11

THE FACE OF THE VOID

The scream is a hideous crawling horror that paints my room in rage.

My sisters have come.

“The bitch broke out of her crypt!” Sylvia howls.

“How could she have had the strength?” Ophelia sounds near to fainting herself.

“The Reborn came to her rescue,” Sylvia snaps, and I hear my smallest sister’s unsupported body slump to the ground.

Vivian is scornful. “He could not have shifted the stone,” she says.

“What else explains it?” Sylvia paces wildly, her stilettos beating a ferocious tattoo against my floor. “He got away from us. He went to the garden. We tracked his scent here, and we find her coffin opened. I will kill him myself!”

“Shut up,” Vivian commands. “Where is his scent?”

From within my curtained bed, I scent the air with my hungry sisters. Even with my body pressed to his, there is no smell of blood from Dominic. I have drunk it.

“Fuck him,” Vivian spits. “Wherever he is, he’s dead. There’s no scent. What we need to do is find Ollie.”

My wardrobe doors smash against the wall with a splintering crack.

Sylvia swears again. Hard footsteps stride toward my bed. Through my transparent wings, I see Vivian’s blood-red fingertips penetrate the seam between the drapes and rend the curtains in a violent storm of falling velvet and the tiny brass rain of gears.

Sylvia, Vivian, and even Ophelia, swaying slightly, gaze down at Dominic, wrapped in my wings.

“God damn him!” Vivian whispers.

“He’s gone!” Ophelia wails.

I stare into the rigid faces of my sisters who look—blindly—through me and through Dominic in my arms. Ophelia collapses again.

“Where the hell is Ollie?” Sylvia demands.

“Listen,” Vivian orders, “even if she drained the Reborn, she can’t have got far. She was too damn weak.”

I examine their keen faces, each of my sisters listening to catch the sound of my desire. I smile beneath their eyes. They will not hear me. I am full angel now—without desire—soundless and invisible.

“Come here, you crazy bitches! I’ll kill every one of you!” The half shriek, half aria reverberates from my splintered doorway.

My sisters turn from me to glance dispassionately at Alyx standing, uncharacteristically erect, brandishing a broken table leg by the shattered hinges of my door. His hair is a wild tangle in his face, and his cool, ironic eyes roll wildly around the room, crazed—but sober. They pass over the bed, blind as my sisters’ are to Dominic and me motionless upon it.

Vivian laughs. “Alyx, what are you wearing?”

He shrugs his skinny shoulders, wearing leather pants belted with an obscenely wrought diamond-crusted buckle and rock star boots. “It was all I had. Now fuck off. All of you.”

“Oh no, a drunken rock star arrives to ruin all our plans,” Vivian sneers. “Go away, Alyx.”

“Wooden stake,” he counters, brandishing the splintered table piece at her. He looks ridiculous, mad, brandishing the ruined furniture, a man who could never face his own, prepared to take on all the demons of Hell.

Vivian walks up to him and scents the air for his desire. Noiselessly, from the bed, I do the same. If Alyx is still himself enough to want her, or sane enough to fear any of my almighty sisters, Vee, standing with her pale face against his stubbled cheek, will sink her teeth into his throat and silence him in four long swallows. Vivian is full of rage, and he is undernourished.

But I can glean no scent from him.

“What have you done with D?” he demands, meeting Vivian’s puzzled gaze.

“Funny you should ask.” She smiles. “We’re hunting him, too.”

“He wanted to help you guys. But you couldn’t see past your next meal, could you? If you’ve killed him, I swear to God, I’ll make you regret it.”

“He doesn’t want me,” Vivian murmured. “He doesn’t fear me, either.”

“He will,” Ophelia whispered from the floor. “I will make him.”

My ravenous sisters crowd around Alyx, scenting the air and running their fingers across the acute planes of his wasted body. Vivian’s long fingers unfasten his ridiculous belt buckle, and Ophelia sucks hard on two of his fingers. He looks dazed. Hatred he could fight, but what chance does he stand against desire? If he believes—even for a moment—that just one of them wants him, he will be lost. Vivian makes a low moan against his throat, tracing the fertile line between his ear and collarbone with her tongue.

I stand and gather Dominic against me.

With wary eyes on Alyx and my sisters swarming over him, cooing and licking, I take a silent step. If they move just a little from Alyx at the door, I will simply walk through it and away. Alyx’s grip on the table leg is slackening. He shakes himself like a dog, flinging off sensation’s soaking torrent. “You girls wanna have a little party, do you?” he leers. But there’s no scent of desire on him. He saunters toward my bed, his back to me. I hold Dominic close against my body. And we slip the other way.

“Why don’t ya’ll come over here with me? Take a load off.” Alyx steps over the broken curtain rod, its tiny gears at last spun down, and falls onto my bed. I take another step toward the door, with Dominic’s limp body, tattoo-lined, blood-streaked, and cold in my arms. I’m desperate to flee, to take him out of here, but I must not make a sound.

“Do you mock us?” Vivian’s voice is taut as a corset string, strung between metal eyes.

Alyx pats the bedspread beside him. “Come on, ladies.”

I step cautiously around the bentwood table by my door.

He’s stalling us!

Trying to keep us here—

Hoping to deter us—

To buy time for that Reborn to escape!

My sisters’ thoughts seethe like a miasma of swallowed rage around my transparent ankles. They turn blazing eyes through me to the decayed rock star sprawled against the elegant, understated crewelwork of my silk coverlet, red on red. He winks at them lewdly. “There’s enough of me to go around. Come on, girls, wouldn’t be the first time, if you know what I mean.”

Sylvia’s cry is terrible. My sisters close in on Alyx and I slip away through the shattered door with the lifeless body of my love. I have only one thought, one hope, but it is stained with blood. I run the few steps across the corridor as swiftly as I can with Dominic’s body still sheathed in my wings, and crash through the railing into the open space above the lobby.

We fall.

My wings unfurl. They stretch. The void beneath them catches their muscular curve, and our tumbling descent slows. I lock the muscles of my back and flex. It contracts my wings, and they beat against the empty space.

Again.

