Kiss of the Black Angel Page 7

CHAPTER THREE

  "You see, Stefan, the problem is that we've been glorified, vilified and crucified throughout history, yet other than brief glimpses ofhe truth by enlightened individuals, not a single work has ever come close to defining what it means to be an immortal."

  Those were the words Miquel spoke as I regained consciousness in his bed, though their deeper meaning was lost on me when my eyes snapped open and I began frantically struggling to reassemble the pieces of my shattered world.

  Candles burned on the sills of wood-paned windows, curtains thin and iridescent as butterfly wings rising and falling on the cool October wind—surreal and yet oddly nostalgic in a way I couldn't have named.

  The room was awash with color, so brilliant and rich as to be disorienting. Walls the shade of storm slate sky filled me with longing for something I'd left behind in a childhood barely remembered—an imagined fairyland where little boys lay on a bed of pure white mushrooms and stared up at the heavens, blinking with wonder at every magical thing. In the four corners of the room, potted trees stretched leaves of ash and elm toward a cathedral ceiling covered with sunset purple clouds, a mural where painted night had already fallen at the peak of the tall roof.

  The bed on which I found myself was far larger than any conventional bed. An antique that could have come from some baroque plantation in the south, the headboard was openwork wrought iron, filigreed with individual motifs representing the seasons—spring ivy climbing crumbling columns; flowers bursting in the primary colors of summer; muted autumn leaves falling from a skeletal tree; snowflake lace against obsidian winter night sky.

  Like a Technicolor hallucination, two walls were painted with a moon dappled forest that seemed to extend into infinity; and when the wind came stealing through again, I could have sworn I saw the trees sway and bend.

  My head swam. My pulse, rapid and shallow from loss of blood, fluttered in my ears.

  I looked at the vampyre and wanted to weep—not from fear or anger or any other tangible emotion, but because I was overwhelmed with the notion that my blood now coursed through his veins and we were inexorably linked.

  I had fed him from my heart and now that heart belonged to him.

  The thought humbled me utterly. And yet, still in a daze, it didn't seem so terrible, this sense of belonging somewhere when I'd belonged nowhere in so long. At first, as I lay there with Miquel on one side of me and Dimitri on the other, all I could do was record the fact that they sat like mirror images of one another. Miquel was propped on his right hand, Dimitri on his left, both looking down at me as if I were expected to understand anything they were saying.

  I groaned, my head thrashing, but as awareness returned with a vengeance, I bolted up in the bed and backed away from them until my shoulders were pressed against the cold iron headboard. Looking at them now, I was appalled, and before the rational man inside me had an opportunity to vote, the animal within my skin reacted.

  "You son of a bitch!" I snarled at Dimitri, placing the blame squarely on his shoulders for luring me to this place where vampyres were real and blood was sustenance and sanity was a word without meaning. Clenching my fist, I was—

  —six years old when little Jason Haverhill yanked my pants down in front of the whole first grade. Embarrassed, I cried, but that made it worse, especially when Old Lady Marley scolded me to stop being such a baby. (But even she was laughing behind her frilly flowered handkerchief). When my snuffling stopped, I was filled with uncontrollable rage, a fury that could only be quelled as I lashed out at that toe headed, freckle faced Haverhill brat and beat my fists against his ugly mug until his shirt turned red and his bawling wail filled the halls of Patrick Henry Elementary School—

  Now my face burned again, and I would have struck Dimitri had Miquel not grabbed my wrists and wrestled them above my head, pinning me with his unearthly strength.

  Dimitri never even flinched, but he did smile a little, and that only enraged me to thrash against Miquel in a battle I had no chance of winning. His hands were steel belts around my wrists, his legs scissoring my ankles, and yet his demeanor was one of complete nonchalance.

  "So much bolder you are after your nap," he commented, amused. "But this foolish tussling won't change your fate, nor will striking poor Dimitri right the wrong you feel you've suffered."

  I writhed, my body twisting on the bed until the strength left me. Only when it was gone altogether—a casualty of blood loss and vampyre magic—did I finally subside, falling back onto the white satin comforter. My chest heaved with the exertion. My ears roared.

