9

IN DARK

Every angel has a shadow; she keeps it buried with her wings. Its blackness is our oldest home. For millennia, I have slept in this hollow stone that mimics a cave, but when the sliding rock closes out light and hope above me, I feel fear for the first time. I am closed in my red tomb with my new senses. I feel where I have always slept. I feel the presence of what I have hidden, and the absence of light, the grinding crumble of my severed wings beneath me, and the deeper black of my crouching, hiding shadow.

Only a hundred and fifty years ago, I brought this sarcophagus with me to the New World by boat in a mysterious, heavy crate—an archeological find unearthed from ancient Greece—at least that’s what I told the vessel’s curious Victorians. I miss that era of talented amateurs busy cataloging beetles in systems as complex as the layers of lace and bone, fabric and leather they swathed themselves within. Interest in the natural world must never extend to their own bodies. The mysteries closest to home remained furthest from known. I fed, on that leisurely Atlantic passage, my maiden voyage, dressed in widow’s weeds, from a husband and his wife in a sweet tangle of stolen silences and secret glances. Now, in my final, eyeless silence, I reach back for the comfort of that weak web, my closest to love.

Lady Anoria had become too fond, it seems, of a certain English princess. The scandal, had it ever been known, would have clouded the unsetting sun, and so the pale young lady had been married, quickly but well, and dispatched to the Americas before the princess, who would have stopped it, learned they had been discovered.

I met Lady Anoria’s fresh husband on the first cold, starry night afloat while he walked the creaking wooden deck to smoke. I smelled his fear, even wreathed in its tobacco, and I hunted him. He had been seated beside me at the captain’s table in the best salon, the mysterious European widow and the English duke. His new wife, he had apologized, was ill, but the table got on famously without her. Every man at it, except the duke, had wanted me.

I was not curious about him then, strolling on the chill deck alone, only killing time before another gentleman appeared to feed. But when I scented his fear, I fainted. It was my favorite trick in those decorous days, before ambulances and needles, to stagger weakly, already so pale, and swoon. A gentleman would take my tender arm to steady me, and my quilled nails could slip between his gloved hand and cuff. So I fainted on the ship’s promenade and the duke dutifully rushed to my aid, happy for the unfamiliar certainty of action. Gentlemen materialized from the refined night and helped him carry me upstairs.

They placed me on the divan in his stateroom, but when the duchess emerged from her boudoir, pale, tear-stained, and surprised, the gentlemen withdrew. Lady Anoria sat beside me and took my limp hand. I would kill for that touch to reach me now, where I am truly faint, but desperately alone. One was never alone then.

“Constantine, she’s bleeding. There’s blood under her nails!”

Fuck.

“I’ll fetch a basin and a cloth,” he offered. “You should perhaps loosen her stays?” Feminine fingers touched the tight, high buttons at my throat, my body limp on the velvet chaise.

I smelled it on her wrist.

The scent is unmistakable. I opened my eyes. The new duchess was pale with grief, but a naturally rosy girl with blue eyes that were made to sparkle more than weep. From the pall of grief, a blush of simple desire rose, then shame. Poor thing. I moved my lips soundlessly.

“No, don’t talk. You’re too weak.” She inclined her perfect head to the prostrate stranger on her couch. “I can’t hear you.”

“Closer,” I gasped.

“Constantine, she’s waking, bring brandy!” But she did lean closer, and I breathed in the woozy smell of feminine desire.

I have smelled my own today, and still I love the scent. It was too uncommon in those days. I had tasted only woman’s fear for years. The men swam with repressed desires though, and I had fed well on the dark-wood and button-shoe generation. But not on this, this ocean smell while we’re at sea. Not since the French convent, and my last darling’s visions and desire, sweet and red. Lady Anoria shook my shoulders gently and pressed her dewy cheek against my invalid’s parched lips. What I had pretended then, I am in earnest now. I touch my dry tongue to my cracking lips in the blackness and reach to feel Anoria again.

“Can I send for someone? Can you tell me your name?” she implored.

I sighed into the fragile curl of ear and inhaled the precious scent. The taste of it would be exquisite in her blood, so many tendrils red beneath the white ridge and lobe. My feeding edges raked the virginal skin. “Angel,” I whispered, “an angel.”

Duke Constantine was right to fear me.

