to feel where the connections were.

“Holy shit!” He tore his hand away and almost dropped her head. The blood was real. Some of it at least. He had felt the hot arterial pulse against his probing fingers. If even a portion of the flood that poured unstinting from her delicate mouth and down his wrist into a spreading pool on the inlaid floor, if even part of that was real, this little girl would bleed out in his arms before anyone got there. She didn’t need pretend sisters in fake vampire clothes. She needed paramedics and several units of plasma.

“Ophelia, I’ve got to slow the bleeding down. I’m going to reach in your mouth again and try to apply some pressure. Can you show me where you’re bleeding from? These teeth you broke, are they surgically implanted? Can you guide my fingers?”

But she shook her ringletted head again. Careful to keep one hand on the nape of her neck, holding her forward to prevent choking, Dominic pushed a finger into Ophelia’s mouth, feeling for the source of blood. It really did seem to be coming from the teeth themselves. He touched the jagged surface and pushed gently.

“Son of a bitch!” He jerked his hand away again. The broken places in her mouth were wickedly sharp. His own blood mingled with Ophelia’s, real and fake. She might have further cut her tongue on the fractured edges, and he couldn’t apply adequate pressure without tearing himself to hamburger.

“Ophelia?”

She turned swimming eyes to him. Fear stood in stark blue smears down her face. Blood had gotten into her gray eyes, and it pooled in their corners and clumped her lashes.

“Ophelia!” He needed her attention, and she was going into shock. “I have to stand up and take off my shirt so I can use it to put pressure on your teeth. You have to keep your head forward, okay? You can’t lie back, or try to scream again. Do you understand?”

She nodded, and Dominic sprang to his feet tearing off his linen shirt. He pulled his cotton undershirt over his head and balled it into a pad. He bent back to Ophelia, aware of the brilliant red stains on the knees and cuffs of his pants and of the blood that soaked into his shoes.

“Open your mouth.”

He pushed the T-shirt up against the broken places in the little vampire’s mouth. “Can you breathe through your nose? Good. Try to bite down. Gently. Good. You’re doing fine.”

“Ophelia!”

Dominic turned on his knees, crouched over her, to spot the vampire who had bared her breasts for him by the river. She and several other tall, gorgeous women swept around the corner and onto the dance floor.

“Sylvia,” he called to her. “I need you to find a phone and get medical help. Ophelia is losing blood rapidly. She can’t stay conscious much longer.”

Sylvia knelt beside Dominic and took Ophelia’s tiny body from his hands. She turned the pale girl’s face to hers and pulled Dominic’s T-shirt from between the pale and shivering lips. Ophelia gurgled in her limp throat as her head lolled back on Sylvia’s cradling arm.

“What the hell are you doing?” Dominic reached for Ophelia again, but found his arms pinioned behind his back. “She will drown on her blood!”

These svelte women knew their martial arts. He could not move his arms. Sylvia bent over Ophelia to kiss her bleeding, open mouth. Dominic struggled briefly, weak and slippery in the spilling blood, but soon stopped.

The red streams that poured from Ophelia’s lips, even with Sylvia’s lascivious mouth clamped over them, had slowed. Dumbfounded, Dominic watched the elegant redhead holding Ophelia’s delicate face between her strong hands. She seemed to be almost biting into the gaping, bloody hole of her sister’s mouth. But the grinding kiss was working.

Soft lips brushed Dominic’s ear, and the hard fingers on his arms softened. A voice he did not recognize whispered, “Sylvie is keening the edges. It will seal them, and they’ll regrow.”

Dominic sat back on his heels in the gruesome mess. Sylvia bit and sucked at her pale sister, whose body slowly relaxed under the assault. The blood running from between the women’s mouths slowed to a trickle. Ophelia’s breathing steadied, but she was still shaking, and clearly in shock.

Sylvia lifted her stained mouth from her unconscious sister’s. “Help me clean her!” she cried. The other women dropped to their knees around Ophelia’s body. A full-hipped redhead, whose heavy breasts swayed as she crawled, slipped from behind Dominic to join her sisters. He stretched his released arms. Sylvia resumed kissing Ophelia’s slack mouth while the women on either side took Ophelia’s fingers between their lips and sucked each blood-drenched digit. Ophelia moaned, and another sister straddled her narrow hips to deftly unfasten the closures at the side of her velvet bodice, revealing bloodstained breasts to suck. Dominic watched uncomprehending, then stood quietly. Sylvia met his interrogating eyes.

“Stay, won’t you? Our sister will be hungry when she wakes.” Sylvia ran predator’s eyes over Dominic’s shirtless chest, taking in the bare, muscled torso, the smooth, twining tattoo lines, and the blood drying in savage designs against his skin. She licked her smeared lips, a feverish flush climbing in her pale cheeks. But Ophelia moaned and Sylvia dropped her lips to her sister’s once more, kissing and sucking, hollowing her cheeks with the strength of the kisses.

Dominic slowly backed away from Ophelia’s body sprawled in the blood she had spilled over the white and black floor. Kissing, sucking mouths and unbuttoning, caressing fingers danced over her pale body in a sticky tango of hunger and healing. She was moaning freely now, writhing against the floor and the feeding. Dominic shook his head. These girls would fuck a pack of cigarettes. What had seemed to him to be a perfectly obvious medical emergency was, for them, an invitation to a bacchanal. A statuesque blonde Dominic had never seen unbuttoned her shirt and reached behind her back for the clasp of her bra.

Dominic pulled off his blood-soaked shoes. The blonde’s freshly exposed white flesh was already striped with blood. Her pale fingers, riding the generous swell of breast and nipple, looked almost as if she drew the blood from her own flesh rather than painting it on from the floor. Sylvia moved aside, and Dominic glimpsed Ophelia’s pale, but finally unbleeding, mouth. The blonde leaned over her inert sister and touched a delicate, blood-beaded nipple to Ophelia’s parted lips. Dominic watched the pale violet underside of Ophelia’s tongue extend to lap, and the relieved smile that spread from Sylvia to the other sisters.

As if on cue, two more began to undress. Dominic took a soundless step away. The sisters lifted Ophelia’s limp hands to their exposed breasts or throats or vulnerable thighs, and everywhere her fingers touched, long streaks of blood trailed her fingernails. Silently, slowly, Dominic backed away. Olivia had told him to leave, to go to Gaehod. Now he understood why. But Ophelia had said Olivia was in danger, and he needed to see her first. He had to know she was okay. They could go together to Gaehod.

Dominic stood in the hallway and swore violently. He had left his laptop bag and shoes in the ballroom. He was shirtless, and left a red trail of bare footprints on the cold stone floor. His jeans were stained, and his bare chest and arms were streaked in drying scarlet. His only way of reaching Madalene or Dysart—all his slim connections to the safe surface world—were in that bag. His medicine, his laptop, his notes, and all his work, soaking in Ophelia’s blood.

Dominic looked up the stairs, in the direction of Gaehod, his eccentric teas, and his unflappable calm. Did that old man have any sense of the lethal kinkiness he harbored? Dominic looked left, down the stairs, toward the weird underground garden with the self-devouring snake and its apples. Dominic wiped his bloody hands on his jeans and held them out in front of him. All he had to hold on to was doubt. It would have to be enough. Dominic turned left. He knew what he had to do.