Sky Like Obsidian Daggers
By Kevin Filan © 2006



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"I thought you would sleep in a casket," Sharon smirks as she leans against Johann's cool slender body. From below the smell of the day's first bread rises from Boulangerie Ste.-Anne. Johann chuckles along with her as he ruffles her long red hair.

"Coffins keep out the sunlight. In this day and age they're an affectation. The sun is easy enough to avoid." He points to the heavy velvet drapes covering the garret windows. Through the moth holes in the top red curtain the faded grey-green brocade of the second one peeks out. "Once a yard of velvet cost a year's wages. Today even a poor artist can own a dozen yards."

"If he's not fussy about the condition," Sharon says. "I must get you some new curtains soon."

"There is no need," Johann begins before Sharon shushes him.

"You needn't be modest. If Father's money didn't go to artists, it would go toward notes or bonds or something equally dreary."

Across Rue de Montespan the clochards line up beneath the Josephine Baker poster for breakfast at Ste. Marie. Their mutterings float through the velvet along with the first hot shards of daybreak. Johann pulls Sharon closer as the candle on the night table sputters. The beginning of a portrait sits against the wall. Sharon's outline smiles mischievously at the couple entangled on the bed.

"If he were here he'd ask why you couldn't get a job as an illustrator. You certainly have the talent for it."

Johann shrugs. "What firm would hire an artist who can only work at night?"

"I see. So you can't be out in sunlight. But you can't become a bat either. It seems beastly unfair, really."

Johann shakes his head softly. The wind changes. The stale tang of sweat and cheap wine wafts up from below and mingles with the bread and the musky ocean scent of Sharon's body. Three decades earlier Parisian derelicts reeked of absinthe, a century before that of gin, but the smells of bread and lovemaking have remained constant at least, Johann thinks.

"Perhaps you should not read so many penny dreadfuls."

Sharon snorts.

"I hardly think I'm the one who has read too many vampire stories!"

A sunbeam flashes through a hole in the curtain. It stretches a long flaming finger to the foot of the bed, then pulls away as Sharon snuggles against him. The bells of Ste. Marie send the morning orison ringing across the Seine. The candle blazes up then dies. After five nights the warmth from the last feed has almost faded. By tomorrow the tremors will begin again. Johann smiles at Sharon's laughter and presses her close as if the faint pulsing of her heart might start his own.

# # # # #

"Tell me you love me," Johann whispers as they stand naked before the window. The glow from the city has nearly swallowed the stars. Paris looked better by torchlight, Johann thinks. Sharon smiles slyly.

"And why would I do a thing like that? You haven't yet said you love me."

Johann runs his fingers through her hair as he watches the street. The whore he killed not two hours ago lingers in his mouth. He inhales Sharon's scent but the sharp metallic taste of cheap perfume remains. A clochard stumbles past, weaving between the glow of the new electric lights. His skin appears grey-green in the orange darkness, his face swollen like someone had pulled him dead from the Seine and sent him wandering.

"You do not already know?"

Johann buries his face in Sharon's neck, feeling the faint pulse of her blood against his lips. Images float between them as he nibbles her skin. A fat bearded man and a slender consumptive woman sit motionless in a living room; the bearded man reads a book and the slender woman knits, her knuckles white as her face as she wraps yarn about her needles. In a locked room an old woman screams and screams again. Johann pulls his lips away as Sharon smirks and the images fade back to nothing.

"How could I? After all, I presume you've met a lot of women like me over the centuries. I suppose you can't help it. It's hard to resist a man who's both beautiful and immortal."

Juliette had your quick smile, Johann thinks, then the Turks raped her and killed her brother and she never smiled again. Anna had your laugh and your walk and she nibbled on her hair when she was nervous, just like you do. She was nibbling it when she showed me the plague-buboes rising beneath her arms.

The clochard looks up at the naked people watching him. Sharon smiles back at him. Johann wonders how he could capture her warmth; a thin layer of vermillion blush over one part burnt umber to twenty parts lead white, perhaps, with freckles in one-to-fifteen or one-to-twelve.

"No," Johann says. "None like you."

The streetlamp above the clochard's head fades and burns out. It glows faintly for a second, its light the dark orange-brown of Sharon's pubic hair, then fades to blackness. The clochard stands in the shadows for a second, then stumbles on. Sharon turns, grinning. Her eyes are huge and brown and bright as the whore's eyes with the same sadness floating just below the surface.

"Tell me you love me."

