6
I DON’T WANT TO SEE
“Are guardian angels real? Is that ridiculous, underfed, vampirewannabe Olivia mine?”
“I would not expect to find a guardian angel in Hell, Dominic. Would you?”
“No, of course not.” Dominic glowered at Gaehod across the old man’s cluttered study. “Why would they be where you’d actually need them?”
Gaehod threaded a path through teetering stalagmites of paper and books. “How is Olivia?” he asked.
“She’s nuts.”
“Is that your clinical diagnosis, Doctor?” The old man lifted a slippery stack of books, papers, and brass fittings from a faded pink armchair. “Have a seat, Dominic. I’ll make tea.”
“I’ll stand, thank you.”
“A fellow brought me a nice selection of green teas as a gift last month.” Gaehod slipped through a cityscape of rolled maps from the chair to the shelves that flanked a wide-open stone hearth. “I had a new one on Wednesday. I really liked it.” He held a desiccated green tangle of leaves up for Dominic’s inspection before dropping it into a small black clay teapot. “It is a sea creature, I think.”
It did look rather like a miniature green dehydrated squid, and wrung a reluctant smile from Dominic’s angry mouth.
“I was surprised that you chose the paper volume to resume your writing here,” the graceful old man said. Dominic nodded. He’d been right not to trust the confidentially of the networked machines.
Gaehod balanced the teapot and two handleless mugs on a tray. “I understand you have found an admirer in our resident celebrity.”
“Alyx?” Dominic stepped over the stacks and towers to take the tray from the old man.
“Thank you, Dominic. My . . . ah, vertical filing system may allow my work to reach great heights”—he winked—“but it’s rather a nuisance for the housekeeper. I must make my own tea.”
Dominic stood absurdly, in the belly of the lunatic hotel, holding the tea tray. He fought the urge to hurl it, with its pot and mugs, across the room while the innkeeper puttered, clearing a spot for it on his desk. “I understand you stock his room with liquor,” he said. “How do you justify that? Alyx is drinking himself to death.”
“So it would seem.” Gaehod took the tray from Dominic and placed it carefully in the empty space.
“And you don’t intend to do anything about that, do you?”
“I intend to let it break my heart.”
Seated, Gaehod looked so small and so deeply forlorn that Dominic’s outrage seemed tawdry beside it. He sat down across from the old man in the flattened pink armchair.
“Alyx thinks you bring us all here, you know,” he said at last. “He thinks you summon us.”
As if recalled from a distance by Dominic’s words, the old man turned his drifting attention from the fire to the teakettle hanging over it. “I write letters, little more,” he said. He reached through the glowing copper tubing that snaked through the fireplace and grate. He raised the steam-capture cap from the nose of the kettle and poured a stream of boiling water into the pot. “Of course, I did write to you,” he added, brightening. “And here you are.”
“You never wrote to me,” Dominic corrected the old man.
“I did, actually.” Gaehod cast about absently and selected a paper from one of the delicate, swaying stacks. “Ah, yes. Here it is.” He handed a letter to Dominic.
“But you didn’t mail it . . .” Dominic said, scanning the letter.
My darling ones, Reborn and Undead, Damned, Cursed, and Misbegotten—Hell calls her absent children home. Let us meet in general congress at L’Otel Matillide this April to debate whether, in the dawn of this new millennium, we face the twilight of demons. Are we grown obsolete? Shall Hell, at last, disband?
The weak have inherited the earth, but it was not always so. When angels fell, they landed here and, clothed in flesh, walked the land because they could not fly. But Man was given his dominion, drowning Knowledge in his blood, while Desire, sweet vampires, grew fangs and fed upon him. Undead, come home!
In Myth, my Titan children are cursed for the gifts they gave. Some, for fire, burn lifetimes in darkness, creating what none will see, song without listener, image without eye. Others suffer, for a greater gift, through remembered incarnations, the simple agony of love and loss repeating. I call these Reborn home!
Be thou summoned, my children, two champions to do battle for the fate of Hell. Let us gather our ancient, scattered tribes to fashion for ourselves the gift denied us. Shall we close our gate? Shall we steal our destiny? Come home and make your voices heard. Only here can you speak truth, for home is the origin of sin. De profundis, G.
Dominic glanced up, mouth agape. “You’re thinking of closing the hotel?”
“You’ll join me for a cup of tea, I hope. I’m afraid I have little else to offer. I no longer drink wine.” The old man filled the mugs with steaming liquid.
