JUST KISS ALREADY BLOGFEST_THE COLOR OF LOVE IS ... BLOOD

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This Valentine's Day scene is an excerpt from THE LEGEND OF VICTOR STANDISH. It is just after midnight at the crypt of Marie Laveau. Victor has met the ghoul, Alice Wentworth, for the first time. He has so far avoided becoming a late night snack. She asks him how he got the slashes on his face.



I hitched myself up on a marble slab and patted the place next to me. “Pull up a

seat. It’s a long story.”

She flowed like mist up beside me. I reached out and softly took her left hand. Saying a silent prayer, I rolled my eyes into the back of my head and pressed her hand against my heart.

Maybe I could do a type of encore of what had happened in front of Marie Laveau’s crypt.

Sometimes in life you get more than you ask for.

I stiffened as a swirling sea of her emptiness, her loneliness, her joy at being in touch with another hurt spirit swept me up. And I drew her into me, into my memories of burnt out ends of smoky days laced with pain and strife, of the withered leaves of others’s masquerades, of the tiny thousand misunderstandings and clumsy gropings of my heart to the life-hardened hearts of others.

The autumn world of my days on the streets came rising up over the dark horizon of my regrets. Lost friends, mocking enemies, the haunted, loving eyes of Mother. The glittering, insane eyes of Baboon Face and his goon friends. The snap of the neck that cost me Suze and brought the mysterious undead Captain Sam into my life.

The yellowed papers of recollection curled up around us from Detroit, to Cleveland, to Boston, to that strange bus ride to New Orleans.

The light of relief and hope shot through the black shutters of fear and loneliness as images of me wandering lost through the madness that was Meilori’s. Dim figures of Billie Holliday and Daniel Webster wavered before us like shimmering mirages of fear. My sort of betrayal by Elu, my being an unwilling teaching aid for Strasser, Toya’s hot jealousy, my losing everything as I decided that for Captain Sam to live I had to die.

The cry of her anguished heart calling out to me as she struggled to escape her own private hell. Her spooky entrance into my life. My confusion. My own loneliness reaching out to hers.

The circle completing its circuit. Resurfacing from the waters of shared spirits as I gently pulled her hand from my chest. Our fingers parting. The shiver of separation as her pale face looked at me haunted.

I shivered as our union shattered left me soul-cold. Alice was shivering as well. My head was spinning. Something was wrong with my heart.

It wasn’t empty anymore.

What had I done to me?

Maybe you couldn’t see, really see, into someone without it changing you. And you couldn’t show them the you that you really were without the two of you never being the same anymore.

I looked into her strange neon blue eyes. My changed heart skipped a beat. She was looking … looking at me as if she was feeling the same. Her eyelids lowered slightly. Her hand softened around mine. She squeezed it soft. So soft. Yet so cold. But not as cold as loneliness.

A wild thought came to me.

I grabbed all the courage and desperation I had stored in my bruised heart and decided to go for it.

I brought her cold, cold hand up to my own cold lips and kissed it. Her fingers were quivering. Or was that my lips?

Alice’s lower lip trembled. “How could you?”

“C-Could I what?”

She took her hand from mine and softly traced the line of one of Strasser’s cuts on my left cheek, kissing me on the lips even softer. “Turn out so special.”

***