Fiend, page 11
part #3 of Voice of Blood Series
“Share blood?” I asked. “Maria has never shared her blood with me. That is, not since the first time, of course.”
“But not ‘of course,’” Chicot said. “She no had reason to perform the act in that way. I still do not fully comprehend her reasoning in that, except, again, as an element of control.”
“Or love,” said Georgina.
“Or love,” Chicot agreed. “And she does love you, Orfeo. She loves you very deeply. And yet she also absolutely requires control at all times. Having you directly linked to her ensures that. I have no doubt that you have experienced this control.” He smiled at me, and I thought of the ghost hand that threatened to unman me, and added a scoff of my own. “If you haven’t yet, you shall.”
“I regularly taste the blood of Maria’s womb,” Georgina volunteered.
“Yes,” said Chicot a little wistfully, and I saw that he did not find the method as distasteful to imagine as I did. I resolved myself to think on it again. “And accordingly, you are stronger than your age would suggest. But not enough to lessen the disparity.” He unbuttoned his sleeve cuff and rolled the fabric above his elbow. His forearm was sinewy and muscular under skin as pale as sea foam. “Drink from me,” he said. “First you, Orfeo. I will stop you well in advance of any danger.”
His blood came eagerly to a touch of my fangs.
Wine and salt and a faint, delicious taste of pain—
What a lovely childhood in Gironde by the sea! A dark-haired boy with sisters and brothers and massive shaggy retriever-dogs, running along the strand in sunlight so blazing and total that it burned my eyes just to share his recollection. His knowledge was of trees and plants and medicine, of the alchemy of transforming dry brown twigs and tiny blossoms into tinctures that could cure or kill or erase pain from the limbs while leaving the mind clear. He knew the names of more flowers than I had ever known existed, and the properties of seaweeds and the nodules on the roots of growing things. He married a girl with hair the color of cedar bark, who left him and their infant child for an English sailor. When the child fell ill, Chicot traveled to Bordeaux in search of a cure. Instead, the naturalist found the supernatural, and an infinite ocean of grief and hunger.
Hunger.
Chicot yanked back my head the same way he had that of the banker. “Enough, my son,” he insisted, gently but firmly. I watched the echoes of his voice, the sound waves deforming the air, diminish themselves into invisible infinity. He stood up and moved slightly away, putting his punctured wrist up to his mouth. He glowed like a gas flame, as did I. I groaned and pressed my head between my palms, willing the power to recede inside me, and Chicot leaned back against the wall, only the whites of his eyes showing below heavy lids. “Georgina . . . if you would like some, this is the time.”
I collapsed to the leaf-strewn earth, writhing and twitching as the blood coursed through my stomach into my veins. I tore up handfuls of grass in an effort to regain control over myself, watering the new wounds in the earth with my bloody saliva. The grass shriveled and blackened instantly where the blood and spit touched it.
Georgina held Chicot against her in a swooning embrace, her mouth pushed against his neck. Chicot’s face twisted in an orgasmic grimace, and low carnal moans fell from his lips. “Oh, Georgina, oh, Georgina, enough,” he whispered. “Enough.”
I struggled to my feet and gently pulled Georgina away from him. She immediately pressed her lips against his and kissed him passionately, and he did not shirk but returned her kiss. I ran my hands up under her dress, grasped her hips, and dragged her away, pushing her down onto the concrete slab still warm from where we had sat. A few flicks of my claws laid her pantaloons aside in tatters, and I drove my knee against her groin fiercely, crushing my lips against hers. “Me now,” I said inside her mouth. “While we still have this.”
She rubbed herself against my knee, arching her back, her orgasm shuddering through us both like a sudden violent chill. Caught in a diamond chain of cresting climaxes, I did not startle at the touch of Chicot’s hands against my back, pressing me farther into her, directing me. “Yes, now,” he whispered, bent over, caressing Georgina’s ear with his lips. “Let me give you this. This. This is my gift. This is my true task.”