“Gaehod, are you seriously considering putting an end to this?”
“I keep asking myself, do we really need it anymore? It’s beginning to seem redundant of the surface world.”
“Hell is obsolete?”
“You have to wonder, don’t you, when you can buy a pentagram at your local Galleria? I understand that vampires even have their own TV shows nowadays. Witches advertise for coven-mates on the Internet. It’s harrowing.” The old man reached across his chaotic desk to hand Dominic a mug, golden nails glinting, and sat down again as though the effort to bridge the desk had exhausted him. “Who knows?” he sighed. “Perhaps even my secrets might see the light one day.”
Dominic didn’t need his years of psychiatric training to comprehend the terrible pain of the man beside him, despite his light tone.
“What do you think, Dominic? Without social ostracism and religious persecution to drive us underground, do the damned still need this?”
“We still have shame.”
“Oh?”
“I meet other—” Dominic hesitated. “I meet other what you would call ‘cursed’ souls sometimes. We all bear the same mark.”
“Shame?”
“Yes. That inexpressible sense that something fundamental is wrong with us—that we are somehow secretly and unknowably flawed.” Dominic took a cautious sip from his warm mug. The tea was vaguely floral, but not at all sweet. The old man sat silent, not touching his cup. “But it’s vampire hunters now, actually,” Dominic said slyly.
“What?”
“The ones with the TV show. ‘Slayers,’ they called them.”
“Really?” The old man rewarded Dominic with a faint smile. “I should expect a very brief program. Slayer hunts vampire. Slayer dies.”
“She usually does okay, actually.”
Gaehod chuckled. “How very reassuring. Perhaps there is still some fear left then, some resistance to the heroic damned?”
“I think so.” Dominic drained his little mug and gazed into it moodily. “Gaehod,” he said at last, “they really are not heroic, you know. They’re sick, most of them, and in pain. I know you can understand that—how much pain they’re in. Maybe, if you stop romanticizing the damned, you can help them. Otherwise, we’re no better than St. Paul down here. Suffering isn’t enough for salvation.”
“And do you believe you know what is, Dominic?”
“I believe I have an obligation to try and understand. To do what I can to help relieve suffering.”
“Yes,” Gaehod whispered. “It’s hard to witness suffering without desiring those things.” Gaehod refilled Dominic’s mug. “I’ll introduce you to one of Olivia’s lovely sisters after lunch.”
Dominic shrugged.
“You need to collect subjects for your research, and I promised to help you. How do you like the tea?”
“It’s nice. The leaves are tied together, aren’t they? That’s what you were showing me. That’s why you don’t have to strain it from the pot.”
“More flower than cephalopod I suppose.” The old man smiled at Dominic with a fondness so obvious it made him squirm. “Olivia should be joining us shortly.”
Dominic’s mind instantly replayed the striking spiral of beautiful woman through the lobby’s floor. His rebellious body reeled though a swifter but less orderly replay of her lips closing over his. He had resolved against enrolling her in his study. She would make a poor subject.
Dominic drained the teacup and stood. “I’d like to talk with you more about closing the hotel, Gaehod. But it’s lunchtime and I’m starving.”
“She’s very beautiful, don’t you think?”
Dominic slung his laptop bag over his shoulder and scanned the floor for a path to the door. “Olivia? Yes. She’s very beautiful.”
“You say that without pleasure.”
“I don’t trust beautiful women.” Dominic lifted one of the lobby’s small, mechanical trays from the floor and replaced it, wheels up, on the seat of the armchair he’d just vacated. He had had less trouble walking in.
“Why is that?” Gaehod asked.
“Oh I don’t know, something to do with the absurdity of today’s dieting beauties who spend half their lives in the gym trying to sculpt a body like their foremothers had when necessity required that they work in the fields and suffer long and hard for just enough to eat.” Dominic took several more steps toward the door, but had to stop again and shift a display case filled with glass beads from his path.
“I like looking at her.” Gaehod smiled.
“I imagine she enjoys that.”
“I hope so. I do make a point of trying to see her.”
“She’s hard to miss. She really plays it up too, the pale skin and black hair, the tight clothes. She’s the kind of woman who likes to stand out in a crowd, who wants men looking at her. I’ll bet she spends a lot of time looking at herself, too.”
“No, I don’t think so.” Gaehod shook his graying head solemnly.
