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[New Haven-1986]
[Night, Lazarus]
In the twenty-three minutes and fifteen seconds Circe spent in Elysium tonight, not a fractal moment did her eyes, her beautifully dreadful eyes, turn his way. Playing the security tape back, Lazarus lets his fingers slide beneath his mockery of presentability and over old scars, luxuriating in the way her perfect features used to twist into something ugly when she did the same. When she touched him was the only time Circe seemed imperfect. Flawed for the folly of loving him. She’s taken her braids down since last time, and her hair curls at her shoulders as she shares with that fangling a sadistic smile. Lazarus’ head drops back at the remembrance of it, body still broken in long after she let go of his reins. The action exposes the pale arch of his throat, looses a soft gasp which is met in kind, the alcove a veritable chorus, breathy in its harmony.
The resource guarding was all Circe. It was she who shifted his usual dalliances to a dark corner, a back room, a quiet moment where the only one who could profit off his utter destruction was herself. Sans her tyranny, he finds no more value in modesty than in discipline, lets the others partake of his pleasure. His worm-riddled body was nothing precious enough to warrant coveting anyhow. She was the only one who’d ever thought so. And the pit between his ribs is only emptier for her past presence.
Circe. Circe… Perhaps it’s only due to the depth of the night that she still glows so vividly in his mind’s eye. A supernova crashing down to Earth for the express purpose of smashing him up against the headboard, he murmured to her once when he’d woken up midday and found her watching him, red eyes feline in the lowlight. She hadn’t looked particularly impressed by his romantic declaration, possibly due to the fact he couldn’t remember the last day, the fact sickly yellow striations were still ringing his irises, the telltale sign of artificial compounds in the undead body. Still he drifted into trance with her fingers running through his hair and knew she loved him. A love he repaid spectacularly enough Circe now prefers Nisha, Abraxas even, over him.
Abraxas is a moot point, she’s always loved a puzzle, a challenge, a fight, and that was something Lazarus never could’ve offered. Nisha though. Nisha, human and flawed and fallible, and lovely in her spark. His dear friend, his right-hand woman, endearing in even her dishonesty. It drives him nearly mad when she comes back from a smoke break, that sultry scent of cherry leather twining her hair, and lies to his face about the last time she saw Circe. In the footage, Nisha lights a cigarette and Circe rests an elbow on the bartop her mouth pursed in annoyance. Lazarus aches into the velveteen pillows of the loveseat.
Draining the rest of his cup, he stumbles to his feet, not bothering to straighten his clothes. Nearly tripping over the prone forms of various patrons still lost in their highs, he makes it across the lounge to drape an arm around the neck of the doorsman. Lazarus is still light-headed and dizzy on endorphins when he parts with a newly white-faced guard a few minutes later. Usually he leaves the warnings however light to Nisha, but the performance tonight simply won’t do. Too easy and she’ll lose interest.
Beneath his canopy of red silks and black chiffons, Lazarus watches the darkness swim in and out of focus. Of all the substances he’s partaken of, the one by her name has had the longest and most brutal come down by far. Vampires don’t sleep, but Lazarus lets the haze pull him under, dreams in his own way of capitulating the next time she comes to him bored. Of hiding new blossoms of red beneath his clothes for her hands to find, of crawling across the cobblestones to her step on bloodied knees and doesn’t. And doesn’t do any of these things.
Because, he too, at one point loved her.
[Day, Circe]
Don’t think about him.
This period of repose, like any other, Circe finds her thoughts drifting backwards. So many years. It’s been so many damn years. And she can still remember the hard packed dirt of the yard beneath her bare knees. Feel the chill where his shadow fell over her face. The brush of the backs of his fingers on her cheek, his skin cool and papery in its age.
How it felt tearing beneath her desperate, scrabbling hands, tissue shreds clumping under her nails.
If it was a fairy tale the shivering girl clutching her tattered dress to her body as they passed shuttered home after shuttered home would’ve turned to the monster then, would’ve said,
“Mister, what red eyes you have!”
And received in reply, “All the better to see you with, my dear.”
Instead she trailed after knowing she’d never again be warm. With her body she’d lost even the favour of the morning sun which now blistered the tips of her fingers when she toyed with the edge of a refracted beam.
Her maker drew her little hand away from the mirror of the window upon the barn floor, swaddled her in himself. And even as her undead heart strained with the uncertain opening notes of something green, Circe knew she hated him.
