One week later.
Seven days. They say the Lord threw together this sad-sack world in just that time. The deepest oceans and the vast continents marooned in them. The vault of the sky and the furnace of molten rock at the earth's burning core. The sun and the moon and the innumerable stars. The birds and the beasts and everything that breathes and grows and crawls and lives and dies.
Man, and all his many predators.
--
Nothing has changed at the Meralta in those seven days, except for the second-run film in the dusty, rarely used balcony theater. From NavarIn to O Pagador de Promessas. After midnight, just barely, when the streets of the Red Light District are just beginning to fill up, with sorority sisters on pub crawls and hipsters seeking sex and donuts. With truck drivers and drug dealers, lawyers and insurance agents, prostitutes - professional and amateur, of every age, sex, build, and potential persuasion.
The Meralta is not a place for red-lit revelry. No one brings their bachelorette party here. The patrons are lone and furtive, seeking a different (or perhaps merely cheaper) solace than the men and women, boys and girls displaying themselves in the red-lit display windows elsewhere in the district might offer. An insipid looking man with a comb-over and a clip-on bow tie mumbles something to the (same) bored clerk, shoves a crumpled handful of change beneath the bars of the ticket-seller's cage, then disappears inside.
The same prostitute in the doorway of the downstairs theater. The same scent of stale popcorn hanging in the air, a faint but filmy suggestion of chemically enhanced butter-substance. The same dull flicker of dying bulbs in dim sconces. The same worn red velvet runners on the once-grand staircases leading to the upstairs balcony. The small theater.
O Pagador de Promessas has already started. The musical, murmurous cadence of Portugese is audible three-quarters of the way up the stairs. If he does not speak it, but speaks one of its Latinate cousins, the language has a sliding sort of familiarity - like the new scent of old blood. Perhaps, like the trash downstairs, this one runs on a continual loop. A constant circuit of Zé do Burro's pledge, promise and fall.
The doors are open again, expectant.
This time, however, he can see her from the entrance. She stands at the front of the aisle, one shoulder leaning against the cheap baffling meant to sound-proof the balcony theater, arms crossed and resting against her narrow torso, her elbows sharp, pale face lifted in profile, dark eyes moving faintly as she follows the movement of the oversized figures on the screen. Hair loose, tonight, dark and sleek, the faintest hint of curl to it.
Something in her stance says that she is aware of him when first his shadow crosses the threshold of the old theater. Before then, even. But her attention remains on the screen until he draws abreast of her. Only then does she turn, catch him with the edge of a smile like a hook.
"William." The hint of a smile smoked dark eyes. "I have decided that I am no longer in the mood for pious fools," - and the flash of something dangerous, some flare of temper, grasped and then thoroughly leashed. Mastered. "Will you walk with me, instead."
WilliamHe is on time: not early, not late. He strolls to the Meralta via the same route he took last time: down the street as if he was a piece of the night-life -- not aimless but not part of any pack just yet. Tonight William is not dressed as Timothy Dalton in A License to Kill, but affects the casual chic of an actor who wears expensive clothing that fits him well, flirts with modern-day dandyism without discarding masculinity.
And there is the 'Ventrue,' her hair a sluice of darkness, the faintest hint of curl. He doesn't know her well enough to be surprised by the fact that she is not lounging, this time, and when he does come abreast of her, when she does turn to catch him with her hooked smile (fish-hook, open eye?), there is a millisecond, his blue eyes direct and curious, and then he smiles all brash and easy and golden. There is a point to it: not sharp, but as if there were a joke to be shared -- as though there might be a joke to be shared.
And then she wants to change the plan. Go, from this safe, vetted meeting-place to the open street, where anything can happen.
Nobody ever said the monster behind William's eyes wasn't adaptable.
"Yes, I think I will, as long as I can extract your solemn promise not to slap me if I try to hold your hand. The city at night, the stars; a man can be held accountable, but one hopes not by the five-fingered judge."
Energetic, William; and all that energy turned into Force of Personality; a certain rueful, but strong, assured way of speaking, his voice pitched low so it skims conspiracy without ever actually getting its toes wet.
MonserratAhh. She is dressed rather differently tonight as well. Gone the short skirt, the impossibly high heels, that could double as weapons. Stillettos with toes of gold. Replaced with thick-soled, well-oiled boots, black leather, flat to the ground. The sort of boots one could run in. Fight in. Stomp a stranger's face to an unrecognizeable and pulpy mass of blood and bone in.
Jeans and a low-cut, spaghetti-strapped blouse the color of the sea at midnight, the latter beneath a vintage wool blazer, menswear, the subtle hint of a plaid or pinstripe beneath the nap of the wool.
