Kiss of the Black Angel Read online

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  When the car entered a long circular driveway somewhere between San Bernardino and the Mojave Desert, the sound of tires transformed the whine of asphalt to the unique warble of cobblestone. Tremendous evergreens yearned skyward, the scent of freshly mown grass creeping through the vents to color the air green. By the dim light of a waning moon, the wrought iron gates through which we passed created prison bars across the constellation of Taurus, a cage to hold the stars themselves.

  Completely surrounding the estate—nearly 25 acres in all—a 12-foot hedge had been painstakingly pruned to resemble a dragon, its countless spikes and ridges actually dappled ivy. On one side of the gate, the terrible head stretched upward, jagged teeth ripping the sky, red eyes really sensors on high-tech security cameras. On the other side, after wrapping around the grounds, the forked tail formed a delicate curl which was incongruously playful.

  My face pressed to the window, I gazed out over what appeared to be sepulchers, yet what sent shivers through me were the humanesque statues atop those cold, grey markers. The entire front lawn was strewn with these life-size figures, men and women frozen in pose as the breath caught in my throat and the limo's lights split the darkness in two.

  Atop one knoll, a wraith thin woman would waltz forever with an invisible partner. Nearby, a young man was held in an eternal pose of martial arts kata, one stone arm and one stone leg extended in perfect balance. In a corner of this eerie garden, twin brothers no more than 17 embraced, expressions of lust forever preserved in identical faces as one boy's hand cupped the other's buttocks in a gesture of incestuous foreplay.

  But as the car cruised past this gathering of stone ghosts—dozens in all—I caught a glimpse of the central courtyard and the even more unnerving statue standing watch over all the others. A full 8 feet tall, it stood with outstretched arms and black wings that bent longingly toward the garden of lifeless lovers. Instead of raw grey marble like the others, it was intricately painted—raven hair that matched the sheltering wings; lithe musculature shaded bronze and gold; full red lips parted in a sardonic smile. Its head tilted slightly to one side, a pose reminiscent of the Virgin Mother gazing with rapture at the infant Christ, yet the hunger caught in those savage eyes was far from holy.

  So spellbound had I become that I scarcely noticed the car rolling to a stop. When the driver's shadow blocked the window, I must've startled at seeing him there, for he gave a chuckle as the door opened and the night rushed in to deliver me from my trance.

  I stepped out onto the cobblestone driveway, dizzy and disoriented from the wine. A scent of jasmine filled the air, heady perfume painting the sky of this surreal world. Completely surrounding the drive and leading up the marble steps to the estate's double doors, tiny lights glittered like thousands of fireflies. Water rushed through a manmade creek, and frogs hidden within the lush gardens sang an off-key melody that was reassuring and yet keenly sad.

  I do not recall being led up the cool stone steps to the entrance, my mind overwhelmed instead with candles burning from every multi-paned window, eyes of fire that threw my shadow behind me to create an army of willowy ghouls. Nervous, I turned to make some comment to the driver, but the Jamaican had disappeared and I caught only a glimpse of blood-red taillights when the limo vanished into what must have been a subterranean garage or the mouth of Hell itself.

  With hesitation born of dread, I lifted my hand to the bell, but the doors abruptly opened of their own accord. Startled, I took a step back, confronted by a young man I imagined to be a servant. Little more than a boy, he flourished an elaborate bow that caused the tails of his coat to sweep the polished marble floor. His face was smooth and ashen, a porcelain doll incarnate, with a hint of powder on his cheeks and a glimmer of lipstick on his mouth. His gloved hands were inordinately fine, his movements deliberately exaggerated like those of a diminutive mime.

  Without a single utterance, he led me into the foyer, closing the carved oak doors behind us.

  Unnerved, I started to speak, but he laid a finger across his lips, then waved his hand like a magician conjuring a spell. In response, music began to play—Beethoven's Fur Elise. The boy looked at me with his head tipped dramatically to one side, then gave a frown which said the classical selection wasn't to his liking. A wave of his hand transformed Beethoven to Pink Floyd, and now the servant placed his hands together like a child praying homage to God, and smiled a smile of sheer bliss.

  Then, with the grace of a dancer, he indicated I should wait while he turned sharply and retreated into the house, his boot heels clicking sharply behind him.

  My heart beat faster, and for the first time since I'd wandered like a spellbound zombie from my hotel room, I came to my senses with a suddenness that caused me to gasp.

  All the world was mad.

  Suddenly alone in that high-ceilinged foyer with its ice-cream-smooth white walls and its two curved arches leading off left and right, I questioned the sanity of a man who would do the things I'd done that night. I had no idea where I was. I knew nothing of the waifish youth who had invited me here, less of the mysterious Miquel to whom Dimitri had referred.

  Their limo was a hearse, their wine a drug, their servant a harlequin.

  For all I knew, I had been brought here to die in some ritualistic murder. The house exuded darkness despite its fiery eyes. It smelled of decadence and the grave grim yearnings of the human soul regardless of the fresh white roses on the flower table and the painting of Botticelli angels hanging above them.