  Humiliated by a vulnerability to which I was unaccustomed, my eyes fixed on the ceiling, where a tiny spider was building her web in the corner, oblivious to the grim nature of these creatures with whom she shared the room.

  Then, suddenly, I was calm.

  "If you're going to kill me, get it over with," I said, the reality of my situation stabilizing around me. It would be all right. If I died then and there, I'd be with Stephanie again, the struggle would be over, and it would be perfectly all right.

  Releasing my wrists, Miquel ran his fingers through my hair, an unexpected gesture which had the effect of making me tremble because it was so completely without inhibitions, and because I truly believed I was about to die.

  "If I wanted to kill you, I would have drained your life away when I drank from you," he reminded me, though now his tone was unforgivably tender. "No, I haven't brought you here to harm you, Stefan, but to offer you a life that never ends."

  I almost laughed at the absurdity of it all. Vampyres! And yet, my gaze remaining fixed on Miquel, my fingers dug into the comforter as I was again bombarded with the raw understanding of what he was.

  This man—for he could have passed for a man if one didn't look too closely—was a vampyre, a being said to be only myth, yet a myth which sat at my side making a very real indentation in the bed and soothing me with a hand that was undeniably solid and alive, even if cool to the touch.

  The word beautiful had been penned just to describe him, yet it was a word incapable of capturing the antiquity of him and the totality that exceeded the sum of the individual parts. He was more than this man, more even than the refulgent reflection I'd seen in his shiny mirror. He was an immortal with power over life and death, a vampyre with my blood still warm in his belly, a creature who could as easily destroy me as not.

  He was real magic, and that meant the end of the world as I'd always known it.

  When I groaned in acknowledgement of that awful truth, he attempted to placate me with a smile that was anything but reassuring when I saw his teeth. My neck hurt where those fangs had stung me and, stupefied, I raised a hand to the injury still moist from his lips.

  "You—you bit me!" I blurted out, an ineloquent accusation.

  Miquel's smile deepened and, running his fingers down my cheek, he said matter-of-factly, "Bite is such an ugly word, Stefan. I prefer to call it a kiss, and it seemed best to prove my authenticity with such a gesture rather than waste time attempting to explain with a thousand words what a single action could accomplish just as well." His eyes glistened as he leaned closer and lowered his voice to a whisper. "I meant you to find it enjoyable, you realize, though I'll understand completely if you prefer to pretend it wasn't."

  At this, Dimitri gave a hearty laugh, then got up and moved to the window, where he stood with his back to us. Candles on the sill silhouetted him against the night, painting a halo of smoky gold above his head.

  But he was no angel.

  He'd approached me under the guise of a human boy in a vampyre suit at a gathering where identities were put on with a stroke of eyeliner or the donning of a Calvin Klein tux. I'd no more expected him to be a vampyre than I'd expected Superman to fly or Captain Kirk to whip out a communicator and beam up to the Enterprise.

  Miquel sighed dramatically and gave me a probing look that sent flocks of demons skittering through my soul when I realized he really was reading my mind, when I understood
he really could.

  "Ah, poor Stefan, you need someone to blame," he surmised, psychically drinking in my chaos. Then, altogether congenial, he added, "I suppose you could blame me, though you realize I can't force you to do anything you don't want to do. I can make suggestions in your mind and soften your fears with my trance, but any decisions you make are ultimately your own. The only salvation which exists is within you, my friend." His voice trailed off, his smile turning suggestive as he spelled out a blasphemous truth. "Ah, but the only way out of your life that isn't a dead-end is through me."

  Saying this, he once again soothed my brow, undoubtedly to soften the frightening implications of his words. And though I struggled to push his hand away, he slipped one arm behind my head and gathered me to his chest, where, like an infant, I was cradled. I tensed, distraught by his physical closeness, but he put one long finger over my mouth to silence me.