Now, in my own deep terror, I reach again to savor Anoria’s slow confession, mixed with tears I had lapped away. My darling’s timid explorations with the princess were quickly surpassed. I fed from her soft throat, while Constantine paced and smoked. His new wife grew healthier, pale but smiling. She took the air, long strolls, arm in arm with her new friend. He should be heartened.

The voyage would have been tedious without a diversion, and I found the girl endlessly diverting. Such innocence tasted truly strange to me, and liberating. The spoiled child of privilege, and still somewhat ashamed, Anoria let me touch and remained untouched, savoring the heady mix of fear with desire. I taught her woman’s pleasure, desire’s death, and brought her to that dying again and again, with abandon, and with hunger, and with finally what she swore was love.

I began to linger with my duchess, to allow her duke to find us drowsing in their wide, white bed, just to smell the fear on him. I would take his hand to taste it, too, sometimes. And thus I brought my ancient tomb from the Old World to the new, drunk on tides of desire and fear that reversed the tastes of an age where ladies feared and men desired, and illness filled the void that ambition and need left bare.

That Lady Anoria believed she loved me added dimension to my shipboard entertainment but, as the journey neared its end, it troubled me. I can always disappear. I can sink into the invisible eternal that mortals swim within and never see. Ask a fish what water is. Humans are more blind. I can always disappear, but the one-ton block of ancient red history, my past, my tomb that now imprisons me, would stay behind. Anoria could track me through my past into my future in the New World, and that must not be. I needed to get off the ship unremarked, but not unseen.

I invited the duke and duchess to dine with me one night, four days away from the New World’s newest port, in my well-appointed, private chambers. I knew he would drink too much—he always drank too much—but that night I planned to do the same.

“Olivia, look at him!” Lady Anoria exclaimed as her husband tipped toward the floor. I had added a little something to the wine.

“Poor man. He is exhausted worrying over you,” I told her.

“Me?” Anoria laughed, flattered. She did not love him, but liked that he and I both hunted her. Vain girl. She fussed over her husband for her lover’s sake, as though jealousy could touch an angel. But she almost swooned in truth when I grasped him by belt and cravat and hoisted him from the table to my narrow bed. I am too strong for a well-bred lady and usually conceal it. But I threw my lover’s husband from us and took her, soft and eager, in my marble arms.

Without Anoria, without the sea voyage, I might never have learned to love plump women. Even into the present age, after the flappers and the hippies, I still relish the luscious curves of women who remind me of the swells and waves, of the sweet diving into flesh, crossing the sea. Those were more leisurely days. The transit between the Americas and Europe was an enforced respite, a month of gossip in a closed circle, a time apart and in between. There are no red-eye ocean voyages.

I arrived in New York well-fed, and have come home to starve. I smile faintly in my hungry dark remembering. But Anoria, who had been ill and pale with grief when she boarded the vessel in Bristol, must take a turn for the worse, now that New York would soon come in to sight. This would be our final time, and a time worthy of farewells.

I sigh in the dark interior of my coffin. What was the last time for me—the final last? I can’t remember. I have fed from many, as I did on that long voyage, in sips and licks, tiny shivers of hunger stilled in the slicing kiss or raking fingernail, but how long since I had flexed my jaw and punctured skin? When was the last time I fed full-tooth to satiation, to stupefaction as I did that night? Not from Maria, damn the Quarry with its two-quart rule. Not this year, not this decade even. A sob of pure self-pity rises in my throat, but I push it down, remembering.

On that long last ocean night, I came closest to my centuries-old affliction, to my human loophole. I learned how secretly personal and diverse the patterns of flesh-pleasure are, how different from my French nun, how different from men, until I believed I approached feeling myself, so keenly did I map the ways my touch aroused her.

If her desire and sensation created angelic feeling in me, I pondered, could mortal desire and knowledge make angelic comprehension? Humanity is God’s second chance. Could it also be mine? I wrung sensation from that ocean-borne English blossom, and believed humanity might save the angels.

But they can’t. What I knew that night was no closer to real feeling, as I have felt it now, than what she felt for me was love. She was too unbroken for real love, nor had I brought her there to love her. I possessed her. It is as close as gods come.

Ecstatic to have learned both touch and taste, wild with what I thought I knew, I climbed aboard her. But my jaws unhinged before I reached her throat. She looked through her lashes, drowsy with sex, and jolted awake. Her eyes spread like an opened egg. Her lips parted to scream, and she tried to back against the avalanching pillows, but my fangs found her. I had wanted only desire in her blood, but terror came flooding sweetly in and I sucked more savagely in rage.

