I SHOULD HAVE KISSED YOU_Sometimes there are no tomorrows

http://romanticfridaywriters.blogspot.com/p/challenges.html

Once upon a time ...

There was a young girl undergoing painful treatments in the hospital. I owned a book store then. Harry Potter was just out.

Her mother would not let her read his novels. Not being heartless, she asked me to write something she would approve but would also appeal to her daughter's love of faeries and, frowning, she said "magic."

So Fallen, the last fae, and 14 year old Blake Adamson, the clone of the Nazarene, was born.

I made a serial of their adventures. They have never been read but by one ...

for some sleeping beauties never awaken.

(I later wrote other novels, using the same characters, but DAYSTAR'S ORPHAN remains unread by any but one ... until now.)

Here is an excerpt from the end of the trail for Fallen and Blake as he lies seriously wounded in the chariot winging its way to Valhalla, driven by the Angelus, Solomon Cain. Fallen is cradling him in her arms:


Black tears streaming down her face, Fallen held my hand tight as if willing her life force into me. “Don’t leave me, Blake. Don’t leave me.”

As black as her tears became the world around her, so that all I could make out was her face in an ever-thickening mist. My eyes must have been glazing over because I heard her crying low. She squeezed my hand even harder.

“If - If you st-stay, I-I’ll tell you a secret.”

I forced my eyes open wide to clear them.

She reached out and gently brushed that stubborn lock of hair from my eyes. “You know all those times you flew at night?”

I nodded.

“W-Well, I ... I crept into your room then.”

She turned her head to the left as if the memory was killing her. “I ... I used to go to your chest of drawers and touch your - your combs and brush, running my fingers along them. I’d imagine you fighting to get that mop y-you call hair to stay down.”

She smiled a smile of agony, her lips trembling. “I’d - I’d laugh and sit on your bed and s-smell your pillow, that always smelled of pine trees.”

Fallen looked as she were about to shatter inside.

“Th-Then, I’d pick up whatever book you were reading at the time, and ... and I’d open it, looking at the parts you - you underlined -”

She mewed soft and long as if she were about to break down. “Those - those parts you underlined. I read them out loud, pretending you were rea-reading them to me.”

She sniffed back the tears. “Your books. To my eyes, they burned with so many different colors. So many. I - I could tell what books made you sad, or laugh, or angry.”

Suddenly, she wrapped me in a fierce embrace. “But the book that burned the brightest was the one that had ‘Annabel Lee’ in it.”

She sniffed wetter this time. “I knew all about that poem, B-Blake, all this time. All this time.”

She clutched me tighter, holding her cheek against mine and rocking and rocking. “Y-You want to know what the color of love is?”

“Wh-What?”

“The color of love is you,” she sobbed. “Is you!”

She turned to Solomon, who was blinking back tears himself, and wailed, “You’re an angel. Tell me. Why does evil always win? Why? WHY?”

She raised her head and howled gut-deep like a shot animal. I couldn’t take it. And neither could Solomon. He turned his head away, choking down another sob. I lifted my hand with my mind fingers and stroked her cheek.

She shook her head that shivered in spasms. “I always thought I would be Annabel Lee. Not you. Not you!”

I forced my traitor throat to work, and it rebelled, making my words hoarse, almost impossible to understand even for me. “A-As long as you live, I live - in you.”

Her lower lip trembled so I thought she’d break down, but she managed to get out, “You big, d-dumb b-boy scout. I don’t want to go on living if you die. Don’t you know that?”

I tried to speak, but the world grew hazy and dark again. My head nodded to my chest. She shook me hard.

“Blake!”

I fluttered my eyes open and saw her reach frantic inside her mind as she tried to look devilish, but only managed to look even more miserable. “I - I know your secret.”

“What - what secret could ... a boy scout like me have?”

She smiled as if that secret was a knife in her heart. “That ‘full on the lips’ kiss you wrote about in your diary.”

“You read my diary!” I moaned.