“Oh, don’t give me that crap about vampires and mirrors. I saw her reflection in the dome of the roof last night.”
“Yes, but could she?”
Dominic seized the door handle and turned back to the old man. Despite his crisp shirt front and buttoned-up vest, Gaehod looked small and tired amidst the clinking mechanisms of energy capture and the towering stacks of books. “You save everything, don’t you?” he said.
“I do try. I’ll come by your room after lunch and we’ll go down to the gardens. Do you know your way to the kitchens?”
“No,” Dominic said opening the door, “but I’m a smart guy. I’ll figure it out.”
I knock on the old man’s door, and a young man answers. Fuck, this Reborn is everywhere. His fearless blue eyes pierce mine. One thundering heartbeat drains the color from beneath his copper-stubbled face and fills the narrow space between us with the leafy scent of his desire. He grits his jaw against it.
“Please come in, Olivia,” he says stiffly. “I was just leaving.”
There is so much crap spread over Gaehod’s floor that I can’t walk past Dominic into the inviting firelight and uncomforting chairs, but I won’t step back into the hall to let him pass. He closes his warrior’s eyes against my sinuous body sliding across his immobile chest and thighs, squeezing past him into the room.
“Olivia!” The sharpness of the old man’s greeting startles me and I trip over a mound of leather-bound, gold-edged books. Dominic reaches swiftly and steadies me, hard hands on my waist, faster than I knew I was tripping. It would have been an ideal opportunity, had I been thinking, to taste him with a quilled nail against his strong wrist.
But he disentangles himself easily and is quickly out the door. “Olivia, my dear,” Gaehod continues, oblivious to the stumbling his stacked books and rolled drawings, collected specimens and boxed treasures have caused. “Dominic needs an escort to the kitchens.”
“No. I don’t.” Dominic glowers in the hall.
“Would you be so kind to help him find his way?”
“That’s really not necessary.”
I look at Dominic again. He truly is delicious. With the hard lines of strength and sinew disguised under a ragged sweater, and the wide strap of his bag across his broad chest like a bandolier, he looks like academe’s own warrior.
“I’d be happy to,” I say sweetly. “You want anything while I’m down there, Gaehod? Sandwich?”
“Thank you, but I no longer eat bread.”
“Soup?”
“That would be lovely.”
I smile at Gaehod and wink. “Back in a bit,” I tell him, and turn to Dominic. He stalks down the hall ahead of me in the wrong direction. “So tell me about these tests you’ll be doing on me,” I ask him.
“I’m not going to run any tests on you.”
“Why not? I’ve got nothing better to do with my time.” I take his elbow and turn us around.
“I’m not sure I could be objective.”
“All my sisters are more beautiful. If you’re waiting to find a vampire you don’t desire, you’ll have nobody to study,” I tell him as we trot down the stairs abreast.
“It’s not because you’re beautiful that I can’t use you in the study.”
“No?”
“No, it’s because you appear to be attracted to me. I can control for my feelings, but not for yours.”
“I don’t have feelings.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Your belief is irrelevant. And insolent. How dare you presume to judge the truth of my nature?” I slam open the swinging doors into the kitchen, sending cascades of ball bearings rattling away. “You can’t even face your own nature.”
“But you know all about it, don’t you?”
“About the Reborn? Sure.” I yank open a low drawer and pull out a copper-bottomed pan.
“Don’t you see the hypocrisy in that?”
Everything about him enrages me—the savagery of his masculine beauty, the discipline of his athlete’s strength. “As though you could talk about hypocrisy!” I shake the pot at him. “You, the healer who can’t care for his patients.”
“I’m not a physician. I told you. I’m a researcher.”
“Why would anyone research anything, except for love?”
“There’s only one other option, isn’t there?” He squares his broad shoulders and refuses to step out of my path. I could tear his handsome arms from their sockets and put them on to boil. But something in his ruthless, blue eyes—the pain beneath the fury—stops me. He doesn’t shout, but his voice could not hold more power if he did. “I work like I do out of fear—fear that I’m crazy, fear that I can’t control the things my mind creates, hell—fear that
I can’t control anything at all.” I step past him and put the pan on the stove. A gas flame leaps up to embrace the copper. He meets my eyes defiantly, anything but fearful.
“So, what exactly do you fear?” I ask him. I already know the answer.
I wait for him.
He smiles grimly. “Love, I guess.”