"I love you."

Sharon laughs and nestles against him. His arm fits perfectly around the soft curve of her shoulders.

"I love you too. You great mad ass."

# # # # #

"Perhaps you have met me elsewhere, Barbara," Johann says to the American woman. Behind them a Negro pianist plays a tinkling accompaniment to the bass player's thumping backbeat. "Were you in the court at Versailles?"

Sharon raises her napkin to stifle a giggle. The pianist goes into a syncopated cadenza; the drummer fills the spaces between the notes with a wispy wire brush accompaniment. Barbara's eyes grow wide.

"Why, yes!" She swallows her fois gras on toast, then washes it down with half a flute of champagne. Johann moves to avoid the mirror. The gilded satyrs on each corner grin as he steps away and the faint faded ghost of his reflection disappears. "I was a courtesan. For a time I was the Sun King's favorite. But of course that ended badly. It was a very difficult incarnation. I had to overcome my greed and selfishness and learn how to love unconditionally."

Barbara's husband takes a nip from his hip flask. Drops of Scotch slither down his receding chin and find a home on his seersucker suit. "I'm sure everyone is just thrilled to hear about your past lives, Barbara."

"I know you can't help being a skeptic, Richard," Barbara sighs. "But do you have to be a boor as well?" She turns back to Johann. "As soon as I saw you come in with Samantha..."

"Sharon," Sharon corrects her.

"Yes, yes, Sharon," Barbara says, barely looking away from Johann's sapphire eyes. "When I saw the two of you come in, I knew that you had been through many lives."

"You are very perceptive." Johann grins mischievously as the gilded satyrs. "Once I was a Vlach peasant. Then I was a Wallachian hermit, then a Flemish painter, then an Austrian merchant. Today..." he gestures theatrically. "Today I am a citizen of the world."

The trumpeter shifts into a sharp 2/4 riff; the drummer moves from brushes to sticks. A portly gentleman and his equally portly wife dance across the floor in a clumsy paso doble Sharon sips her champagne and smirks at Johann. "How terribly modern of you."

"He's not modern," Barbara says. "He's timeless. Like all old souls."

Richard rolls his eyes. "Everywhere she goes she sees old souls."

"But of course," Johann turns to Richard as the trumpet player picks up on the pianist's cadenza. "All souls are old."

"You see, Richard," Barbara says. "This is wisdom. If you could quit sneering for a while you might actually learn something. Remember what Baba Rashid said? 'Eternity is there for everyone who wants it.'"

Richard sips more from his flask. His hands tremble as he screws the top back on and puts it in his pocket. "Did he say that before or after he said 'I need more money?'"

"You're always thinking about money, aren't you, Richard? You know that material things hold us back if we hold onto them too tightly."

Richard snorts. "Damn white of Baba Rashid to take them from us, then."

Barbara shakes her head, then turns to Johann. "You're a very wise man," Samantha is very fortunate to have you."

"Sharon," Sharon says again.

"Yes, yes, Sharon."

Johann bows. "I am honored, Madame. I can see that you have learned a great deal since our paths last crossed in Versailles."

The portly couple sashays back across the worn parquet floor; the drummer segues into a quick martial beat. Barbara blushes. "And you're even more charming as you were then!"

"You flatter me," Johann says as Sharon tries to stifle her laughter. The drummer hits the cymbal and the crowd breaks into a jitterbug.

"Forgive me for interrupting this reunion," Richard examines his Rolex. "But we have another party to attend."

"The Hendersons can wait, Richard."

"Please," Johann says. "I do not wish to inconvenience you. I am sure that our paths will cross again." He smiles as he kisses Barbara's hand. "After all, we have eternity, ne c'est pas? "

"Such a gentleman!" Barbara turns to Sharon. "It was a pleasure meeting you as well, Samantha. I hope we can talk more soon."

"Sharon," Sharon says, but Barbara and Richard are already making their way between frenzied dancers. She watches as they exit, then turns back to Johann.

"So you were in Louis XIV's court?" she says, smirking openly now.

Johann shrugs. "Perhaps she mistook me for someone else."

Sharon snorts. "That must be it. I'm sure that the Sun King was surrounded by beautiful vampires."

"Perhaps he was." Johann takes Sharon's hand, smiling like a gilded satyr. "But none so beautiful as you... Samantha."

Sharon blushes, then clouts Johann on the head.

