Kiss of the Black Angel Page 3

CHAPTER ONE

  The 15th Annual MystiCon was well underway, but I didn't belong here among the starship troopers and the knights and ladies in their Arthurian finery. The huckster's room writhed, undulating with milling misfits and freelance vendors hawking everything from pointed ears to solid gold chess sets cast in the likenesses of Tolkein's hobbits.

  Money traded hands, coins jangling. A bearded man broke into a raunchy folk song, strumming a battered mandolin. At the booth next to mine, a lady with long gray hair and one blind eye gave Tarot readings as a Celtic harp played Greensleeves on a distorted cassette. Two aisles over, a young knave in a jester's hat extolled the virtues of the swords he was selling, proudly proclaiming in an affected English accent, "Guaranteed to sever the head of the nastiest dragon or your money back!"

  There were two things any science fiction convention could guarantee: the atmosphere was chaos, the majority of attendees not plugged in to the reality most people would consider normal. So when I looked up to see a vampyre standing in front of my table as if he'd appeared out of dusk's early vapor, it never struck me as particularly unusual.

  Dimitri was a face in a crowd of odd faces, though paler and more gaunt, with straight blond hair that would have fanned over his narrow shoulders had it not been gathered into a loose bundle tied with black satin bows. And while his costume was striking—a black velvet tuxedo and sable cape—his persona seemed nonetheless tame when compared to some of the others wandering the drafty exhibition hall at the L.A. Airport Hilton.

  He arrived just after sunset, not long before the room was scheduled to close, and stood there looking at the Star Trek mementos, movie posters and new age books which were all that remained of my daughter. Stephanie had been buried almost two years now, and while I would have preferred to leave her belongings enshrined in her room, the house had been sold to satisfy the terms of the divorce, and I couldn't bring myself to toss her favorite possessions in a plastic sack to be picked through by strangers at a thrift store.

  No, it had to be here that the ashes of her memory were scattered, here that her spirit was returned to the other pilgrims who'd shared her visions of faeries and far-flung civilizations, worlds more real to her than life in the suburbs of San Diego had ever been. It had to be here, where she and I had come so often—I as a bewildered guest to sign copies of my books, Stephanie as my guide and my inspiration.

  Ironically, had she been at the convention, she would've recognized Dimitri for what he was. She would have skirted behind me, whispering, "He's a vampyre, Daddy. Don't talk to him and don't look in his eyes!"

  Wanting to indulge her as any father indulges a daughter, I wouldn't have replied when Dimitri first spoke, and I never would have known that he wore those mirrored shades to conceal more than just his identity.

  But because Stephanie wasn't there, I was vulnerable when the vampyre began to make small talk. Charming and expressive in a manner not commensurate with his age—maybe 19 and tender at that—he tipped his head in greeting, then said in a voice so clear it could shatter entire realities, "I wish to thank you, sir, for making me believe in spirits and sprites."

  I stared blankly before I realized he was referring to my first book, Travelogue of the Underworld, rumored to be a factual account of the author's adventures into a shadow reality existing at right angles to our own. At gatherings such as these, it wasn't uncommon for people to believe my books were the truth.

  But those were stories I'd written to entertain Stephanie when she was a little girl, and now the room shimmered, more mist than substance, more past than present. Merlin walked by in a tall purple hat, Xena and Gabrielle not far behind.

  'The world's not science, Daddy. The world's magic if you just look!'

  But the words were spoken by a ghost, and any magic I'd ever known was buried in her grave.

  "I wish I could tell you it's true, but fairyland's closed. There's no such thing as elves or trolls, no sorcerers, no magic. Nothing," I concluded, sharper than I intended.

  The vampyre gave a small smile, delicate and birdlike. "Oh, but there are," he insisted with an expressive gesture of ashen hands. "They exist because you made me believe they can, and belief is the first principle of magic, just as the ability to create belief is the mark of a true storyteller."

  Oddly, his words didn't strike me as hollow flattery. Though I was now just another face in the swarm, the fact that Dimitri knew who I was after my two-year absence from the convention circuit gave me an unexpected sense of comfort, leaving me embarrassed for the way I'd spoken to him.

  "Sorry, it's been a long day," I muttered, a polite social lie to conceal the grief still consuming me whenever I saw a girl in the crowd who looked like my Stephanie, whenever I looked at the empty chair behind the table and remembered when she'd sat at my side.

  I turned away from the memories.