  "Hush now, Stefan. Look at what I'm going to show you and try not to put up such a fuss," he said sternly, rocking me as a father might rock a child and lulling me into some altered state with the deep and metered cadence of his voice alone. "Just be still and let me tell you a story that has no words and no end, yet a story that begs to be told."

  His body was warm now, heated by my blood. Stretching out next to me, he pulled my head down on his shoulder, and though I longed desperately to be free, there is no defense against vampyre magic, no hiding from the trance. His white cotton shirt pressed my cheek, bearing the scent of him that was muted cologne and wildfire out of control, anesthesia and aphrodisiac all at once.

  Terrified that he would kill me, perhaps even more afraid that he wouldn't, I began to pray—for strength and detachment as he ran his hands over my back to calm me; for some glimmer of hope when there was no hope left; for salvation from knowing I was falling under his spell because I did find him altogether alluring. It was what he wanted, of course, the way I had to feel because it was his will.

  But as an inexplicable telepathic union opened between us and he whispered against my ear, "Ssshh," I suddenly knew no one was listening to my prayers except the very devil in whose arms I was held.

  "Hush now," he said again, seductive and terribly calm. "Just close your eyes, Stefan, so you may finally begin to see."

  And my eyes closed as if I'd been drugged.

  Perhaps Miquel's most terrible power was that of Truth—the ability to strip away the lies humans tell themselves and force them to look at reality for what it is. This seeing came as a tickle of thought, a trickle of an idea, a drop of awareness that quickly swelled to a rushing river. It came when he opened his immortal mind to me, pulling me inside that somber sanctuary which was both Tartarus and Elysium.

  And though I struggled fiercely not to look, I beheld in his thoughts those higher truths humans could only imagine: the dreadful condition of mortal man, the futility of old age, the emptiness of an afterlife consisting only of casket satin and bone dust. I heard the wail of the void as the prayers of lost angels and fallen souls were screamed out into the night, unheard and unanswered, and I tasted the emptiness between galaxies which no words could ever describe.

  It is one thing to acknowledge intellectually that Man is alone in the universe. It is another matter altogether to stand in the middle of that wilderness and see it for the wasteland it is. It encompasses no color, no sound. It permeates everything, yet cannot be touched.

  It is a meaningless abyss in the center of the chest where human awareness got caught in a permanent spin and drain cycle. All of us have touched it at one time or another, yet for the first time I knew what it was.

  That black hole at the heart of human consciousness was the blind eye of our manmade God.

  Assaulted with the sensation of knowing rather than merely believing, I still believed life had meaning. Yet I knew it had none. Man had created God to create Man, and now the entire lot of them were stuck in an endless loop.

  It was so simple it was blinding. This brief life was all there was and it was a life that always came to the same fatal end. The flaw in the program was that the program was irrevocably flawed, contaminated with a self-destruct virus that was intrinsic to the program itself. Death was death, certain and final, for although I had a human soul, there was nowhere for it to go except back to the oblivion that spawned it.

  God wasn't sitting behind the grave with a catcher's mitt.

  Oh, we were immortal, yet it was an immortality existing on a cellular level alone, the recycling of our atoms across a universe so vast it was inconceivable that two molecules from the same human body would ever find one another again. If we lived after death, it was as fertilizer for the flowers on our grave or dinner for the worms.

  Valhalla was a fallacy, reincarnation a lie.

  When I looked up into Miquel's eyes and saw my reflection captured there, I understood these things with a terrible and dark sobriety. Heaven and hell were only ghost towns with crumbling altars and unpaved streets. God and the devil were off playing cards for quarters and could no longer be bothered with the snivellings of Man.

  Worse than merely lost, we were a lost cause, blasé.

  A cry of despair tore from my throat, for though I had never been particularly religious, I had cultivated a firm belief in God. I needed my God, as most men did: someone to cry to with my suffering, some fanciful benefactor to pray to for things I neither needed nor wanted. But most of all, as Miquel had already noted, I needed someone to blame for the state of our wretched world and the death of my beautiful daughter.

