10

DEATH

“I want,” I whisper, like a bell pounding the hours in me. “I want. I want. I want.”

I want Dominic. And freedom. I want to do things I have done and not noticed. I want to be things I have dreamed and not seen. I want to live. I want without reason, unseen, and by myself alone. “I want. I want. I want.” Tolling rhythmic as a bass drum, or a heartbeat.

I want things I cannot have, and the longing aches, vibrating through every shivering sinew stretched on my mortal powerless-ness to realize divine desire. I want out. Angels might be what is wanted and not what wants, but I know with certainty that I want the fuck out of my coffin. I want to stand up again.

Weighed down by my mingled bone and shadow, I reach slowly for the stone slab above me and push. With all of my old strength and new desire, I press up against the roof of my coffin. The stone is rough and dusty against my too-soft fingers. And too heavy.

“Help?” I whisper to the silent blackness wound around and through me.

I need help.

My angelic body is invincible, and my arms sculpted perfection in pure marble, but my back is a woman’s still, strong to carry and to bear weight that would break the arms of men. The idea comes like a sob, unbidden and almost too late. I twist onto my belly, brace my torn hands and knees, and set my spine against the stone. I press.

I hear the cold mass grind. Blood from my back pricks sticky against the rock. I scramble in the dark for something soft to pad it, cramming whatever my groping hands find between my yielding flesh and the unfeeling stone. I throw myself against it again, pushing hard away with the full strength of arms, legs, and back, groaning. Move. It must. It has to. I have to. There is nothing more.

———

Dominic’s chest, blood-streaked and bare, strained against the air he gulped, hands on knees, doubled over in the grand foyer, ringed with a timid floss of cultured confusion. The only sound in the abruptly silenced space was the rasp of his raw panting and the pounding of his heart.

“He does it for the exercise.”

Dominic blinked and rubbed trickling sweat away from his eyes. The crowd turned from him to Alyx, sprawled inelegantly in the same high, wingbacked chair, Dominic’s untouched breakfast balanced on an impatient, spinning tray beside him.

Dominic shook his head. “Find Olivia,” he gasped.

Alyx gathered the flaps of his bathrobe around himself and tugged at the silk necktie belting it. He lurched to his feet.

“Dude, you look like shit.”

“Where’s Olivia?” Dominic straightened and gripped his hands over his head, trying to calm his riotous heart and lungs enough to run again.

“Is that your blood?” Alyx steadied himself against the high chair’s back.

Dominic glanced down at his bare chest and bloodstained pants. He shook his head. “Ophelia.”

“Never liked her,” Alyx shrugged. “Too skinny. Vivian on the other hand, all that leather, the whips…” Alyx gave a gleeful growl low in his ruined throat.

Dominic clamped his punctured ear again and heard, too many stories over him, the grotesque grinding of stone on flesh.

“Sugar, sugar, sugar…” Alyx sang, half sauntering, half falling across the lobby toward him.

“Help?” whispered his angel.

“Olivia!”

Alyx fell into a closer chair and shrugged. “Her room’s up there,” he said.

Dominic hauled the withered rock star to standing. “I have to find her,” he panted. “She’s in trouble. Might be dying—fading.”

From behind the purple lenses of his brass goggles, Alyx’s muddy eyes searched Dominic’s. “Look, I don’t know shit, but I know breakdowns, dude, and you’re about to have one.”

Dominic shook the man again. “I have to find her.”

“Check her room.”

“Where?”

“Seventh floor. Halfway between the first door and the next.”

Dominic nodded and filled his searing lungs to run. “Go get Gaehod, okay, Alyx?” he said. “Tell him to find Olivia. Sylvia is hunting for me, and if she finds me, she’ll kill us both.”

“Dude…”

“Alyx!”

“Yeah?”

Dominic scrubbed his bloody ear in frustration and froze, sickened by what he heard—the unmistakable sound of Olivia’s perfect body giving way, pressed, and breaking. But it was close. “Go get Gaehod!” he shouted at Alyx and stumbling, threw himself into running again, up the spiraling hall. Up and up, to her.

———

I brace my bleeding back, padded now with my velvet shirt and severed wings, against the stone a final time. Desire is immortal and impossible. The damned have no pleasure in memory, but I have eddied in its sweet appreciation. I have stroked my memories, stirred them to yawning and curled myself around them, drenching and sweet.

