and Falling, Fly

Ophelia rolls onto her delicate back, grinning at me. Her tiny body writhes on the velvet sofa as the long wail of spriek tears through her. Head back, mouth gaping, feeding edges quilled, my youngest sister screams until her lungs are emptied, airless. The next inhalation makes the spriek. Inaudibly high, it strikes as an almost-pain in the sockets of our jaws. This is the way we summon one another. She should not use it now, no matter how long I have been absent from our ancestral home.

“What the fuck?” The door of L’Otel Matillide’s Quarry bursts open behind me and Sylvia sweeps in, red hair flying, cheeks flushed in outrage. Seeing me arrests her. “Oh, hello, Ollie,” she purrs.

“I know, Sylvie. Sorry?” Contrite Ophelia perches on the couch edge, her kneesocks slipping, but Sylvia stays near the door, beside me—her long-straying sister. She studies me a moment, then wraps her porcelain, adamantine arms around me and kisses both my cheeks. Together Sylvia and I walk over to the bank of low velvet sofas and join our younger sisters. But Sylvia doesn’t glance my way again. Her steel eyes are plowing the one-way glass that separates our luxurious lounge from the sparsely furnished covert where our naked victims wait.

L’Otel Matillide’s Quarry is newer than New York’s and decorated in the same eclectic style that the old man uses elsewhere in his opulent hotel, a blend of modern high style with priceless antiques. No electricity or plastic. Hell is built to be self-sustaining.

“That’s the rule, even here. I must wait. Mine is not available.” Sylvia leans back against the overstuffed sofa arm and stretches her stocking-clad legs on the soft cushions. She turns to our tall, muscular sister whose short-cropped blond hair accentuates her ridiculously high cheekbones. “Vivian, why don’t you go ahead and pick one so they’ll let another up?”

Vivian re-cinches the shiny vinyl straps across her chest and rings for the quarrymaster without rising. A weird tension spikes the room, which I hadn’t sensed when it was just me and the younger girls. Sylvia, and her obvious impatience, has changed something.

Ophelia walks up to the glass. “I think you should pick the baby-blond fig,” she teases Vivian, tracing the outline of a very young, exquisitely pale girl who leans against the pane. “Or maybe I will take her”—Ophelia grinds her delicate features in a lewd wink toward me—“to spare her sweet pussy the shaving.”

“Vivian’s insistence on hairless women is well gossiped, if not fully understood,” Ophelia prattles in the gaping silence. She looks like a Victorian schoolmarm gone bad. “But I know her secret desire to incise just over the pubic mound so that what she has begun between the legs of her prey with her lips and tongue, she can continue at puncture. It is her endless quest to cause simultaneous blood release and orgasm.”

“Release the tall female, with hair like my sister’s,” Vivian tells him, running her tapered fingers through Sylvia’s Irish tresses. I have a moment of pity for the masses of luxuriant copper hair that will fall to the razor tonight.

Vivian flips her long, muscular legs over the sofa end and waggles an impatient steel stiletto. “I’m a traditionalist,” she says. “I hunt with seduction. I pull up alongside them in a car and offer them a ride. But they’re not allowed to get into a car; that’s against the rules. So they decline. When I get out, they’re so grateful for the company, for the offer of help, for the distraction when I touch them—”

Vivian’s fig walks, with as much dignity as is possible barefoot, to the trapdoor in the floor of the covert. She bends from the waist, deliberately exposing the split orange of her still-unshaven sex, and grasps the ring in the floor. Swinging it upward, she turns and descends backwards from our view, pulling the trapdoor closed.

“No,” Vivian admits. “I touch their minds, it’s true. I calm them, lull them. I offer the backseat. They are so unresisting. I serve them, worship breast and belly, undress yielding arms, and open unprotesting legs. They give themselves to me so completely. They never ask if I’m the hunter, never question the way their fate unfolds, since it feels good.” Vivian towers over Ophelia. Our baby sister slides sensuously to her feet, running rosy fingers up Vivian’s lean thighs to stand, tiny and innocent, before her.

“Yes, and you taste them, don’t you?” Ophelia whispers hoarsely, the olive velvet of her frilly frock brushing Vivian’s slick jet latex. “You taste the soft and salty, red and white, opening them and opening them again. How many times? How many have you done? Gotten both?”