  But there was nothing out there—at least that is how Miquel perceived it—and the reality of that profound abyss devastated me utterly and sent me whiplashing back into my own body. I began to shake uncontrollably, convulsing.

  "I'm sorry," the vampyre whispered against my ear, rocking me until my body stopped its shuddering. "I am sorry to end your world so abruptly, but isn't that how worlds always end, Stefan?"

  What surprised me was his genuine sorrow, for I knew then that he was as alone in the universe as I was myself. His eyes were wet—wet with red tears that left a trail on his unshaven cheek, tears he cried for me because I was too afraid and too proud to weep for myself.

  "Sometimes, knowing you are alone is worse than being alone," he barely whispered.

  "Then why did you show me?" I demanded, my heart an unlivable desert, broken in two by the things I'd seen. "Why did you want me to know?"

  He bent over me, and for a moment I thought his fangs would deliver me into death, but instead he placed his mouth close to my ear and spoke so softly I barely heard him. "Because truth is all we have, dearest Stefan, and the greatest truth of all is that I could be wrong, though I've no reason to think so." He paused, then added with a certainty that told me he'd already made up his mind: "I will show you some of these truths, and you will show them to the world."

  When I stiffened, afraid of what he was asking me, his hand tightened on my shoulder. He tilted his head, the masculine stubble of his chin a shocking contrast to the softness of his lips moving over my neck as he spoke. "Humanity has lived in spiritual darkness and religious fear too long. It's time their eyes were opened, and who better to do it than you and I? My knowledge, your words, yes?"

  He was seducing me with an opportunity to say something which had perhaps never been said before, and surely he knew it was a lure no writer could have refused. The ramifications caused me to bolt up off the bed, for while I was adamantly telling myself I couldn't be enticed into such a Machiavellian task, I had already begun falling into the mire of that dark seduction.

  For that I hated him.

  In a single evening, he'd torn down the walls I'd spent a lifetime building, making me see what I didn't want to know, and now there could be no going back to the sanctuary of writing children's books and drinking cappuccino with Charlie and driving off to church on Sunday to look for promises of salvation that were as hollow as my own heart.

  'The only salvation which exists is
within you...'

  Crying out as I tore away from him, I staggered to the middle of the floor, disoriented and physically ill. What little blood remained within me drained to my feet and dragged me to my knees, and suddenly I was holding my entire life in my hands, looking at it for the tiny microcosm it was.

  It was finite. It would end.

  All I had held sacred was lost, reduced to ash as I stood apart and watched, yet Dimitri turned from his station at the window to regard me with a look which told me I was behaving inappropriately. With long, delicate arms crossed over his boyish chest, he sighed heavily.

  "Really, Stefan," he chastised, his songbird voice a desolate melody to my ears now. "Nothing has changed except your perceptions. Life and death go on, but don't you think it best to finally tell these secrets so that men and women may live their lives honestly rather than on their knees? For after all, do you really believe nuns would marry ghosts or priests wed the solitude of their own sinful hand if they knew this book they've held sacred is only a myth written by ancient politicians to control an unruly population? Indeed, if people knew the truth about life and death, you'd see them finally come alive!

  "It's time for Man to take responsibility for his own immortality, Stefan! It's time he starts to use that dormant portion of his brain to create his own heaven and destroy his cumulative hells so that—perhaps—he might find a way to transcend death on his own. As it stands, Man goes through his life thinking he'll live again, so he consoles himself with believing death is only a transition when, in reality, it is the end of his entire world."

  How does one answer that? I couldn't.

  And the world spun out of focus all over again, though for reasons altogether unclear to me at the time.

  Miquel shot a disapproving glance which Dimitri met with a sultry stare and a subtle curling of his lip. Disapproval and disagreement synapsed between them, as if the kid had said too much too soon. Never speaking out loud, they argued, quarreled, tension crackling between them like a violent storm.