I grimace with pain, and remember Dominic’s unfurled hands as he stood leaning, laughing with me over the railing at L’Otel Matillide’s domed peak, looking down the spiraling stairs into the pit, into reception and the milling damned who did not see us, Reborn and Undead, watching them from above.

I stretch my bruised body, ragged from battering rock. I will fight it again, but not now. The pulling muscles howl under my dusty skin, and I reach for another memory. I want Gaehod. I want to see the insane old man who built this wild, vast mansion inverted in the ground. I want to sit again in his study—the belly of the beast, or the brain stem, drinking tea. For connoisseurs of blood and wine and poison, he pours out his little, stemless cups, every blend of leaf and herb unique. Right there, at the hub of Hell, Gaehod’s wide-awake calm beckons, and I lap at the memory. It is all I have to drink.

———

Dominic was close. He struggled to calm the rebellious symphony of his screaming flesh enough to hear his angel caught in stone. He listened. A sob? A whisper. Here? He glanced up the long corridor and back again behind him. Doors lined the hallway. There were so many rooms, and any of them might hold Olivia. Dominic listened again, his bleeding ear against the door nearest him. Nothing. And then, a sound.

A sob?

No, but her voice, and he threw himself against the door.

———

Dominic is gone. He’s safe and distant by now from this mad place, and though it breaks my new heart, I am grateful.

I make a sound like a sob, but it isn’t. I loved him and it has set him free.

Maybe a hiccup?

Dominic saw me and loved me and it got him out of Hell. I have been his loophole. The sound comes again, and I know what it is.

I spent millennia searching for a mortal love to lift me to Heaven.

I have loved a mortal and been trapped by angels in Hell.

I am laughing out loud.

———

The antique brass lock gave way beneath the force of Dominic’s shoulder and he tumbled into a dark room furnished in the standard Hotel of the Damned eclectic style. A lean and modern wardrobe occupied one wall with Scandinavian solemnity, while an elaborately carved Victorian bed, draped and curtained in patterned red velvet and exuberant silks, filled the far wall.

Urgency warred with caution in his still-hammering chest while he scanned the light and dark woods for some sign of Olivia. He spotted a blue and gold shawl draped over a massive red stone box that, at first glance, he had thought was part of the living stone wall. Could the sound he had heard come from that? He shoved the star-dappled cloth aside and ran his bloody palms over the cold stone.

“Olivia,” he called softly, “are you here?”

———

I am screaming. The sound bounces back at me from the stone that holds me. Seconds distort like blood dreams and with a violent rebound. The full flood of Dominic runs over me. His kiss, his betrayal. He should be miles away. He must be safe. I accepted this endless black to get him out of Hell. Why is his voice seeping through the rock, calling to me, not in memory or dream?

“Olivia?” His voice is louder now, an invocation.

“Olivia?” A third time, “Can you hear me?”

I scream his name in rage and terror, forcing the power of both against the rock lid.

———

Dominic ran his bloodstained fingers along the rough seam of the dry stone lid. He ground the heels of his hand against the edge and pushed, but the rock was almost level with his head, too high for him to get a purchase on, and he could not bring much force against it. Adrenaline and will had dragged him here, dashing through Hell’s corridors and open spaces. Now they were poisoning him. Or maybe the snake. Neurotoxic venom could explain a lot.

Shaking, he leaned heavily against the stone that he had no sane reason to think imprisoned a woman whom he had no logical reason to believe was in danger.

Dominic’s shoulder throbbed from the impact with the door. He looked across the room at it, standing open, the jamb splintered where he had torn the lock’s strike plate away from the wood. His reptilian nature had driven him to this irrational behavior. It would take hours to make sense of it—to discover where Olivia was, what had happened, what it all meant. For all he knew, this barren place wasn’t even her room.

Dominic looked around. He opened the wardrobe too forcefully and the black beads of captured energy rained down its back and disappeared into the floor. The closet held Hell’s “outsider” uniform: black leather and velvet, high lace-up boots and heavy belts. No books, no papers. No name. Dominic pulled back the bed curtains that rolled on channeled cogs. He gazed down onto the bed’s pristine expanse of silk, hearing the gears still turning. In Hell’s biosphere, not even the energy of pulling back the curtains for the night was wasted.