“Together, at the same time? Never.” Vivian flexes her jaws and takes Ophelia by her slender throat. “They’ll come in my mouth before they feed me. But never in the moment that they do. I don’t know, maybe it’s the pain. Or the surprise.”

“No.” Vivian easily detaches herself from Ophelia, who crumples to the plush rug. “I cannot find one to combine her pleasure and mine, to be both sacrament and satisfied.” Vivian strides to the door in the back of the lounge, looking every bit the prowling dominatrix in her latex catsuit and metal heels.

“She wants to taste the pleasure in their blood, I think,” Ophelia whispers, sliding up the couch to me. She rests her ringletted head in my nerveless lap. “Already Vivie is scenting her prey,” she murmurs. “At this moment, only a thin wall separates her from the woman who might finally fulfill her.

“Stay here a while,” she whispers, her swollen lips puckering. “Stay and play with someone your own strength, who you don’t have to be careful not to break, someone who does not fear you.”

“Open your mouth,” Sylvia commands her. Ophelia nods meekly, the back of her head pressing hard into my thighs, and parts her lips, pink tongue touching her teeth tips, the edges erupting. Sylvia stretches her jaws and drops her mouth over Ophelia’s to grind her razor points to lethal sharpness.

“Fetch the largest man in there,” Sylvia barks at the quarrymaster, and drags the trembling Ophelia to her feet. “Go claim your fig and never spriek in this place again.” Her voice is a cruel whisper. She glares into Ophelia’s liquid eyes, then throws her at the door in the back wall and sits down hard beside me.

“Ophelia will take the strongest man in the tank,” Sylvia tells me as our chastened baby sister retreats through the rear door, “and still be fined for damages.”

I say nothing, and together we—Hell’s two senior citizens—stare into the one-way glass at the four remaining figs in the covert. The downy blonde keeps glancing at her bare wrist, anxiously.

“Are you well, Ollie?” Sylvia reclines into the sofa’s soft cushions. In a symphony of coursing sinews, the man who will feed Ophelia tonight sits up straight in response to his summons.

“Ophelia wants to give up control, or have it wrested from her,” Sylvia says, her lilting Irish voice expressionless. “She wants to be dominated, but she is an angel, too powerful for mortals to claim. So she breaks them.”

“Thou shalt not,” Sylvia mimics our father, “desire to know God biblically.” I arch an eyebrow in her direction, but she’s still staring into the covert. The fringes of her red hair graze the delicate bow of her collarbones, and her tailored black dress sets off the perfect whiteness of her marble flesh.

A sly smile parts her pale lips. “You should have seen His face,” she intones, picking up our father’s story in his voice, scrubbed of all but the faintest traces of Eastern Europe.

“All aflame!” I join in, and together we recite, “your mother and I—angels!—cast out to bear you, like Eve’s children, in suffering, outside the gates of Eden.”

“Oy, the suffering!” Sylvie puts in for Mother. “And they—given dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creeping thing that crawls upon the earth. And you, angel-born, cannot plant vineyards and eat their fruit, or take cup and drink.”

“Ah—” Sylvia sits bolt upright, pointing to the trapdoor in the floor of the covert. It rises and she leans forward in hungry anticipation. The sight of blond hair further excites her, but she sags into the couch again. A rippling muscular Adonis emerges, and begins to pace the covert.

Sylvie’s fig is young and appealing, but unremarkable except for the rather shocking paleness of her nipples and the defiant tilt of her pointed chin. She makes a slow parade around the covert. She’s tall, with the sort of ridiculous long legs you only see on fashion models and teenagers. She knows who hunts her, and she knows she is already there.

Sylvia watches her haughty fig circle, enthralled. “I always drank full-tooth. Even before we started building quarries and paying our figs to let us. But this girl is different. The dreams I see in her blood are so vivid, so rich.”

“I know. And that would ruin it. I found her pole-dancing in London and brought her here, and everything I’ve done for ethical consumerism, setting up the Quarries, starting the initiatives and the committee, all of it has been for this—for her.” Sylvia is rigid, watching her.

The girl in the aquarium freezes, listening, then walks back to the trapdoor. “I let her see me sometimes, as she slips away.” Sylvia slides the brass key around its fine chain clockwise on her wrist until it hits the lock, then counterclockwise away from it and back again and again. She doesn’t meet my eyes. “We’re not supposed to, I know. But, Olivia, do you think she’s conscious enough then to remember my face? Do you think she maybe wonders about me during her recoup days?”