She writhed beneath me, spilling into me, her naked breasts and slippery thighs roiling, life pumping. Time stretched. It twisted and opened as softly as her sex, and I rode into the blood dreams on her futile fighting. I drank privilege and class, tutors, needlepoint, and summer homes. I drank her petty doubts and petulant denials. I drank the princess’s secret reachings and the swift and sobbing marriage to the duke. I drank the carriage ride to our vessel and its strange, mountain name. And then I stopped. I could not drink the first night at sea, the glamorous stranger who fainted, or our days again. I did not want to kill her. I only thought I did.

The next morning, when the doctors had finished tending his wife, Constantine came to me. He confessed, in shattered sobs, his fear that last night, drunk, he had ravaged his new wife, forced himself upon her and destroyed her mind. She was too frail. I comforted him, stroking his hand, and agreed to tend his darling in her delirium. I nursed her (and from her) the last three days until we docked, keeping her just below the surface of waking. Then I left them to their guilty incompetencies. May their human frailty unite them. They each could have loved the other.

I claimed my cargo and took a train unnoticed. Anoria would recover swiftly, but would be too embarrassed and too weak to search for me.

I am weaker now than she. And more ashamed. I put my ruined hands above me and push at the rock. I cannot shift it. Its coldness shivers through me and slowly, seeping through the smooth rock, terror shakes me until not even the memory of Anoria can hold it at bay. I feel it. In the darkness all around me, in the airless space, I feel. The horror of my new ability rises against my calm. I have never been inside this stone when I could feel, and even the best remembered pleasures can no longer keep the newness of real sensation from me.

I feel the want of air, the lack of sound, and my sightless shadow, a stupid, mute, and restless thing, waiting. I hate it. It has no thought or feeling, it only is, which is why I keep it here. I crowd myself against the cold stone away from it, but it is shadow in darkness, a ghost in wind.

I feel it touch me. I am screaming.

———

Empty-handed, Dominic stalked the corridor, Cro-Magnon in his gait and rage. The garden’s unbarred gate stood open, and he walked resolutely through it to the tree. He did not run. He did not even hurry. With her sisters drinking vicariously from Ophelia’s desire spilled out across the ballroom floor, Olivia was safe. Nothing rushed Dominic, but nothing could have stopped him.

He dropped to his knees before the tree, and grimly thrust his hands deep into the blackness at its roots. The snake writhed around his wrists and up his tattooed forearms in rivers of molten gold and red. He grasped at it, but the smooth body slid between his hands and around them, winding and pulsing. Dominic seized a closing coil and dragged it up into the garden’s weird light. He threw the twist onto the grass and pinned it with the full weight of his body against the ground. Still, it flowed under his broad palms endlessly, like flood water beneath an old bridge.

“Come out!” he howled into the empty garden, into the slithering hole, but the mirroring darkness only whipped through his hands. He drove his bare heel into the snake’s flesh to hold it, but it slithered ceaselessly.

Then the snake’s cool voice came from a golden bough above him. “Ah, isn’t that always the way?”

Dominic tore his gaze from the undulations beneath his knee and hands. How had the damned thing wound itself into the branches? The serpent flowed across bark, unperturbed by the detour its body took through Dominic’s bare hands and beneath his naked foot.

“Isn’t what always the way?” Dominic stood up panting, uncomprehending.

“Truth slips through your hands.”

“You aren’t truth. You’re the devil.”

“Are you prepared to explain the difference?”

Dominic took a step toward the glittering eyes, reaching for the shimmering head, and tripped over the coil at his feet. He sprawled on the ground. Softer, at least, than the dance floor. The snake wound around his ankles and along his thigh. Dominic struggled to stand, but could not. Cool, hard circles of sliding snake pinned his arms against his sides. Dominic shuddered. A slender, dank sliver licked the opening of his ear. He smashed his head against the ground.

“Get off me!” he shouted.

“You called for me.”

Dominic’s full strength strained against the tightening spirals that enclosed him, but nothing gave.

“Dominic, what did you come here seeking?” the snake hissed in his exposed ear.

Dominic struggled to breathe in the snake’s cold grasp. The intercostal muscles he needed to expand his lungs against the embracing coil seemed too small, by contrast, to the constricting mass.

The snake’s sibilant voice showered spittle into his ear. “Or did you only come to fight?”

“I came here to understand where the hell I am. I came here to make you tell me what this place really is,” Dominic panted.