And we are no longer falling. I circle the air above the milling damned. They stare, pointing upward at the bloodied man, lost in the unbreathing sleep of angels, whose body seems wrapped around a phantom lover. His arms are draped across an empty space, legs caught by invisible ankles. So this, I hear one think, is what my soul does on those perfect nights. I knew it traveled.

But I am flying straight up now. Up and up toward the spiral of Hell’s starlit dome, ascending into Heaven. The glass shatters and rains soundlessly down behind us, and I fly with him into the night.

———

A moment separated itself from nothingness in lonely, horrible isolation. Dominic braced himself. Stay just one. But another came behind it, stringing ash links on a chain, dragging him from oblivion. Wait! There is something buried there. Something he must return to. Or from.

But it was gone. Everything was gone. He was dead, and time rushed at him in torrents. He had no strength to shield his face from the minutes hailing into his open eyes. Wait. Remember.

The angel’s eyes were bottomless as love. He struggled to reach them, and she put her red lips against his—like fire—but he kissed her, and closed his eyes to feel her mouth again. Stay here and now, nowhere and timeless. Dead, with lips on an angel’s. Wait.

He pulled his breathless mouth away. “Olivia?” he whispered. Her depthless eyes met his again. He took her winged shoulders in hands he didn’t know were his until they touched her. “Olivia, why are you here?”

“I love you,” she said.

“I died.”

“I know. I killed you.”

Her exquisite head dropped against his silent chest, and Dominic wrapped unsteady arms around her, quaking against the painful, waking bone and sinew of his body. His limbs convulsed violently. Olivia clung to him, waking his stomach and thighs where she pressed against them, too.

“Dominic, what’s happening?”

“I’m slipping.” Life was pulling on him, irresistible as sleep. He smiled. “I’m going back. I’ll find you again soon. Wait for me.”

“Dominic, no!” Her pale fingers ran across his face, down his arms in trails of flame against his skin, kindling him.

“I won’t remember at first, but by eighteen, I should be back to you, back in Ireland.”

A sob wracked her, and Dominic turned her face to kiss her once again. Her lips trembled beneath him, making him want to kiss her more strongly, more deeply, to smooth her tremors with the necessary force of it. She hiccupped.

It was a funny, human sound in his lifeless mouth, and he forced himself to pull away from her lips. “Olivia, I know it seems like a long time, but it will pass quickly. Nothing compared to how long you’ve been alive.” He pushed two crystal tears away from her brimming eyes with his ashen thumb. “And when I find you again, I promise, I’ll make it up to you. We’ll make love, finally. We will—”

“You don’t understand.”

She closed her boundless eyes against him, pushing a new rivulet of tears down the smooth plane of her cheeks as he stroked them. Every touch of her body, every kiss, pressed him back toward living, and yet he could not let her go.

He would return, in a new body, a new beginning. He was willing. All his life—all his lives—he had fought it, but now he was willing. He would go back, face the piecemeal agony at adolescence, the grueling, slow remembering, the irrational puzzle coming together, and he would find her again. He could face anything for her, with her, his angel.

He took her encompassing mouth with his again. He wanted to stay as long as he could, to comfort and reassure her, but he had to taste her mouth again. She opened perfectly to his kiss, a deep softness in her yielding to his insistent lips and tongue. Would making love to her here, in the aching in-between, drive him more quickly back into the endless cycle, faster back to his next rebirth? He should stop, but desire overwhelmed him. Her mouth welcomed his, not hungry, but sustaining; not forbidden, but divine.

She pulled her lips away. “Dominic, if you can’t find me down there, I’ll be here.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you can’t find me at the hotel—”

A woman’s voice, distant and muffled, cried out in pain. “Mother,” he whispered. Olivia closed her azure eyes.

“I’m an angel now,” she said. “Full angel. I can’t—”

But Dominic stopped Olivia’s mouth. He kissed her against a strangled sob in his throat, and in his ears. He had died too late to save her. The woman wailed again. Was he that close to return?

“I won’t be there,” Olivia whispered. “I’m invisible there. I don’t know if I can find you here, in the between, every time you die, but if I can, I will. Dominic, I love you.”

Her hair was impossibly soft. “I’ll come back and find you here,” he promised.

Hospital noises drilled at his ears. A man’s voice now, calm and rhythmic. He was slipping.

Pure horror tinged Olivia’s pale face. “Dominic, you mustn’t suicide. I know what happens to Reborn suicides, it’s too terrible to bear.”

Dominic ran shaking hands down the strong column of her back and bowed his head. He nuzzled her throat and spread his fingers across her back as if he could contain her. No, he wouldn’t kill himself. He carried lives and heartbreaks, and experienced the terrible pattern of life and loss repeating now, but as a teen, it had come back in bits and pieces. It had been terrible. It was still. But to remember it all—the impossibility of escape, the inevitability of suffering—before birth, before speech? It destroyed the mind it housed and the shell-shocked children were all born mad. No, even to return to her, he would not begin his own end. She shuddered in his arms, and he pressed a lingering kiss on her delicate collarbone.

Pain seared across his face and chest, a terrible constricting agony, and he found his fingers back on her angelic face, tracing her brows, pushing into her hair.

“Olivia…” It was all he could manage. Her body clung to him, her fingers strong in the muscles of his arms, her supple legs wrapping his. To kiss her would push him farther from her, but what could he do but kiss her? He took her mouth again and again, almost savagely, and with each spasm that wracked him, felt her open more.

“Olivia, if you want me to stay with you here, I have to stop. It’s pulling me away.”

She gave a little sob, and he crushed her against his body. “I can feel you,” she whispered. “I thought I would be beyond physical sensation here… pleasure, pain… but it’s more acute, more intense.”

“Does it hurt you?” he whispered.

“No.”

He was grateful she didn’t ask him the same, because the pain for him was intense. Every place her body touched, he was branded by flame. Still, he kissed her and wrapped his searing arms around her. He braced himself against the tearing pain, to welcome the angel he loved, and would happily suffer to hold.

Light pressed blood-red against his open eyes. He was losing her face, vision slipping into a crimson and underwater glow. He gasped and clutched her harder, her breasts tender brands against the flesh of his chest. He caught one in his hand, and she cried out as though he’d slapped her.