  Something in their wordless exchange contained more history than in all the world's encyclopedias, yet attempting to translate it to language would be no easy task. It was, quite simply, an exchange of passions dating back centuries—an exchange that caught me in the crossfire, where the tempest in Dimitri's eyes revealed—

  —a young boy alone on an foggy night shore, shrouded in heartfelt silence and sick with the disease of unrequited love. Greece, when tattered sailing vessels brought visitors from faraway lands and the music of shepherds' flutes carried down from rugged hills.

  The boy wept into the ocean's basin, depending on it to carry his tears away in secret just as it had carried his love away to Italy. He never saw the shadows unfold nor felt the unnatural wind against his neck until it was too late. And he certainly never understood that it was his own melancholy which beckoned the vampyre from the belly of some dismal ship where he had hidden seeking passage out of the country.

  When unrelenting arms closed around him and the cruel fangs found his throat, all Dimitri felt was the puncture wound through which his soul was greedily drained. As he lay dying, he thought of love and was glad to be released from it. And as he drew his fatal breath while cradled in the vampyre's possessive embrace, he smiled up into those rueful eyes and said in a diamond clear voice, "Thank you, sir, for taking my life so gently."

  And then the boy was dead.

  My head pounded as I was inundated with telepathic images so vivid it was as if I had become Dimitri, looking at the past through his perceptions just as I'd looked at myself through his eyes earlier that evening at the convention. I felt for him. I felt with him. I died with him in Miquel's arms there on the warm, soft shores of Piraeus.

  But as I stared into Miquel's quicksilver eyes, he just sat there on his bed with his lips drawn back to a vicious snarl and shot me a look which catapulted me back through time itself, a vehement thought that proclaimed:

  The boy mustn't die!

  The blood singing through Miquel's veins fed more than his thirst and the outpouring of gratitude he felt while expecting the hatred reserved for one's executioner was so acute he wept. 'Thank you, sir, for taking my life so gently'.

  What manner of creature was this?

  He gazed at the ragamuffin in his arms and longed to join him in death, yet that was a voyage reserved for humans alone. Miquel could no longer remember when he had been mortal. He could no longer recall when he'd walked in sunlight or taken a lover to his bed.

  He could no longer remember when he had felt love, and though the One who Created him had said he would never feel it again, he experienced that old stirring return with a vengeance now. Love, he thought. And the word became an obsession wearing Dimitri's face.

  But it was too late, that unique force of life gone from the universe when the boy's mismatched eyes closed in death.

  The unfairness of it overwhelmed Miquel, the very existence of death incensing him to the point of outrage, and it was that divine injustice which caused him to tilt his head back and wail a wordless cry of bone-splitting despair into the night. A keening shriek. A soul deep weeping to rival an angry siren's screech or a banshee's scream.

  And then, looking down into the face of this mortal angel, he fell calm and coldly determined as a sensation such as he'd never known gripped him, shaking his very soul inside his body.

  Though he had no real idea of what he intended to do, he tore away his shirt, and with a broken shell found in the sand, drew a wet line across his nipple until a trickle of red bled from him. His body shuddered against the pain and rapture of such a deep cut, and moving solely on instinct, he cupped the pale head and lifted the still warm lips to the wound.

  Intuitively cradling child to breast, he watched those lips turn dark with his blood as the river flowed into the dead boy's open mouth. Frantically, desperately, he rocked the limp body in his arms, his only solace a far removed memory which told him he had once been suckled at his Creator's breast in similar fashion.

  "Live again and live forever," he whispered, exerting the sheer force of his vampyre will to create the reality. A litany now, over and over: "Breathe because I bleed for you! Breathe because I need for you! Breathe because I am the only god I know and because I call on this immortal blood to make it so!"

  Though he'd never spoken such words before, they fell naturally from him now. The blasphemy tasted sweet on his lips, an honest hatred for death, for the pious lies of a God who'd long ago forsaken him.

  "Breathe... live... breathe..."

  And because the blood was part of him, alive and vital as the paradox of those very words, Miquel accompanied it on its magical voyage. No longer a single entity, he was elaborately woven through the boy's empty veins. A caress of human heart, unbeating but still warm. A burn of needful lips now beginning to suckle on their own.