Undulating against him, the snake’s body slowed, and the pressure on Dominic’s torso eased slightly.

“What do you think it is, Dominic?”

“I think it is the dangerous offspring of Gaehod’s extraordinary wealth and complete insanity.”

“A worthy pedigree. Madness has many children, but few grow more swiftly than those she births to power. This country is speckled with that brood. Have you done any sightseeing in Ireland, Dominic?”

Dominic struggled for deeper breaths. He was at risk of hyperventilating, and nothing would be more dangerous than to lose consciousness in the embrace of this snake. “Not much,” he answered.

“Been to Blarney?”

“No.”

“That’s a pity. You should try to see more of your world.” Dominic found he could almost free his right hand from beneath one of the sparkling, pinioning spirals. “I will. But first, tell me where I am now.”

“Why?”

“Because if I know where I am, I’ll know what to do.”

“Information is not toxic to indecision,” the snake observed. Dominic managed to push a thumb free. “Of course,” the whisper continued, “I could tell you something that would make up your mind about what to do next, but you could know the exact nature of this place, understand precisely what it is, how it is constructed, and still not know what to do.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“True.” The snake’s suspended head seemed to nod. “Sense is not a made thing. Not something you can construct from the materials you have at hand.” Dominic flexed his wrist and slipped his hand from beneath the rope of muscle that that bound it. He opened and closed the fingers cautiously.

“All this industrious construction!” the snake whispered. “Such busy little beavers, making up your minds, building knowledge, forming conclusions. Your vast, pathetic aspiration is to take one more step down the path of Bacon and Skinner, but there are secrets down unblazed trails and constellations in undiscovered stars.” Dominic ground his free fingers into the soft earth.

The snake flicked its tongue against Dominic’s earlobe and slid its hard, round head down his throat toward the tree. “To see truly new things,” the snake whispered, “you need new ways of seeing. Every time you invent a new lens, there are new things to observe through it. Every listening device brings new sounds. What speaks to you now that you simply do not possess the tools to hear?” Dominic anchored his heel against the dirt. The snake’s head glided up the tree toward a low-hanging fruit. “What confronts you that you still do not see because you lack the way of looking? What do you do when you know there are unknowable things?”

Bracing himself against the earth with foot and hand, Dominic abruptly arched against the winding snake. He yanked himself free and, grappling an armload of the undulating coils against his bare chest, threw himself over the roiling mass. The snake’s forward motion stopped. It brought its eyes level with Dominic’s, squeezed closed against the effort it required to hold so much writhing strength compressed in his arms.

“Knowledge can’t give you what you want to know,” the snake whispered.

“The first time I met you,” Dominic panted, “you said you were more than knowledge, you said you were inspiration and insight.”

“That was hardly the first time we met. And you don’t believe in inspiration.”

Dominic tightened his arms, working every fiber of his strength. He squeezed the throbbing coils in his arms and felt the snake subtly deflate. “Convince me,” he choked. “Inspire me.”

The tremor that ran through the snake could have been a laugh or a shudder. “So you’ll wring inspiration from the devil?” it said.

Grunting with the effort, Dominic tightened his hold on the serpent yet again. The creature’s rippling body tangled with the static tattoos that spiraled Dominic’s arm until he had to look away from the illusion that his arms were snakes. “Go on,” he panted, “prove to me that inspiration is anything but the clever conjunction and realignment of things I already know.”

“You really don’t understand, do you?” The weight under Dominic’s body began to flow again. “Proof belongs to the surface world. You can prove facts. You can’t prove meanings. Wrong vocabulary, wrong tools. Your quest to have the world make sense, to force it to conform to patterns you already know, is an impossible desire. Impossible desires are their own hell, with their own angels, and angels—always—can get you closer to God.”

“I am so fucking sick of angels!” Dominic shouted. “I’m not a character in a goddamn fable, and I don’t want an allegory or a symbolic explanation.”

The snake laughed. “You are a man, like Everyman.”

“I just want to understand reality. That’s all. Not meanings, not interpretations, just what’s actually out there.”

“Do you, for a moment, think you have the proper tools, the proper framework, even the proper sensory organs to perceive, much less to understand, what’s ‘actually out there’?”

“I want to understand as much as I can.”

“And if you could understand more than you do right now? I have dropped apples on heads before Newton’s.”

“I understand Newton’s universe. We’ve transcended it.”

