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Mistletoe
For even in this room, we are moving out through stars
and forms that never let us back
Everywhere he goes, he is a stranger.
It's a nomad's life, one he's lived for, oh, decades and decades. His youth is a simple disguise; change the clothes, add the latest slang and even his dearest acquaintances forget eventually. And he does like to check up on them: a visit here, murmuring of family ties, a gift now and then if they struggle, trinkets for the people he collects like charms on a bracelet, stringing their hearts on his wrist.
They never forget him, and they never remember him either. That nice young man, they say to him when he calls again, still in the peak of life when they have become old and crinkled. You look a bit like him, you know. He had a lovely smile.
Like a whispered blessing, he leaves peace behind him. All he takes in return is a little blood, enough to sustain him, slipping down his throat with feverish heat. It's a fair exchange: sweet memories for sweet life.
Others might find it lonely, this carousel of faces and places, but he prizes it. An eternal traveller, he wheels through the world, drinking in all it has to offer. It changes as much as he does, and so he always finds new excitement.
He's ridden camels across the desert, trying to learn Arabic and sending his guides into fits of mirth as he spat out sand and dust and nonsense. Like a sore thumb, he stuck out as a tourist in Parisian cafés, gulping down coffee and clumsily reading the newspaper. He even hacked through the jungles of Ecuador once, but he wasn't fond of the insects or the hallucinogenic quality of the light, all dappled green shadows and knifing beams of sunlight. From there, onto the sprawling metropolis of London, where the smoke-stained monoliths of Victorian England squat alongside shiny glass confectionary, an architectural fairytale of Cinderella and her Ugly Sisters.
In a hundred years, he'll do it all again, and it'll all be different.
He came to his life from necessity, but he loves it now. If he has a home, its walls are the warm press of human bodies, its roof tiled by chatter and news.
And its furnishings are made up of the fascinating and the rare: all those humans who've wrung affection from him during his whistlestop tour of time and space. The ones like her.
From the moment she came in, spattered with glittering snow, he could see she was locked up tightly as an oyster. He saw frailty in her wary face, thin and faded and pretty as pressed violets, and heard strength in her caustic words. A strange mix, and one full of intrigue.
She deflected his questions with ease, and he found himself amused – and a bit insulted – when she darted away from the threat of a mistletoe kiss like a nun fleeing a brothel.
He had already traded a dozen chaste kisses with men and women he'd never met, accompanied by varying degrees of awkwardness and enthusiasm. It was nothing more than formality – but she shied back with something close to fear in her face, and he wondered why.
It turned mere curiosity to enthralment: and so he began a seduction. Not with tender words or light gestures, but with challenge, with raw wit.
Chase me, he tells her, and loses himself amid the clusters of oblivious partygoers.
And as they dart through the labyrinth of bodies, he finds himself more and more willing to be caught. Her speech is unaffected and wry, and she skims the room like an insouciant dragonfly, never too personal, warm but distant.
It's an art, and he recognises it as his own. She too is itinerant, a kindred spirit despite her humanity, and his fascination grows as their game progresses. He finds himself distracted – by an expansive gesture, by the way she plays with her hair, eventually by the mere fact of her silence.
At last, they meet, her appeal multiplied by the wait. When he surprises laughter from her, it transforms her, shattering her suspicion, leaving the fresh, wild beauty of a foxglove, bright in her eyes and curving softly on her mouth.
But the respite is brief: and he glimpses something like sadness before she composes herself. What a riddle she is, and he'd like to untangle it, he thinks, while he was tangled up with her one morning, her dark hair fanned across the pillow.
It's been so long since he stayed with anyone for longer than a few days. So long since he's wanted to – since he's felt attraction as strong as this.
And somehow, he finds himself coaxing her out of the nosy crowds, surprised at his own eagerness. Back to that mistletoe, dangling promise and poison, half-wanting to see if she will deny him, half-wanting an excuse to touch her.
~*~
She closes the door behind her, and the sound has the finality of a gunshot. His heart has picked up, and the anticipation is curling up through his stomach, slow and smoky. She feels it too: it's there in her parted lips, waiting in her pale eyes.
There's nothing to say: he only holds out his hands, and this time, there's no sign of fear, only a smooth determination as she moves forward. That's odd in itself, but he thinks little of it.
"I don't usually do this," she tells him, her tone saying she doesn't expect him to believe her.
"Good," he replies. "I like to know I'm special."
She settles into his arms, and it reminds him how much he likes to hold and be held. His loneliness is a constant companion – so much so that he ignores it, barely feels until moments like this, when it crashes in on him just how damn good it is to feel that spark of recognition in someone else.
The heat of her seeps through her clothes, the curve of her hips against his palms hidden by mass-produced designs and cheap fabric. Her hands are a pleasant weight on his arms, moving back and forth, and he thinks that if he were a cat, he'd be purring right about now. She smells of soap and snow and that faint, neutral scent he thinks of as human, and he doesn't do anything but savour her. He's in no hurry.
"Are you always this arrogant?" she asks, but there's amusement peppering the words.
He pretends to consider it. "Sometimes I'm bearable."
