Page 75 of Angel's Kiss
“It wasn’t,” she whispered against his bare shoulder, the old burns there a strange texture as always against her cheek. “He’s dead. Buquet is dead.” It made her sick to say, but she could not run from the truth, not here in the dark without her lust to drive away the memory of one sin with another. “Because of me.”
“No, because of me.” Erik took her face in his hands, and all she could see in the dark was the light of his loving eyes. “You did nothing wrong. It was an accident.”
“I pushed—”
“To save me,” Erik intoned, and Christine choked back a sob, seeing Erik fall in her dream. “I’m the reason he was there. I’m the reason he did not run.”
“A man is still dead because ofus,” Christine protested.
“A man who would have destroyed us both,” Erik countered, and Christine’s heart fell once again at the certainty in his voice. And the lack of any guilt. She remembered his eyes as he choked Buquet, the utter coldness and resolve. How could those same eyes look at her with such regret and devotion now?
“I know what you’re feeling,” Erik went on softly as Christine shivered. “You were numb at first, as if it wasn’t real. There had been some mistake, or maybe there was something you could say or do to erase what happened. And now you are realizing you can’t. You feel sick, like you want to crawl out of your own skin, because the person you suddenly are, you don’t even recognize.”
Christine recalled being in his arms, how it had made her feel perfect and free to only be his. Even now she wanted it again: to kiss him until there was nothing else, to listen to his voice so that every other thought was quiet.
“Does it get better?” she asked softly. Erik inclined his head so that their foreheads touched as he nodded.
“Tomorrow, or the next day you’ll begin to realize that it couldn’t have been any other way. This was the fate he chose long ago. You won’t believe it the first time you tell yourself he deserved it, but you will think it. And soon, you’ll know it’s true.”
Christine closed her eyes on fresh tears, the undeniable truth behind Erik’s words settling in her soul. “You’ve killed before.”
“Yes,” Erik whispered. “Many times.”
“In Persia.”
He nodded again. “And before.”
“How many?” Somehow, she had always known. It had been the way the Persian had called him a monster. And the way Erik regarded himself. She had known in her heart he was a killer for weeks, and still she had taken him to her bed.
“Christine, are you sure you want to know?” Erik asked. Christine pulled him back towards the mattress with her, so that their heads rested together on one pillow, their bodies pressed close.
“Tell me,” she ordered, knowing that he would not refuse. “Tell me everything at last.”
Erik took a deep breath, the light of his eyes disappearing as he closed them in preparation. “I blamed myself for my mother’s death, and when Steiner died in the fire, I took joy in not running in to save him,” Erik began carefully. “But the first death I caused, truly, was my first lover’s. If she can even be called that.
“After Vienna, I traveled for years, joining different Romani bands across the continent, learning all I could and entertaining at fairs as a magician and musician as well as a living corpse. I was welcomed enough to survive, but not to belong. Back then I was naïve enough to think that one day that could change. That if I looked long enough, I would find a place where I belonged. And I was a young man, I had desires, but I could never act on them. Or so I thought until I came to Venice.
“It was Carnival, I was seventeen, and the whole city was masked. I could move about freely, as I never could before. I sang at the finest parties, picked the pockets of the richest dukes, and drank and laughed with people who were alive and beautiful under their dominos and masks. I met her at a party on that final Tuesday before Lent, about this time of year, I guess. I never learned her name.”
Erik paused, and the light of his eyes disappeared again as he closed them, remembering. Christine took his hand, clasping it gently to her breast.
“She was much older than me, I know that. But she enjoyed my voice and said I looked young and strong. I was drunk and stupid, so I went to her bed when she invited me. I wanted to know what it was like, to make love. It was...pleasurable, but brief. Afterwards I was in a daze, so I did not notice when she reached for my mask. I can still hear the way she screamed when she saw me. I tried to run, but before I could, her husband rushed in.”
Christine shivered, already guessing the terrible end of the tale.
“He was drunk too,” Erik continued. “I cannot say what sort of man he was, but it was not me he went after first, but her. It was not a fair fight between the two of them. He grabbed her, he struck her again and again while I screamed at him to stop and tried to intervene. And then threw her so she hit her head against the marble top of her vanity. He threw her so hard. She was dead before she hit the floor. I can still see that too, the way her skull caved in...”
“You didn’t kill her,” Christine protested, and the light of Erik’s eyes returned, searching hers in the dark.
“No. I killed him, the husband, when he turned on me. To this day I cannot say how I won that fight. Perhaps it was because I hated him so much in that moment for what he had done. I saw my father in his face. But we fought, and I ended it with my hands on his neck. The next thing I knew, he was dead. Then I ran.”
“You were defending yourself,” Christine said automatically then recoiled at her words. How could she so easily dismiss such a crime?
“I told myself that while I was vomiting into a canal. I believed it by the time I fled the city. Once I reached Rome, I knew he deserved it.” Erik paused for a deep breath. “Just like Buquet did.”
“What happened after?” Christine asked, feeling sick herself.
“I wandered the world, cursed and marked like Cain himself. I traveled all through the Mediterranean and into Arabia, and then India. Each place I went, I explored and learned, but I never could stay too long. I always drew suspicion and revulsion. At least in parts of the East, if I covered my face and myself in the right clothes, I could pass for a strange, tall woman. But women in those places were barely treated with more dignity than I was as a freak, so I rarely did it. I was always an outcast, often met with violence. But I didn’t kill again. Not until Punjab.”