And it’s true. He fears it because he has already suffered it—the entire pattern of birth, and love, and death. The endless agony of losing those he has loved. The grief his deaths have caused those who loved him. A terrible and primal love drives him to protect himself, his family, and his lovers from that pain. I have never wanted anything as ferociously. And I am the angel of desire.
I walk past him along the long rows of refrigerator drawers until I find one marked “Soup.” Dominic pulls his ratty shoulder bag off and hoists himself up to sit on the counter beside it. His guileless eyes don’t leave me. He watches me spin the lid off a soup jar and dump it into the pan. My mood won’t soften under his gaze the way my tits would.
“I think,” he says at last, “that my guardian angel would be a better cook.”
This makes me laugh. “I think your guardian angel is asleep on the job,” I say.
“That’s what I thought.” He nods sadly, but winks at me. “Guess I’ll have to make my own sandwich.” He leaps down from the counter and engages noisily with the ball-bearing-hinged cabinets and drawers. I stir Gaehod’s soup, watching Dominic. His athlete’s body is graceful and efficient, but how passionate he is, and how hard he loves—and the terror of that love—puzzle me. I scent the air, but there is no fear and no desire on him. I would break my teeth against his throat, he is so free right now.
“Olivia, we got off to a weird start. I’m sorry. I’d like to try again.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Want a sandwich?” he asks me.
“No.”
“You sure? You could use a little meat on you.” He’s joking. My body would plump for him sweetly if he wanted me that way.
I pour the old man’s soup into a bowl. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let that stand. Desire is an actor’s trick-handled knife. If he doesn’t want me, I’ll turn the blade around.
“Yesterday, you said you could help me.” I slip a spoon into Gaehod’s bowl, keeping my eyes down and my voice uncertain. “I’d like that.”
He has stopped with the bread and lettuce, the tomato and the knife. I stir the soup a little with the spoon.
“I thought you weren’t interested.”
“I am, but . . .” I look up into his fierce blue eyes. The tenderness in his face almost makes me feel ashamed. “Okay, if I’m honest, it’s mostly that I’d like to see more of you.” Almost, but not quite.
“Olivia . . .”
I pick up Gaehod’s soup bowl and push the trick blade in. “I shouldn’t have said that, about wanting to see you. I have to go.”
Some may master their own, but few can resist the taste of another’s desire. We’re all part vampire in the end.
The catacomb of hallways swallowed Dominic, walking beside Gaehod, perfectly dressed for a night at the Victorian opera, except for his absence of footwear. Intrigued by Olivia’s new openness to his work, eager to start working with her, Dominic was not interested in meeting the other vampires right now. But the innkeeper had stopped by his room and collected him after lunch. And he did still need several more girls to round out the study.
Along one corridor, Gaehod stopped to look through a mullioned window. It opened into a room whose opposite wall was lined with identical, but smaller windows. In front of these windows, on benches, blank-eyed men and women sat unblinking, shoulder to shoulder, in close-packed rows. Horror fingered the back of Dominic’s neck.
“Who are they?” he whispered to Gaehod.
“Watchers.”
“What are they watching?”
“A life.”
“Whose?”
“It doesn’t matter—they just have to watch it all, from beginning to end.”
Dominic suppressed a shudder.
“It’s not so bad,” Gaehod reassured him, “a little tedious in the hours of sleep, infancy, and old age, but they are damned for one lifetime only, for the sins of their last. It’s soon over.”
“Why?” Dominic realized he was whispering, although Gaehod made no attempt to lower his voice.
“The last time around they had fates, not destinies. They made no choices. ”
Dominic shook himself. “Isn’t it a little creepy for the people who are being watched every second of their entire lives?”
“The Watchers only bear witness. They can’t do anything about the life they observe, so most of the Watched aren’t aware of them. A few will sense them, of course, and believe in angels or fashion tinfoil hats.”
“Does it work?”
“The tinfoil?”
“No.” Dominic scowled at Gaehod.
The old man returned his glare with a subtly mischievous smile and the overtly theatrical whirl of opera cape over one shoulder. “I thought you did not believe in reincarnation, Dominic,” he chided and started walking again. As they turned the corner, Dominic caught a momentary glint of light off glass. Had there been another window across the hall, behind him? He hadn’t thought to look.
Dominic bit back his welling rage and kept walking until he was confident he could keep the anger from his voice. “Why are you showing me this?”