In the millisecond as she turns to him, his blue eyes direct and curious, her own catch the light. Not of the religious fable unfolding in a constant drone of Portugese on the screen, but one of those guttering sconces that line the balcony In that moment, her own eyes are not merely dark, but a deep, humid, murky sort of green.
And then the charm - open, golden, engaging - she by contrast seems disengaged from it, but willing to cede him the space required, willing to indulge it and then be so indulged. That lashing suggestion of leashed anger dissipates. She allows it to dissipate, grits her teeth (the molars, grinding. Not the eyeteeth. Not the canines. Not the fangs), and it opens up, spreads through her, makes room.
"Then you have my pledge. My solemn promise, should you try to hold my hand, I will not slap you." Murmured. The hook returns to the edge of her smile here. Suggestion, perhaps, that she would do rather worse than a slap were she of a mind.
"Shall we." The loose tip of her head toward the lobby, the sweep of inky hair, and she begins to walk. Behind them, on the screen, the Brazilian police murder this weeks Christ stand-in on the steps of he church, and the crowd begins to fight over his corpse.
WilliamShall we, she says, and they shall, as simple as that.
The door catches their (no) reflections, disperses them among light. William tears his ticket stub in two and tosses it into the trashcan which waits, squats, hulks, just outside the faded lion-glory of the Meralta's carpet. The first re-emergence into the night and the blue-eyed boy looks both ways, up and down the street, getting his barings, a faint line between his eyebrows, his eyes squinched. Ages gone, men lead: nations, rebellions, revolutions. Artistic movements, underworld politics, scientific discoveries. And dances. William might well be from an age where social cues were controlled by a lady, and Monserrat counts, even edged as she is now, even swallowing grit and anger, sharpness, her own hooks: a lady or a land-mine. He's curious to find out which.
And so. A second to let her pick the route. The second squandered, he'll tip his head and indicate the left. Flash of jaw, of adam's apple, golden stubble: Did he die with his beard on or like a boy, naked, waiting still to be somebody? His hands find his pockets and his shoulders lift, as if seeking warmth: tiny masquerades that have become second nature (as once they were first, for it was no masquerade), and then...
Frank, invitational: "Tell me about your week. Who happened to sour your appreciation of pious fools?"
MonserratMonserrat squanders no such seconds. Outside, the cool, crisp night air. Winter fading into spring. How many winters fading into how many springs, with the night sounds cast around them in an ancient whirl. They go east, down the block and she is swift and assured even now, when she works to keep her pace a measured amble. Scattered in front of the hash parlor, a quartet at least of young, stoned men stand smoking on the sidewalk. She takes pleasure in scattering them. In the way they dance like atoms on the head of a pin.
Fewer masquerades than he employs, out here, though she employs a few herself. Breathes in order to feel the cold air enter her lungs. Would perhaps unearth a cigarette were if colder, so that the smoke could stand in for the exhaled mist of human breath.
Doctrinaire Sabbat - oh that great unwashed rabble - howl at such affectations. Tear down the walls and rule in truth, they shout at each other. Less than children, worms who have not seen a single human lifetime's worth of stars and moonrises and murders.
"Hah." He asks about her week. She laughs aloud; utters the laughter as just one exclamation, but there is a skin of a sharp and genuine humor wrapped around the jagged edges of her voice. She is watching him aslant, the gleam of the streetlights against his golden stubble.
A moment's frank appraisal. She holds him steadily in the disc of her gaze, steadily enough that her pace slows as her dark eyes skim him up and down, and down and up, and one more time before some circuit turns, some lock clicks home, some decision is made and not to be regretted. "I recently learned of the death of a colleague."
Her own gaze is heavy, and heavily lashed, her eyes ringed with kohl. ANd her hair gleams blue-black in the darkness.
"A pen-pal. A correspondent. A scholar, of sorts. Condemned for his many heresies, or some such. Some trumped up, imaginary infraction against the proper social order."
Their pace has slowed, and her eyes remain on his face, cast slantwise. Ahead, the gleaming lights of a nightclub chasing neon against the dull and blasted sky. Stars pulse beyond, in the murky haze of a gathering fog, their brilliance blown out by the light pollution.
"Now you."She breaks off, cuts a glance away, and then back to him, steady now, as frank as he, though not precisely invitational. "I want an answer from you. Are you working for someone else. Or for yourself."
He makes some small sound in the back of his throat - resonant, deep, gleam-hint, neutral (fill in the blank [sympathy or interest or courtesy] - of acknowledgment when she mentions her colleage. The pen-pal. The correspondent. The scholar, of sorts. His regard is on her face, mostly; her eyes, as she speaks, but it sweeps once over her mouth and the skin of her throat, whether her body moves as she speaks, what sort of punctuation or lack there-of all that makes. "Good pen pals are difficult to find; my condolences on that point," he says, as if it were a natural thing to say.
