Day 12: 2,468 words; 21,919 total

Part 5: Two to tango

Kirill hadn't spoken a word since we said our goodbyes to Arthur, and he didn't say anything when I swiped the car keys from him. He just raised an eyebrow and went around the Jaguar to get into the passenger's seat.

It took me a minute to fiddle with the seat and mirrors, but the car itself started up like a dream. Like riding a tiger, I thought. Not something you forget.

I let my reflexes take over as I watched Kirill with one eye. His hands rested on his knees, the index fingers touching. His fingernails were a little long, and they hooked into the fabric of his pants, tense and taut.

I'd long learned to recognize the signs.

Kirill fell in love easily. I knew his type: just this side of innocent, reserved, with secrets to hide. He'd draw the secrets out, break the spirit, tarnish the innocence, and sooner or later it all came crashing down.

In the time I'd known him - was it five years, or already six? - only one of these affairs had ended in death, a sordid tale of a dark-haired nun driven to suicide by her demon lover. Another woman had threatened to, and a young man, too young as I'd told him, but Kirill never listened, had set fire to the office, and only my and Willem's gargoyles, newborn then, had saved Kirill from burning. I knew about other victims, for he drew their faces sometimes in the margins of documents when the dark mood took him, and he drew them both in life and in death.

I hoped this time would not be as bad. I knew better than to reason with him.

"N'est-ce pas un peu trop vite?" he asked.

It took me a moment to switch to French. A look at the speedometer told me I was pushing a hundred and ten, and at one a.m. the streets of New Granada weren't nearly deserted enough.

I watched my hands move on the steering wheel, maneuvering between vehicles, ignoring car horns and pale faces that passed by in the blink of an eye.

"Rachel!"

I shook myself. "Sorry," I said in English. "Got lost in thought."

"Should I drive?" There was a glint of actual concern in his eyes.

"No. I like it." I forced a smile. "I hope this proves to you that I can drive, too."

He turned his attention back to his own hands, and I concentrated on driving. I did not slow down, but I launched the car into a dizzying series of turns that took us through empty alleys and suspect shortcuts. The engine did not protest once.

I could grow to love this car, I thought.

Soon, too soon we were in Radclyffe Lane. Kirill got out at the front door, leaving me to put the car in the garage. I puttered around the ground floor for a while, fixing myself a sandwich, and once it was nothing but crumbs, I decided it was time to go upstairs.

He was sitting in the dark, by the open window, letting the night wind ruffle his hair. This, too, was a sign, so I just made my way over to the closet door and turned on the light inside it as I collected my clothes. When had I started keeping so many of them at Kirill's, anyway? I guessed it was because he hadn't had a serious lover since early last winter; with the months we spent engaged in vampire power plays, and later the Bahamas thing, there just hadn't been the time. Come to think of it, the last one had been Penelope, and she had never come here, for some strange reasons that had to do with symbolic betrayals and sheer hypocrisy.

Okay, so maybe I was a little pissed off, in the usual way of someone looking forward to weeks or months of actually having to search for suitable sexual partners. But that was neither here nor there.

"What are you doing?"

I blinked. Kirill was standing at the door to the closet, though the light didn't quite shine on his face.

"I don't know about your word, but in mine, when a girl finds another woman's lingerie in her guy's closet, that's usually the cue for a screaming match," I said as I folded up my favorite muslin nightdress and put it on the quickly growing stack. I would need to make at least two trips to the guest room, maybe three. "I'm just looking out for the safety of my own ears."

He put his hand on my arm, and the loose sleeve of my shirt treacherously clung to his fingers. "I didn't say I'd pursue her."

"Kirill, I've got eyes."

"Then use them to see!" he snarled.

His fingers clenched around my arm like a vise, and he all but threw me into the room. I stumbled and sat down on the bed, too stunned to protest, as he slammed the closet door shut, plunging the room into darkness. I heard his footsteps, then the striking of a match that flared like an alien star. His hands were trembling, and it took him three matches to light the twin candles on the mantelpiece.

I listened to his breathing, ragged and shallow, and I could not understand.

Once the candles were lit, he turned back toward me, and I rose out of some contrary pride that made me refuse the role of the injured damsel. He raised his hand, then dropped it, and sat back in the armchair.

"Do you know what human life means to me?" he began. "How brief it seems? And yet it draws me, always, though I know that at best it's just a single moment of happiness before everything crumbles. I envy humans. Brief lives, yes, but so bright. I want to go up in flames just once, though it mean becoming ash-" He paused, looked at me.

"Instead when you reach for the fire, others become ashes," I finished. "Does it make the urge less valid?"

"I don't know. Rachel - what gets me through this, century after century, is my desire to know. Everything and everyone, and all emotion that there is. And I don't even know how to make it work for myself!" He rose again and tore at his collar as if it were suffocating him. I saw a small button drop to the floor, roll, hit the wall and stop. "Sometimes I think I've tried it all. Every sin and virtue. I've tried to play the demon, I've tried to play the saint - but each time I'm stuck going through the same motions, heading to the same disaster. I don't see the point anymore."

I shivered as if he had struck me. "There are three paths to immortality," I said, hearing the echo of another voice in my own. "One is madness, be it noble or base. One is curiosity, the wish to know God through knowing the world He created. And one is love, and that one goes further than all others, from the dawn of Man until the day the Earth itself dies in fire or in ice."