“Very good, ready for the next step out?” The snake’s bunched body spilled easily from Dominic’s arms. Had he ever had hold of it? He had thought he was winning, but now that seemed impossible.

“Did you know that snakes once had wings?” the serpent asked, flowing smoothly toward its tree again. “It’s true. We spanned the earth and sky, creatures of the material and etheric worlds—a perfect paradox. What do you call a winged snake, Dominic?”

Dominic scrambled to his feet, away from the hole the snake thrust its tail into. It must be nearly bottomless to house such lengths of slithering, and the garden was on the lowest floor. Such depth was hideously visceral to Dominic. It frightened him, which made him angry. “I don’t know,” he growled, “a dragon?”

“That’s right! Across the globe, God is not so universal in cultures and stories as dragons are. We could breathe fire when we flew, and water when we swam. We were everywhere once, with a foot on each side of a paradox. It’s why we’re footless now.” The snake slipped backwards into its hole. “That’s where you are now—caught against the actual nature of reality.”

Only the flickering tongue of the snake protruded from the bottomless pit it dwelt within—its tongue, and its even deeper eyes. Its voice was just a hiss. “But here’s the secret of the garden, my friend. Some of you can find in my wrack’s horizontal stretch, a vertical reach. Raise yourself to Eden before the fork in the road, the fork in the tongue, the forked pre-fall nondual, my poor, bare, forked animal. Make my wrack a ladder.”

The snake’s voice was receding. Dominic lay on his naked belly in the grass, peering into the blackness. “Can you teach me how?” he asked and pressed his ear over the hole to listen.

The snake’s voice was barely audible from the depths of the hole. “Push man into woman and find oneness once more,” it whispered. “Lose yourself in another, and find yourself in love.”

———

The sound I make reaches my ears and hurts them. It reaches nothing else. My quills are achingly dull, but I blunt them more with scratching, scoring the stone above my head, and screaming. Shadow brushes over my face, my eyes wildly staring, but it is just the dust of the rock I tear at, falling down on me. I cannot turn over; the space is too constricted, closing in with my shadow’s deaf advance.

I gather my soul to spriek, twist my body hard against the rock, away from the creeping, rising touch of shadow, but I cannot inhale. I will breathe the shadow in. And my sisters will not come.

Please, I do not want to drown on my shadow. I want my slow starvation, my numbness, and my beauty back. I gulp the air in terror. Shadow touches my foot. I coil up my leg and twist to pull it under me. I tear again at the stone, feeling my flawless flesh shred. Shadow touches my scar-marked back. I spin to push it against the stone. It touches my navel. My torn hands flail, clawing, but it is only shadow. I cannot touch it, or fight it back, or block it.

It rests on my chest. I cannot breathe to scream again. It touches my breast. I am panting. My breasts have never known touch. I cross my arms across my chest, draw up my knees. It’s on my breast again. I have pulled it closer. I uncoil and whip wildly at my body, to push my clinging shadow from me, but it ripples out from every touch, spreading over me like fire catching.

It touches both my breasts. I press my hands hard against the low roof stone and feel the cold rock against my palms. Feel the cold nothing of darkness upon each breast. I scream for Gaehod, and throw all my failing strength against the stone. I am flailing without control, coldness touching everything. I scream and scream for God.

Silence invades me.

Desire presides over many things. It is the guardian angel of ambition and adultery, of flirtation and assassination. It was worshiped once. A devotee of mine, a queen, was taken with her husband’s slave, and bound to him. My splintering mind scrambles to remember her, the godking’s wife, stripped and tied to a strong board, her legs pulled wide. They thrust a carved phallus between her thighs and forced a stone between her teeth. The pharaoh’s slave they drugged to sleeping and they forced his mouth, too, and placed it over her, open mouth over open mouth, and used the linen mummy strips to bind them.

Twist over twist, they tied his arms around her, and hers across him. They wrapped them thigh to thigh, breast to chest, bound together, frozen lovers battling, and left them in the tomb to die. My worshipper’s screaming did not wake her lover until the draught wore off. Terror, and then exhaustion, and then terrible thirst took them. And madness. And then death, the queen before the slave, who felt his lover’s body finally become still, then cold, then rigid and swelling. It took three days. I will take millennia and still not die. I will only fade. Into a ghost, a shade. Oh God—into a shadow!