“I think about her constantly in the days between. I plan our hunts, dream her flavor, imagine her life. She is always crawling over my thoughts.” Sylvia’s haunted eyes meet mine. “She consumes me,” she whispers. Her fig pulls back the trapdoor and descends from view.

Alone in the Quarry, I press my body against the covert’s cool glass. Inches away from me, a nubile girl twists her coiled hair around a fragile ebony finger, but no sound or scent of her reaches me. So very young and almost wild with suppressed anxiety, she stands up and sits back down. She knows time is passing, but she, of course, is not allowed a watch. The covert, with its waiting room magazines and upholstered chairs, has no clock. Vampiric altruism extended only to our own comfort.

Another man climbs the stairs into the covert, the replacement for the fig Ophelia now hunts. The illusion of clothing clings to his sculpted body, ruddy tan except across the luminous white flesh of his ass where wicked red wheals stand in narrow strips. He has been whipped recently and sits gingerly. The Quarry recruits figs from Dublin and Cork, even Belfast, and pays them very well, but this man, slender and hard, and lithe as a flamenco dancer, is here for his own pleasure. He wants to be hunted. He is hoping to be attacked in the night.

I can’t help him. Nor any of them waiting, in dread or anticipation. Even the figs who are not summoned have sold, at the very least, their peace for tonight. I have not sharpened my quills in so long that to feed full-tooth now would risk killing. I leave the Quarry and return to the public rooms of Pandemonium, rejoining those mortals who are cursed by only the will of God, and not their own as well.

Dominic fished in his jacket pocket for his room key to the rasping accompaniment of Alyx’s tortured breathing. The poor bastard had followed him up the winding central hall from the lobby to the second floor and down one of the radiating corridors to this familiar doorway. It hadn’t been a long walk, but it had exhausted Alyx, and he leaned woozily against the wall while Dominic flipped past the shiny, flimsy keys for his town house, office, and lab, to the dull iron key he’d thought of as merely decorative for years. He slotted it into the ornate lock and pushed the door open.

The room was unchanged, unused since he’d left it. But it was tidy, dustless, and the potted plants had thrived. Dominic put his laptop bag down on the bedside table, noting an aging red leather diary strategically positioned there. Alyx collapsed on the bed, a cascade of ball bearings harvesting the energy of his fall and noiselessly shunting it down through the floor. The hinges on the door, the feet of the desk chair, were all the same, rigged to recycle the momentum of every human motion. Alyx reached into the filthy pocket of his bathrobe and extracted a pair of blue lenses, which he began to switch with the bronze ones in his complicated goggles. Dominic turned his attention to the computer terminal—the only change in the room since he’d left it.

An erratic hybrid of modern science and timeless materials, the monitor used the latest (and sickly expensive) display technology. Dominic whistled between his teeth. He needed to see what that looked like lit up. He felt around the brass base for a power button and pressed it. A mechanical drone muttered as the machine’s small wooden fan blades spun up.

He had forgotten how gracious this old room was. He had furnished his Cambridge town house himself, and lived in it every day since he’d bought it, but it still felt less homelike than this strange, underground hotel room that had stood empty for the last nine years. Dominic shrugged and opened the closet. There, looking fresh out of the box, were a pair of his favorite running shoes. He chuckled and picked them up.

Alyx rolled his rheumy eyes. “I’m losing confidence in your ability to solve anything, Doc. I bet you go to the gym—big, healthy guy like you?” Dominic nodded curtly, pulling sweatpants and a T-shirt from the heavy metal-strapped dresser drawer. “But there’re no weights in your room here, right? No fancy dress-up clothes in your closet either I bet. Why? ’Cause you wear that shit, but it’s not who you are.”

“Yup. You don’t get stuff here, you get props. That new vampire chick we saw today? She’ll have a closet full of latex. Viv’s got whips and ball gags. Pandora gets a row of jars. Whatever.”