  "So you're a vampyre," I commented numbly, hoping to lose myself for a moment in someone else's world. I motioned toward the clothes he wore, the dark glasses hiding his eyes. "Am I to assume you never drink—" here I paused for dramatic effect "—wine?"

  "Ah, Dracula," he sighed, catching my eclectic reference which would have been lost on any normal human being. "A truly unfortunate stereotype that will haunt our kind for centuries to come."

  Maybe it shouldn't have surprised me that he spoke as if from experience.

  An uneasy silence dropped between us as he studied the articles on the table, the way one politely looks at something when he's really looking for a reason to linger. Picking up a dusty copy of The Lost Boys, he slowly turned it over in his hand until the harsh overhead lights glinted off the cellophane wrapper and time did a backbend—

  —in my den, a prisoner to the clackety-rackety-click of a plastic keyboard as I pounded out another chapter of Lucas the Lizard. But I was startled from my thoughts when Stephanie burst through the door, excitement sparking in waves that were all but visible. "Daddy, look!" she exclaimed, holding up the spoils of her weekly allowance, a shiny new copy of The Lost Boys. Sun streaming through the window flashed off the shrink-wrap and bounced around the room, time taking a snapshot. "Watch it with me tonight? Okay, Daddy? Please?"

  But I'd been too busy that night and every other night, and now my throat tightened as Dimitri held that same old tape in his hand, a ruthless reminder of what I'd lost. Ghosts were strange companions, manifesting in the form of an old movie, an empty room, a song on the radio.

  Oblivious to my grief, Dimitri set the box down, fingertips barely brushing the soft peach tablecloth as he looked up from his silence.

  "The portrayal of vampyres has become quite an obsession in Hollywood," he murmured, clasping his hands together at his waist with an air of formality that seemed somehow natural. "Still, it's unfortunate that no film has ever captured the true essence of what it means to walk the Earth as a citizen of the night."

  Strangely nervous, I laughed, not for what he said but for the manner in which he said it. After all, I was the word merchant—or had been before Stephanie died—and Dimitri had stepped on the untended grave of my muse with his eloquent manner of speaking and his aggrandized gestures that would have suited a character in a very old book. He belonged in another world and time, right down to the cloistering scent of his cologne, the brush of powder on his cheeks, the old world propriety of his conduct.

  "So what does it mean?" I asked, not sure if I expected an answer or was only making fun of him.

  He didn't respond, just twitched his lips in a smile that might have been real had I been able to see his eyes. Instead, I saw only myself in duplicate, his glasses throwing my reflection back at me as twins.

  For an instant, I thought the images were tiny paintings on the lenses, for no mirror ever captured a man as he saw himself. Momentarily disoriented, I gaped at the distorted stranger, this man who always seemed too tall and too thin, this man who had peered back at me in mirrors for 34 years, an eerie doppelganger wearing my face. Stefan London was his name
—my name—yet I knew nothing of the man behind it. It was only a symbol for the face who wore it, four syllables meaning absolutely nothing.

  Only when the scream of a plastic phaser split the air did I jerk myself back to reality, embarrassed to be searching for my lost identity in another man's glasses.

  "I—uh—sorry. I'm Stefan London—please, call me Stefan," I stammered, as if speaking the name out loud might cause it to have meaning again. I thrust my hand toward him, a marionette going through jerky social formalities.

  He bowed slightly from the waist, far more graceful than my clumsy handshake. "I am deeply honored to make your acquaintance, Stefan. As for myself, I am called Dimitri, though it's only a word, as you already realize, a label incapable of telling you anything about me. Sad, really, that our entire lives are spent in such isolation from one another. Don't you agree?"

  How could I answer that? While verbalizing the mental aloneness every human being experiences every moment of their lives, he seemed to be reaching inside my mind, speaking my thoughts aloud in a way that destroyed the isolation itself.

  And even if it were nothing more than some inexplicable synchronicity, the confident aura with which Dimitri spoke sent a chill down my spine. This kid hadn't just crawled into the tuxedo and the black silk cape on a whim. He fit inside them, for unlike most human beings, Dimitri was more than just his name.

  He truly saw himself as a vampyre, and the fact that he believed it intrigued me utterly. Instead of automatically writing him off as just one more deluded soul, a part of me I'd thought extinct broke free of its grief with a vengeance that was exhilarating and at the same time absolutely terrifying. A voice inside my mind burst alive, whispering, 'What if he is? What if he could be? How did it happen and what does it mean to be a vampyre? What if...? Oh, what if it could be real?