For that hour, we three were one, and when dawn came, I was both sorry and relieved to see him go. Georgie and I went straight to our own rooms, to distill our separate thoughts from the sea of the experiences and emotions of others.
Revolution
I spent the entirety of the July revolution (all two and a half days of it) hiding in the Cimetière du Calvaire.
I had found a pleasing stone mausoleum, mostly empty, to make my temporary residence and clubhouse; I brought candles and books and a pair of opera glasses, so as to keep an eye on the dramatic plumes of smoke rising from the city. I did not know if the violence would spread across Paris to the village of Montmartre, but I wanted to have a head start in escaping if it did.
Georgina had gone to join her fellow revolutionaries at their barricades. Maria remained inside the apartment, fretting silently and trying to pretend unconcern. All of the servants had deserted us, and I grew weary of having to fetch and carry for Maria, to try to set her hair in the way she preferred, and set the warming iron on the bed. So I stormed out, secretly hoping she would follow. She did not, too preoccupied in thoughts of her lover, and I joined her, in privacy, in fretting.
I sat in the semidarkness of the warm summer evening and calmed myself by reciting the rosary. As I relaxed, I reached out to Georgie’s mind, demanding that she let me know that she survived, and was not lying in distress with dreadful sunburns turning her fine pale skin to red leather.
At once I received an answer: Georgina lay in bed with the sister of a montagnard, providing distraction so that the young woman would not worry about her radical brother. I provide comfort, not perdition, she assured me. You should not hide; come into the city and join us. Softly, through her ears, filtered the sound of ecstatic panting.
I could not resist a smile, or a flutter of arousal, both of which I shared with Georgina. I am quite content to remain here, thank you.
Suit yourself; this woman is exquisite. I shall return, mostly intact, my sweet Monsieur Grise!
Like a door being shut in my face, the connection disappeared, and I was left alone with the dusty, moldering corpses. I cannot say I preferred their company to that of my lover, but it was preferable to the thought of leaving the calm and safety of the cemetery, with the scent of ripening grapes from the nearby convent’s vineyards.
It was there, in the mausoleum, that I first experienced the shocking fullness of memory that is the eternal curse of the vampire. The smell of the vineyards brought with it the first thoughts of the Fattorio di Ricari I had had in more than ten years: the taste of our wines, the sundrenched hills, the flavor of milk-and-honey.
The cemetery itself reminded me of my mother’s passing, which, due to my foolishness, immaturity, and cowardice, I had not witnessed. Lying against cold stone, my eyes unfocused in the near-total darkness, I thought of my mother’s embrace, her calm, sad eyes, the sound of her voice, like bells blown from dark-brown glass. I remembered these things, but I felt hopelessly distant from my mother, not merely by distance or my continued life; I felt as though I hardly knew this woman. “Mamma” had been substituted in my thoughts by Maria. I felt more that I had been birthed through Maria’s bloody thighs, and when I tried to recall the specific details of my birth mother, I had clearer images of Maria’s lips against my forehead, and my clumsy attempts to set her smooth golden hair.
Consumed with desperate loneliness, I sent out my thoughts, searching even for Lorenzo, but found nothing. Either he was too far away or he was dead; but he was not within my scope of perception. I tried, as well, to find Elena, but it was the same; I heard only the worry of Maria, the satisfied lust of Georgie, and a background roar of all the excited and terrified minds in Paris.
In an attempt to distract myself from crushing self-pity, I leafed through the pages of my copy of The Bride of Abydos, a rare early Byron work that Georgina had proudly located for me. There was love of a sister contained within those pages, but my eyes blurred with tears before I could find the passage. Byron was dead and I had hardly cared before that moment. I now wished that I could find his body and revive it, and demand of it the answers which had eluded me thus far.
Why did he love me? Why did he leave me? Did I hurt her? Did I betray her? Is this the nature of my damnation?
I prayed to Holy Mary and Jesus to rescind my life, but they did not deign to grant this childish, selfish request.