  As the music abruptly stopped, a cuckoo clock sang its tick tock dirge, causing my body to jerk. I cast a rapid glance over my shoulder, and though I saw nothing, some eerie sixth sense warned me someone was there.

  The air seemed to move, little currents drafting through the room, silent breaths of an unseen audience. A hint of cologne, faint yet undeniably masculine. And though I couldn't say I heard anything at all, there was a sense of cloth brushing cloth, the barest rustling that comes when a handkerchief drops to the floor or a cat rubs against one's leg in a dark room.

  I felt him there. Waiting. Watching.

  And then my mind was out of control, conjuring images of maniacs and madness and my own blood spilling out to stain the polished hardwood floor. With a rough breath that came out as a garbled cry, I spun toward the door. I'd run back to the real world if need be. Or I would crawl.

  When my fingers closed around the cold metal knob, I experienced a profound moment of relief—a split second before a hand appeared from behind me to press the door closed again. In that instant, I knew the dread of a man strapped in the electric chair waiting for a governor's reprieve, and the ironic sinking in the pit of the gut that came from a wrong number. I knew what it was to die a thousand times in the span of a single moment. And I understood what it meant to look death in the eye and come away with the knowledge that, in the end, there is never a reprieve for any living thing.

  Frozen in time as an unnatural calm fell over me, I stared at that graceful hand for an eternity. The fingers were long and elegant, the nails carefully manicured. On the middle finger was a gold band etched with the Greek symbols for alpha and omega, on the fourth finger an oval cut emerald the size of a large almond.

  His skin was olive-hued and dark, and as my head slowly turned, I saw on his wrist a band so smooth it shone like liquid gold. He wore a simple white shirt with the sleeves pushed up to the elbows and the three top buttons unfastened, and a pair of jeans so fashionably old they were more patches-and-holes than anything else. The scent of Eternity clung to his body—for he had a keen sense of humor about himself—and when I raised my eyes and looked into his face, I was inundated with the profound realization that Miquel wasn't human.

  That was the first thought which assaulted me, though the assault was gentle and dangerously erotic. I knew his name. I knew what he was. And I knew that he was a vampyre.

  He studied me with candid curiosity, keen eyes raking from my face to my toes and back again
, and then he gave an unexpected smile that caused the color to drain from me completely. The front teeth were normal enough; it was the incisors that formed the exquisitely sharp fangs gleaming in his full, wet mouth.

  "Such terrible anguish in such a lovely bottle," he murmured in a voice rich with the faintest accent. His words caused me embarrassment, though that was quickly forgotten when he extended his hand in a gesture that seemed trite under the circumstances. "My name is Miquel Kaliq Constantine," he said, his smile turning bolder. "At least it is the name I've adopted for a lifetime or two."

  Perhaps I was too shocked to do anything but respond in the expected manner, or perhaps I was already so deep under his spell there could be no hope left for me. I offered him my hand, and when he grasped it in an embrace shocking for its strength as well as its chill, I could only imagine what other names had followed him throughout history. Eros, perhaps. And Pan. Don Juan. But I also considered Vlad the Impaler. Ivan the Terrible. Belial, Zamiel.

  My breathing stopped. My heart tapped a crazy rhythm.

  He stood at least six foot five, coal black hair brushing the tops of his shoulders in ragged layers and spiked bangs that would have suited a brooding model or a moody bass player in a rock and roll band. His features were angular, sharp, and so perfectly chiseled that he might really have been a Greek god or maybe a Hollywood special effect escaped from its creator. His lips were full and surprisingly pink, his strong chin sporting a two-day shadow which imbued him with an overall ominous look.

  His face and body called him 30. His aura told a darker secret of his antiquity.

  But what held me captive were his eyes, substantiating all myths of a vampyre's ability to mesmerize. Green as the emerald on his hand and flecked with lighter shades of brown and gold, a hundred flames reflected in those immortal mirrors—candlelight and history and secrets so profound no human could have known them and lived.

  While Dimitri was alluring by virtue of his ashen innocence and ballet dancer grace which could be misinterpreted as fragile, Miquel wore his power in a far more imposing fashion, not the willowy body of a youth but the finely honed sculpture which was the epitome of all things male. If Dimitri were Gainsborough's Blue Boy, Miquel was the model for David—yet he was the paradigm whose true physical splendor couldn't be captured even by Michelangelo himself.

  He was life and death and pure carnal force, and though I had always considered myself strong-natured, I knew I had encountered a creature to whose will I would inevitably bend. I had never been so drawn to another man, yet I stood before him practically swooning with the knowledge that this was how he wanted me to feel and there was nothing whatsoever I could do to change it. If Dimitri had briefly bewitched me, Miquel had stolen all my reason, and I knew in that instant that my life would never be the same again.

  Without question, he was a vampyre—a being who could drain away physical defiance and moral inhibitions as easily as he could drain the blood from my body. With God as my witness, I tried to fight him. My fists clenched, fingernails digging in until my palms bled like the wounds of Christ, but even that tangible pain was inadequate to break his spell.