The sound came muffled through the ashes in his ears. He dropped his hand lower, seeking between her legs. They opened readily and he stroked her. She took his mouth again, and he inhaled.

“He’s choking!”

A man’s face peered down. Dominic clamped his eyes closed, gasping, but Olivia was gone.

“Hello, son,” the man said.

Dominic squinted into the hovering face, the brimming eyes and terrible teeth.

———

Alyx looks like shit. He is folded behind the exploded door to my apartment, limbs bent at bad angles, bits missing. Not that I ever saw him look well. Still, death makes every face a mockery. My avenging sisters have gone. I listen for the sound of their hungers, but the hotel is quiet. I can’t hear Gaehod, but I never could. I’ve come back to the hotel to find him.

My bedroom is a war zone. The heavy stone sarcophagus lid is shattered, and chunks of rock lie everywhere—radical, natural shapes amongst the ridiculous, ornate carvings and silly Spartan lines. The curtains torn from my bed pepper the floor with gears and uncoiled springs, and the wardrobe doors lie splintered where Sylvia threw them. There’s nothing here I need. My wings flex tight against my back. I had thought I would grab a shirt, but I square my shoulders to lift my naked breasts high. I’ll go bare-breasted to Gaehod. I will stand before him, quill my angel’s wings, and plead. Every moment pulls Dominic farther from me.

“I always knew you had great tits.”

I freeze. I scent nothing.

“Who’s there?” I demand, loathing the quaver in my voice.

“Yo.”

Alyx is lying right above me, his narrow back resting against the ceiling, staring with considerable fondness at my bare breasts.

“Eyes, Alyx.”

His soft, brown eyes meet mine reluctantly. He looks younger than I remember, but real and solid, and floating down to stand beside me.

“What the fuck?” I ask him.

He shrugs, looking at his abandoned body behind the door. “Jesus, I was skinny. Why didn’t anybody make me eat?”

I pick up his broken body and carry it to the bed. His left eye is swollen closed, ringed with a purple so deep it looks black near his nose. I push a pillow under his rolling head. His nose is flattened to the right side of his face, and he’s missing his two left front teeth. The oddly pristine right side of his face looks only mildly surprised. It is anything but peaceful, and unsettling even to me, no stranger to death’s sculpting fingers. I arrange his stiff limbs as properly as I can, although I leave the left arm spayed out to the side. I could push it down, but the sound would be too much for him. He leans against my tomb, watching me.

“Ophelia,” he says quietly, nodding at his corpse.

I pick the heavy drapes from the floor and toss them over the bed’s broken rails to shield the poor, broken body from his eyes. I need to reach Gaehod, but I can’t leave Alyx here, alone with his ruined body.

“Ophelia did this to you?”

“Yup. I was having a drink in the lobby and Dominic blew in, acting crazy, looking for you. He said you were in trouble. Then Vivian and the vamp girls went by about ten minutes later. I figured they were hunting him. I wasn’t going to let that happen. But fuck, man. I’m useless. What am I going to do against a pack of pissedoff vampire bitches?”

“You came up here after them? Alone?”

“Yeah. Not that it mattered. Fuckers didn’t know where D was, either. He wasn’t here, so I tried to keep them from leaving. Vee just picked me up and hurled me. I don’t weigh much, I know, but damn… Anyway, the glass dome in the lobby exploded, and they all left to see what the fuck—except Ophelia.”

“She was too weak to follow them.”

“Weak? That bitch broke my arm with one hand! She crawled over to where I was trying to get up after being chucked across the fucking room and”—Alyx give me a wry grin—“had her way with me.”

“She drained you to get her strength back.”

“She seemed strong enough.”

“But she hurt you before she drank?”

Alyx shrugs, but I am sure of it. Ophelia is famous for the fines she pays to the Quarry in damages. She would have tortured him any way that didn’t waste blood.

“Hey, if I was into S&M, it would have been great.”

“But you’re okay now?” I ask him. “I mean you’re not still in any kind of pain, right?”

“I feel great. Better than I have in years.” He shoots me a wry grin. “Wouldn’t mind a drink, though.”

“No booze in Heaven, I don’t guess,” I say.

“Hang on, are you dead, too?”

“Yeah.”

“And Dominic?” I catch the masked despair in his eyes.

I just nod. And Alyx looks hollow, truly dead for the first time. He sags.

“I came back here to find Gaehod,” I say. “Maybe he’ll think of something.” But Alyx is staring at his mangled corpse on my bed, shaking his head.

“How fucking typical,” he says bitterly. “I wasted my life, and now I’ve wasted my death. If I could have stopped them—”

“It wasn’t your fault,” I tell him, but he doesn’t hear me. I sit down beside him on my destroyed tomb. “Alyx, I was here. With Dominic.” I have his attention now. “Dominic found me in my crypt. Broke the lid open with his head. My sisters couldn’t see him, because I hid him with my wings. I’m invisible to the living.”

“And to the Undead, apparently.”

I laugh. “Yeah, apparently. You are the reason I was able to carry Dominic out of here. They all closed in around you, and I walked out the door and flew away with him.”

“Jesus…”

“You saved him. Us, actually.”

Half a smile twists his beautiful lips. He looks at me clearly through cloudy eyes. “Where did you take him?”

“To Dublin. To the hospital there.”

Alyx makes a low whistle. “You gave up the bet then? The hotel’s gonna close?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I say. I hate the idea of not having this place. I need it. The world needs it, no matter what Gaehod says about modernity and acceptance. I hang my head. How will Dominic ever find me now, when he remembers?

“Can they save him?”

“The hospital? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I believed they could when I took him there, but then I saw him here, where we are, he was being pulled away.” I swallow against the tears. “I think he died,” I say. “In fact, I think he might have been reborn already, reincarnated. I don’t know. That’s why I need to talk to Gaehod.”

“You saw Dominic here? In this room?”

“No, here, in Heaven.” Alyx looks so defeated that pity curls itself around my waist. “It’s overrated, don’t you think?” I elbow him gently. “I remember Paradise being different before.”

“I don’t think we’re in Heaven,” he says.

“We’re dead.”

“I know, but seriously, it’s me. What are the odds?”

“Maybe your final act of self-sacrifice redeemed you. That was a pretty noble thing you did.”