  It was a voice I knew well, yet one that had been silent so long I'd believed it mute. In short, Dimitri's very existence made me want to write again—a reaction I could not have predicted under any circumstances. I took a step away from him and would have bolted altogether had the wall not halted my retreat.

  My words were no longer for sale. I had to keep them locked up inside lest they, like Stephanie, leave me forever, for although I might occasionally run across a ragged novel bearing my name in a used book store, the man on the dust jacket was dead.

  Suddenly, I wanted to chase Dimitri away before he disturbed my living death. I'd grown comfortable in my mourning and was loathe to give it up. Yet it also occurred to me that perhaps Stephanie had known him. Maybe she'd spoken to him or flirted with him at some other convention years ago. Maybe he would remember her sad smile, her rare laughter. With an effort, I controlled my panic, forcing an unnatural calm.

  "These things belonged to my daughter—Stephanie," I said, gesturing toward the table as I spoke her name.

  Dimitri looked at me from behind his dark glasses for a long time. "She was a beautiful girl," he said at last.

  My heart beat faster. "You knew her?"

  Another long silence followed, as if he really did have eternity. Then he shook his head. "No, but because she lives so strongly in your memories, it's as if she still stands by your side, the stygian sprite of your early novels."

  His insight left me numb, its implications chilling me through to the very bone. And yet, suddenly, it didn't matter how Dimitri knew these things. It only mattered that he did know them. It only mattered that, for one single moment, I no longer felt so completely alone.

  Finally, blurry-eyed, I managed in a whisper: "Thank you.”

  I wasn't sure what I meant, but perhaps I was simply grateful to him for acknowledging my grief in a way most people never could. It made friends ill at ease, made them find reason to be someplace else.

  But Dimitri didn't withdraw. Instead, he studied me as if coming to some profound decision while the two of us stood encapsulated together at a mystical crossroads existing apart from the rest of the world. Finally, in a gesture that was curiously intimate, he smiled ever so slightly and slowly removed his glasses, our eyes meeting for the first time.

  My initial reaction was that he must have some medical condition which could account for the fact that his right eye was cobalt blue and flecked with gold while the left was a shade of green like summer grass. Animal eyes, predator sharp.

  I should have known then that he wasn't human, or perhaps I refused to acknowledge it because those terrible eyes were penetrating the very core of my mind. But when he reached out and grasped my hand, pressing it between both of his own with a strength I could never hope to match, lightning flashed inside my head, obliterating whatever sovereign thoughts made a man unique unto himself.

  The din of the convention was chopped off, and before I could react, some supernatural force jerked me away to a place where the stars were black and the sky white, where the silence was as shrill a dying man's scream. I was falling then, plunging through infinite space and timeless void, a disembodied consciousness hurtling toward oblivion through the very nothingness which was both destination and annihilation.

  My only thought was that the city had been struck by a nuclear blast and this was what it was like to die. But then, through sheer intuition, I understood that I had been miraculously transported into the alien environs of another man's mind, where I stood looking out through his monstrous eyes, seeing myself through his strangely intensified perceptions:

  A man in the peak of his life with shaggy hair the shade of pine bark after a cool rain and eyes blue as tropical waters. Though willow thin from too much grief, he was also willow strong. And though he struggled to stress only the mediocrity in himself, the strength of the long distance runner he had been in his youth always crept past the nondescript clothes and downcast eyes. Stefan London was beautiful, his soul a veil of black lace torn in spots by sorrow, yet it was through those gashes that his crippled aura bled to draw people to him as flame was attracted to wick—

  "Yo! Death Star to dealer! You okay, buddy?"

  Darth Vader was shaking my shoulder, waving one of Stephanie's books under my nose until the scent of printer's ink and dust acted like smelling salts to shake me back to my senses. "How much you want for this?" he rasped from inside a black plastic helmet.

  The jolt of being catapulted back into my own body was like a rubber band snapping, the pain of it causing me to gasp. I had no idea where I was, nor even who, and the world had become a merry-go-round churning out of control.

  Then I saw. Still standing in front of me as if nothing were out of the ordinary, Dimitri just looked at me with those omniscient eyes which seemed to be saying, You wanted to know what it's like to walk the night? Well, I can show you, my friend, things you can't even begin to dream. Oh, the things I can show you with these eyes...

  Bathed in an icy sweat, suddenly sick to my stomach, I yanked my hand away from him, yet before I could discover any answers in his face, he slid those mirrored shades back on and reality righted itself, not unlike an old film fluttering through the projector until the picture and the soundtrack were once again in sync.