# # # # #

"I don't see why I should go home. Grandmother hasn't recognized any of us for years. What makes them think she's going to recognize us now that she's on her deathbed?"

The smell of rotting flesh wafts from the abattoirs as they pass Station Paris Bestiaux. Johann puts his arm around Sharon as if he could shelter her from the stink. She moves closer to him. Their footsteps echo against the drawn shutters; fog shimmers around the streetlights.

"We went through this with Nana," Sharon continues. "It's our family curse. We live to a ripe old age and die senile." She gulps. "I can't go through it again. Watching someone I love shrieking on a bed and wondering how long I have until it's my time."

Through the luminescent mist Johann sees a warm glow crouching in a doorway. He tilts his head, listening to the harsh short breaths as they draw closer.

"I suppose I must sound like a perfectly heartless beast to you."

"No," he says, distracted.

Sharon frowns. "Are you listening to me at all?"

Johann leaps forward suddenly, leading with a high hard left hook. The pockmarked man stumbles bleeding from the shadows. His straightrazor clatters as it falls to the street. Johann grabs him by the throat and lifts him into the air. Sharon gasps for breath. The pockmarked man gasps with her. Sharon tries to scream but can only manage a choking stutter as Johann slams the man face first into Le Magasin du Charolais with a splattering wet cantaloupe thump and grunts like a stunned pig, then slides limp to the ground.

"He... he... He wanted... he wanted..."

When she is frightened she stutters as Lydia stuttered, Johann thinks and smiles at the memory.

"He wanted to rob us, yes."

"But he was in the shadows, in that, that doorway... How did you know?"

"To me he was plainly visible." Johann smiles. A skinny alley cat watches from a mound of rotting garbage and grooms its patchy fur. "But I forget. You do not believe me."

She buries her face in his chest, still sobbing for breath. The alley cat leaps into the darkness and disappears; Johann follows the glow of its warmth as it stalks toward the fainter glow of a rat.

"I think you... I think he's... "

Blood bubbles under the pock-marked man's nose as he moans on the sidewalk. Beyond Sharon's vision the cat leaps, then grabs a rat by the neck. Its squealing death rattle shimmers faint and high over Sharon's sobbing; its terror mingles with Sharon's and scratches at the edges of Johann's brain. The warmth and fear fade from the dying rodent, then the cat drags it behind a garbage can.

"He'll be all right. It would be worse for him if you were not here."

It would be worse for him if I had not fed yesterday, Johann thinks as the blood pools on the cobblestones.

Sharon catches her breath. "You picked him up with one hand. Like he was a child!"

"The transformation makes one much stronger." He smiles. "Not that it was necessary. They have not yet made the Parisian who is a countryman's match."

# # # # #

"Your hands are calloused," Sharon says as she runs her fingers gently across his palm. Over the window Sharon's new black curtains cover the old ones; a sliver of electrical light stretches toward Johann's easel. "Workingman's hands."

"Yes," says Johann. "I spent the greater part of my youth behind a plow."

Johann smiles as Sharon leans back into position against the fabric covered couch. Fifty years ago I would have claimed noble blood, he thinks. Marx and Lenin have made that unfashionable. Not since Robespierre have so many wealthy children affected humble origins.

"Aren't you a bit thin for a ploughman?" Sharon asks as he returns to his brushes.

Johann shrugs "My whole family was slender. And I never wanted to be a farmer anyway. Always I wanted to be a painter. But of course I thought that was impossible."

Johann applies a left nipple to the portrait with a five vermillion/three raw umber mix. A damp August breeze shifts the curtains. The candlelight shifts with them. Sharon disappears into shadow, until Johann can see only the faint red glow of her warmth against the darkness. The breeze changes direction again. The candle flames up to reveal Sharon lounging naked and insouciant against white muslin gauze.

"Nothing is impossible if you put your mind to it."

Johann shakes his head, his smile fading. "No. Many things are impossible."

Sharon laughs. "Like vampires?"

Outside rain begins to fall. An American seeks shelter beneath the bakery awning. Josephine Baker grins at him from the poster across the rue as Johann begins work on the right nipple.

"Buffalo gals won't you come out tonight..." the American sings loudly and off-key as Josephine Baker's panther stares hungrily at him.

"Good Lord!," Sharon says. "What a horrid racket! Somebody should tell him to be quiet."

"... and dance by the light of the moon."