———

My voice breaks. He cannot hear me. And I no longer can hear him. Has he left? My legs slip out from under me, my arms shaking. I lie still in my coffin, exhausted. My angelic strength and mortal will are gone. I am fading.

———

Dominic picked up the strike plate from the carpet and placed it on the graceful Art Nouveau table by the door. The elegant, bent-wood piece held only a strangely iridescent, beautifully curved teapot. Dominic glanced again at the massive stone box, and ran weary fingers across the pot’s fragile, translucent porcelain. Modern in design, with a wide, shocking red horizontal stripe bold across the middle of the classic spout, belly, and handle, he knew without looking that the maker’s mark and number on the bottom would be from one of the old houses.

Dominic put the teapot down.

His strong fingers dug hard into wood. The frame of Olivia’s door groaned under the pull, like a bow bent to the arrow.

———

My angelic hearing pricks me.

I scramble to my battered knees again. The hard gasps of a man preparing his lungs to dive terrify me. Dominic, what are you doing?

Then footsteps, propelled from the doorway’s slingshot, run headlong at me. Toward my immutable sarcophagus, a missile, a battering ram, runs to drive his mortal body against the lid and push it back to free me. If it does not slide, it will kill him.

———

Level with his eyes, the split in the stone Dominic held targeted for impact flashed like the teapot’s red stripe. He ran toward it with all his gathered strength and speed. He gathered power swiftly, pumping his runner’s arms wildly, although he planned to throw them over his head before he hit the rock. He would shift the lid or break his skull against it.

Olivia was inside, and he intended to set her free.

———

“I want him to live.” Pure desire now, I’m whispering on my knees in the dark not damned.

I throw everything I am and want into my bleeding back against the stone. The cold weight of the coffin lid yawns, tilts, and crashes down.

I uncurl, dropping my shredded red corset to the ground, stand, and spread my tattered wings.

———

The impact exploded red in Dominic’s gut and teeth. It threw him backwards. The sprawl surprised him as much as the shift.

But the stone had shifted.

He sat up, bloody and sick. Reality skittered across the floor-boards on clattering claws. Everything he knew or believed in was wrong. Above him, bare-breasted, wings spread, a ghostly angel shimmered through the pounding redness. The room lurched. Dominic struggled not to vomit. His forearms, where they had hit the stone lid of the sarcophagus, were already showing bruises. He touched his fingers to his head, and they came away bloody. He knew something about head trauma, but couldn’t remember what.

The angel stood over him, eyes unseeing, black hair pouring over her bare, white shoulders and across her naked breasts. Why was she shirtless? She held her pale arms outstretched. Behind them, massive, white wings spread, shimmering six feet at least, on either side. No Renaissance artist, no New Age airbrush, has ever done justice to the pure, unearthly sexual beauty of angels. Dominic blinked. The wings folded and restretched. Her hands reached forward. She swayed, and Dominic realized suddenly that she was in danger of falling.

“Olivia!”

Could she hear him? She trembled, her blind hands reaching. Dominic staggered to his feet.

“Olivia?” he called again, afraid.

How do you approach a blind angel? Magnificent, ethereal, erotic, her wings contracted against her unearthly body with hypnotic grace, their joints forming delicate peaks behind her ears. Her slender arms and shoulders seemed even smaller within the curved frame of feathers. Dominic took a tentative step. She swayed again. Her cloud-gray eyes—profound, but frightened—darted around the room, finally seeing where she was. Dominic squared his battered shoulders against the crushing pain in his head and arms, and stepped closer. Had she whispered to him?

A slender, long-boned hand reached forward, and Dominic took her gentle fingers in his own. Her perfect body tilted toward him and, fearing she would faint, he boldly wrapped his bleeding hands around her waist and lifted her away from the open tomb.

He carried her, trailing long wings, to the curtained bed and carefully placed her inert body within its arching frame. A ridiculous, childish longing yanked at him to simply climb into bed beside her and pull the curtains closed. But Sylvia would not be long in coming. There was no way to hide.