"God is dead," Kirill whispered. The candlelight shimmered on his dark hair. "Dead, or else he has cursed us to this life eternal, to sin and violence and lies..." He looked up at me, and for a moment he seemed impossibly young, younger than he had ever been in this un-life. "Who were you quoting?"

One truth, I thought, deserved another, but still I turned my head away before I spoke, looking at the way my shadow wavered on the wall. "Lucian. Saint Lucian of Nicomedia."

"I thought I'd read all his writings."

"It wasn't something he ever wrote down, I think." I put my arms around myself, recalling another night of confessions, thirty years past and more. "There was wine and there had been a battle, and I was the one talking of being tired of existence."

Kirill was silent, and I didn't blame him. Lucian was a legend, a children's story, one of the first two mages to make peace with the new world order that would reign the Earth. The Church made them saints, and the Night Folk made them all but gods.

"It was after Katanga," I said, more to fill the silence than anything else. "After the Tribunal dealt with the trial, I had no place to go. I did some rash things. He found out, I never asked how. That was more or about it."

"He is as wise as legend would have him be," Kirill said. "Which would you say it is with me - madness, curiosity, love?"

"All three," I said simply. "It's always all three, with everyone. That's the point. You have to be a little crazy, a lot curious and very much in love with life to gobble it up a century at a time."

He touched me then, just a hand on my shoulder, but I felt as though he was catching me after a long fall. His shadow joined mine on the wall, and then swallowed it up as he took me into his arms.

I let him draw me towards the armchair. He sat down, and I curled up at his feet, propping my head on his leg. I felt his fingers in my hair, drawing the pins out one by one.

"So, you were saying?" I prompted after a while. "About Natalie?"

"What did you think about her?"

Bastard. "Very young, very innocent, very polite. Eager to know things. Will fall into your bed as soon as you show the slightest bit of interest. And?"

"And I'm wondering if it's worth it," he admitted. "Maybe I should let her be innocent a while longer."

"Mmm. I guess all those virgins get boring after a while."

He pulled at a lock of my hair. "Sarcasm doesn't suit you."

"Oh, go stake yourself." I turned my head and kissed his thigh to let him know I didn't really mean that. "So you're going to try the unrequited love thing for a while? That should be a change."

"I was thinking more of dropping the whole matter. I do that sometimes. When I grow bored with a certain type, or when I get too close to really getting burned."

"Right." I shifted to my knees to get better access to him. The clothes he'd chosen for Arthur's do had been in a vaguely Empire style, and while he'd long shed the coat, those pants were really sinfully tight. And tempting.

"I only tried the unrequited love thing once," he continued, touching my face. "And that was-"

Something tightened in my throat, a sharp pain like a snakebite, and I knew I wouldn't let Kirill finish that train of thought. Kissing him would have been the traditional way, but other parts of him were closer, so I put my mouth to better use.

There are some things no man can easily refuse, and Kirill wasn't an exception. And it wasn't exactly chivalry that prompted him to insist on returning the favor, or that it would be more comfortable for us on the bed, and I had my theories about the way the silk scarves appeared out of nowhere at all.

The sky in the east was already lightening when we fell asleep, sated and tired and blood-spattered, because after a certain point Kirill had stopped paying attention to catching every drop, and I had been too busy urging him on to consider the effect on the sheets.

-

I dreamed of music first.

That was all there was: darkness and the music. Guitars, and a rhythm that took me back a very long time. Jadzka had a gramophone, I remembered, and we'd play this song and pretend we were dancing with the boys of our dreams. I hadn't thought of Jadzka for decades, not since I learned she died when the Russians came, but this was the same melody that had echoed on the Lvov street with our laughter.

Tango Milonga...

It was the same gramophone, with the slight scratch on every rotation, but when I turned to find it, it wasn't Jadzia winding it up. It was Kirill, in a black suit with a red carnation in the buttonhole, and he bowed to me as he invited me to dance.

It quenches the flame of blood in my breast...

He led like he lived, forceful and considerate at once, and I gave no quarter. My dress whirled around my knees as we turned. It was gold and red and spattered with black, snakeskin satin, and there were bands of true snakeskin at my wrists.

Tango Milonga, play it for me once more...

Step, step, step, step, turn, no signals between us and still we went through the same figures. He let go of me and I passed behind him, trailing my hands along his shoulders, but just when I was about to slip away into the darkness, he caught me once again.

Goodbye, storm and heartache - time changes everything...

We were immobile now, pressed too close, too near, and I saw his eyes were dark and immobile, slit-pupilled. Snake-eyes. As were mine.

All will sputter and fade, before this melody rings in the day...

Tango Milonga, whirling around us in a last desperate paroxysm before the world went dark.

-

I woke with a smile on my face and a pain in my chest. I slipped out of bed and tiptoed up to the still open window. I could not have slept for more than half an hour, but the sky in the east was already a brilliant pink, and I knew that if not for the buildings on the other side of the street, I would see the sun itself rising on another circuit of the globe.

I remembered the sunrises in Katanga were faster, as had been the sunsets.

Rachel, Rachel, so sure in the dark and helpless in the light of day.

I let the snake come up, its strength and simplicity reassuring me. There would be another night, and people to find and maim and kill. Nothing could stand in my way, because I was who I was, and that was all there was to it. No-one hurt me and mine and lived to tell about it, and not now that I knew what 'mine' really meant.

I heard the sheets rustle as Kirill sat up.

"Come back," he said, and I followed his words.

He held me in his arms, strong and warm with stolen blood, until I fell asleep again, and he did not ask why, before I did, I nipped gently at his throat with my blunt teeth.