The rain picks up. Outside the American retches, then falls to his knees vomiting. Johann remembers the American he killed last night. That one was drunk too, but swollen where this one is cadaver-thin. The roll of francs and dollars in his wallet paid two months rent; before Black Monday even the poorest American would have been good for six. The American stands, then stumbles retching through the rain.

"It seems he heard you," Johann says, his smile nearly as mischievous as Sharon's.

Sharon's laughter sends the American on his way as he rounds the corner. Johann wonders if he will pass the alleyway where his countryman died last night, if he will hide in there to urinate, if he will find the body slung behind the trash.

"Are you still with us, Johann?" Sharon asks. "Or are you dreaming of the Roman Empire?"

Johann shakes his head, smiling faintly. "That was before even my time."

Thunder rumbles in the distance. Outside a woman screams. "Fermez bouche! " someone growls, then cuts off her second scream with a slap. Lightning flashes through the curtains along with her sobbing. Johann puts his brush in the turpentine and watches paint swirl like stormclouds in the solvent.

# # # # #

"Why, Johann, it's lovely!"

Sharon grins as he fastens the necklace. The candle on his dresser makes the emeralds sparkle like green fire. For a second Johann can almost remember springtime sunrises, then that fades. He presses his hands against Sharon's face and tries to capture her visions of sunlight, but finds only scowling parents and dark hallways and screaming old women.

"But I can't accept this! This must have cost you a fortune!"

Johann shakes his head. His fine blond hair, almost as long as Sharon's, shimmers as it blows in the late September breeze. The candleflame flickers; the air smells of burning leaves and decay.

"I have had it a long time. Until now I have never found anyone who could wear it properly." He pauses. "It came from a duchess named Marie-Louise. It was all she had left after the peasants sacked her family's estate."

"And I presume you saved her from the mob."

"No." He stares absently out the window. Josephine Baker smiles back at him; beside her Theda Bara licks her lips and grins lasciviously.

"It rained the day they executed her. I wore gloves and a broad hat and wrapped myself against what little sunlight filtered through the clouds."

"So you can go out on cloudy days? You should move to London, then. You'd never again have to worry."

"I'm afraid not."

"It's just as well, then. My father would never approve of you."

He smiles, but his eyes remain sad.

"That day I was outside for no more than an hour. For weeks afterwards my face was blistered. I was afraid I would be scarred permanently." He pauses again. "No. I was not afraid. I did not care."

The BOULANGERIE STE.-ANNE sign over Theda Bara's head creaks gently back and forth in the breeze. Sharon leans back against him as he massages her shoulders.

Johann closes his eyes and tries to think of nothing but the warm softness of Sharon's flesh beneath his hands.

"She curtsied to me as they led her onto the scaffold. That was the 13th of Thermidor, 1795."

Sharon turns, only half-smirking.

"Must I hear about all of your other women?"

# # # # #

"You know that one of these days I'm going to catch you eating something."

Sharon sips her espresso delicately. At the table behind them two tow-headed Norwegians argue about André Breton's latest essay. The mustachioed waiter puts Bix Beiderbecke on the Victrola.

"You still believe me mad, don't you?"

She dunks her citron tart into her espresso, then nibbles on the edge. Johann wonders what it tastes like. In his time, lemons were a luxury enjoyed only by the rich, and coffee something the old knights remembered from Jerusalem. He touches her hand and tries to feel the flavor of lemon, but the stale thin taste of the clochard he killed yesterday overpowers everything else.

"Who could ever tell in Paris? They'd think you were just another mad artist."

"Is that what you believe?"

"Not at all. I think you're far more talented than most mad artists."

The taller Norwegian pounds the table and yells loudly. A century ago they might have ended their disagreement with a duel; now they will just write articles in underground newspapers denouncing each other as capitalists. Johann smiles as the fat one calls his friend bourgeois.

"I am not so talented. I have some training, but I do not have a master's eye."

"And who trained you," Sharon asks, smirking again. "Leonardo? Michelangelo? Rembrandt."

"A man named Maitre Rogelet de la Pâture." Johann smiles. "At first he thought me mad, just as you do. Then he took me on as an apprentice.

"I'm afraid I've never heard of him."

"He was wealthy and famous once. But still he was a miser." Johann smiles. "I was a bit older than most of his students, but he did not have to feed me."

"I see. And I suppose you never drink wine, either."

Johann shakes his head, frowning.

"That was an awful film. Dracul was no Hungarian savage. He was a Transylvanian savage. There is a great difference."

"You'd know better than I." Sharon puts down her pastry. "Perhaps if you ate something you wouldn't be so beastly pale."