Perhaps she would grow to adore him for a time. But she’d hate him for longer.
In hindsight, the girl would understand these two things were not mutually exclusive.
“Mister, what long nails you have.”
“All the better to hold you with, my dear.”
They traveled for a long time across marsh and moor, stopping in whichever town her maker desired, skipping over others on a whim. Despite her misgivings, they were welcomed anywhere they went, lavished with wide smiles and compliments and bodies.
In the beginning she’d marvel at it, the ease with which he’d ingratiate himself in a town’s local clergy, spin a stranger into a close friend. Back before she learned like attracted like. Before she understood compulsion.
Though some nights she doubted his love for her, he was powerful, of that there was no question. Powerful enough to do whatever he wanted, to go wherever he pleased. The freedom of power was perhaps the true identity of Circe’s first love. One she courted clumsily on her new legs, a tremble in her knees, a knife in her hands.
Dark droplets dried on her face as they warmed themselves at an untended hearth, their ever-gracious hosts no longer around to feed the flames.
Sometimes they kicked over a rolled rug on their way out. Looked down on the resulting blaze as it feasted through thatched roofs and drought-brittle grass with an appetite momentarily deep enough to match theirs.
“What use are the laws of nature to those who have conquered even Gaia?” He lifted her hands against a backdrop of orange teeth and she hated herself too then for trembling all over. “Cup your palms now along the distant townline, my Circe, and see how we have made even our own supplicant sun.”
“Mister, what sharp teeth you have…”
All the better to eat you with.
The street is silent enough the entire night seems to ring with her footfalls. Vampires are quiet creatures, bloodless and papery and shielded by the shadows themselves when they move. She gives all this up if it’ll let her run faster. Reach her quarry sooner. Because she can’t find him. She can’t find him.
Familiar streets bleed together becoming alien, and the branching side alleys of North Haven she knows as well as the patterns of her partner’s major arteries have tangled, even the carotid lost in the cacophony. Still, Circe runs. Her bare feet pattering across cobble, her dress a blood-stained mess of frayed thread trailing about her legs. Her body which has not changed since that night decades and decades ago feels shrunken, her limbs shorter, making less ground. Wide red eyes scan streets and walls and windows and the racing of water along storm drains mirrors her cat-quick thoughts. She’s young again in her aloneness, reduced, weak for the loss of him, and desperate to remedy the incongruity Circe breaks into a dead sprint down a side street with a vaguely familiar signpost and runs and remembers snippets here vines hanging from a window on the second story there and runs and retreads a path taken long ago and follows and finds a crumpled shape lying at the back of the alley.
There is so much wrong with the sight, with the figure’s mangled form, that it takes far longer than it should for Circe to call out by name for the man who is very nearly a part of her own soul. In wild anguish she flings herself as a bat, a moth, a bird, through the air, losing her grip on her transformation to tumble to her knees at his side calling, calling.
A flicker of recognition passes through Edgar’s eyes before the awareness goes out of them entirely and he is gone.
“My dear…” Circe brings a palm to his pale face, joins her forehead to his. The blood which so diligently kept his organs running now sticks to her skin as it dries, forms dark clots on the fabric of her dress where it’s soaked in. There truly is a first time for everything: for the first time, his body as she hugs it is cold. Edgar, her beloved Eddie. Perhaps that’s always been the crux of the problem. Edgar has never truly been hers, bonded in blood, in the frigid iron change of unlife. Circe could remedy that issue right now. Something long dormant lurches in her chest, an assurance of her power. Like all vampires who have lived past their fangling year, she has the ability to turn mortal flesh, to bind another forevermore. Instead she holds him tight as lingering warmth seeps between her fingers. Until Edgar is gone and all that’s left within her reach is the body he once inhabited.
Perhaps she goes well and truly mad then. With immortals there is always that compounding risk of losing one’s integrity under the ceaseless torrent of time. Her maker had lost more than his humanity by the time he found her, she understood it now, what the occasional flickers she caught were. The nature of the brightness in his eyes when they watched their latest artificial inferno together. If she’s made it this long, doubtless even his presence played a role. Vampires are social creatures, and she feels the sudden loneliness all the more acutely for the past twenty years of kind company.