It wins him a smile, and before he's expecting it, her fingers tighten on his arms, as if she doesn't want him to escape – fine by me, he has time to think – and her mouth brushes his, light and tantalizing, a prelude-
And then he feels an impact so violent he thinks for one moment that the house is tumbling down around them. Images assail him in a silent barrage, as if he's zooming through the world at the speed of sound, encased in a silent, terrifying bubble.
Blood on someone's gaudy carpet, tacky and cheery-red – daubed on fingers, a wild glimpse of a room in chaos, furniture hurled about and the door half-hanging off its hinges. Jolting through the room – someone running, he realises, stumbling into a bathroom to grip the sink and stare up at the mirror.
It's her face. Younger, maybe three or four years ago, as pale as flour except for her mouth, which is a violent crimson slash across her face – smeared with blood, that's why. And on her neck, there, she touches the two gaping wounds from which red rivulets ooze. Her eyes are too bright, rings of steel in an otherwise human face.
He knows at once what happened to her, but before he can take a breath, he is shuttled into another memory.
This time, she's in a littered alleyway and a man stands before her, gesturing. From the strain on his face, he's shouting, but in this mute world, meaning is made into pantomime. His clothes are tattered and dirty, the rain slicking his hair into a shiny helmet, but his fangs are white and dazzling in the streetlight.
The view drops: she's on her knees, hands clasped in front of her. Whatever she's pleading for, it rouses only fury in that man who looks as though he should be begging at her feet. His fist fills her vision; streaks of grey and red obliterate everything.
"No more!" It's her voice screaming, he realises, as if from a great distance. "What's happening? What are you doing to me, you monster!"
The words hit him hard. He's never been called that, not by a human.
Somehow, he focuses, though her memories crowd about him like hungry ghosts; through the haze of swirling colour he can make out her and the hallway. Hasn't he heard of this before, this unasked-for invasion? It's impossible to think with tableaus of carnage and grief nibbling at his mind.
His hands are cradling her face, for some reason – he doesn't remember doing that, so he snatches them back. As if a portcullis has dropped shut, the images vanish, and he is left breathless, aghast.
She cowers back, all that earlier fear streaming through her eyes. It's terrible to behold, and he reaches out instinctively.
"Keep away from me!" She knows what he is, no doubt about that, and if she's been attacked by some vagrant vampire, no wonder she's so frightened. Her ragged voice is full of vitriol. "Don't you touch me. Don't. You. Touch. Me. I know what you are."
He cannot deny it: to him, it's nothing terrible. "Part of the Nightworld. A vampire." Her breath hisses in, and he needs to tell her that he's no monster, that he's loved and been loved, that he's never hurt a living person. "What happened to you..." he begins.
Her hand chops across the air like a guillotine. "It's none of your business."
"But you're my..." Suddenly the word is there, springing to his lips. "You're my soulmate."
Befuddled, feral, she stares at him. "Is that supposed to mean something to me?"
Everything, he wants to say, and suddenly the long years of travel fall into place like the last pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It was no aimless journey, no matter that he liked to fool himself. No, in all those years, all spilling through his hands like salt, all those humans he's loved and sometimes lost, he's been searching for someone, seeking out the still and sacred point of his life.
He's been waiting for her.
But he can't put it into words without sounding overblown or downright obsessive, so he only says, "It's nothing to be afraid of."
Her laugh lashes across the air like a whip, and her fear is transformed into something harder and sharper. "I'll be the judge of that."
Jury and executioner too, he thinks at the ferocity that animates her face, bringing out not beauty but grotesquery. Her mouth is distorted, her eyes glacial. He glimpsed her strength earlier, but he had no idea that it was born of cruelty.
He's helpless in the face of her hostility. He's never been the target of such direct hate: blind hatred, indistinct hatred, mere dislike, yes, but those things are facts of life. It wasn't him who savaged her, nor him who introduced her to the dark lustre of the Nightworld. Yet he is the one flayed under her unforgiving eyes.
"Let me by," she orders.
He tries one last time. "Please..."
Fury explodes into her face. "Let me by!" She wrenches aside her hair, exposing her neck – he sees her scars then, two spots as iridescent as the inside of a shell. "Or are you going to finish the job?"
Horrified, he can only stammer denials, and then she is storming past him; he cringes back, her anger so tangible he's afraid it will smother him.
One movement, and she's grabbed her coat, leaving early just as she entered late. He can hear the flurries of snow against the door, thumping hard as his heart is. When she opens the door, it sweeps in, dashing against her skin, but she doesn't flinch.
Before she leaves, she turns, harsh and beautiful against the grey night, a winter queen upon her throne. Only he, who knows the secret of the scars beneath her hair, can see the edge of vulnerability.
He fumbles for the words, desperate not to lose her who he has only just found.
Her mouth seems as vibrant as the mistletoe berries. But her voice is shaken, softer than he expected; for a fleeting instant, he thinks regrets flares in her face and he seems to feel it as intensely as he did her rage. "Don't try to find me. I'll make you regret it."
And he is abandoned, this blessed wanderer, staring at the place where she stood.
~*~