Against the blood-red silk of the coverlet, Olivia’s skin and wings shone pure white. Her black eyelashes shivered against her translucent cheeks. Dominic’s head throbbed with the dull pain of impact and his heart with the harder pulse of fear. The moment Sylvia could leave Ophelia, or safely carry her, she would come hunting him. And Dominic had no doubt she would kill him.

He blinked against the illusion that the complicated carvings on Olivia’s headboard and bedposts were moving. Tortured wooden sinners seemed to contort in burls of mud, wallowing in graven ecstasies. The centerpiece, an altar taken, no doubt, from a decaying Irish cathedral and refashioned for Gaehod’s hotel into a bed, held two carved naked figures standing, legs and arms entwined and whipped by devils in lurid medieval relief. Their bodies were being forced, by the repeated lashings, to pound one another endlessly. Their crime on Earth, their reward in Hell. But the figures held their faces a little bit apart, their eyes, fashioned of small blue stones, were alone immobile in the writhing wooden mass. He must have knocked himself harder than he had realized.

Olivia’s head fell to one side, and her black hair ran over her bare breasts and outstretched arms like clouds across ice. She was deathly pale.

“Olivia?” Dominic’s hands felt too big to cup her delicate shoulders, but she must wake up. They had to move.

“Olivia?”

Her ashen lips whispered, and Dominic leaned closer to hear her.

“Olivia?” It was a soundless whisper against her flawless cheek, but she turned her face toward it and his lips met her cool skin. Without his willing it, his mouth touched the place beneath her soft lashes and lingered. She did not move, but the throbbing pain and terror slipped from his lips as he kissed her, and he reached a careful hand to her cheek to turn her face to his. Her pale lips rose like a bubble from the still surface of her lifeless face, and Dominic opened his mouth against them in a kiss that was almost a prayer.

“Olivia?” He spoke it against her mouth, unwilling to take his lips from hers. A slow inhalation lifted her breasts against his supporting arm. He closed his eyes and took her mouth again, a deeper kiss, drawing her willing lips into his, feeling the elastic tenderness of her flesh.

Everything he had feared and never faced, everything he had hoped for and never asked pressed into his fervent kiss, sliding and coursing against her. Her lips trembled under his, and opened. With a stifled gasp, Olivia was living under him, her mouth responding, her hands on his bare shoulders, and her breasts beneath his chest.

Dominic tumbled into a dazzling liquid fire. His body, through its lacerations and contusions, stretched beside Olivia to pull her pliant body against his battered own. Some nameless dread caught in his belly, but he slid his bloodstained hands between her back and wings and rolled over her, the bare flesh of his torso smothered against the rise and fall of her full breasts and sloping waist, and her mouth, under his, kissing him.

“You must flee,” she whispered. Her hands slid across his back, sending radiant shivers of pleasure across his flesh.

“We both must.” Dominic couldn’t stop kissing her to speak, but he forced the words against her lips. “Your sisters blame me for what happened to Ophelia, and they’ve already tried to kill you once. They won’t stop now.”

“I’m too weak.”

“I know.” It took every bit of Dominic’s long-trained and powerful will to take his lips from the mouth that drowned him, but he tore himself from above Olivia’s body to lie beside her again. He wrapped a protective arm around her, and cradled her against his body, pillowing her cool cheek in the hollow of his chest and shoulder. She turned her beautiful face up to him, but he forced his eyes away from her tidal pull. Instead, drawing her closer, he touched the sweet, swollen pink of her nipple. She shuddered. He traced the high tenderness with the ball of his thumb, feeling her body tremble against his, watching the flesh gather and harden until she moaned.

“I have never felt this—never felt anything—before you,” she whispered. Her eyes were closed, a look of painful concentration on her face.

“I know.” Dominic wanted to kiss her trembling breast, wanted to climb her desire higher, give her all sensation, every pleasure. It would be simple. He gently pinched the reddening flesh of her shuddering nipple, winding the fingers of his other hand into her hair to pull her face against his throat.

Her mouth opened against his neck. She stiffened, but he pressed her closer. Hard teeth caught on his flesh. He stroked her breast again.

“Dominic—” She pushed away, but he held her.

“Dominic, no!”

His desperate mouth was in her flowing hair. He held her face against his carotid pulse. “You have to.” His voice sounded strange in his own ears. “You are starving, and your sisters are on their way.” He knew it as the words left him. They were carrying the screaming Ophelia off the ballroom floor.