I am screaming again, bloodying my fists and knees and the soles of my feet against the stone slab over me. I must get out of here, away from that thing, this insistent darkness. The horror mounts and mounts and will not be denied. The shadow touches me, climbs over me, mindless, stupid, mute. It feathers across my breasts and elbows, seeps between me and the rock, against me, beneath my clothes. It insinuates itself between my toes and pushes down into my ears. I pound my head to shake it free, but it climbs between my hairs and pushes down my scalp. It slides over my closed eyes. It curls against my nostrils. It worms between my clamped thighs. Now I cannot scream or blink. It is poised against the hole in the center of my eyes. Why can I feel this? All the nights I slept with this black darkness and felt no fear. I asked for this. I asked for feeling.

I have felt him touch me. I saw him see me. And I did not feed. The spriek tears my throat unbidden. They will hear it and laugh. My angels do not love me. They rushed to save my sister, but even in their urgency, in the terror of her bleeding cry, they stopped to bury me. Does it mean I matter to them more that they attended to my death before Ophelia’s? Does she matter to them at all? They will sharpen her broken teeth, grind down the jagged, bleeding edges with their own mouths, but they will drink from her while they do. Her blood matters to them. It’s as close as they get to love.

I am cast out. Again. Damned and more damned, by God and now by family. I came here to be myself without apology, but even in Hell, I cannot be accepted.

No. He cannot.

I open my lips to say his name, and shadow licks them. This is how hope dies at last, thrashing wildly from stone to stone, on broken wings, in the dark, alone. My shadow touches me again, scrapes the smooth, closed place between my legs and digs at the hard center of my eyes. My shadow is the closest thing I will have to a legacy, the only thing I ever made. I feel its touch on my lips. I have tasted few things, and all on the blood of mortals. This is the taste of despair. I want to spit it out.

If I had kissed Dominic in the garden, if I had bitten him in the abbey, I would not have this in my mouth. I cannot close my weak lips against it. My jaws unhinge. It runs into my mouth, against my throat, too heavy to hold closed against it. It weighs against my tongue, pushes behind my teeth, pours over my gums and down my cheeks, distending my lips, pushing, pouring until I can no longer hold my throat closed against it. Retching, I swallow.

It is cold in me. It worms up from between my thighs, and down my throat, into my pupils, my nostrils, my ears. But it does not become me. It swallows me, but I am gulping, too. We flow into one another, and my starved body will no longer be denied. It eats and is eaten, desire and its disappointment, feeding. This will change me. And as my shadow’s dark weight envelops me at last, I know how.

———

Dominic lay on his belly in the cool, black grass, seething. “Love? Love is the answer? Christ! If you think for a minute I’m going to buy that sophomoric bullsh—”

He was flying backwards as the snake shot from its hole. Its massive weight landed heavily on his chest, writhing over the sprawled length of his battered body, and it thrust piercingly sharp teeth into the depths of his ear. Dominic shouted with pain and felt blood well from the deep tympanic puncture.

“No!” the snake screeched soundlessly. “How do you make two into one? I just told you.”

The horror of the writhing body’s crushing weight pushed Dominic toward panic. He was losing it. Losing his grip, his sanity. The enormity of his isolation and abandonment shook him. Had the snake’s bite poisoned him?

“Fuck you!” he spat between clenched teeth, flat on his back.

“Not me!” The snake’s roar twisted though the blood in his ear. It reared up from Dominic’s chest, its smooth, blunt head swaying over him, questioning.

Did Dominic actually understand? He forced his eyes closed against the snake’s hypnotic dance.

“You get pretty close, don’t you?” The serpent’s sibilant voice whispered in Dominic’s mind as much as in his bleeding ear. “Touching heaven and gutter, orgasm-blind seeing self and other? Your recreational re-creating of creation procreates. Sex apes God, and creates life.”

“And pushes us into duality again,” Dominic whispered.

“Very good!” The snake dropped his head, its forked, black tongue flickering over Dominic’s bare chest. “Two made one makes a third, a child, who will be both yours and his own,” it hissed.

“So now even sex is a symbol?”

The sinuous snake danced, overtly erotic, across Dominic’s chest, but his mind clung to the intellectual puzzle the snake had dangled.

“Terribly elegant, don’t you think?” it whispered. “Powerful, and designed to get your attention.” The snake’s flickering tongue tormented the flesh of his bare chest, still pinned under the undulating coils, one loop of which now spiraled sensually between his legs. “Sex is the clearest instruction you’ll ever get from God.”

Dominic shook his head and wiped the blood from his ear. “That sounds like something the devil would say.”