  He made a motion that cautioned me not to resist, then took my hand and gently uncurled my fingers. And though I struggled to look away, I was paralyzed with sick fascination as he ran the pad of one long finger over my self-inflicted wounds. Then, never taking his gaze off of me, he touched fingertip to tongue tip, moist lips slowly closing over a single drop of red.

  He drew a slow breath, his eyes closing in approval, and only then did I realize I had been droning incoherently.

  "Ohgod—ohmygod—godhelpme!"

  He gave me a look that might have held amusement or curiosity. Then, with a movement so graceful and quick I sensed more than saw it, he placed one hand behind my head, the other on my ribs, and drew me to him in an embrace as intimate as it was inescapable.

  "My dearest Stefan, stop talking to God and yourself, for aren't they really the same?" he asked, his body a cage surrounding me. Fairy-tale eyes darkened, and when he leaned closer I noticed the gold cross he wore in one ear as if in defiance of his nature. "If your Heavenly Father were such a benevolent old man, you and I never would have met—and that would have been the real tragedy, don't you agree?"

  Because he willed it, the strength had left me until I was nothing but clay, the raw material of life that could offer no resistance against the sheer potency of his magic.

  "Please," I heard my voice saying, and hated myself for begging. "Please—let me go!"

  He pinned me with those terrible eyes, and for a moment I thought he might—not because I asked it, but because he detested weakness and I was behaving like a child. But before I realized what was happening, he brought me so tight against his chest I could feel the hard, slow beat of his immortal heart.

  A soft sigh came through his lips and, shaking his head in a gesture of tender reassurance, he forced my body against the cool white wall, compelling me with a thought not to look away.

  The sensation I cannot describe except to say it felt as if the idea were mine rather than his. I wanted to look into his eyes and never glance away. I wanted to feel the heady detachment of his trance like a drug-induced euphoria. And I wanted to collapse in his arms, a dead weight caught between the world of the living and the world that belonged to the night.

  My head had fallen back, and only now did I realize the ceiling was covered with mirrors through which I was compelled to watch the obscene sight of my own seduction by a vampyre. Miquel's reflection was remarkable, the mirror capturing the essence of him which couldn't be seen by human eyes alone. A noncorporeal radiance engulfed him, a silvery resplendence reminiscent of the ethereal glow attributed to the angels themselves.

  But Lucifer was an angel, too, I thought.

  And I began to weep.

  Yet while I would have been loathe to give him any credit for compassion, I felt he wanted to make this easy for me. His arms went taut around me, the full length of his preternatural body pressing against me as if to shield me from what was to come. With a tenderness that was cruel somehow, he smoothed the hair away from my face, leaning in until his lips were brushing the curve of my ear.

  "Ssshh," he whispered, rocking me back and forth. "It doesn't have to be like this, Stefan. It doesn't have to be so terrible if you just let go of your fear."

  I knew it was going to happen then. He really would have me. A long feast of my blood. A little drink of my soul. Yes, he would have me, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it.

  As that unshakable understanding came to me, his embrace loosened just enough to let me breathe. And as if he'd heard my tortured thought, he said quite reasonably, "Yes, I'll have you, my friend, but if you give in to me without a fight, you'll find my kiss far more pleasure than pain."

  Then, with that suggestion murmured against my throat, I felt the rapid sting of his teeth and the blade sharp rush that set my blood flowing. The pain of his bite was acute, that peculiar brand of anguish which raises the hair on the back of the neck and causes the body to go taut, then limp, then taut again, the pain that makes a man surrender instantly in some misguided hope that his surrender might somehow ease the torment or appease the tormentor.

  His fierce fangs easily punctured my flesh to bring a stream of warmth pouring down my neck, a torrent quickly diverted by the vampyre's tongue, a crimson well tapped at the source with a ferocity that coaxed a needful moaning from his chest. Separate from myself, yet mercilessly more aware of my body than I had ever been, I became instantly weak as he began drawing hard on the wound, his suckling so intense I could actually feel the blood being pulled through my veins.

  I must have tried to cry out, for a rush of wind came from my lungs that carried no other sound. My arms thrashed at the air. My legs were numb, and I would have fallen had he not held me.

  It is impossible to say what went through my mind as he took me there in the foyer while Dimitri looked on from ca
ndle-carved shadows. Only then did I see the boy, a lanky blond waif leaning against the wall with a jealous grin as his master drank from me in what was, to vampyres, the most intimate of all experiences.

  At the time, I would have denied it. I would have said the torment of Miquel's kiss was not something to be described as sensual. I would have tried to convince you that I found no pleasure in the eager suckling which drew the lifeblood out of me while feeding his wicked thirst. I never would have admitted that the sensation of his arms constricting around me as he fed was the most repulsive and yet the most comforting embrace I had ever known.

  And never—absolutely never—would I have confessed to being overwhelmed with a yearning so excruciating that I fainted in his arms and became a believer in vampyres.

  My squandered soul liquefied, flowing out of me in twin rivers: one was red, the other pale.