"Some of us can eat. They get no benefit from the food, but it does them no harm. I have never been so fortunate. When I try to eat solid food I become violently ill and vomit almost immediately."

He takes the tart from Sharon's plate.

"Should I prove it to you?"

She grabs the tart from him, laughing as the argument behind them subsides to a low Norwegian growl.

"Buy your own pastry!"

# # # # #

Sharon takes the Aztec dagger from the nightstand. The obsidian blade gleams black as her new Chanel dress draped over the chair.

"This looks lethal. And beautiful. Rather like you."

Johann smiles.

"Thank you. I think."

"And I suppose it came from Montezuma himself?"

"No. From a conquistador who had just returned from the New World." Johann smiles and runs his finger down the notch at the dagger's end, then points to the tiny scar below his breastbone. "Had he struck my heart instead of a rib I would not be here today."

"I see. So it doesn't have to be a stake, then?"

Johann shakes his head. "No. Any sharp object thrust into the heart and left there so the wound cannot close itself will kill us. So will fire and acid."

Sharon runs her finger along the blade. A few coppery flakes of dried blood fall on the scarred wooden surface. Sharon shudders, then puts down the knife.

"So how do you do it without getting caught?"

"Killing, you mean?" Johann shrugs. "It has never been so difficult as you might think. The world has always had too many people. A few here and there were never missed."

"You sound like a Dadaist."

"Now you think I am a Dadaist." Johann frowns. "Artists have always tried to paint madmen. Today they have decided to be madmen."

Sharon hesitates, then picks up the blade again. "So you must kill them, then. Do you need all their blood? I would think that maybe you could borrow a little bit."

"If we feed without killing sometimes the sickness is transmitted."

"I see. Quite sensible, really. We couldn't have the world overrun with vampires."

"No," Johann agrees. "Death is far more merciful.

Sharon snickers as she averts her eyes from the glistening blade.

"Do you know that you are a very silly man?"

# # # # #

Sharon stands at the alleyway's edge. The grubby-faced toddler in Johann's arms stares at her, the gash in his throat widening as his head falls back. Sharon tries to scream but no sound comes out, only a faint high whistling gasp like the child's last breath. A rat scurries behind a garbage pile as the toddler drops to the ground. Johann feels the warmth flowing through him like galvanic current and tries to hide his glassy-eyed smile.

"Now at least you know I'm not mad."

Sharon turns and runs into the fog.

# # # # #

"I did not expect you to come back."

She stands at the door, then steps in, her eyes downcast. Johann reaches out to her but she does not take his hand.

"It's all right." She nibbles at her hair as she stands two steps inside the doorway. For a long second she is silent, then words begin pouring out. "I just came to say goodbye. I received a telegram from Father today. Grandmother is dead. I suppose I must attend her funeral. And then I should really try to get back to my studies. I've mastered precious little French here. Perhaps I need a classroom to apply myself." She pauses. "I'm sorry, Johann."

"I am sorry as well. I am sorry about your grandmother," Johann says. "And I am sorry that you saw me like that. I wish you had not."

"It's all right. It was bound to happen sooner or later."

He smells her fear high and sharp like the air by the Westinghouse generators.

"I will not hurt you."

"I know." She moves in two steps further. "And I suppose I owe you an apology. I'm sorry I didn't believe you sooner."

"It is all right," He moves over on the couch. "Please. Sit down."

Her back is straight and her eyes face forward as she sits. When he puts his arm around her shoulder she stiffens. Her fear floods through him; he pulls his arm away but she remains stiff.

"I understand your feelings."

"Do you?" She looks down at the worn wooden floor, then back at him. "I went to the library. There really was a painter named Rogelet de la Pâture. He died in 1464."

"Yes," Johann said. "He was a bitter, cantankerous old man, but I mourned him nevertheless. I still miss him."

"How old are you, Johann?"

Johann pulls her close. Her fear blends with his own as he touches her skin, until he cannot tell where one ends and the other one begins.

"My village was Cathari. The Papal armies razed it one night and put every man, woman and child to the sword."

He feels her pulse fast and frightened as he massages her neck.

"I ran up a mountain path, hoping they would not follow me, knowing that they would. There was a fire in one of the caves. I ran toward the fire. I do not know what I was thinking. If I could see it surely the soldiers could see it too."

She squeezes his hand.

"It's all right, Johann."

He closes his eyes and tries to hold onto her fear her like an anchor against the onrushing memories.

