At the Slaver's Association
The Caravan Arrives
Paying a Call
There Goes the Neighborhood
At the Realm of Thorns
Native Ground
At the Consortium
Through the Looking Glass
Plucked
Peer Gynt
Solitude
Clipping a Raven's Wings
When Once We Were Mortal
Neighbor of the Beast
The Hunter, Dawn
Realm of Thorns home
The Slaver's Association
Message boards
Web site
|
When Once We Were Mortal. ~ Finale. If you had just a minute to breatheAnd they granted you one final wish Would you ask for something like another chance Or something similar as this Don't worry too much, it'll happen to you As sure as your sorrows are joys And the thing that disturbs you is only the sound Of the low spark of high-heeled boys ~ from "The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys", Traffic It was as peaceful an afternoon as any other, in mid-November, when autumn's choking was finally beginning to dim the glitter along Sunset Boulevard with its callous haze, and stern, glowering clouds mingled with the smog overhanging the city like distant acquaintances making small talk at a polite cocktail party. Peaceful, perhaps, had it been any other town, but the air was filled with unease that day, an intangible crisp foulness, and the sluggish brown-grey torpor thickening over the skyline of this otherwise buzzing metropolis could only be a sign of foreboding. A girl with a snow-white complexion, moonglow in stark contrast to the year-round sunshine kissing the skin of tourists and locals alike, meandered down a lonely antique promenade, an offshoot of busy Melrose Avenue. Not many feet seemed to find this secluded stretch of pavement, and so she was left to make new discoveries among the old virtually on her own, gazing in at block after block of Depression glass and porcelain dolls and Victorian hat pins, all locked away behind the tenuous barrier of glass. As the girl eased to a pause in her wanderings, and splayed her fingertips over one of the panes, resting her cheek against its cool surface, a reflection caught her eye - the striking figure of a woman advancing towards her with brisk, purposeful strides. Even the distorted mirror the glass presented could not obscure the livid, screaming red curls framing chilled alabaster, and the predatory alleycat sway that caused the tails of a black trench coat to swish as though they were being teased by the triplet steps of a waltzing breeze. Although her eyes were shaded by a pair of jet-lensed cat's eye shades, with a garish sprinkling of rhinestones at the points, the pale-skinned girl could see that she was stunning. The woman kept coming, and as her pallid admirer tore her gaze away for a split second, to turn in towards the door of the shop, the woman turned in the same direction, and they thudded into one another. "Oh, I'm so sorry," the girl gasped, her brow furrowing in meek apology. "Are you all right?" Furtively, she searched the redhead's cold features for some sign of acknowledgement. Suddenly, she felt something prodding at her ribs. "That's the barrel of a gun," came a silken-smooth purr, reverberating soft and low across the shell of her ear, with little more substance than a moaning wind carried through a drafty corridor. "I suggest that you move away from that door as inconspicuously as you can." The girl looked puzzled, but not frightened, and as she started to pull away, she felt her forearm gripped in a vise, with a strength she had never known in a mortal female. Glancing down, she noted not barbaric, overgrown, musclebound limbs, but delicate hands sheathed in black kidskin gloves, and some sixth sense brought the hairs trembling to life along the back of her neck. "There are two silver bullets in the chamber - in case I miss the first time," continued the woman, with a deliberate, slithering hiss. The pale creature gaped in horror, and her struggling ceased, all but the turncoat trembling of her lower lip, and the nervous thrumming of blood in her ears. The woman nudged forward, and they strolled in relative silence, cozy and arm-in-arm, until they reached a sleek, angled 280Z the color of ripe eggplant. A sliver of sunlight, and the silhouette of a nearby street sign, were reflected in its polished hood, soon to be joined by the outlines of two faces, one surrounded by flame, the other framed in shades of midnight. "Get in," snapped the mystery woman, shoving her captive with an alarming lack of care through a suddenly open passenger door and clipping the top of her head on the door frame. As she came around and slid into the driver's seat, she slid those cat's eye shades down the bridge of her nose, and for a brief second, the girl experienced a surge of remembrance. But it only lasted long enough for a gloved fist to bisect her line of vision. "Night-night, my white rose," crooned the abductor, just before she swung back and clocked the girl across the temple with the butt of the gun. There was a wincing crack, a few splinters of light, and then a syrupy, malicious cackling that dissolved swiftly in the ink-riddled miasma of unconsciousness. When the girl came to, she found herself bound uncomfortably tight to a wooden chair, her ankles lashed to its legs, her wrists flattened against the arms and tied with scratchy jute cord. As she blinked to awareness, and looked dazedly about her, she found herself in some sort of loft apartment, sparsely furnished, but for a few dim floor lamps, their shades thick with ancient cobwebs, and, of course, the chair. To one side of her was, she supposed, a full-length picture window, but the mystery of what lay on the other side was shrouded behind a heavy velvet drape the color of bruised apples. The mystery woman strolled out of the shadows, and into the center of the room, now bereft of her trench coat, and sporting, instead, a floor-length robe of champagne satin, with the fluffed toes of marabou mules peeking out from beneath the hem. Still, her hands remained gloved in kidskin, and in one, she cupped a dainty martini glass, while the other cradled the gun. "Why, good evening, my dear," she said sweetly, her rose-hued lips curving into a cruel, amused smile. "Like a drink?" Her sunglasses were gone, and again the girl searched her features for some clue to her identity, and the odd tendrils of recognition that threaded themselves through her addled mind. "Can't tell who I am?" quipped the woman, as though on cue. "Why, Snow, I'm hurt. After all these years, you've forgotten." Her tone was dripping with treacle and sarcasm, punctuated by a facetious fluttering of her lashes. "Perhaps this will help..." She approached the window, then, sweeping