“God!” Dominic exclaimed, “that’s just unconscionable. I was hoping I could work with him to make some improvements here, help some people, but he’s poisoning his so-called children. He makes a big show of how much he loves us, and then supplies us with exactly what we need to destroy ourselves. This is bullshit. I came here to do research. I came here—”

Alyx shrugged. “I dunno. You ask him. That fucker can mainline the memestream. Whatever he needs, he puts it out there, and we all just breathe it in. Might have been a movie that summoned you, or a song. It doesn’t matter. You were walking around on the surface, then before you knew what happened, bam! you’re in Hell.”

“Look, Alyx, I don’t know what Gaehod has told you about alcoholism being a symptom of a deeper spiritual problem, but it’s bullshit. What the hell difference does it make whether it’s demons or drugs that’s possessing you? You still don’t belong to yourself. Something else owns you, and that’s no way to live.”

“You sound like Gaehod. ‘Alyx, stop giving your power away.’ But maybe it’s just my brain chemistry, right?” Alyx adjusted his blue-tinted lenses over his blood-tinged eyes. “Like you were talking about. Maybe there’s something screwed up in my head that makes me this way. Maybe you’ve got some pills—”

“You followed me up looking for drugs?” Dominic towered over the wreck in his bed, grinding his fingers into his palms to keep from grabbing Alyx by his sticky bathroom lapels and pitching him out of his room. “You think I’m going to write you a prescription?”

“I don’t give a shit. Whatever you wanna try on me, I’m game. Drugs, scans, tests—bring it on. I’m your goddamn guinea pig. You can’t fuck me up any more than I am. If there’s a chance, man. If you can figure it out . . .”

Dominic turned away, investigating his computer terminal to save Alyx the humiliation of being seen so close to tears. The warm yellow light of the monitor undulated softly, and Dominic picked up the slender metal pen beside it and touched the screen. A swirl of liquid color opened from the contact point and letters materialized from the patternless soup. {Hello, Dominic. Login, please.} He looked around for some other input device.

Dominic untied a satin bow and unrolled a thick velvet rectangle with letters painted on the fabric in gold. He placed it on the desk before the monitor and sank his wrists into the pillowy softness. He touched his fingertips to yielding bubbles beneath the letters and typed in his birth date.

“Sleep paralysis,” Dominic explained. “You’re awake but you can’t move. It happens sometimes coming out of REM sleep. You probably just dozed off without knowing it.”

“I don’t fucking doze off. Told you already. You can’t hear much but your own theories, eh? I don’t sleep. At all. It’s why I’m following you around like Hell’s fucking puppy dog. I want you to help me. I’ve taken so much shit, coke, meth, ket—whatever was around to keep me going—that my fucking body has forgotten how to sleep. Or believes I don’t need sleep. Or some stupid shit. I have to have my nightmares awake.”

Dominic turned back to the beautiful monitor. A photo of eight bundled packets, some of parchment, some scrolls, some tanned skin, filled the screen. Dominic shuddered and toggled the monitor off. He turned for the bedside diary just in time to catch Alyx as he stumbled.

“On what! There’s nothing left. Nothing holds still.” Alyx reeled wildly, fists flailing at the air. Dominic allowed him to land a punch against his ribs to save his dignity. Then he bent from the waist, picked Alyx up, carried him to the bed, and dumped him on it. “You have to change what you’re doing. Nothing else, no drugs, no operation, nothing is going to make it better if you don’t change what you do.”

“Let’s get drunk tonight.” Alyx pulled the halves of his bathrobe together and pushed himself up against Dominic’s pillows. “The vamps hang out at Pandemonium most nights, and I know you’d like to meet that new gal. She’s gotta be one of them. There’s this other one, Vivian, you gotta see her. Smokin’ hot. Wears all this leather and bondage gear. Now that’s a woman who could make a man behave.”

Dominic held the door open for Alyx, who slouched through it. “I’ll see you tonight,” he said. “We’ll go look for Vivie and the new girl downstairs.” He gave Dominic a wicked grin. “When you’re done with your exercise in redundancy.”

Pandemonium is crammed with the meat of sex, the bone and blood of human hunger. It pulses with the endlessly throbbing, indifferent drone of every nightclub in every city. The smell of blood and desire rub against my spine, vibrating with the painless, rageless music. Beautiful bodies flow around the bar in delicious bloody excess, pumping dance and talk. They stand in clots, or bind one to another in corpuscular pairs and trios, men and women, men and men, homocytes and heterocytes. I slip into the stream like nicotine.