“I can’t. My quills are too dull. It would hurt you.”

“I don’t care.”

“The punctures would be huge—gashes.”

“I don’t care.”

Dominic felt Sylvia scream his name in the garden. She was hunting him, and her rage echoed painfully in the bones of his feet.

“I don’t know if I could stop in time.” Olivia’s voice was raw. “It could kill you.”

“Your sisters will kill us both.”

Her slender body convulsed against his, and then she was above him, hair spilling over his face, nipples hard against his chest. Despite the danger, the sisters prowling the black garden grass searching, Dominic’s cock gave a primitive pulse against the fork of Olivia’s legs opened over him. “You must leave here!” she pleaded. “I will go to my sisters. I will buy you time. Go back to the garage, take a bike, and get the fuck away before they scent you.”

Dominic lay on his back against the red silk and smiled. Framed by her shimmering, outstretched wings, Olivia’s white face and depthless eyes shone with a breathtaking beauty. He was willing. He wanted to. Not to flee, not leave without her—that was out of the question—but to die with her. To stay here, dreaming in the drowning desire to taste and touch and pleasure her. Until her vengeful sisters came and killed them both.

A hard, flat line caught his eye across the soft curling sweep of her pure white wings. He squinted at it. From behind her, the harsh outline of her exploded crypt shone through her torso and wings. She was becoming transparent.

“I’m Reborn, right?” he whispered. “I’ll come back to you.”

“You don’t believe that.” Olivia shook her head, black rivulets winding around her face. Dominic pushed a slender tendril behind her ear, allowing his fingers to trace the graceful sweep from fragile lobe to trembling chin. He raked the pad of her inviting lips, and she closed her fathomless eyes.

He drew her face toward his. “I love you,” he whispered, his eyes clamped against the pain that choked him.

“I love you,” he said again and kissed her soundlessly. He held her hard by the fragile slope of her waist. “I’m not leaving.”

“Dominic!” She brought her lips to his. The delicate tips of her breasts touched his hammering chest. What he felt would strangle him, if he kissed her mouth again.

“Olivia, I can face it all again, but I have to know I can find you. You have to be here when I come back. If I die knowing that the memory of you will resurface for me, that I can love you again, then I’m glad for my curse. But, Olivia, God, Olivia, if you die…” A tear slid between their cheeks, pressed together, and Dominic could not have said if it was hers or his. “You have to let me feed you. It’s the only way.”

Olivia’s voice was choked. “Dominic, it may already be too late.”

“It can’t be. I love you. Doesn’t that have to change something?” The sob that shook her was almost a word. “What did you say—loophole? What does that mean? Olivia, is there something special about blood that’s freely given? About love?”

“I don’t know.”

“But there could be?”

“I used to think so.”

“Well let’s believe that now, okay? Let’s try,” he whispered.

The howl of outraged vampires shook the garden, half a mile below.

“Either you kill me or your sisters do, and at least if it’s you, you’ll be strong enough to fight them. And, Olivia, I’m coming back.”

“Can you? Will you?”

“I swear it.”

Her black hair rained around them, enclosing them in a torrent of silk and silent beauty. Her kisses lit separate fires in him, behind his eyes, deep in his belly. They ignited and lingered, spread and engulfed him. And he let them rage. He withstood a firestorm of kisses on his cheeks and lips against the flat of chest. Her fingers ran molten up his arms and into his hair. Then Olivia was standing by the bed.

“Olivia!” he cried.

“I’m not leaving.” Her voice was flat. Dominic watched the shadows of the room play across and—horribly—through her. “I’ll stay with you and I’ll do what you ask, but I need something from you first.”

Dominic pushed himself up on the bed. The sisters were stalking the lowest halls.

“Anything.”

“Make love to me.”

“I thought you couldn’t…”

“I don’t know if I can. But until today I couldn’t know pleasure. Before I… Before you…” Olivia peeled her pants off and stood before him naked. “I want to try.”

Dominic climbed off the massive bed to stand silently beside her. He took her face between his hands and kissed her again, long and painful and slow. If he came back and found her gone, he would not be able to live. He would hole up in this grotesque hotel and spend the rest of his incarnations in madness.