Now you.
William's gaze drinks itself down. He still seems engaged; his eyes are still meeting hers, still easy enough doing so; maybe they go skyward for a second, as people's eyes will when they're thoughtful, when they're searching themselves -- but he knows himself well. His gaze drinks itself down, and though he seems so engaged, so present, there's a certain stillness -- a second in which he does not breathe when he should breathe, when he'd been playing the game 'til now -- that speaks of distance. Not, necessarily, from Monserrat: but wool-gathering, William, for a second.
"That's fair," he says, and then he appears to measure her before saying: "I'm working for myself."
It might be the truest thing he will ever say to her. Maybe once upon a time, a long, long time ago, there was a prince (our hero), and he lived in the day (which was bright), but did such deeds at night (as those who slept would quake to think on), and maybe then it was all for Some Thing, some Great Thing that was Yet To Come, that was to be Cherisehd and Protected. Something that lit a fire in his bones, that burnished his voice into the honey-whiskey thing it is today, the thing of power: and maybe then, that long time ago, maybe just maybe then he worked for somebody or something else. Maybe even now that all is mostly darkness and shade he still works for something that is only his because he has decided he will believe in it and because he has decided that it might as well be true:
But that's a fairytale, and when you say something is a fairytale in these modern nights, you're calling it a lie.
He has always worked for himself.
He grins at her. "As far as I'm aware."
MonserratAs far as he knows.
Oh, this. This seems to please her. There is a glimmer of dark approval in her eyes, a certain unbending of her frame. That low hint of laughter that accompanied her earlier exclamation finds a sort of slow-burning, subvocal expression. A deliberate one, as all such sounds must be, in creatures who do not require oxygen for their continued existence. For whom respiration is now merely an artform, a frame that they inhabit to blend into the crowds of short-lived kine.
Monserrat offers William her arm, just so. Crooked. The gesture has a girlish feel to it. Can her perhaps imagine it – the quiet courtyard, the standing, radiant heat, the long shadows countersunk beneath the honeycombed gallery. The sound of water from a trickling fountain in the center, and two girls, dark-headed, crooked arm in crooked arm, tucked together and making a circuit of the velvet shadow and the scintillating sunlight. Whispering whatever paltry, wicked little secrets they might have to share. The sordid testimonials of an adolescent heart.
“Now, William,” their footfalls are soft, dampened by the night, the drifting mists, the shadows through which they stroll. Ahead a group of young women, drunk, gleaming with sweat spills from the nightclub on the corner. Billows open like a mobile, single-celled organism and contracts again, searching for shoes, keys, drinks, wraps, partners, cell phones and the way back home. They slice through them neatly, but her head is turned to follow the trajectory of one of the girls down the sidewalk, lingers, and then, finally returns to him. “ – we have discussed my week. Tell me of yours.”
WilliamMonserrat offers William her arm, just so. Crooked. A reward? William's grin has subsided in the natural course of things; he is no psychotic or addict, to grin and to grin, until one notices his grin is a skull's. Nope: He has the rhythm of a living man down pat -- the grin has subsided, but the remnants of it are in his opaque eyes, the lift of his eyebrows, the contours of his cheeks, the almost-faded twist of his mouth, which twists again -- crooked -- at Monserrat's gesture. He takes her arm, just so. Having taken it, he keeps it close. His clothing soaks up what borrowed heat he gives-off: the cold pale stars have secretly been burning all these nights, but William, who gives off the impression of dynamism or of vigor even when he is not in a passion over something, is secretly ice. He might have been a boy once who, when his cheek was touched, was told: you burn like a bonfire. Until one night: your skin as cold as winter -- come in. And maybe that was when he knew.
"Have we really, though?" William says, and the cadence might conjure up some other place briefly: some place more North Easterly or last Centuryish. He doesn't go so far as to lose his common-day television American accent. "I'd say it was more of a mention, though I'd be happy to discuss it in greater depth: I find rebels interesting -- and all proper heretics are transformed into rebels eventually." Thoughtful: and it seems perfectly sincere, this musing, as if it might take him away, though he shan't let it.
He smiles at her, something with the eyes that the flickering neon of a sign have limned in hallucinogenic amber; have darkened the blue to a near black; have gilded him as gold as a knight in an illuminated manuscript faced with Hellfire. "My week," he says, and directs their walk across the street. The traffic is in a lull. Somewhere nearby horns blare, the tipsy impatient to get somewhere else, impatient with those who are skulking from sidewalk to sidewalk, narrow black shadows. "No deaths, so you've one up on me there. A number of books, and librarians." His voice flattens on the word 'librarians,' and the name of that tone is dislike. "For the most part, I've been exploring, as happy with Seattle as a clam with a pearl. If you haven't taken one of the ghost tours, you're missing out."