“Hiya, honey.” A cocoa-skinned Amazon dances up to me. Her hair spirals in fat dreads across her muscular shoulders, and her low-slung jeans bump my hip bone. I should have keened my quills on Sylvia’s before she went to take her blood communion. Soon my edges will be too dull even to make the tiny cuts that go unnoticed, but tonight, my surgically fine nails slid up slender brown arms and draw the sweet, sweat-tinged droplets so subtly that the dancer, focused where our belt buckles grind, does not feel their acute caress.

Her blood is slick. She has taken something. Another taste will tell me what. She turns me by the waist, grinding my compliant hips against her own, the forks of our legs spread like the webbing of fingers. Her long black lashes veil eyes that have not met mine. They could be brown or green. Her hair falls over her throat. I could push it back and kiss her neck, sample the slickness of pot or pills. Hell, I could puncture her and strike, feed properly and full, tear her supple body open with my dull quills. It will be the only way I have left, if I don’t keen them the next time I’m with my sisters. I’ll come back for her tomorrow night. Tonight, I’m already bored.

But over the dancer’s dark, broad shoulder, I catch an intriguing glimpse of a face I recognize from the airport magazine’s “rock stars in rehab” cover. He’s wearing goggles and a filthy bathrobe belted with an orange extension cord. One scarred arm twists upward to drape across the muscular shoulder of the man I saw today in Hell’s front parlor. He shrugs the rock star’s frail arm off and nods to me. Do I know him? Even in the dark club, his health and strength make a jarring contrast to the withered singer. Only his eyes betray his place here, among the damned. He has lived and died and been reborn, lifetime after lifetime. In childhood, these cursed Reborn forget, but as adolescence dawns, their memories of every incarnation awaken. Poor bastards. I think it’s worse than being undead.

The dancer’s grip on my waist tightens. Only her hips are moving now, and no longer to the tuneless music pulsing through us. Her eyes are not closed, but clamped, her hips not driving, but driven. A deep blood red seeps under her earthy skin. Brown stone nipples tent the fabric of her shirt. Perhaps, like my sister Vivian, I could possess the pleasure of mortals, summon their ecstasies, and command their orgasms. I pluck at a dark pebble with my hard fingers. The dancer’s startled cry is drowned in the torrent of music. But in her moment of wild-eyed surprise, I learn that they are green. She plunges below the surface again, pushing her body against mine. Her distended nipple sprouts hard between my twisting fingers.

I can feel the Reborn watching me, and find him more interesting than the tuneless dancer. The faces of the Reborn change lifetime to lifetime, but mine, of course, is unchanging over millennia. If he knew me once, he will know me still, but I have seen too many for too long. Sometimes they all run red together. Without tightening or loosening the crush of my fingers, I begin to wind the fleshy bulb of the dancer’s breast, left and right. Her body surges against my stillness. If angelic flesh could bruise, her grip would hurt me, but she is oblivious to my pain or lack of it, mindless of me except where her fork grinds against my thigh. If I were as open as she, would this arouse me? Would we pleasure one another with the throbbing music in the pulsing crowd, our sex and hearts beating rhythm?

But if I try to touch my scarlet lips to hers, the dancer will reject me. I could drop my hungry mouth to the generous rise of breast. That I would not be denied. She holds her breath, releasing it in sudden gasps. Her hips grind against me. The Reborn’s eyes have moved on. The dancer starts to shudder. I look into her face, suffused with heat and color, with blood, with life. Her mouth opens like Ophelia’s in spriek, but silent in orgasm. In its clutches, her graceful body contorts. Death agonies look the same and pass as quickly. And both are replaced with the same annihilated vacancy.

Alone again on the throbbing dance floor, I watch her rippling and scarless back stagger into the beating red stream of the living. Then I sense him. Behind me, coming closer, alone now, eyes on me. I wait, but he hesitates, a blockage in the artery that feeds the dance floor. I wind my serpentine way through the press of bodies toward the exit. He will follow. I slip through the doors. I could vanish now.

“Never hunt a hunter,” I whisper low against the pulsing warmth of his throat. Motionless on the threshold, I hold the door open and his hard body imprisoned against mine. He tries to disentangle himself and, rather than make the point that my one arm could restrain him, I release both door and man, and stride away.