  Though he had never experienced this holy thing before, the instinct to create another like himself was suddenly there as if it had been waiting for the sound of Dimitri's voice to awaken it. And for the first time, he knew he was more than just a vampyre. He was a Creator—one who could give life as well as take it. Of all the preternatural powers, this was the most sacred. Maybe one vampyre in a thousand possessed the gift of Creation. Maybe only one in a million.

  The implications flooded him, spilling from him in a cry of sheer wonder. He was a Creator!

  Waves broke hard against the shore as dawn slaughtered another night. The first sliver of silver tore the horizon at the same instant the boy's chest heaved with an unearthly cry. Like a newborn babe—and that he was—the child knew only its pain and its insatiable need. So with little regard for its father/mother/sibling/progenitor, it attached its newly formed fangs to the nurturing laceration and made known its demand for Life.

  For years to come, all Miquel would remember was scooping the little progeny beneath his cloak as dawn came looking for them with accusation burning in her fiery eye. Running at full force, in awe
of this fragile son of his blood, he barely made it to the darkness of the old ship, and even then Helios singed the ragged edges of his vampyre soul—.

  "Enough!" Miquel decided roughly, breaking eye contact and shattering the spell. "Enough!"

  I must have cried out when I fell back to Earth, back into my body, on my knees in the middle of the floor.

  Had I seen the visions only in Miquel's eyes? Had I tasted a vampyre's hatred of death only on his tongue? The stench of dead fish cloistered in my nostrils from a sailing vessel that hadn't existed in hundreds of years said otherwise. The pale white sand dusting my hands confirmed it.

  Suddenly, it no longer seemed important that Miquel and Dimitri were vampyres. All that mattered was this transcendental experience which defied explanation and would have shaken mere science to its foundations. I had been there—on the shores of Greece in what I roughly imagined to be the 17th century.

  Suddenly, I wanted to crawl to Miquel—for I was unable to walk—and beg him to show me more. How I craved this knowledge, this feeling of wonder that had been dead and buried since Stephanie left me. For the first time since I delivered her body and my soul to the care of worms, I was alive again—ironic, considering that it was vampyres who brought me back from the dead.

  "Please!" I said to Miquel, feeling as a junkie must feel surrounded by an ocean of morphine just out of reach. I looked back and forth between the two of them, realizing I'd been trapped in their private mental war. A taste of vampyre magic. Bait I couldn't ignore. "Please!"

  Whatever became of me was irrelevant. For the first time, I truly knew there was a reality beyond the five senses, and for an opportunity to photograph it with my words, I would do anything in all the worlds.

  Miquel looked at me as if coming to some private decision, then turned his eyes on Dimitri and quirked a smile beset with those menacing teeth which now struck me as oddly attractive. An unspoken communication passed between them, then Dimitri shrugged with seeming indifference.

  "If he plays with his food the way he plays with his words, he might prove an interesting distraction for a century or two," the boy said to his Creator, substantiating my suspicion that they'd been reading my thoughts all evening. He turned his head to study me with a fair amount of disdain, a twinge of jealousy. "But there are thousands of scribes in the world, Miquel, and while this one is somewhat intriguing, is he really worthy of the dark evolution? Is he worthy of being an immortal?"

  What surprised me was my immediate and profoundly emotional outburst. "I'm worthy, goddamn you!"

  But I had to ask: worthy of what? Of being a monster? A thief of human blood? But as I looked at Miquel now and recalled his vulnerability when he'd shown me how alone each of us is in the world, I could not attach the label 'monster' to him whatsoever.

  He was, quite simply, another species. Not human. Not at all a "vampire" as mythology paints them. He was something else entirely, and he had shown me more about myself in a single evening than I'd learned in a lifetime.

  More than any monk or priest or doctor or wizard, this creature despised death and had gone to war against it.

  Now he was offering me a chance to live forever, yet I couldn't help feeling a bit like Adam pondering the outstretched apple. He wanted my words, which meant he was asking for all I had. He wanted me to tell the world vampyres were alive and God was dead, and it was a job I didn't want in the least.