Alyx snorts with derision. “I don’t think so.”

But it doesn’t seem like much of a heaven. “Where do you think we are?” I ask him.

“I dunno. Limbo, the Beyond. We’re just out there, man.”

I’m sitting on the edge of my sarcophagus beside him, but he’s looking down at the floor between his shiny boots. His hands on the red stone are white beneath the bloodstains, and I rub away a flaking coil that winds around his wrist with my finger. “I need to find Gaehod,” I tell him. “Do you want to come with me? We can ask him where the fuck we are and what we’re supposed to do now.”

Alyx shakes his head. “No. I know what I’m supposed to do now.”

I glance over at his ruined body on my cursed bed, and feel afraid for him. Mortals are so frail, so temporary, so… mortal. Gaehod translates mortals as dying ones, and so they are. And so they are afraid.

“Will you come with me?” he asks, not looking at me.

I start to say I can’t, that I have to find Gaehod in time, but… okay, if I’m honest, true immortal that I am, the one thing I’ve got plenty of is time. Dominic is dead. And even though it would help me to know what will happen to him now, there’s nothing I can do with the knowledge. And Alyx is alone for the first time, the way I have always been.

“Sure,” I say. “Where are we going?”

He stands, and I follow, past his poor body, through my shattered door, and into a dank and silent cave. Our backs are to the cave mouth, and we walk away from it, from the high moon and shivering treetops, to grope our way deeper in. The ground is craggy and sloped, and before too long we start to smell a faint, sweet smoke rising from deep cracks in the ground beneath us. We’re in Delphi.

“You must be looking for the oracle,” I whisper to Alyx.

His grin is crooked and he slips his hand into mine. “Just all my life,” he says.

We step across a wide fissure and almost trip over a little three-legged stool.

“Oracle?” Alyx calls into the still blackness.

“Pythia!” I shout, but only echoes come back to us.

Alyx sits down heavily on the empty stool. “Figures,” he grunts. “I didn’t tell you, but before you showed up, I tried to leave your room and ended up in this fucking horrible hot desert with a burning bush that wouldn’t talk to me either.”

I try to imagine Alyx standing in the sand, shouting at a flaming shrub, but it just makes me giggle. “I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s not funny.”

“Yeah, but it is, isn’t it? I mean, seriously, all my pathetic life, I’ve been trying to figure out what the hell I was here for—what I was there for—on the planet, I mean. I figured, when I died, at least I’d get to know. I never really believed in God. Not since I was a kid, when God was like Santa Claus, this old white-haired magic man who could bring you whatever you wanted if you asked real nice, who would make your wishes all come true. It was baby faith. But then he didn’t show up a couple of times, no matter how I asked. Figured he’d stopped listening, phone off the hook.”

Alyx shrugs. “I guess I still believed there would be answers when you died. You’d get to know what you were supposed to have done. Your destiny, calling, whatever. I thought I’d finally know why. He’d say, ‘This is the reason you were put on Earth. This was your reason for being,’ and I’d know if I had failed. Or maybe succeeded.”

He’s trying to sound casual, unconcerned, but his fingers grip mine hard, and his other hand is balled into a fist. His eyes scrape the walls and ceiling of the empty cave.

He shouts into the blackness over us, “I want to know!” He peers over the ledge into the crack in the ground. “Tell me!”

“Tell us.”

It’s a whisper that forms in my mind like a headache. I glance at Alyx, but he’s transfixed. He hears it, too.

“I don’t know,” he whispers.

“Tell us now why you have lived.”

It is a thousand whispers, brushing against my cheek and ankles, pouring up from the earth and down from above. “Tell us why you have lived. God only asks the questions.”

Alyx is shivering. I want to touch him, reach my transparent hand out to him, but the air is too heavy with whispers, and I can’t move. He looks at me. He is almost impossibly beautiful, his cheek and collarbones rising on the same steep angle, like wings.

“The purpose of life is to have a purpose for life,” he says softly.

I nod. I get it. But we’re dead. It’s too late for us to have a purpose. The dead have only what meaning the living give us.

“And the purpose of death is acceptance,” Alyx whispers.

“I’m not so sure about that.” I’m trying to joke, but I just sound strained.

“For me.”

“Alyx? You’re slipping.”

He smiles.

“Are you going to Heaven?”

He shakes his head at me.

“Is this Heaven?”

He shakes his head again. “No. This is just one of your deaths.”

I shudder. “How many do I get?”

“Only two.”

He hardly looks like himself anymore.

“Any idea when the other one’s due?” I ask him.

“You’ve already done that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Adam, the count, the duchess, all the way back…”

“No, they never knew me. Never loved me,” I say.

“Exactly.”

“They didn’t kill me.”

“You aren’t life, Olivia.”

“I don’t get it!” This is pissing me off. Alyx isn’t making sense.

“I saw them,” he whispers, vanishing, smiling, slipping away. I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about, but he looks blissful. “I touched them,” he murmurs. He starts to hum, smiling, low in his throat, a perfect, clear note.

I close my eyes to clear them, and he’s gone. I close them again, and I’m back in my room, alone with Alyx’s broken corpse, ashen on my scarlet bed.

I don’t get it. Of course this is Heaven. It must be. The place I’ve been trying to reach since Time trapped me in human form. I’m just not as happy as I thought I would be.

Alyx’s body jerks violently, and I jump. I watch with horror, but there is nothing more. He looks childlike, laid out this way. Once, he had a mother who tucked him into bed. Now he only has me, poor bastard. I creep to the contorted form of the second friend I ever made, to pull the red curtains over him. He whispers to me.

I can’t stop screaming.

———

Arms flailing, hands clawed and grasping, he struggled against the ash in his mouth that kept air from rushing in. He couldn’t breathe. He coughed again.

“It’s okay. You’re okay. Try to relax.” The ruined teeth smiled down at him. “Dominic, can you hear me? Blink twice if you can.”

Dominic blinked. One. Two.

“Good. Can you talk?”

“I think so.” His voice tasted rusty, of blood and disuse.

“Can you tell me your name?”

“You called me Dominic.”

“That’s right. Do you know your last name? Or your birth date?”

“No.”