Burying her nose in the junction of his throat, Circe breathes in his scent. The faint sweetness of skin beneath the tobacco and the cedar and the iron. Then she begins to eat. She eats and eats until her jaw is sore and her belly is full to bursting. Still there is more and she is loathe to leave any morsel untreasured. Cracking a rib bone, she sucks out the marrow and tries not to be sick.
Edgar making her ill, that too is familiar in a way. It wasn’t more than a week after the beginning of their mentorship that he dug around in his satchel after class one day, handed her a parcel wrapped in twine with a scoff about “making too many” before striding away. A mystery however small was always a delight, the answer in this case, two fragrant raspberry scones of a lovely pale golden colour, even more so. When she thanked him the next night her compliments were as genuine as the pride flushing the high points of his cheeks for Circe had eaten every last crumb, kept it down for as long as she could. It went on that way for a while. Edgar having a penchant for sharing snacks, his latest bakes. It’d been a while since she’d received such things from a place of affection, and her health was a small price to pay. It went on until he pieced together human food was incompatible with the vampire body and all that implied in retrospect and the stakeout at hand dissolved into a ruinous argument. But in the end he forgave her.
There is no forgiving this.
When she’s eaten him completely, Circe finds the mouth opening of his hollowed-out skin and crawls into the shell that once hosted his essence. It’s almost warm inside with her wrapped up. She traces the constellation of freckles on his arm and gives herself to the drag of blood-bloated hibernation. Even as numbness takes hold, she knows the momentary peace will not last. Soon enough the sharp rapping of sapience would come upon the mausoleum door and drag out what is entombed. Soon enough she’ll eat the skin too.
When Circe comes out of her trance, she’s hungry despite her imaginary feast. It takes a few sips of coffeetable blood, the equivalent of nightstand water, to place the time by the sliver of sunlight tracing its way down the edge of her blackout curtains. High noon, the day is only halfway through.
Padding downstairs, Circe makes herself comfortable in Edgar’s worn leather chair. She wraps her shawl around her shoulders tight against the chill and waits for him to come to her. They'll have the conversation about Nocturne tonight. It's too dangerous to shield him from the information for any longer as fun as it’d been to have a secret amour.
When they first took the museum case, Edgar said he didn’t like what an investigation even the SSF wouldn’t touch implied, and Circe agreed. Now it’s grown into something more than fleeting curiousity. Become something they can’t turn down, back out of. So they’ll figure it out. They will, no doubt with Edgar’s sharp mind and her boundless skills. Plus, the whole magic aspect gives it some level of stakes, grandeur, not bad for a denouement. After that…
Perhaps it was time to leave.
The breakup would suck, but, really, Edgar has no right to be too angry knowing that’s simply what vampires do.
[Dawn, Abraxas]
Closing the door behind him, Abraxas lines his shoes in the hall, hangs up his outer coat, and makes his way through the silent foyer, his steps sure despite the lack of light. The only illumination in the entire house flickers soft and ghostly suspended mid air in empty rooms as he passes through them. Not a breath stirs, not a floorboard creaks. In this place cut out from the endless bustle of the city, everything is as it always is. Actually, the house is tidier perhaps than when he left it, no less still.
It is only when he nears the door to the basement that the motes shift, drifting to coalesce in the center of an empty glass lantern and filling it with a purple light. One speck the size of a firefly does a figure eight loop through the air before joining the others. A phantom smile on his lips, Abraxas picks up the lantern by its handle and makes his way down into the rune-laced buzz of magical darkness.
It is the past which lies beneath the beneath. As the passage way opens into a homey living room and he sets down the lantern, the sprites spill from it zipping every which way in delight around the rooms nestled among the roots of Norwood Manor.
Passing the closed door of the sewing room, he enters his bedroom, the adjoining bathroom. The post-shift ritual is familiar even among his habits, and it is not long before he’s standing in front of the mirror, freshly showered. Damp hair curling at his collarbones, he sets his ring in a little dish on the counter, turns on the tap, and begins working soap into a lather. A faint scent of citrus perfumes the air as he rubs at his palms, beneath his nails, the spaces between his fingers. All the way down to his elbows before rinsing off his hands beneath the scalding water. Bergamot and blood swirl down the drain, an endless eddy which gradually stains the porcelain pink. On the third pass, the water is a little clearer.
Outside, the daytime world begins to stir. Down beneath the soil, Abraxas stands at the sink with water dripping from his hands and washes them again. Again,
Until he’s clean enough to remember her.