She shook her mane, a bitterness twisting her face. “Such a silly thing. A simple thing. And ... And I teased you so with it.”

I had tried to stay with her, but it was no good. Her face. I could barely make it out anymore.

Only her tortured eyes, and them only in a thick haze. My head nodded, then my chin settled on my chest, and I heard her from far, far off.

“A-And now, wh-when it is too late, when y-you won’t even feel it, I’ll give you our f-first, our last, my only kiss.”

A flickering light filled my eyes. Fallen’s face came into focus. She was crying.

Her face was coming right to mine, her lips open, her breath soft and perfumed.

All became black.

DOES DEATH WEEP AT CHRISTMAS?_Friday's Romantic Challenge

Here is my entry for FRIDAY'S ROMANTIC CHALLENGE

{I NEED A CHANGE} :
http://romanticfridaywriters.blogspot.com/p/challenges.html
{This is my spectral Christmas In August tale,

spotlighting Samuel McCord, the man with the blood of Death in his veins.

DayStar, his Moriarity if you would,

is the being from outside Time itself who has the peculiar delusion that he is Lucifer.

Samuel is the narrator.}
It was Christmas Eve. A lonely church bell was tolling midnight in the silvery distance. Meilori's was dark.

I sent everyone away. No one but me to die when my Christmas guest arrived.

DayStar had announced his coming earlier that evening with a gift at the front door :

A dead baby in a manger with the word "Midnight" written in blood on its tiny forehead.

The ceiling speakers murmured the recording of Meilori playing the "Moonlight Sonata." She left me with only haunting memories and this one lone recording the night she walked out of my life.

The lights died. The music stopped. I straightened in my chair. My last showdown. It came to every Ranger. Time to face it with courage.

"Hello, DayStar," I smiled.

A tarnished gold voice sneered in the darkness, "Hello, Samuel. Ready to die?"

"I died seven years ago."

"Ah, yes, when your beloved Meilori stormed out of your life. Wasn't she the one who professed, though she were dead, still she would be at your side at the end?"

I watched him shrouded in shadows, just barely making him out. He looked this way and that.

"The end has come and look : no Meilori."

"You're wrong."

I tapped my chest and head. "She's right here and here."

I sensed more than saw him approach my table, the sound of his steps steady, firm and unrelenting.

Heard the chair opposite me being pulled out. Felt as well as heard him sit down in the plush leather chair and neatly arrange his clothes.

"Armani if you are wondering, talking monkey."

"Only the very best for the very worst."

He laughed as if I mattered. I smiled back as if I gave a damn. We both weren't fooled.

DayStar’s words were little more than whispers,

"Once the world lived by night.

The dark drew people together. Under its cover, they could feel the need for each other.

But I gave the night to the predators, kept for myself the day so that the living could look into eyes filled with fear and hatred.”

I fought the urge to challenge his delusion. I reminded myself of Jung's warning that challenging the delusion of a madman only made matters worse.

And when said madman had the power to wither a man with just a whisper, making things worse seemed like a poor game plan.

I shrugged. "You see what you look for."

His smile flashed like a knife from out of the shadows. "You still die alone."

A boy's happy laugh sounded from just outside Meilori's.

Strolling easy through the saloon doors like the wild gypsy he was, Victor Standish laughed as if at the funniest joke in the world. "Wrong! Boy, would you be lousy on JEOPARDY."

"Victor," I snapped. "You promised you'd leave."

He flashed me that scamp's smile of his. "And I left. I never said anything about not coming back."

Alice Wentworth solidified beside him, and he stiffened, "You promised to let me come alone."

Her neon-blue eyes sparkled with the burning love that only the young can have.

"And so I let you come alone. But there is nowhere you will go, Victor, that I will not follow. Not even to meet the devil himself."

DayStar laughed as if all his dreams had come true. "Oh, Samuel, you get to see the young lovers die first."

Victor shook his head, picking up the now living, giggling baby from the manger.

"Sorry to disappoint you, your Hind-Ass. But Mother promised me she'd pass over this place tonight."