“And yet you came to me to have your questions answered, when you could have turned the other way.”

“I thought you might tell me the truth.”

“So I have.”

“Your key to the secret wisdom of the universe is sex? You advise I go find someone to fuck, and all will be revealed?” But even as the words left him, Dominic knew that encoded instructions were often misread. He pondered the neurotoxicity of snake venom, feeling giddy with understanding.

“The advancement of knowledge, your fondest desire, eh? But no, I don’t give advice, just knowledge.” The snake slowed its helixed coiling up the tree. “To question what you think you know, not in light of new information, but in order to bring new information to light, knowing it will ignite and blind you, takes real courage. You have won a friend in me. I’ll tell you a secret as a prize.”

“Thank you. I’d shake your hand, but, you know.”

The snake stopped his spiraling and touched the tip of his midnight tail to its lipless mouth. “It’s enough for me that you were willing. It’s been a long time since anyone has given me their ear.”

“Van Gogh? Romans, countrymen? Besides, I’m hoping that maybe, if I can learn from you now, you won’t sneak up and bite me in the future.”

“No. But I promised you a prize, so I’ll add some information to your wisdom. Your angel is dying.”

“Olivia?”

The snake stabbed his blunt tail into his lipless mouth and swallowed and swallowed. Terror swam up Dominic, but he knew it would be useless to try and squeeze more information from the snake; its mouth was already full.

———

I swim in darkness. Eyes opened, eyes closed, it makes not a fucking fig of difference. I cannot see. Nothing to see. No one sees me. Around me, inside me, the night of my ageless sarcophagus has swallowed and penetrated me. It pushed itself inside me and pulled me into it until we are one.

I am always falling, but a strange new beauty clings to this descent. I am drowning and do not care to swim. Flying down, hair streaming into tragedy, I could almost welcome the familiar sensation of the plunge, through air and water, through stone and despair and into perfect love. The impact forces a sob from me.

Strange sensation—like a backwards swallow.

I am crying—angels don’t cry—I am crying for the beauty of falling, for the night that holds me, and for the darkness I hold. For the stone, that cold and unforgiving womb of earth that traps me in what is real, in rock and bone, in death and love, all dead to me, the Undead.

All I have left of living is recollection. In memory, I trace the smooth planes of Dominic’s face and the hard lines that scored it in the ballroom before he kissed me. Every place our bodies touched throbs again with cushioned stabs in the darkness. I close my eyes. In the warmth of memory, his kiss stretches, curling fresh fingers of pleasure into my imperfect flesh. It elongates, and I notice, for the first time, his teeth’s brief grind of desperation before he kissed me, as if they seized and tore away some final veil between my mouth and his surrender.

He caught my shoulders first, to cushion the crashing of his hard body into mine, to not hurt me, to pull me to him without stopping. His strong hands grasped and clutched my body closer, nearer, until he gentled them enough to take my face. In the cold stone, I hear the shudder of his steadying inhalation. His stone-blue eyes pierced mine, dove in hard, then skimmed my face. Had he been frightened? Washed in sensation, I sway in his fierce arms and whisper his name, “Dominic.”

I slide my ruined fingertips against my lips. The shiver of his passion, kissing me, trembles deeper now against my swallowed shadow. My body is taut as the strings of a lute, stretched so that even an artless touch can make the humming vibrations heard. He kissed me then, and the resonance of his hard mouth calls my hesitating fingers to strum clumsily against my shuddering flesh now. His beautiful lips barely brushed mine first, but that had been too much tenderness, and his next desperate kiss brought his mouth and tongue hard and seeking.

Careful, in my private darkness, I touch my new fingers to the soft velvet encasing my living flesh. I trace the memory of his strong, steadfast body against me. His demanding kiss opened my lips, my face in his trembling hands. I rub the crown of my full breasts beneath the silken cloth. His sweet tongue coursed through me, marking the keen height of my breasts, but I cannot find the same center of pleasure within them now. The fabric mutes my touch.

The stone’s coldness against my twisting arm adds a chill shiver in the cramped black when I reach to find the back zip. I pull it down, and the boned and tailored vest jumps free. I had never noticed how hard it holds my body in. My freed flesh feels vulnerable without its borrowed hide, more responsive—open and exposed. I run my raw hands over my warm belly and across my breasts in a rush of pleasure just to be released.