“Do you know where you were born, or where you are now?”

“Hospital?”

The old man chuckled. “I suspect you are correct on both points, my son, but I meant more specifically.”

Dominic looked around. He recognized things, knew the names and uses of them, but he could find no context to place around them—or himself. He shook his head.

“Today’s date?” The old man asked, brows contracting.

“No.”

“It’s April twenty-seventh. Do you know who I am?”

“A doctor?”

“Yes, but I’m not here in that capacity. I’m your friend. My name’s Francis Dysart. You and I work together in the U.S. But we’re in Ireland now. You had an accident.”

“What kind of accident?”

“Well, that’s part of the mystery, son. Nobody knows. You turned up in the emergency ward downstairs two days ago. You were a right mess, from the sound of it.”

Dominic struggled to sit up. Dysart helped him, gently supporting an elbow and raising the head of the bed with a lever. “A nurse walked into an empty examination bay, and found you naked on the table. You looked like you’d been hit by a car or fallen from quite some height. You had a fractured arm and depressed skull fracture, but—and here’s where it gets really interesting—no intracranial hematoma, no bleeding at all. In fact, your blood volume was dangerously low. They gave you six units.”

“Damn.”

“I know! Stranger still, with that much blood loss, they could find no internal bleeds, and the hypotension may actually have saved your life, since it prevented any bleeding into your brain from the head trauma. But you were very near to empty, and we still don’t know how that happened. Your head and forearms bore generous surface abrasions, but no lacerations large or deep enough to explain the blood loss. Dominic, do you remember what happened to you?”

“I don’t really remember anything.”

Dr. Dysart smiled too brightly. “Transient global amnesia isn’t uncommon in head injury with reduced blood flow, especially with coma. I’m sure your memory will return soon. I really should summon a doctor. They’ll be very eager to talk with you, now that you’re awake.” The old man studied him. “Dominic, do you remember the date?”

“April twenty-seventh.”

“So the amnesia is strictly retrograde,” the old man muttered. “Dominic, I need to ask you something important.”

“Okay.”

“You were… No, no, you are a brilliant young neuroscientist. One of the best in your field, and you’ve been working with me for the past several years on problems dealing with memory. But you and I have never really discussed the reasons behind your interest in this area. You’re a very private—I won’t say secretive—but a very quiet person on the topic of your past. I’ve never been able to get you to say much about your childhood or family. I have wondered, through the years, if you weren’t trying to forget something.”

Dominic said nothing.

“You should know that your mother has been notified of your accident and is on her way,” Dysart said, “and that several other people are here to see you.”

“Okay.”

“You’re not afraid of anyone, are you? Not in any danger?”

“I don’t feel afraid. Do you think someone did this to me?”

“We honestly don’t know, but the police have been involved. There’s certainly no way you could have walked into the hospital in your condition. Someone must have brought you.”

“Okay.”

“Dominic, you weren’t engaged in any kind of radical experimentation over here, were you? Something I didn’t know about? This isn’t an operation or a medication gone horribly wrong, is it?”

Dominic hated to see the old man’s face so scarred by worry, but no matter how he tried to push his gummy mind backwards beyond waking up to Dysart’s voice and teeth, he simply couldn’t see anything.

“That doesn’t feel very likely, but I don’t know.”

“Well, don’t let it worry you, son. These amnesias are typically short-lived. Your memory should start coming back soon. Although I imagine they’ll want to do another CT now that you’re awake. I wish I had thought to bring your old scans from our lab as a baseline.” The man was talking to himself, gathering his coat and hat, rummaging through the magazines on the floor. “Here’s another odd thing,” he said, turning back to Dominic on his way out. “Yesterday, out of the clear blue, your laptop bag appeared in your room. Just right there in the chair. Nobody knows who brought it. The ICU nurses didn’t see anyone come in or out. Nothing on the monitors. It looked as though someone had tried to clean it after you’d bled all over it, but it’s here, if you want it.”

“Thanks.”

“I’d give it to you now, but I don’t imagine you’d get a chance to unzip it before the doctors come in. But you’ve kept a photo log as long as I’ve known you. It’s online, I’ll jot down the URL. I didn’t find any clues in your latest pictures—mostly snapshots from the roadside by the look of it, but maybe something will spark your memory. Oh, and don’t tell them how long we visited. I should have gotten them right away…” Still muttering, the doctor let himself out of the tiny, glass-walled ICU room. Dominic watched him shuffle up to a central desk, but closed his weary eyes against the burst of activity the old man’s news caused. Nurses snatching up phones, doctors striding his way. He wanted a nap.

———

“Dominic, dear boy? Dominic, are you awake?” A slender hand shook his shoulder softly, but insistently. “Dominic? It’s Madalene. Can you spare a moment, my dear?”

Dominic rolled onto his back and opened his eyes. An older woman leaned urgently over the hospital bedrail.

“Oh good! I’m so glad you’re awake. My goddaughter’s waiting in the hall, so I won’t take much of your time. Just one quick question.” Dominic sat up and raised the bed’s head to support himself. He felt weak. Time to start getting some exercise. He stretched his creaky arms above his head and flexed the muscles along his spine. Madalene’s practiced eyes ran over his chest and down his legs. Had they been lovers? She glanced away discreetly. He didn’t think so. She pulled a chair up to his bedside and leaned in conspiratorially.

“Dominic, do you know who I am?”

“No.”

“I’m the reason you’re in Ireland. I sent you here on a mission, and I have reason to believe you’ve been more wildly successful than I would have dared to hope.” Madalene’s cultured voice was soft, but urgent.

“Radical experimentation?”

“Not really radical, darling. Just innovative.” She was clearly excited, nervous, and expensive.

“Are you the reason I’ve been moved to a private room?”

“Well, let’s just say that I’m not without influence here.”

“I didn’t think I was getting the usual treatment.”

“No. You’re getting the very best.”

“Thank you.”

“Not at all. If I’m right, and you’ve solved my little difficulty for me, you can become accustomed to no less.”

“I’m afraid I don’t remember the nature of your difficulty.”

“Really?” The woman leaned closer to Dominic. Her delicate perfume and face powder combined to gently waft the heady scent of pure wealth over Dominic. Whatever was on her mind was important. And secret.