"An old woman sat by the fire. She held out her arms to welcome me. When I came closer I saw the knife in her hand. Before I could turn she had drawn it across my throat."

Outside the automobiles rumble like oncoming armies as he rubs the faint thin scar on his neck.

"The last thing I remember is her mouth against the wound and the sound of hooves. The soldiers must have frightened her off before she could finish with the cutting. Perhaps they missed the cave altogether. Perhaps they found me and thought me already dead. I do not know. When I came to myself again the fire was only ashes and my village was only ashes. And the night was shining for me like it had never shone before." Johann closes his eyes, smiling faintly "That was the year One Thousand One Hundred and Twenty-Seven since the Nativity of Our Lord."

Her eyes are wide and frightened and there is something in their depths which Johann has not seen there before as she nibbles on the ends of her hair.

"And you've not aged since that time?"

"I have not grown old."

She stares out the window at Theda Bara and Josephine Baker, then turns back to him.

"Tran... transform me, Johann."

# # # # #

Four days and nothing. She is immune as Anna was immune, Johann thinks. Sharon's face is cold and pale as his as he touches her brow. The bells of Ste.-Marie ring low and sad, their pealing nearly muted by the rumbling of automobiles. The winter's first snowfall drifts softly over the garbage piled outside. A few flakes drift in through the open window. Johann lets the icy draft blow over Sharon's body as if the cold might slow the decomposition. The candle on the nightstand flickers and burns out.

It is better this way, he tells himself. She will never hate me for what I have done, the way Lydia came to hate me.

Johann squeezes her hand and waits for a response. When there is none he crosses her arms over her chest again.

The years will not make her hard and hollow. She wished to be forever young and now she shall. It is better this way.

Johann touches her again and tries to read her thoughts, but there is only his own sadness.

It is better this way, he says to himself again.

A hot rhythmic jazz trumpet wafts upstairs from Café de Guilborg. The old Cathari prayer rings in his ears in the hard crude Wallachian-accented Latin of his youth. All is temporal, God alone is eternal. It brings a sad smile to his face as he closes her eyes.

"Solo. Aeternum," he whispers. "Alone. Eternal."

The trumpet solo rises to a climax as Sharon's eyes spring open.

# # # # #

The wino mutters as Johann draws the obsidian blade across his throat, then the muttering fades to a gurgle. Johann tries to ignore the tremors as he kneels to drink. Two days since the last feed and already the red thirst is on him. The junkies in New York have water not blood, the thinks as the wino's gurgles disappear into the music throbbing from CBGB's. He tilts his head back and swallows, letting the ecstasy carry the bright bitter Sterno-scented warmth through him. When he opens his eyes Sharon stands at the alleyway's entrance.

The wino voids his bowels. Sharon kneels beside him and sucks at his wound. The harsh brown smell of shit joins with Sterno and garbage. Yellowed newspaper blankets rattle with his convulsions. He claws out toward Sharon. His hand nearly closes on her emerald necklace, then he falls back onto .44 CALIBER KILLER CLAIMS TWO MORE VICTIMS.

"I'll never end, transcend, transcend!" Patti Smith screams in CBGB's. The crowd screams with her.

A snowflake fall in the wino's open eye and stays there for a second, then melts into nothingness. Sharon stands, her eyes shining bright as her necklace, bright as the streetlight, bright as a forgotten springtime. Johann crouches silent beside the body. For a long second they stare at each other. Neither one speaks. Finally Sharon turns and walks silently down Bowery toward Chinatown.

The snow stops as Johann exits the alleyway. In the club's doorway Portia clutches the collar of her leather jacket. Her scarf nearly hides the heavy masculine line of her jaw; the sweat on her forehead gleams orange in the streetlight's glow. Lenny Kaye breaks into a guitar solo. Johann kisses her cheek, feeling the faint roughness of razor stubble and the high excited shimmer of her emotions beneath his lips.

"So..." Portia asks, smiling like a Moliere heroine. "Did you find a victim?"

"Lots of victims."

Portia giggles. "Why is every pretty boy in New York insane?"

Johann holds Portia close as if her unbelief might infect him. The electric light has obliterated the stars. The sky is cold and clear and black as an obsidian dagger. Johann closes his eyes, afraid he might cut himself, and concentrates instead on the smell of baking bread and the warmth of flesh and the musky ocean scent of her body against his.

"Tell me you love me," he whispers in Portia's ear.