  In front of my table, a small crowd had gathered to gawk at Stephanie's collection, yet their expressions were vacant, their attention captured by plastic toys and paper worlds hidden inside out-of-print books.

  "How much?" Lord Vader asked again.

  He might as well have spoken High Martian. I could only stare into the distorted world the mask reflected back at me.

  "I—did you see—?" I stammered, fighting the vertigo.

  Dimitri placed a hand on my shoulder, warning me to silence with a oddly erotic gesture of one long finger laid discreetly over pale lips.

  "Each of us sees only those things we allow ourselves to see, Stefan," he said in response to my thoughts. Then, leaning nearer, he added, "What I see is a man whose grief is an unrelenting master but also a powerful muse—one that could serve us both well."

  I pulled away, realizing in an awful flash that his li
ps never moved when he spoke.

  "Who are you?" I demanded, struggling to shake myself free of a dream that had turned dangerously real. "What do you want from me?"

  And suddenly we were alone again. Darth Vader stormed off carrying his head under his arm and the others just drifted away, extras milling about at the whim of some unseen director.

  "It's not a question of what I want, per se, but a matter of how we may be able to help one another," Dimitri explained in that crystalline voice. "True vampirism isn't based on the surreptitious control of your mind or the theft of your blood, but is instead a matter of give and take." Here he paused to give me an alluring smile, then concluded rather boldly, "I've shown you a glimpse of yourself through my very own eyes, so now I ask you: are you interested in seeing more? Are you interested in discovering who you are, who you can be? Are you interested in evolving beyond this mortal life and into eternity itself?"

  His questions unnerved me deeply.

  It was hot in the room.

  My mouth went dry.

  In a matter of minutes, with a minimum of words, this willful fiend had seduced my senses and burned my sensibilities. He had lured me to the very brink of madness and now I would be compelled to follow him over the edge—not only because he was clearly a magical being, but because he made me feel alive again, so much that the sensation was not unlike physical arousal, and that was the worst of all.

  As if understanding my dilemma, he reached inside his jacket, pulling out a card which he handed to me with a flourish of pallid hand and lace cuff.

  DIMITRI ALEXANDER KARROS

  FREELANCE COMPUTER ANALYST

  213-555-8267

  Graveyard shift only

  Dazed, I read it twice before he said, "If you should choose to pursue these feelings, Miquel and I would welcome you into our home this evening."

  His speech was so formal and succinct it was altogether spellbinding. I had to blink to rid my mind of images I couldn't have described had my life depended on it. Wine thoughts. Gravestone musings. Mermaid etchings that flowed through my soul like black water and left me hallucinating.

  Stephanie dancing with Mephistopheles high atop the Acropolis, spinning and seeming to fly as her long black dress flew out from her on the wind. Then I was cutting in—not to waltz with my beloved daughter, but to dance in the arms of the devil himself because the idea was as erotic as it was absurd.

  These were the visions that came when Dimitri touched my wrist in a gesture of intimate familiarity. His fingers glistened with emeralds, rubies, a star sapphire that reminded me all too much of his one blue eye. He was casket satin, moonlight on baptismal waters.

  And then he was just a man-boy in a vampyre get-up as my mind abruptly translated what he'd said. Mortified by the very feelings he referred to—taboo curiosities I might have found intriguing years before—I held out his card to return it.

  "I'm driving back to San Diego tonight," I muttered, tripping on my words. "Maybe some other time."

  The room was shrinking, the air thin. In the alley outside the building, dusk was luring night into the city.

  But Dimitri leaned over the table and, in a brazen gesture, folded his card into my palm and closed my fingers around it until the stiffly laminated paper cut into me and drew blood. Our faces only inches apart, he smiled again as a drop of red squeezed through my fist and rolled down my wrist.

  "A lie is a terrible way to begin eternity, Stefan," he sang to me, his breath a cemetery breeze, cool and eerie on my cheek. "Miquel will send a car for you at ten. It is best that you come willingly."

  He brought my hand to his lips, and though I thought his intention was to kiss it in the fashion of a European gentleman bidding farewell to a paramour, he flicked out his tongue and darted it between my fingers to catch the flow of my blood. It happened so quickly I couldn't twist free, and my heart cramped as I saw the lips of this dreadful cherub stained red.

  Before I could say another word, before I could parade my wounded pride around the room or hurl accusations at the boy, he was gone. A flash of burgundy, a sparkle of bejeweled hands, and he had vanished into the crowd, disappearing altogether.

  My hand smarted. Somebody giggled. I couldn't breathe.