“You never felt pain before today either.”

“No.”

“It might…”

The vampires were swarming the lobby now.

“You just asked me to kill you.” Hysteria tinged her perfect voice. “You want me to drive my dull quills into your neck and drain your life from you in the remote hope that you’ll remember and find me again in however many years it takes you to reincarnate. You’re asking me to knowingly kill the only man—hell the only thing, mortal or divine—that I have ever loved. I want to feel this first.”

If she faded into nothingness in his arms while he made love to her, he would live and die regretting without end what he could not change. But she had lived since the beginning of time, inspiring what she could not feel.

Silently, he undressed. He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled her to him. He kissed her smooth belly and ran his greedy hands up to her high breasts and down her slender back beneath the gorgeous wings. He stroked her, wondering at the supple texture and smooth, lean form of her. His thumbs pushed up the rise of her thighs to circle the silky nest of black hair that crowned them. He looked up, but her eyes were closed, her body swaying. He pushed his fingers between her yielding thighs and felt the ocean softness of her. His cock ached.

“Do I… ?” she whispered.

He slid a finger against the warmth and darkness. “Yes.”

He bowed his head to kiss her over the dark curls and stopped. Her sisters were climbing the stairs. And she was fading. A blue shadow, eerily like letters, played against the taut clear white of her flesh. Sylvia screamed, cursing him in the torn-open door of his downstairs room.

Dominic took Olivia’s waist in his hands, guided her to the bed, and pulled the curtains shut around them. Her face was pale, but when he kissed her, waves of desire poured from her against him. She wanted him, was alive to him, was giving and open and ready for him. Dominic was shaking. Whether from terror or desire he didn’t know, but he wanted her. He wanted to love her, to feel her, to drive his body into her, to lose himself in her, and find himself.

“I love you,” he whispered.

The room shuddered with the thundering of the last hallway door torn from its hinges. Between Dominic’s hands, Olivia’s shimmering face showed no sign of anything beyond an enveloping pleasure. Could she not hear her sisters? Her tender mouth pulled his in invitation when he kissed it, and her pale, beautiful legs opened. Trembling, he pushed his cock between her yielding thighs. If she was afraid, she did not show it.

“I love you,” she answered and closed her oceanic eyes.

Dominic raised his body back from the woman he knew he loved and with a groaning, convulsive thrust, gathered all his force, and drove his throat against her open mouth.

———

An arterial burst of footsteps ricochets across elongating time. I drink his flight, taste my sisters’ pulse. Dominic, impaled on my blunt quills, lies motionless across me. His living blood presses into my teeth’s hollow cores and down the back of my gulping throat. I do not want this. I do not want the ragged, leaking place in his skin, slippery and warm against my lips. I do not want Dominic sacrificed for such a wild and distant chance. But my feeding teeth are buried, and it would be easier to hold my breath to suffocation than refuse the pouring of his life into my parched mouth. My limbs, of their own accord, twist over his, pull his powerful body closer. I hold him, sucking. Killing him.

“Olivia!” Sylvia screams down the distant hallway, her voice an indistinct roar in the distortion of his blood pounding in my ears. Already my vision is darkening, sights as old as I am taking shape, tumbling into the blood dreams. I glimpse earthen walls, clay amphorae stacked and marked with indented tiny triangles. A mother’s black eyes and strong, long nose. A whisper that rasps and growls. I drink in the oiled beard and brows of a proud brother, older, and revered. I see his handsome, dark throat brutally severed, then the brilliant flash of the dripping blade before young eyes. Then I see only the deep red I must stop draining. Dominic died young his first lifetime.

Through the darkness, I urge my sisters to hurry. They will tear him from my teeth. Perhaps in time to save his life. But they are hunting him by scent, tracking his steps searching for me. It will still bring them here, but not directly. He did not know my room.

I see eyes again in the red darkness—cold and yellow. I feel terror seeping and taste the keen ache of unmoving muscles. He stalks the feral eyes with other men in an impenetrable jungle night. Many of them died that hunt, but he is welcomed home to a grass-thatched hut and straw mat. A woman reclines upon it, her legs around his hips. Then her face again, washed in sweat. But there now—nestling against her breast—cradles a tiny head. His first child. Love dripping, and then drowning in a screaming agony of vomitus and blood. So much more painful than the sudden sword. Heartbreak drenches me.