“I promised you a tour.”
“I thought you were ready to stop all this, to close this place down?”
“I have been considering that, yes. What do you think, Dominic?”
“I think all these underground people need help,” Dominic said wearily.
“And of course you need your research subjects who might be easier to persuade if their familiar, comfortable home were no longer here to welcome them.”
“I think their ‘familiar, comfortable home’ keeps them in their familiar, uncomfortable sickness. If they were forced to function in the real world, they might recognize the disconnect between reality and these stories they tell about themselves.”
“They should dismiss these mythic selves?” Rounding another corner, Gaehod’s cape gave a skeptical swirl.
“They should get help.”
“My dear boy, I house the damned and the cursed: descendants of ancient races, angels, and the great-great-grandchildren of titans and elves, as well as souls punished for a single lifetime’s wrongs. They’re exquisite and deep, rare, magical beings. Why should they want to be anything but what they are?”
“Because they’re in pain. Gaehod, I’m afraid your affection for these people keeps you from seeing how screwed up they really are.”
“Yes.” Gaehod nodded. “Love is blind.” A warm smile split the old man’s face. “Speaking of which . . .” He pointed a slender finger toward a flight of stairs where a set of naked, olive-skinned legs was descending into view. The two men, young and old, stopped to watch the woman appear, rosy toes, dimpled knees, gently swaying hips, high delicate breasts, softly parted lips breaking into a stunning smile.
“Hello, my dear,” the old man said, placing a reverent kiss on the girl’s inviting cheek.
“Hello, Father.” She embraced Gaehod, held him against her gentle body, then continued down the hall.
“Who was that?”
“She’s a student from the Venice school, a hierodule, just arrived.”
“A what?”
“A hetaera, a nadītu, how do you translate it?”
Dominic recognized the Greek. “Temple slave?”
“Temple prostitute, sacred prostitute. That’s closest I think.”
“I can see why you enjoy your work.” Dominic turned a wry eye over his shoulder at the beauty swaying away.
“I have tried to help them.”
“I know you have. But, Gaehod, I think they might get more help, better, more modern help, if you closed the hotel. Psychiatric medicine has come a long way. A lot of people in tinfoil beanies do very well on paliperdone.”
“You want me to close the hotel?”
“Yes, Gaehod. I do.”
“Would you be willing to champion that cause?”
The miles of rock between him and the surface world of light and sanity, of reason and science, crushed him. How could he champion anything? “Absolutely,” he said.
He drew breath to question the old man, but they turned a corner and he released the air in a low whistle of surprise. Dominic and Gaehod passed beneath a towering gate, high and wide and without bars, into a twilit, subterranean garden.
The peculiar light made a contrary dusk in which color stood out more starkly rather than muting into the gloom. The golds and purples were shocking, and even the gray-leaved olive trees, whose gnarled roots clutched the bare rocks along a black river, seemed young and supple. Dominic followed Gaehod’s bare feet across brilliant, soft green grass riddled with golden crocus and bending daffodils, to the edge of the black water. There, the unmoving figure of a gorgeous woman sat staring into the water’s reflective surface.
“I am so very sorry for your loss, my dear.” Gaehod bent over her, mingling white threads of hair with her crimson streams, and kissed her flawless brow. She sighed, but did not look up. The strange garden light stripped her of shadow.
“I didn’t mean to.” The woman’s voice bore the indents and peaks of Ireland, rolling and enchanting, even with their burden of grief. “I haven’t killed in years.”
“I know.”
“I loved her.” A perfect tear, in which the whole strange garden was reflected, inverse, trembled on the delicate rim of her upturned eyes. Gaehod brushed it away with compassion so intimate and profound Dominic turned away.
“Sylvia, I’d like to you meet Dominic. He is Reborn and, like you, remembers many past loves.” Sylvia’s icy gray eyes, when she turned them to Dominic, held pain miles deep.
“If only the river I sit by were Lethe,” she said to Dominic, her Irish voice a sweet burble beside the silent water, “we could both drink and forget.” She patted the green bank beside her with a graceful hand. “Come tell me of your lost loves.”
“I don’t remember.”
Dominic pulled his laptop bag over his head and sat down, pushing it away from him across the black grass.
“I’ll leave you two to get acquainted.” Gaehod smiled down on them. He turned and walked toward the door, stopping only once to pet a potbellied dog and pluck a pomegranate from a shrubby tree.