What he's not saying is of course that some of his week has been spent inquiring after her. The blueblood who isn't. Monserrat, sired by a man of faith and conviction. What he's not saying is of course that some of his week has been spent setting up some insurance, contacting someone who might be able to follow her after this little meeting, discover what neighborhood she sleeps in, some scrap of information that'll let him excavate whatever false identity she's living under, and there-by excavate her true identity. What manner of beast he's working with.
What he's not saying is, of course, that he spent the week hanging out at Voodoo Donuts, and directing servants.
He did spend a lot of time with books. And Librarians.
Even recently arrived in a city, William is a good boy; he has already been working on their mutual project. He might even have something, but he's in no hurry to divulge: that vampiric patience -- a learned trait -- at work again.
MonserratWithout her heels they are quite of a height, a matched pair, one might say, with a certain degree of humor. The kind of irony one inhabits rahter than breathes. The sun and his enshadowed sister - some dark, twinned star. She makes a noise - a back-of-throat - noise, when he corrects her. That her confession was more of a mention, musing over the progression from heretic to rebel, and back again. Her eyes are sharply focused on his profile in this moment, tracing the smooth cut of cheek, the gleam of his eyes beneath the amber glow of the few still-working streetlights. The ghastly slice of neon as they walk below a brothel's garish sign.
"And all rebellions turn static. Doctrinaire. Revolutionaries begin the endless, feverish search for counter-revolutionaries and create new orthodoxies of thought and belief. Once you have established a new orthodoxy, what do you create but new heretics, who will someday seize the terrible courage of their outsized convictions and take up arms against their father's gods.
"Rather like the life cycle of a moth, the endless rounds of creation and destruction. The burrowing blindness of the cocoon, the brief burst of brilliance as it emerges from gestation, only to end, ragged and terrible, circling some buzzing, ugly, electric, man-made fixture, imagining it the moon."
This is all briskly spoken, and though there is a keen edge to the words, her features remain dispassionate, quite nearly clinical. As if she herself had not lived and relived this monstrously vexing little cycle too many times to count.
"So you see, I do not find rebels interesting. I find them foolish and foolishly dangerous. I prefer a world without orthodoxies. God hardly requires our permission to be. It simply is."
--
She remains as close as he keeps her, but no closer. There's no ceding to this, just that lingering sense of girlish intimacy, the dark head tipped toward his own golden one, the settled, matching pace achieved without apparent thought.
He is happy with Seattle as a clam with a pearl.
"Are clams really happy with their pearls?" - she murmurs in response, challenging but not arch, beneath the drift of his voice.
Then at last, a low noise. This one of clotted bemusement at his endorsement of ghost tours.
"And did you see any ghosts, William?
"Do you have any to see?"
WilliamThe glint of sound in the back of his throat which is now familiar: a chuckle arrested -- a vibration of sound that doesn't seek to become bright. The glint of it is enough -- like an almost-light on the edge of a sharp-thing, or on jewelry, ornament. "I applaud your metaphor, Monserrat, if not the implication behind it. Is there something unworthy or wrong with living out the life cycle of a moth? Why not say that rebellions are a first step?"
Caesura.
"Familiar with Dylan Thomas? The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, yadda yadda," and he speaks with one hand, sketching with great energy a line that means the rest of the poem, a hobbyist's enthusiasm. It's his voice that is arresting, however. His voice that is most alive. Engaged, as much in her reaction as the apparent hint of his beliefs. "And that's why I find rebels interesting, heretics as much so, and why -- " with an air of rue " -- while I might be moved to name some individual revolutionaries 'foolish' or 'foolishly dangerous' -- " and the rue disappears, swept as surely away as a thread of blood in a river " -- I'd, shucks, I'd feel like a heel for letting that get in the way of an interest. Have you ever found a place where you could live without orthodoxies?"
That last question is polite, but there's no malice and no edge buried in it: a matter-of-factness, as if she might very well have found some out-of-the-way village once upon a time and set-up her own cult of kine and taught them how to think. Or perhaps he's only thinking of a cult, or a club, a coterie of like-minded individuals, a controlled crowd beneath them all: Perhaps he's only wondering at her contentment. Making conversation.
And he always has an answer, a quip, at ready: that's as true as the sun is (and the languor it brings, entirely natural after so many years).
Are clams really happy with their pearls?
Angelic: "Oh, sure. Happy until some amateur pearl-diver comes around and pesters it."
Then: a cut of a look, a deepening of the shadow at one corner of his mouth. He rubs his hand across his jaw. Scritch-scratch, a faint sound.
"I rather think I might have."
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