  And yet, it was a job I had to take because I needed—so desperately—to prove him wrong, and the only way I could do it was to live long enough to make a thorough search of all the nooks and crannies of the universe where the Almighty might have gone to hide.

  Maybe that's why Miquel wanted me. He needed a fool who could argue both sides of any coin with equal conviction, a bumbling pilgrim obsessed as much with the journey as with the destination.

  Oh, I wanted to find God, all right—but for all the wrong reasons. I didn't want to worship the son of a bitch. I wanted to slaughter Him for destroying my faith in Him.

  In answer to that thought, Miquel gave a melancholy smile. "Mortals feed themselves on faith because they have little else to sustain them, Stefan," he said as if he really did feel sorry for them. "Indeed, when I was still a man, it was easier to believe in forbidden apples and a serpent in the garden as a means to explain Man's mortality than to believe our entire existence was random chance. It was even easier to believe the soul might exist forever in Hell's torment than to think it would not exist in any capacity whatsoever."

  Truth again. That's how he gave it to me—in little doses of irony and pain.

  Immortality, then, existed not in resurrection nor belief in any deity, but only in the tender mercy of a vampyre's kiss—the kiss of the Creator, the kiss of the black angel. Eternal life was to be found only in eternal death.

  "You begin to understand, Stefan," Miquel told me as he got up off his bed and walked to where I still knelt. "But is it a life you would want? Most men would prefer to die simply because it's far, far easier than living forever, and this is not a choice to be made lightly." He placed a hand on top of my head and looked at me with an expression reminiscent of angels gazing on their mortal charges.

  I knew then what the statue in the courtyard symbolized, and why it watched over all the stone ghosts in a moonlit garden. They were Miquel's human lovers, dead and buried and destined to be mourned forever by their immortal beloved who had gone on without them. I envied them such devotion. But I also envied him the eternity stretched out in front of him, his patient mistress.

  "I don't want to die," I told him, realizing for the first time the truth behind those words. "I don't want to die!"

  I wanted to weep for all the souls already lost throughout the scope of time, my Stephanie most of all. We were throwaways: replaceable, recyclable. And I suddenly despised Nature for making us in such a shoddy fashion. Perhaps, I thought deliriously, vampyres were more thorough than God—better creators than the Creator. They made their children to last, at least.

  And so, in that moment of tumultuous revelations, I added blasphemy to my list of unpardonable sins, though it never occurred to me that such a sin or such a pardon would have required the cooperative agreement of something which did not exist. How much we depended on God. How much we depended on nothing.

  I trembled, in awe of this knowledge and yet filled with dread at the thought of my own death. Even Dimitri had died. Surely Miquel had, too. But why must it happen to me?

  My ethereal ponderings stopped cold, my knees aching from kneeling so long on the floor. Outside, even the frogs had given up their singing, and in his motionless silence, Dimitri had become a still life portrait framed by the open window.

  I blanched, holding my breath. And I lifted my head to look the creature squarely in the eye, mentally asking the question I didn't have the nerve to ask out loud. Are you going to kill me?

  "No one gets out alive, Stefan, not even us," Miquel warned aloud, oddly compassionate despite his threat. "If you choose to live forever, it is true you must first die in my arms."

  I stiffened with anxiety, but he soothed me by tangling his fingers in my hair and slipping a thought inside me that transformed my worry to molten slag.

  "It's just a small part of the price," he said softly. "And look at it this way, my friend. You will go to your death with knowledge of it! You will die with the certainty that you will live again—a certainty not dependent on hollow hope or fragile faith." He paused for a moment, offering a wistful smile. "I cannot promise you heaven, Stefan, but I can give you eternity if you're willing to accept it."

  The cadence of his words was so hypnotic I wanted to be lulled into that new life by the sound of his voice alone, and it is my belief that had he simply told me to die I would have done it then and there.

  "But—why?" I heard myself ask in a strangled, desperate whisper. "Why would you offer this to me?"