Sylvia gazed into the black water. Dominic wished he had remained standing. “I was looking for God,” Sylvia murmured, “but I saw myself instead.”
“So you killed her?”
She shrugged a slender black-swathed shoulder. “That killed her. Mortal blood retains deep loves and fears. When we feed, we catch the glimpses, like dreams. It’s the danger in going back to the same source too often. You become one of their fears.”
“Or loves?”
“I guess.” Sylvia shrugged.
“So what kills them?”
“If you keep feeding when you can see yourself in their blood, it . . . I don’t know. I guess it closes a loop or something. It stops their hearts.”
“That’s impossible you know, right? To see memories in blood? Memory is a neurological function. The notion that even genetic information is ‘in the blood’ is purely poetic.”
“Gaehod said you were interested in memory. Do you remember every love from every lifetime?”
“Every one. No—but they’re not really memories, they’re delusions. I only think I remember them.”
“How tragic!” Sylvia pulled her lips into a succulent moue. “You lose your lovers twice this way, once in the deaths you remember and then by not believing their memory.”
“You can’t lose what you never had.”
“Of course you can. You can lose hope where things have always been hopeless. You can lose faith although there was never a God.”
“You can’t lose your heart if you don’t have one.”
“You have a heart, Dominic. I can hear it.”
Dominic felt very conscious of the meaty apparatus of humanity, of his beating heart and too-big, useless hands.
“I didn’t mean literally,” Sylvia giggled, and slipped fragile, porcelain fingers between the buttons of Dominic’s shirt, pressing coolness and heat against the bare skin of his chest. She ran her fingers over the snaking raised lines of his tattoo. “Distract me from my sorrow, Dominic.”
He took her fine, white elbow in his clumsy hands and extracted her arm from his shirt. Sylvia wore the same strange key bracelet that circled Olivia’s wrist. It, too, was clasped with a small padlock, and although it looked as though the key would fit into the lock, the chain was too short for the key to reach. Sylvia dropped her hand to Dominic’s crotch and began to stroke him through his constricting jeans.
“Doesn’t that feel good?” she whispered against his neck, raising a legion of chills.
He nodded. “It does. But I’m not going to make love to you.”
“I didn’t ask you to. Fall in love with me instead.”
Dominic grinned ruefully. “Make love, fall in love.” He shrugged. “I’m not going to do either.” He moved her hand from the buttons of his jeans and placed it on her lap.
Sylvia’s spurned hand swept to the tiny black buttons of her high-necked blouse. Beneath the delicate black cotton, her pristine skin shone in the strange garden light. She pushed the halves of her shirt open and ran dainty hands over her exposed, abundant breasts. Her luminous pale coral nipples contracted in the cool air and she fanned seductive fingertips across them.
“Do you want to touch me?”
Mute, Dominic shook his head.
“I can’t feel your touch. You can be as rough as you want. You cannot bruise or injure me. You can’t hurt me.” She cupped her full, inviting breasts with caressing fingers.
“I could break your heart.”
“I could break your neck.”
“Do you want to?” he asked her.
Sylvia tipped her perfect, pale face to one side, considering. Her copper hair tumbled gracefully over a milky shoulder. “No.” She smiled. “I don’t think I do. Do you want to break my heart?”
“No, in fact quite the opposite. Sylvia, I believe I can help you. I’m working to develop medicines that might heal your heart. Would you be willing to participate in a research study? I could pay you.”
Sylvia’s laugh rang silver and unfettered. “Darling, I’m a vampire. I have more money than I could ever use.” Sylvia looked down at her breasts in her hands. She pushed the twin globes of tempting flesh toward her lowered chin and dropped them so they shivered and rolled deliciously. “I don’t want money. I want your desire.”
“You have that.” His voice was thick.
“How would you touch me, knowing you cannot arouse me? How would you make love to woman for your pleasure alone, knowing she feels nothing?”
“Physical numbness is not an uncommon psychiatric symptom. I believe you can feel. I can help you.”
“Try.” She held the cloud pink nipples toward his dry lips.
“I cannot become sexually involved with study participants,” Dominic ground between clinched teeth. “And in good conscience, I can’t make love to you knowing that I am incapable of having emotional or romantic feelings for you. I can’t fall in love again.”