When Georgina returned the day after the monarchy had fallen, her hair was cropped short and she wore the trousers, blouse, and jacket of a stone laborer. Although I felt it was Georgina—that same lean, cat-eyed, humorous face winked from under a greasy soldier’s cap, her body still radiant—for a moment I did not recognize the tall, thin young man who strode in heavy boots into our apartment. “I have returned,” the young man announced in the husky-sweet accented voice of Georgina.
“What have you done with your hair?” Maria and I cried in unison.
“Oh, please. It will grow back, if I want,” said Georgina, doffing the cap and running her fingers through cropped dark strands, now shorter than my own. “I took this disguise in order to better meld myself with the republicans. You would be surprised; I am not the only woman wearing trousers who built the barricades.”
“That is idiotically reckless,” Maria snapped. Her lips were pinched and white.
Georgina rolled her eyes. “It is safer and more sensible than trying to do the same in a gown by Madame Palmyre. I was never in any danger; you underestimate me, my diamond. Have I not the same strength that you have?”
“Your strength will not protect you from a cannon shot that knocks off your head!”
“I was never in any danger. Why won’t you listen to me? At least I care about something more genuine than the curls in my hair and the timing of His Majesty’s shits—”
Furious, Maria struck Georgie in the face with the back of her hand. Gobbets of blood and teeth flew out of Georgie’s mouth and spattered against the parquet floor, and Georgie fell to her knees. Thoughtlessly, I dove for the loosened teeth, only to find them disintegrating into gray jelly among the blackening spots of blood.
“I fought for your freedom.” Georgina’s voice came muffled through her ruined, dripping mouth. “I stood up for all our freedoms. I saw innocent men ripped in half from the bullets of palace guards. I set paving stones until my hands bled because I believe that we can be free and we can remake the world. You are a fragment of a dynasty that was destroyed hundreds of years ago; your time is over.”
“You talk like them,” Maria hissed. Her heart contained a maelstrom of conflicting emotions, but pride, as always, triumphed over all. “You are delusional, like them. You cannot remake the world. The world is made and there is no remaking it!”
Georgina rose to her feet again. Her cheek was bruised and her lip still split, but the drying blood had sealed it up, and I could see the skin healing, even from down upon the floor. “I am willing to take the chance that there is,” she said. “Because I have had enough of silence and acceptance while the corruption of the government is allowed to flourish. They are consuming and destroying all of Europe. The nobility gulps caviar while the children of the working class starve. They will seize our very lives if given a chance. Nothing can change unless we make it change.” The bruises on her face faded to nothingness, and her eyes flashed black fire. “We will remake France. By force if necessary.”
I also rose to my feet, and stood between them, my eyes on Maria. “Please, Maria, don’t ever beat her again,” I said. “Or I shall have to die defending her honor, even against you, my lady.”
“I would not kill you to make a point, little greyhound,” said Maria, chastened. She trembled, and would not meet my eyes. “I am . . . I have been . . . Oh, my dearest love, you have nearly killed me with worry!”
Georgina embraced us both, pressing me between them, enclosed in her arms. Maria put her arms around me from behind. I relaxed into the sweet suffocation as they kissed, my face pillowed on Georgie’s breasts, bound tightly against her ribs with a linen cloth under her blouse. “My love, we cannot die that way,” Georgina whispered, a shivery current running between us through the vibration of her voice. “You should know that. We would both be dead a thousand times over by now. But I wouldn’t let anything happen to me; I love you too much.”
In this tender moment, I did not mention, or allow to be perceived, how overwhelmingly erotic the sight of Georgina in men’s clothing had been to me.
I am a mercenary of desire, a naughty, sneaking child to the last.
To her credit, Maria did not gloat when, two weeks later, Louis-Phillipe was inserted as the King of France, destroying the more radical factions’ dream of a truly democratic republic. Georgina stood on the balcony, her cruelly short hair obscene in contrast to her flowing red dress with yellow lace cuffs and collar, her face hard and expressionless. Her disappointment tasted like iron in my mouth. “Another bloody king,” she muttered, crumpling her newspaper and throwing it over the balcony. It landed in the fountain and sank. “This will never do.”