I cannot stop drinking the endless blood dreams.

A mother’s eyes swim though the red. They brim with love and close in death. Her lifeless face sinks into the rich stream and coils into parchment, rolled and tidy, resting on marble. He loved them, not as fiercely as the death-stolen mother, but that lifetime’s loves were never that strong again—the devoted practice of medicine, a cool passion for thought, and the narrow hips of boys.

Through the reddening, his past slides again toward death, and I battle to slow my hard, convulsive pulls of hunger. My sisters are coming. Their footsteps in the closer hall are slower than his pulse, but more relentless. Their feet, his heart, drums, or horse hooves echo inside stone. A woman above him, her head thrown back. I taste sex. Warrior, be thou summoned. Her body initiates him. Warrior, be thou safe returned. A splintering blow shatters bone and prevents it.

Then wives—too many wives—and children with sweet liquid eyes who bow their faces to the ground.

A father, two masters—one artist, one owner.

A friend on horseback coils a lasso with nimble hands.

A blond wife-to-be running, and black blisters creeping over infant flesh he loves, as I have never loved skin and bone and blood.

An old man with terrible teeth and a doughnut, a ridiculous sweep of black, and my own desire-blinded eyes. No! My fingers reach to touch his copper hair, tuck a fallen piece behind his ear. I tear his throat away.

Gasping, swallowing, I lie against Dominic’s limp body, his face still as a frozen stream, its freckles like leaves caught in early winter ice that would collapse if you put your heel upon it. Tears gather behind my eyes and surface. A sob comes as a low groan in the moment that the broken door to my room is torn away. I swallow the sound, too, and wrap my wings around my only and unbreathing, pulseless love.

———

Dominic poured into the insistent pulsing pull of Olivia’s power over him, losing himself in her. Her swallowing matched the beat of his hammering heart, and he listened to the liquid sounds of them together. Singing, his heart set the tempo, her hunger gave the harmony. It rose, and slowed. His pulse followed her lead, dancing against her lithe body, until he didn’t know whether it was his heart or her mouth that moved his blood through him.

Even with his eyes open, he couldn’t see. He was blind, and the urgent sounds of her sisters drowned in the aching beat of their bodies’ shared pulse. All he could hear, all he could feel, was her. He was dying. Consciousness pulled away from the edges of him, exposing fathomless memories of love and suffering and loss. Why were they still there—the wives and children, and the other deaths? Delusional, even now, damn him.

What happens in the visual cortex when it is depleted of oxygen-carrying blood? When people refer to lives flashing before their eyes, were they witnessing a final electrical discharge, the simultaneous firing of every collapsing synapse? Buried memories rose from neurological graves to flow with his slackening pulse out of him and into her.

He wished he could see her. Love lapped at him, washed him with a heat that didn’t warm him. He smelled ash. A particulate, scentless sensation filled his nostrils when he inhaled, but he clung to the warmth of Olivia’s cold mouth on his throat. He remembered her in the ruined abbey, the way she had reached for the hair that fell in his face. She needed him. Needed this. That was all that mattered.

His breath was coming slower. Awareness shrank away from the cold peripheries. He had never been young. The loss of every love had weighed him down, but now he was light at least, the free-floating, tiny pieces of him dissipating.

He was loved.

He would be remembered, as he had always remembered.

He watched himself, the lover, float away from himself, the beloved. How could he say good-bye to himself when the extinguished cinders weighed nothing at all?

Consciousness cowered in the last places of breathing, the mind away from the brain, the self from the other, shrinking, reaching, yearning—not for the light—but for the ashes. He slid up the face of oblivion, falling faster than gravity, upward with the ashes.

Dominic stood up into the silence. There was no sky. The ashes had no air to float into, only the deepening quiet of an unbeating heart and an undrinking mouth, still softer and at one with the silence, without sensation.

She was gone.

He must remember her.

His body was gone.

He must remember.

Everything had gone into a silence made of ash. He must…

He was gone, and yet somewhere, he was there. His thoughts remained to note the memory motes dancing away. Remember! Memory makes us immortal. Like angels, immortal. Like ashes, what is left of what is burned. Remember. Time and thought flame out. Awareness out, and memory.