“Dominic, you emailed almost a week before your… accident. In that letter you hinted that you’d made a critical discovery, but also that you were becoming alarmed by something. Since my goddaughter was sightseeing in the British Isles—she likes ruins, part of the whole Gothic thing, I imagine—since she was already here, I thought I’d pop over and, ah… encourage you. As soon as we touched down, I learned of your accident. I came as soon as I heard you were conscious.

“Last night, I stopped in, but you were asleep in the ICU. Apparently they’d been running tests all day. When they were moving you to this room, I picked up your bag to bring it with you, and a little pill bottle rolled out. I took a chance. You had used the word formulated in your email. I knew it was risky. I gave one to my goddaughter, and Dominic, she already seems to be improving. She’s outside right now, wearing a sweatshirt!” Madalene was trembling, and rested a thin, vein-spattered hand on his bed to steady herself. “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve seen her in anything but latex?”

A different and beautiful hand shakes the little brown pill bottle before his eyes, asks him something, and he’s trembling, too, aroused suddenly, hard beneath the thin hospital blanket.

“Dominic?” Madalene gripped his elbow, nails driving into skin. “Did you just remember something?”

“I think so.”

“What? What did you remember? About my goddaughter?”

“I don’t know.”

“Dominic, do you remember the pills?”

“I remember someone taking them. She was beautiful.”

“She is, but do you remember the formula?”

“No, but I’m sure I would have written that down. It would be on my laptop—”

Madalene pulled the bloodstained bag from a chair and placed it beside him in the bed.

“I know you need your rest, but please, Dominic darling, just as soon as you feel up to it, would you find out what you can about those pills—how many, how often, how long?”

He nodded.

“There were just two left. Is it possible that only one pill could be enough for…”

Dominic nodded again, and Madalene reached into her exquisitely tailored suit jacket to fish out a business card with another woman’s name. “Megan will be able to reach me wherever I am. Just tell her it’s you.” Madalene stood by the door, her shrewd eyes taking in the full length of Dominic’s body on the bed, and then every inch of his face. “I know quite a lot of your personal history,” she said in a voice raked clean of emotion. “Perhaps we can exchange notes? Your past in exchange for my goddaughter’s future?”

“Mrs. Wright—”

“Ms.”

“Ms. Wright, if I can do anything to help your goddaughter, I’d be happy to.”

“Just out of the goodness of your heart, I suppose.”

Dominic shrugged.

“Your heart was wiser when we first met.”

“I’d like to think it was always good.”

“Good is not innocent. Nor the other way around. But that’s the glory of your condition, isn’t it? You can think anything you’d like about who you used to be. You might be innocent and good. I could envy you that, my dear, if I weren’t already too old for new beginnings. Get well, Dr. O’Shaughnessy. I’ll pop in on you again after my tour.”

Ms. Wright pushed open the door, only to have it caught from the outside and held wide for her. A thin, graceful man entered and beamed benevolently at Dominic, who struggled to swing his legs over the side of the mechanical bed. Before he talked to anyone else, he wanted to stand up and try walking. Does every critical care patient become a confessor? People had been testing their secrets against him since he woke up, and this man, although he looked wise and gentle, an antiquated professor in tweeds and wool, also seemed about to do the same.

With soft hands, the man wordlessly lifted Dominic’s feet from the bed and slipped a slender arm beneath his shivering shoulders, supporting his weight easily. Intent on walking stiffly from his bed to the window, Dominic did not say anything or meet the man’s eyes until he had accomplished his self-assigned goal and sank, exhausted, into one of the elegant chairs that framed the window.

“I’m glad to see you upright, Dominic. You’re looking well.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s not the case,” Dominic chuckled. “I haven’t seen a mirror since I woke up, but I know I haven’t shaved, and I can feel the sutures in my scalp. I bet I look like Frankenstein’s monster.”

The older man smiled. “You were always too handsome for your own good, anyway.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know anything about you.”

“No, of course. I’m sorry. I’m Gaehod. You were staying with me before the accident.”

“But I’ve known you a long time?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry,” Dominic shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

“How are you feeling, Dominic?”

“Okay. I had my first bit of a memory just now, I think, talking to the woman who was here before you.”

“Ms. Wright? Really?”

“Do you know each other?”

“I know her by reputation, but I’ve been having a very interesting chat with her goddaughter. Madalene wasn’t pressing you for information was she?”

“No. But the doctors say that the first seventy-two hours are critical. If I’m going to recover my memory, it needs to happen in the next two days. The prognosis drops dramatically after that.”

“Have you considered that you might be better off without it?”

“Without my memory? No. Why?”

“You could choose to see your amnesia as a gift.”

“A gift from whom? What are you, a priest?”

“From an angel, actually. And no, I’m not a priest. Far from it. But I could restore your memory.”

“You’re a doctor?”

“I’m an innkeeper.”

“So how is it that all the medical experts are telling me it’s simply a matter of time, whether my brain heals or not, and you think you’ve got a miracle cure?”

“I can’t really explain that.”

“Are you who brought me here?”

“No.”

“But you know who did.” Dominic studied the man’s serene face.

“It doesn’t matter. She’s gone.”

“There’s an awful lot you’re not saying.”

The old man smiled. “And an awful lot I could. But here’s a simple and conventional bit of wisdom for you. You’ve kept a journal as long as I’ve known you, and that’s a long time. I’ve brought it from your room. Read through it. Once you’re done, if you have questions, I’ll be willing to say more. But let’s get you back to your bed. You look about to slide out of that chair.”

Too weak to nod more than once, Dominic allowed himself to be steered back to bed by the old man’s deceptively powerful hands, and was asleep before he had been fully lifted in.

———

Dominic closed the red leather diary and put it back into the bag that Dysart had bought to replace his bloodstained one. His laptop, likewise soaked, was with Trinity’s computer experts for data recovery. Dominic stayed standing, enjoying the increasing strength of his back and legs. He braced a hand on either side of the window and flexed his arms and chest.

“The doctors say you’re much improved,” commented Dysart from the doorway.

Dominic pulled his laptop bag off the chair and gestured to the professor, who took the proffered seat.