“I believe you can feel. I can help you.” With a sweet smile, she turned his words back on him. He reached for his laptop bag, but Sylvia knelt on the riverbank, her ripe breasts overfilling the forked fingers of one hand. Dominic’s mouth was dry, but he dared not lick his lips so close to the succulent flesh. Sylvia’s free hand pushed back the collar of his shirt, tracing the jugular thread where it beat lust and iron. A red tear splashed onto her upraised breast. It trickled down the cushion of rosette flesh, hunger, and salt.
“Hello, lovers.”
Tall and almost fluid, Olivia stood silhouetted in the portal, motionless. Dominic jumped to his feet and looked around for a reason to be standing. The sight of Olivia yards away affected him as Sylvia, even topless and nearby, had not. Sylvia reclined on the bank, pillowing her head in upstretched arms. Her round breasts stretched into pears, swollen marble teardrops sprung from the black veil of her unbuttoned blouse. Dominic looked from her to Olivia to the river, and back, irresistibly, to Olivia. She came toward him across the flower-spattered grass. Dominic spotted a tree growing beside the stream and, looking for something to do with his hands, reached for one of its fruits casually, but the wind swayed the branch beyond his reach. He tried another time and sat down empty-handed.
“Shouldn’t eat the food of the dead, anyway,” Sylvia mused, still bare-breasted. “Hello, little sister.”
Dominic stood up again.
“Gaehod said I would find you here.” Olivia addressed only Sylvia. “I came to offer my sympathy.” She did not glance at Dominic.
“Whatever for?”
“For the death of your timeless love,” Olivia said.
“Oh that. Have a seat, Ollie. Have you met Dominic?”
“Yes.” Olivia sat coolly beside her sister. “Have you been rending your garments for grief, my sister?”
Dominic felt the blood rise in his face. From the green ground, the two stunning women regarded him unblinking.
“Perhaps we should go for a swim?” Sylvia suggested. She began to peel gauze-fine layers of clothing from her body.
Spellbound, Dominic watched the hypnotic dance of fabric and flesh, then collected himself. “I think I’ll just go for a walk,” he said and struck out blindly away from temptation.
He walked away from the two exquisite, delusional women, deeper into the dark garden, straying aimlessly. Finally he sat down against a gnarled apple tree. He wasn’t having much luck recruiting vampires for his study, although they seemed willing enough participants in anything else.
“Guess who?” a sibilant voice whispered. Dominic looked around, but couldn’t see anyone. He didn’t think Olivia had followed him. Sylvia would be swimming in the black river now, her pale, sinuous body slipping through the soundless water.
“Guess who?”
Dominic checked behind the tree, but found no one. He shrugged. It was a weird place. “Give me a hint,” he said to the empty air.
“I’m shaped like a cock, but I move like a cunt, and my throat’s open all the way down.”
“Olivia?” Dominic stood up again.
“My tongue is forked for her pleasure, whispering ‘eat!’ Women have had food issues ever since.”
“Oh, I get it. You’re the serpent in the tree of knowledge, right? Where are you?” Dominic searched the tree’s golden branches, but movement at the base caught his keen eye. From a hole at the root of the tree, right where he had been sitting, a forked tongue flickered in the darkness. All Dominic could see of the snake, when the tongue retreated, were twin, unblinking, black eyes, two darker places in the black of the hole.
Time for new meds.
“Are you going to talk me into eating an apple?” Dominic asked the hole.
“Not if I can simply shake the tree and drop one on your head.”
As if something deep under the ground, in the roots of the tree, were pushing it, the serpent’s head squeezed out of the small hole and onto the grass. “Knowledge, inspiration, revelation, it’s all me!” it said.
Its iridescent, blood-red body glinted rainbows and gold in the perpetual twilight brilliance of the underground garden. Its mirrored scales and blunt, rounded head pushed along the ground and against the tree trunk. It wound, making three smooth coils up the trunk, to the height of Dominic’s hips, and lifted its head, like a bobbing arboreal erection from the tree’s trunk. “Riddle me this,” the snake said, “does not even human law make knowing the difference between right and wrong a prerequisite for punishment?”
“Yes.”
“And yet Eve damned all women by doing something she’d been told not to—before she tasted of this tree. She had no knowledge of good and evil until she ate. She disobeyed without the ability to know disobedience was wrong.”
“But you knew it was wrong.”
“Yes.”
“So why did you tempt her?”