“No, but I registered tonight. ‘Olivia’ was the newest name above mine.” He shrugs, lifting muscular shoulders. “I guessed.” He wears a buttoned shirt and a tie over his military torso, but he has an artist’s lips. What a strange jigsaw.

Cheeky! The cursed are usually obedient. What makes this Reborn bold? I grace him with my most seductive smile and turn into one of the ground-floor entrances to the spiral hall that curls upward to the glass skylight thirteen stories over our heads.

He laughs, and I find I like the sound. It seems to come from deep in his broad chest, rusty perhaps, but rich. A frown scores the strong planes of his face. “But you said I can’t guess.” He could be ferocious, but he’s playing.

We are nearing the first door in the hallway. I have access all the way up, but he will not, so I lean my elbows on the railing and look down over the floor of the Grand Reception Hall of the Hotel of the Damned.

How strange to say it, to hear the words hang in the air between me and a mortal man without the taste of terror in my throat or his blood in my memory—to speak the truth without hope of salvation, or fear of failure.

He stands beside me, his large hands wrapped loosely around the railing. His index and pinky fingers curl toward the middle of his hand, accustomed to tucking into fists, but the flesh is dappled and smooth, dusted with fine copper hair that glints in the dim light of the corridor. I glimpse tattoo blue beneath the cuff and wonder how he’s marked his body. Do the rich blue lines run over his hard chest, down his bicep and across the elbow of his other arm?

“I drew it on myself with Sharpie when I was seventeen,” he answers my exploring eyes, “and walked to the tattoo place. It was part of a pre-Roman British mania I was going through at the time.”

He seems as ancient as I am. Most of the Reborn never leave the hotel, once they remember their way back. I understand their unwillingness to experience yet again the heartbreak of living, dying, loving, and parting, knowing what will happen, having lived it all before. But he is old for reawakening, and has just today checked in.

Although they have not changed in size or shape, I am keenly aware of my high breasts and perfect skin. I turn to him, softening my body and my smile. “Why were you and your buddy stalking me in the club? It doesn’t look like your kind of place,” I tease him.

“Did you?” I steal a peek at him, his handsome head lowered, eyes down. He looks weary, but his profile is strong. I could love that face with its fierce red brows and hard jaw, or at least love to taste it.

“Yeah.” Earnest eyes meet mine. I slide a hand into the crook of his elbow and snuggle up against the mortal warmth of his muscular arm. I match my steps to his when we start walking again.

“Let me guess,” I tease. “You were stalking me because you’ve always had fantasies about vampires. You want to offer yourself to me, want to feel me strike into your lovely throat with my wicked fangs and feed.”

“I’ve got it! You want me to turn you, to make you immortal. I can’t do that, you know. Hate to disappoint a fan, but it’s just legend—contagion by the Other. Vampires are born, not made. My sisters and I are all Desire’s fallen angels. There are no more up there to come tumbling down. Sorry, kiddo.”

“Nope.” He grins. “I’m not looking for immortality, although that would pose an interesting challenge to the so-called curse of being reborn, wouldn’t it?”

I touch the metal plate beside the doors and they swing open on silent pneumatic hinges. Dominic walks beside me through them. “I came back here, to Gaehod’s hotel, because I have spent the last several thousand years searching for a way out, and I’m tired. I had hoped that in mankind I might find a key to my own salvation. I thought—in God’s divine do-over after his creation of angels didn’t work out as planned—I might discover my own second chance. I believed humanity might save the angels. But you can’t. I’ve come back here to become undead on the inside, too, to give up futile hope, and with it, suffering.”

He’s quiet a while, then turns his clear, deep eyes on me. He looks like I must when I scent for desire or fear the first time. “What if hope is not futile?” he asks me.

Bending to match his height to mine, he takes my shoulders in his large hands. His brilliant blue eyes blaze with surprising passion. “I believe I can help you,” he says.

“Will you let me try?” He is fighting for composure, trying not to frighten me with his urgency, but the intensity of his beautiful face stirs something in me. Sincerity is a rare delicacy on the twisted, ironic lips of the twenty-first century. My deep teeth throb to taste it.

His lips do not move when mine brush them, so I kiss him again, more softly—slowly—the very lightness of my kiss a provocation. And it works. His hands grasp my shoulders to pull my yielding body against his powerful frame. The immobile strength of his chest is trembling, and he takes my lips in his, once and hard. Under his demanding mouth, mine opens to take his seeking tongue within. The smell of his pure masculine desire drenches me. Deep emptiness pulses in my gums.