Dominic paced. “I feel great, but I can’t convince them to let me out for a jog.”

Dysart chuckled. “It’s still too soon. But you’re sounding like yourself again, D—impatient as ever.”

“Well, you would know that better than I. It’s weird. You have memories of me and I have—not only none of you—but not even any of me. You have more of me than I do.”

“Your memory may still come back, D. We haven’t crossed the seventy-two-hour threshold yet.”

“But we’re getting pretty damn close, aren’t we?” Dominic prowled the space between the bed and chairs. “When I was first waking up, you said you thought I might have been trying to forget something.”

“I don’t think your amnesia is psychosomatic, D.”

“I know, but I think you might have been right. My landlord brought me a diary he found in my room. It’s clear I kept most of my notes on my laptop, but there are hints. I talk about an experiment I want to conduct. What if I can’t remember anything now because what I tried worked? I think the man I was wouldn’t want his memory back. I think he—I mean I—would have chosen amnesia over memory.”

“I don’t know, D. I suppose it’s possible. But we haven’t exhausted your medical options. I’d still like to see what some high-dose intravenous thiamine might do. Would you take my recommendation, even over your doctor’s? He disagrees.”

“I trust you, but you’re not the only person from before my accident to tell me I wouldn’t want to get well.”

“Who else has been visiting you?” Dysart’s rheumy eyes narrowed.

“Nobody I know.”

The doctor flashed brown teeth at Dominic. “But of course, you don’t know me either, do you?”

“No. So, it’s hard to know who to trust.”

“Trust yourself.”

“My present self or my prior self? Hell, can a man even have a self without a memory? I want my memories back to feel whole again, but everything I know about my whole self says I wanted to be rid of my memories. I don’t know what to do, and time is running out.” Dominic dropped wearily into the chair across from Dysart.

“You may not remember yourself, but I know you well enough to know that nothing I—or anyone else—can say will sway you. You’ve always been one to make up your own mind.” The old man heaved himself to standing and patted Dominic’s shoulder.

“You don’t have to go,” Dominic said.

“I also know you well enough to know when you’re done talking. You’ll think it through and make your decision. Get some sleep, son. I’ll be back in the morning. Visiting hours are about over anyway. I’ll go before they throw me out again.”

Dominic nodded, looking out the hospital window at the river. By this time tomorrow, if he didn’t do anything, his memory would be gone. Perhaps he should just let it go.

———

Alyx is right. Getting what you want is not the death of desire any more than not getting it is. I beat my practiced wings hard through the hotel lobby’s vast spiraling space, up through the glass dome I broke four days ago taking Dominic to Dublin.

Alyx didn’t want to die. He just couldn’t figure out how to live. All his talent went into his voice. He had none left for living, or for happiness. I wish I could have helped him, but what can the Undead offer the living? I have no talent for happiness myself. Alyx, at least, had his suffering to call his own. Everything I have, I’ve stolen.

I’m halfway to Dublin before I know where I’m going. I will track down Gaehod tomorrow, but I want to see Dominic again now. Even his inert body would be better than this. I fly across the black country, over the cars and homes bleeding their light into a hungry dark that swallows even the brightest beams in time.

I find him standing in a new hospital room five floors above the ICU where I last saw him. He looks wonderful. Healthy and powerful again, in pajamas someone else has bought for him. He looks out the safety glass into the night. He cannot see me in it.

I wait until he sleeps. Then I climb into the metal-railed bed to rest my timeless body against his. He is warm and human under their white blankets, and he smells of mouthwash and dry ovens. I gaze into the thin, folded flesh of his flickering eyelids and kiss his slack mouth. He makes a low groan and turns his copper head away from me. I lift a sleep-heavy arm with its fine spray of freckles and tuck my invisible body against him. It is easier to feel him in imagination than to touch his senseless body beside me. I close my eyes and conjure him standing in the brilliant, gas- lit, mirrored ballroom. His lips are parted in my memory, as they are now, but I see them as they were then, open against a hunger he wars with himself to satisfy. I could stay like this forever, immortal and invisible, making love to him in vision, but he’s a restless sleeper.

“He moves like that, in his sleep, because it hurts him.”

It is Gaehod’s voice.

“You can see it on the monitors—the spike in heart rate, elevated body temp. And yet he fights to stay asleep.”

My winged back is to the door. I whisper his name, but Gaehod doesn’t reply. Can he hear me? Or see me? Is he right about Dominic? I touch his unshaven cheek with my invisible fingertips. He moans.

“You’re hurting him, Olivia.”

I leap to face him, full of rage. Standing before him, slight man that he is, my wings outspread, I am taller, stronger, invisible, immortal, and divine. But he can’t see me, and even if he could, I wouldn’t frighten him into telling me otherwise.

“You carried him here, didn’t you?”

Yes.

“I wonder if it occurred to you when you did, or when you came back tonight, that it would cost us the hotel?”

What? I’m psycasting to him, but I don’t know if he can hear me. He pauses between sentences, but he may be just thinking of what to say next and not listening to me at all.

“That was the flip side of the wager, my beautiful daughter. Dominic would kiss you in the garden, or you would come here with him. Myth lost, my child. I’m closing down the old home.”

“No! You can’t do that,” I shout, forgetting he can’t hear me. “How will he find me the next time? Where will I go to wait?” The slow, steady bleeps of Dominic’s monitors are the only thing in the air between us. Sleeping easily now, without me, his strong chest moves in rhythm with life. I fold my wings around my still naked body and push a piece of hair back from his handsome face. It leaves an angry red wheal where my finger brushed the skin of his brow, but he does not wince.

“You saved his life, bringing him here, Olivia. Just as he saved yours. Only a symbolic gesture could redeem an angel. Only modern medicine can save a doctor. What we believe in heals us.”

But what good is my redemption to me if I can no longer touch him?

“Once, you sought a loophole. You believed that if a mortal could both see and love you, it would allow you to return home, escape the world of the living. Now, full angel again, you want to remain material. You’re the reason he came back, I think, although I’m sure the doctors would disagree. They feel quite heroic, having saved him.”

What do you mean?

“Dominic embraced the empty space, my dear. He put his arms around the hole. In loving something he could not have, he met the pain that let him know he was alive. It was that pain that woke him.”