“As long as there are fighters like you, it never will. Have patience. These things don’t happen overnight. Democracy requires work; of course there will be pauses along the road. Do not let your idealism blind you to the true goal.”
My Georgie turned and threw her arms around me. “Oh, Feo,” she teased, “have you become a republican?”
Rather than answer her, either to lie and say I shared her radicalism, or to speak the truth that politics mattered little to me, and that injustice, the vicious heart of existence, never died, I kissed Georgina’s red, salted lips until I could no longer taste her tears. “I fight for those like us, you see,” she murmured against my mouth, “those of us who are different, who do nothing wrong, but who are hated for what we are.”
I shushed her, and kissed her more avidly. Her expected response was gratifyingly swift. Together we returned to the apartment and the couch in the sitting room, and shrugged off the garments that defined us but did not describe us. This was easier than it might seem, since Georgina had not bothered with wearing a corset since returning from the barricades.
She straddled me, as though she were a rider and my loins her saddle, and grinned. “Do you like that I’m a boy now?” she purred.
“You will never be a boy, even if your head was shaven,” I replied, squeezing her breast. Against her creamy flesh, my elongated, darkened fingernails appeared as the savage talons of an eagle. To dissolve the unease caused by this distasteful sight, I turned her so that I rose above her, nudging my knees between her thighs. “No boy could ever have skin like yours, or a smile like yours, or a sweet rose like yours.”
“Oh, perhaps sweeter . . .”
“Never, my George. Never. There will never be anyone like you.”
She smiled wistfully. “George . . . Ha . . . I like that.” I have become a stranger. Where has Jadzia gone? To the same place as the skinny little hare? How we change, we changeless ones! She kissed those thoughts into my throat. “I do sometimes wish I could be a boy, just for you— there is so much that I want to do to you.”
“Yes? Well, treat me as the boys at Les Halles would.”
Georgina laughed heartily. “For maximum verisimilitude, you have to be standing against a wall with your trousers unfastened.” I laughed too; the idea of putting on clothes so recently shed was plainly absurd. But the sudden sharp desire to create the scene overcame me, and I stood up and donned my trousers.
She stared at me, astonished for a moment. Then her attention was engaged. “Against the wall,” she murmured, slouching her shoulders and pouting, tousling her hair with her fingertips till she looked like a youth, albeit one with a very old soul. “Thirty sous for my head, forty for my arse.”
“How much for your hand?” I teased, watching her take to her knees before me.
She rolled her eyes indignantly. “My hand? Monsieur, please. Go talk to André over there, he’s desperate.” With a wink, she bent her mouth over me.
For a while, I was transported with a keen joy that no Les Halles boy-prostitute or Sorbonne angel could produce in me. It should not have been different, and yet it was; no one was or ever can be like Georgina. Every pinpoint of contact bloomed unique and perfect. Is it not always thus—in love, or the next-best thing? And is this not how a man too often defines love?
A burning impatience flared in me, and I could be still no longer. “Stand up,” I told her, giving her my hand. She stood, and I slipped my hand between her thighs, where the dense hair rustled like silk when brushed. “Oh, you have this! How much for your pretty cunt?”
“All the world, monsieur,” she said, eyelashes aflutter.
“I have that,” I replied, and bent her over the couch.
Her roaring, lusty laughter was infectious. Always, we laughed while we screwed, pinched each other, tickled each other, let our happy tears run rampant over the other’s skin. For this reason, it was some time before either of us noticed Maria standing in the doorway, curiously observing us. In over a decade, she had never interrupted us in flagrante delicto; we were always aware of each other, so there was simply no excuse.
I sat up abruptly, interrupting Georgina’s orgasm, and had reflexively hidden my nakedness behind hers before I’d even had a chance to think. “Damn you! What’s your problem?” Georgie smacked my bottom impatiently, then looked across the room. “Oh,” she added.