Then I find his seeking mouth in memory again. I kissed just the softest lower lip then, and he made a little sound, a stifled groan, and opened his mouth to me. Turning his copper head, he brought our tongues and lips, mouths and bodies still closer, and my fingers dust the places where our bodies touched. The caress both surfaces the pleasure, and sends it diving to my core.

Some buried heart—long-dead or never animate—flutter-pulses deep below my waist. The wonder of it sends my eyes searching open in the darkness. Remember! His strong arms wrapped around me, pulling my body hard against his. My fingers pass again over the peaks of my new and naked breasts. His starving kiss plunges into me, and against my gulping shock and joy, true feeling runs through me, dancing over and behind my shuddering breasts.

Fear starts to prick in my throat with the drenching pleasure, too powerful, unknown, and unfathomable. My legs shudder with my breathing, staggerings of air. The new inverted liquid peak between my softening thighs reaches deeper into me. I whisper “Dominic,” my lips soaked in the swirling scent of pure potent feminine desire.

Impossible.

I taste the dark air again.

But it is. My own desire. My teeth and nails are blunt. I keen the edges and feel—not my own—but my shadow’s breaking through.

With shadow’s black, sharp teeth, I sink untested quills into my flesh. The first taste wracks me, sob and swallow, but desire fills my starving mouth. Scent tumbles into the sterile space, and sensation breaks in lapping shudders. I taste the fingers of the driver from Dublin, automotive oil and beer, and Irish cigarettes. Sweeter now than before, full of flavor and a strange new taste. I suck again. The tiny taste I had from Dominic the night I offered him an apple and cut his bold fingers with my dull blades. “Dominic,” I whisper again. He is safe on his way to Dublin now.

Drenching, worming newness comes in the tastes I have tasted, in the drinking I have drunk. This is pleasure, washing, illuminating. I taste strength and dawning power, and the bitter taste of my shadow mingled with what I have made and what I have taken, the blood of men and angels.

The blood comes slower to my shadow’s feeding teeth. I withdraw the slender edges and feel them fold deep against my own quills, secret in my gums. I lick the broken place on my arm to savor the last sweet seeping from the closing holes, and the bruisey ache in the flesh beneath my tongue. Sensation eddies and a soft smile floats across my lips, atop my breasts, and in the secret place shadow has left between my legs.

Desire, be silent. Run down my throat. I remind myself of its fading. Savor, and the taste of tea. I swim in perfection.

———

Dominic scrubbed his poisoned ear, impatient with the tickle of blood from the snake’s bite. His hand came away sticky and red. Shirtless and shoeless, with blood on his hands and on his feet and chest, he looked around the dim garden wildly. Where was Olivia? Hell was vast. She could be anywhere within it.

Dominic racked his memory for everything Ophelia had told him about the way angels die. If she faded to the point where she could no longer feed, he could never get her back. Delusional or not, she was in real danger. He wanted to shield her from the macabre weirdness of her sisters and the hotel. Delusion and reality didn’t matter—maybe they were the same—hell, maybe he really was what Gaehod said. It didn’t matter. Finding Olivia was everything.

Dominic ran through the distorting garden light, almost hoping it was all real. He could give her all of himself that way, and find her again lifetime after lifetime. He could bear the endless returning, if he could find her in it. But he had to find her in this present first. The blood oozing in his throbbing ear was maddening. He bounded up the stairs from the garden, wiping his bloody hands on his jeans. At the top, he shoved his finger in his bleeding ear.

“Dominic.”

It was Olivia’s voice. He whipped around, looking behind him. Nobody. He closed his damaged ear again with a stained and tentative hand. Where was her voice? Dominic strode down the hallway, listening. Silence. Again he plugged his ear and heard her angelic voice, but more distant. He ran the other direction, down the stairs back toward the wide, barless gates. At the threshold, he stopped again and listened.

“Dominic.”

She sounded weak—but closer. Dominic ran down the corridor, across the stained floor where his bare feet had tracked blood from the ballroom. He hesitated at that doorway. He heard Ophelia moaning, but not Olivia again.

“Dominic!” Sylvia’s voice cut through him. “You owe my sister blood! Come feed Ophelia of your free will, or I shall bring you to her dead.”

How the hell could he hear Olivia with that bitch screaming at him?

Dominic plugged the bleeding ear again and listened.

“I want.” Olivia’s voice was faint but constant.

Dominic ran. He ran full-tilt, following the disembodied voice of a dying angel in his punctured ear, ready to lay down his life for her desire.