  Miquel only looked at me, his unexpected empathy a tangible presence in the room.
"I offer it to you, my grieving friend, because you burn with a thirst for life that will be reborn in your vampyre skin, surviving even the barrier of death. The pain within you can make the nature of life and death ugly enough and beautiful enough to peek through the words you'll write. People will come to you—frightened and impassioned and looking for answers—and you will bring them to me."

  I started to protest, but he shushed me to silence. His voice softened to an awestruck whisper, and once again he caressed my face to mute the blow of what he was telling me.

  "Together, Stefan, we will build a new garden with mortals who'll live forever because that's the way nature intended it before Man lost his way and became a plaything of Death."

  Now Dimitri turned from the window, locking his gaze on his master. "But is he worthy?" the boy repeated, sultry.

  Miquel's wicked smile was his only answer as he knelt at my side and gathered me against his chest, an embrace so intimate I could have refused him nothing. Had he asked for my life, I would have given it. Had he taken it, I would not have resisted.

  But he merely held me in those illusory black wings and rocked me back and forth as we knelt there in the center of his deep green world. It was another reality—a place where trees grew out of the floor and time was a forest painted on the walls and the sun was always setting on the ceiling. Forever sunset, my mind whispered, delirious. Forever dusk and dawn's a million years away.

  Then, as if it really were a kiss, Miquel bent his mouth to my throat and sank the sharp points of his teeth into the wounds he'd left me with before. It hurt brilliantly, though I made no attempt to pull away from the euphoria that instantly overcame me. This time, I did not lose consciousness, and I can only describe the soft red suckling as a libertine union of pain and pleasure.

  It lasted only a few seconds before Miquel drew back, and the additional loss of blood drained my strength entirely. My head collapsed on his shoulder as the breath flew out of me, and then the black angel brought his moist crimson lips to my pale dry ones and left a kiss on my mouth that tasted of my own blood.

  It was a flavor both erotic and sweet, a taste of copper pennies and a little boy whose face I'd once worn running by the railroad tracks with autumn leaves and magic spells crumbled in his pockets. It was a brief taste of knowing my life could go on forever, and a deeper drink of the realization that I had a right to eternity. The dark evolution, Dimitri called it. Perhaps that's what it really was, a willful parthenogenesis whereby a man passed through death in order to evolve forever beyond its reach.

  My head swimming as Miquel's mouth brushed over mine and lingered there, I wondered if this were the forbidden kiss that would forever transform me.

  "Just a taste to whet your thirst," he whispered in response to my thought, and I felt him nurture my disappointment like preparing a complex cocktail. He was a vampyre all right, whether he drank blood or sorrow, laughter or tears. "Tomorrow is soon enough for eternity. For now, you must return to the dayshine world and make your peace with your mirror."

  His proclamation stunned me utterly.

  I tried to protest, to tell him my peace was made on my daughter's grave, yet he hushed me with a finger laid across my lips.

  "It isn't only a matter of manners that I send you away to contemplate this grave choice," he said, so close I could count the fires dancing in his eyes from the candles' myriad reflections, "but this is how it is done, you see. You must offer me your life and your death willingly and of sound mind, and this you cannot do while weak from loss of blood and still half fainting from my spell."

  I was afraid of thinking about it at all, afraid I would change my mind or come to my senses or simply give in to other responsibilities as I'd always done before.

  The thought caused him to smile—compassion and darkness all rolled into a single paradoxical expression that embodied the sheer essence of him.

  "If you survive the transformation," he told me in a tone which said these were the most important words I would ever hear, "you will learn a secret which will give you the strength to live ten thousand years and beyond. But I am constrained to warn you, the price each of us pays for immortality is high and filled with irony. You would be wise to turn me down right now."

  I'd already paid the highest price of all. My daughter was dead. Eternity would never be long enough to mourn her. "I won't change my mind," I insisted, and a terrible resolve caused me to add coarsely, "just do it!"

  But he shook his head and fastened those preternatural eyes on my soul. "You know I cannot, Stefan, for all of this is nothing more than a dream within a dream."

  And with a hypnotic gesture of one bejeweled hand, he made it so.