across the room with the elegant sidestep of a starlet, and pushed the drape aside with the barrel of the gun. The girl nearly choked on a sudden intake of breath, and her inquisitiveness was quickly swallowed by the brushfire spread of panic. Through the murky glass, smudged by decades of smog residue and neglect, both women could see the angry glare of the full moon, hanging ripe and luminous over the Hollywood skyline. "I have lived many hundreds of lifetimes fearing these nights," hissed the woman, her lips curling back in a defiant sneer at the heinous moon itself. "It is time for this madness to end... for both of us..." She drifted from the window, allowing the folds of rich velvet to fall back into place, as though with the forlorn hope that the drape could shield them from their lunar curse. "Mother told us when we were very young that what one had, the other would always share," she continued, breaking off her musing for a sip of dry gin. "So long as we both live." At that, the woman stopped before her captive, and lifted her glass in a mocking salute, turning her features up into a wayward shaft of light. Recognition finally struck Snow-White, like a wrecking ball slamming into a concrete wall not quite ready to yield, but groaning under the impact of a decision not hers to make. The face was wisened, thinned and sculpted into aristocratic curves by centuries of worldly experience, but something of the child her sister had once been still lurked there, if only in the playful dementia that danced behind the brittle emerald of Rose-Red's eyes. As Snow-White watched, those patrician features began to harden and swell, and emerald glowed into gold, then lucid yellow. She didn't have to glance down to know that her own hands had begun to twist into familiar knots - she could hear the cord straining, could feel the jute digging into her skin as prickly hairs sprouted along the backs of her knuckles. "I am your savior, Snow-White," Rose growled, her velveteen timbre charred at the edges as the change began to work its rancorous sorcery on her vocal chords. "As long as we both live, we share this torture. Our mother's blessing has become a curse. And so we must both die." A tear snaked its way down Snow-White's contorted cheek. She had never been confronted with a more stark truth, and had certainly never been faced with the even more vile truth of the change occurring before her very eyes, the slow stretching and crumpling of Rose-Red's outline into something no longer human. With a grimace, she flexed her shoulders, and tore the twine away from her wrists as though it had been tissue. Now free, she clamped her hands around the ends of the chair's arms, to still the trembling of her fingertips. "Do it," she whispered, a dispassionate stare locked on her sister as she awaited her final fate. Delicate hairs had begun to spring up all over Rose-Red's skin, a fine coating of rust and copper wire, and her muscles were twisted so that she could barely hold the gun level. Blinking back tears, she raised the barrel to face her sister. At the moment the shot was fired, the martini glass slipped from her hand, and as the bullet swam through air thick with regret, the glass tumbled in a slow motion ballet towards the floor, so that the subtle cracking of metal through bone was forced to contend with a star shower of shattering chimes and bells. The shot was accurate, as Rose had known it would be, and Snow-White's eyes rolled back in her head. Moments later, her breathing had stopped. At last, she was dead. Dead as a doornail. Dead as that chunk of cold silver now embedded under her ribs. Her feral, furrowed brow began to smoothe, her fangs receded, and quick as that, she was once more the fresh-faced young girl she had always been. "I was right," Rose gasped, the excitement bubbling up in her whisper to a low, underlying giggle as she stared down at hands made newly graceful by the chance on which she had gambled. "Our mother's blessing... so long as we *both* lived, we shared the curse." Picking her way gingerly over the crunching cushion of broken glass, she lifted a wan hand to her cheek - it was elegantly curved, a poet's dream, not a trace of hair or the ungainly bulges of fangs. As her lips began to twitch at the corners, with burgeoning self-satisfaction and amusement, she glanced, once, with feigned remorse, at the gun, and as she fired a second, careless shot into her sister's body, that hint of mirth ballooned into a full-fledged laughter, rich and sweet and ripe as summer berries. Tossing the gun away through its own cloud of sulphur and powder with an equal lack of concern, Rose turned towards the shadows in the corner of the studio, where loomed a figure whose outlines were barely defined, as though he had been drawn with a thick charcoal swab. "It's over!" she rejoiced, the twinkling lights of greed swimming like fireflies in her eyes. "It worked, my love... at last, I can join you." And her voice tapered off to a bittersweet nightingale's song, tempered by the madness of her smile. At last, her lover was borne of the darkness, but even in rustic light the apartment provided, he remained an enigma, a disembodied soul swathed in milky flesh and irregular stripes of blood crimson, and sable velvet, night's waterfall shrouding his brow and crashing in waves of black magic over shoulders that almost weren't there. Soulless eyes met her avaricious emeralds in a grin, and as the sinister glint of his razored incisors cut through the murk all around him, she rushed into his arms. Passion drew her there - arousal kept her cast in place. Moulding her curves against him with the flawless malleability of a lava flow, and filled with nearly as much raw heat, she dropped her head to one side and swept the cayenne curls away from her neck. A river of scarlet pulsed along that alabaster curve, just beneath the surface of her skin, glowing like a beacon beneath that ivory gossamer and singing a joyous aria of invitation... and screaming with the rapture of eternity when his teeth ripped through her tissues at last... 
The percentage you're paying is too high pricedWhile you're living beyond all your means And the man in the suit has just bought a new car From the profit he's made on your dreams But today you just read that the man was shot dead By a gun that didn't make any noise But it wasn't the bullet that laid him to rest Was the low spark of high-heeled boys. ~ from "The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys", Traffic Except where otherwise credited, all text is © Barbara Shaurette, 1997/1998 |