“I didn’t. I told her the fruit was knowledge, not poison. That’s all I ever said to Eve. ‘It won’t kill you.’ Curiosity killed the cat (and the pussy). Eve was damned for nothing less.” The snake wound higher up the tree, coiling again and again. “And yet my apples are still to blame for most of the suffering in your world.”
“Oh?” Dominic reached into his pocket and extracted a bottle of pills. He knocked one into his broad palm and swallowed. “How do you figure?” he asked the helixed snake. Might as well enjoy the theater until the medicine kicks in.
“You will always see the world in paired opposites now: male and female with their fig leaves, right and wrong with their swords. Ask yourself, would the story have ended differently if Eve had not blamed me?” The snake wound a seventh time around the tree. Eye to eye with Dominic, its flat head extended from the trunk in a new and breathing branch, it whispered, “What if Eve had answered, ‘I chose to eat this’?”
Dominic glanced, with a vague sense of dread, at the hole beneath his feet. From its darkness, pushing upward, the snake’s tail protruded and rose. Shimmering and winding upward, it spiraled the tree, crisscrossing the glistening coils already wound there, reflecting itself on itself in infinite recursions. Dominic squeezed his eyes shut and opened them with only dim hope the apparition would be gone.
“You humans walk so eagerly into tyrannies,” the snake mocked. “The thrall of addiction, of oppression, of victimization—‘I was tempted. I couldn’t help myself. It’s genetic.’ Or you hand your power over to other forces, kinder gods, and are controlled by your To-Do List, or your Childhood Trauma or your Chemical Imbalance. New gods for a new age.”
“Listen,” Dominic growled, “if it weren’t for my fucked-up chemistry, we wouldn’t be talking.” The tail wound higher, sliding over and slipping under itself.
“Eve swallowed not the simple split of good and evil, but duality itself,” the snake said. “So she and Adam saw the differences between all split things: man and woman, good and evil, god and human, and went scrabbling for fig leaves to cover them up.” The tail reached the head, and the snake flicked itself with tip and tongue slyly.
Dominic shook his head and looked back through the garden, back toward the relatively less hallucinatory vampires. This snake was enough to make him miss those girls.
“And that’s original sin, my friend,” the snake whispered, “the cleft in your mind that you can’t span. It’s elegant, really. No work from me required, to stretch you on the rack of paradox. And I—self-pleasuring, self-destroying—put my tail in my mouth, and suck, and swallow.”
“Dominic?” Dominic wheeled violently away from the snake whose body seemed still to be winding and reflecting, pushing from below the tree, into and around itself. He wanted to hide.
“Dominic?” called Olivia. “Where are you?”
“I’m here.” Lord, what a state he was in.
In the luminous gloom of the garden, the Reborn’s freckled whiteness stands stark against the browns and greens. He tears an apple savagely from the tree and glares at me like a hunted thing. But I am not hunting him. Not really. Gaehod asked me to keep an eye on him, that’s all.
“You didn’t want to come down to the river?” I ask him. “Wash away your sins?”
“I don’t believe in sin.”
“Right. Are you going to eat that?”
He looks at the apple, a red so deep it’s almost black, and tosses it lightly into the air. “Why, are you hungry?” He meets my eyes for the first time since I entered the garden.
“Yes,” I say, because it’s true. He pitches the apple to me, harder than he needs to, but I catch it with ease.
“I’ve already had one,” he says, voice held steady. “But I have seen people chewing different fruit from the same damn branch fly planes into buildings secure in what they ingested here. So thank you, no. I do not want another one of your damn apples.”
I drop the apple into the pocket of my coat, black as an oil slick and as long, and walk up to Dominic under the tree.
“What do you want then?” I whisper. He smells like fig leaves and denial.
“I want not to be here anymore. I don’t want the weird light and the underground garden and the lunatic landlord. I don’t want your sister unbuttoning her shirt—”
“Knowing what you don’t want is not the same as knowing what you do,” I remind him.
He grimaces, and meets my eyes. His voice, when he speaks again, is stripped raw of its usual veneer of academia and irony. It is naked. “I don’t want to keep meeting new vampires. But I need a reasonably sized study group to make good on a promise I don’t want to have made for money I don’t want to have taken for research I don’t want to do.”
Rage haunts the junctures of his handsome face. Even the colors of him battle one another. His red lashes bloody his blue eyes. Dark freckles bruise his golden skin deliciously.
“Come on,” I say, “let’s get out of here.”