Did he ask for me?

“He woke up here. And you, my precious child, are going to have to come down and live in the real world now, if you want to be with him.”

That’s impossible. I wouldn’t even know how. And where? There’s no hotel left. No place for me.

“Dominic’s memories are gone.”

He doesn’t remember me!

“He’s found, at least, a way out of the suffering his curse has caused him, lifetime after lifetime. You should be happy for him.”

How can I be happy?

“You should be happy for yourself as well. You both attained what you came home to find. Dominic, his past forgotten, dwells in a new world that is completely explicable. Any abnormalities in memory he may experience going forward are attributable to a previous severe head trauma. Everything he has experienced since waking makes sense. And you, no longer shaped by the desire of others, live in an abstract realm where your every desire is gratified.”

I was happier with the wanting than the having.

“You always held yourself aloof from life anyway, my darling…”

It never seemed real to me! I could not feel. It was a temporary place of punishment.

“And now you are beyond it.”

I want to come back.

Gaehod walks past me to Dominic’s bed and stands over him, gazing tenderly down at the sleeping man. I think everyone must have been in love with Dominic—Alyx, Gaehod, me. Are they as oblivious to my love for him as I have been to theirs?

Look up if you can hear me, I psycast to him, but Gaehod doesn’t glance away from Dominic’s still face. I shout his name, but I know he cannot hear me.

I have longed for this—total freedom from the needs of others, and the constant gnawing of their eyes, but now, without them, I feel like the separated pieces of me are coming apart. I squeeze my eyes closed against the tears.

———

Gaehod’s study is dark and still, lifeless as my crypt. The constant fire he keeps on the low grate has burned out. Even the flames of Hell will die when we don’t feed them. I look around the desolate room. Without Gaehod’s pottering presence to tend them, the stacks of papers and books just look untidy. The room is haunted by him, his touch, his ordering on everything that, without him, dissolves into meaninglessness and chaos.

———

Sylvia stands over Ophelia in the Quarry lounge. Ophelia’s hands are bound. She is howling, and her flailing whips the ropes loose to fly around her like fantastic garlands, which Vivian silently captures and reties. Ophelia’s struggles rock the antique armchair to which they’ve lashed her delicate frame, and the clatter and roll of ball bearings and cogs make a mechanical hailstorm beneath her shriek. Alyx’s only slightly larger body, gaunt and ungainly in its brokenness, lies on one of the modular, backless sofas, empty and meaningless as Gaehod’s office.

“You had no right to take his life,” Vivian accuses our baby sister.

“That right is not yours to bestow and take away,” Ophelia snarls back.

“Enough!” Sylvia cries. “Carry her to her tomb and be done with it!”

“You have not that right either!” Ophelia chokes on rage and hysteria, hurling her bound body violently between the ornate arms of the carved chair. I am standing behind her, and although all my raging sisters turn their eyes in my direction, they cannot see me.

“We have the right to decide who is too broken to dwell among us.” Vivian’s voice is bright ice. “And you cannot fight us and win. So you must submit to judgment.”

Even for angels, it devolves to brute force.

“We find you guilty of murder—”

“Hypocrites!” Ophelia shouts. “We are all vampires!”

“—murder most foul.”

“You know what we are, but not what we may be. Odin and Jesus on trees! See how the branches are breaking…” Ophelia’s voice trails into a gurgling wail.

“She’s insane!” Sylvia barks. “We can’t try her like this.”

“Bullshit.” Vivian grips our keening sister by the jaw and sniffs her lips. “She’s stoned on Alyx. I used to hit that fucker when I wanted a buzz. It wouldn’t take much. And she was weak to begin with. And drained him. Put Ophelia in her crypt. Let her fade away. She’ll never be any saner.”

My sisters nod. “Sugar, sugar, sugar don’t you laugh. Driving is flying and the highway’s my whore.” Ophelia launches into song, writhing against the ropes that hold her. “Sugar, sugar, sugar take my breath. Your kisses are poison and I want to drink more.”

I will be a ministering angel, while she lies howling. I close my eyes to bless her.

———

The moist night air at the empty abbey insinuates its chill through my self-less self in a way even the cold of the grave could not. The spectral cows don’t see me, but unnerve me more than Gaehod’s empty office or Alyx’s corpse. My avenging sisters are carrying Ophelia to her grappling grave.

Above me, the Irish night seems endlessly heavier than it did when I walked with Dominic here. I circle the ruined building, trying to locate the glassless window he looked through to see a star as home, but the stones blend with the grass, and the walls with the night, and I’m afraid to walk along the boundary fence because of the cows. I must inhabit all this, partake of this, if I hope to love him.

It could destroy me.

I climb the bell tower’s spiraling stairs to stand at the peak of the roofless church. It cannot hold me. How can anything?

I flex my wings. They stretch like a fighter’s arms from the taut center of my back. Spread, they are so formed for flight that the light breeze tugs me into it. I lean my naked breasts into the air and raise my chin, my hollow throat stretched against the emptiness. My fingertips curl around the soft flesh of wing ridges, the muscles of my arm wrapping upward to lend the strength of bicep and belly, forearm and chest to the span of my extending wings.

I let slip. They beat. I am flying.

Flight is not a glide, but the muscular swim of a fluid body through living air. My every sinew and thought is lost to the tides of space riding me up and down, driving ascent and gravity, pulling and pushing me and the void I fly across. I leave Earth behind me. I am mastery, pure and potent. I am desire and denial. I am inner contradiction. I own my entire soul.

The Atlantic is cold and distant, swollen like a headache, folding wave on icy wave under me. I flew here once before, cocooned in metal, beside a prattling Persephone, winging our way home to Hell. Now I will make the unfathomable my own, and be forever both buoyed and anchored by its breaking within me.

I pike my body, pull tight my wings around me, and make a comet of my cloud-light flight.

I plummet.

My body rattles madly. I cannot hold my wings. I am knocked backwards, see the moon-drenched sky receding, then thrown over again, wings torn back, torn apart, ripped from me. Blood flies into the space behind. Air drives into my lungs so fast it drowns me. Falling out of control, out of grace—I am free. Falling.