His hands are hard on my shoulders. His brilliant eyes have mine again. “We can’t do this,” he says, voice choked. “I can’t do this. I want to help you. I really do. And I think I can. But I can’t get involved with you personally if I’m going to be working with you professionally. It’s unethical. It’s a bad idea. It’s . . . it just doesn’t work.”

My kiss has rattled him, and his confusion and desire spread from his lips to me. I, who cannot feel pain or pleasure . . . I am tasting something new. I turn and walk away, but he falls into step easily beside me. We walk a long time in silence, spiraling up.

“Olivia, I’m a medical doctor. I work with brain chemistry and medicines. I believe I can help you escape the hell you’re in. There are treatments, therapies. You could get well, be happy. Live a normal life. I want to offer you the hope that things can get better.”

I round on him, furious. “I don’t want your hope! I came back here today with my last hope. Tonight, I realized that even my cynical sisters quest helplessly after something. Even they cannot be free from the tyrannies of hope. Hope is the unthinking, unseeing master of unending hell. I have my own. Don’t offer me yours!”

Dominic’s voice is meltingly tender. “What if you’re right? What if hope is the master of Hell? What if something in your own mind, in your own hopes, or fears, or ideas, is the cause of your suffering? What if you are not damned?”

My laugh is almost a howl. “I take no pleasure in food, but I still eat,” I tell him. “I have no joy in life, but I live. Does that sound like an ordinary woman? I am the Undead. The Hollow. I am Numb. I am the sacred, stuffed into the profane. My body, made like yours of vile mud and ash, cannot contain all of who I am, and yet I am nothing at all. I am timeless, spaceless, crammed into time and space. I am the unspeakable made into a single word. I am a true violation of Truth.”

He dares not look at me. “I used to feel that way.” His voice is low with the weight of things never before said. “When I was a kid, I started having dreams of women. Most boys do, about that age, but mine were of women I had whole stories for. From all over history. The first time I had sex, I almost went out of my head. Not just the way it felt, but the images I saw—other faces, other beds, whole lifetimes.”

“For a while, the memories came flooding back so fast I couldn’t keep anything straight,” he tells me. “Then I remembered this place, the hotel, coming here in other lifetimes, and how to find it again. I came back. Here, there are diaries that look to be hundreds of years old, of lives that I remember. I remember my children, how much I loved them, how they died in front of me or watched me die. I tried to track the lineage of one son born before the Second World War, but I was black, and the records are bad. I felt”—he gropes for an unfamiliar word—“helpless.”

“But they aren’t memories,” he continues, so determined he sounds angry. “They’re delusions that behave like memories. Seizures in the memory parts of my brain. I’m learning to stop them. I’m getting close to a treatment.”

“No, it’s more than that. I no longer accept the idea that I’m cursed. It’s ridiculous. I was a child and I made up a story. You probably did something similar. I universalized my experience. Comprehending my mortality changed me, that’s all.”

“Ah, Mammon. He’s an uncle of mine.” I pull my hands away and walk the edge of the balcony. I can sense his eyes on me. His solitary shadow stains the wall across from us.

I turn to him. He looks like a warrior—proud, beautiful, powerfully built, straight, and hard. I could break him for fun. “No man serves a god for its own sake, only for what it might do for him,” I tell him. “You serve science with a zealot’s prayer for your own salvation.”

“I take it you are uninterested in participating in my research?” he says, still not looking at me. The masculinity of his beauty is exquisite—strong but not blunt, mortal but unshielded, and the contradiction pins me with fascination’s fine spines. They prick like desire smells.

“I could bite my lip and kiss you,” I whisper, conforming my soft body to the unyielding length of his spine, “and in my angelic blood you would taste real freedom. I could drink from your mouth without hurting you, and feed all my hungers while I strengthen yours.” I slide my hands along his strong shoulders and press myself onto tiptoe to bring my succulent lips to his ear.

But I do not kiss the tiny pulsing place beneath it. “For days after, you will see more clearly, think more swiftly, be stronger physically and less prone to disease.” He wets his lips with his tongue and swallows hard. “Come,” I whisper to him, “claim what you desire.”