His face went as hard as his past life. "You know like she did way back when in Ancient Egypt."

His gypsy's face lit with a grin.

"When your Mother is the Angel of Death, well, let's just say her Christmas presents can literally take your breath away ... or not."

Alice hugged him. I wanted to. Instead I just winked in approval.

And that is how DayStar had his second-worst Christmas Eve.
***

STUCK IN THE MIDDLE THE VICTOR STANDISH WAY

Denise and Donna have a new Friday Romantic Challenge:
http://romanticfridaywriters.blogspot.com/

This prompt is about the others in the romance couple’s lives DURING the break-up.

Inlaws, best friends, co-workers siblings, the kids and other immediate family. Anyone who has connected with the couple and is expected to choose sides when the relationship ends.

What we want to see (in 400 words or less) is how “the others” feel or is changed by the ending relationship,

and what they see as the strengths/weaknesses of the couple. We want to live the romance through a second party. (This is not a love triangle.)

Me, being me, I did it in 500 words. But this is Victor Standish's story, and you know how he is!

This is an excerpt from NEW ORLEANS ARABESQUE:

Her eyes were dark with more than the night.

Yes, Meilori’s eyes were jade quarter moons waiting to rise. What made them dark was her soul steeped in hate … for me.

“Standish,” she husked, “what does it take to kill you?”

Why did all my enemies ask me that? As if I would tell them. A bloody Captain Sam had a trembling arm around her bruised shoulder. He was leaning heavily upon her.

The two of them escaped her sister’s trap by the skin of their teeth. They both looked ready to fall.

I was dribbling a bit of blood myself. They wouldn’t have made it if Alice and I hadn’t fought off Maija’s reinforcements. Captain Sam looked uneasily from her to me and back to her.

I sighed. Losing Meilori for 7 years to Maija’s deceit had almost gutted him. To lose her now after just being reunited would destroy him.

I felt my face go tight. Sometimes to save the ones you loved, you had to lose them. I sighed. I always knew that alone was my destiny. I turned to walk away.

“Time to surf the waves in California.” I whispered.

Alice cried out to Meilori, “Oh, Lady Shinseen, please do not send Victor away! I – I am bound to New Orleans. I cannot follow him.”

Meilori murmured, “You are better off without the gutter rat.”

Alice sobbed, “I will die without him.”

I kept walking, but Captain Sam called out, “Victor, no!”

Meilori snapped, “Samuel, he is your son not mine!”

I turned around. Uh, oh. Mother, the Angel of Death, was materializing beside a startled Alice. Sfumato!

There were a billion ways for this to go wrong. I didn’t think there was a single one for it to go right.

Mother smiled a thing of nightmares. “No, Ningyo. He is my son.”

Meilori smiled back. “Go ahead. Strike me down. Samuel will never forgive you. And I will have my revenge.”

I started clapping. Meilori turned furious at me. I smiled my skull smile.

“No, Your Brittleness. Your sister, Maija, will have her revenge on you. You will die. I will die. Sam will die inside. Alice will live an eternal Hell. And Mother will be denied us all after leading us to that bright light.”

I sighed, “All of Maija’s most hated enemies will die or be in torment.”

Meilori husked, “Maija is dead.”

“Really?” I sighed. “That would be a first. All my enemies, Maija included, are like damn cockroaches. You can never seem to kill them. Besides, Maija knows you. She knew what would happen when she set all this into motion.”

Meilori frowned, “What do you suggest I do, gutter rat? Learn to love you?”

I shrugged, “I’ll settle for tolerate me and love Captain Sam. That last will tie Maija’s panties in a knot even if she is dead.”

Meilori fought a smile and turned to Captain Sam. “I can do the last with all my heart. You live … for tonight.”

I smiled as if it were a raw wound. She talked as if my enemies weren’t going to kill me long before Christmas. Alice squeezed my hand.

I squeezed back. The trick was to live each moment until that last breath. Alice smiled with trembling lips as if thinking the same thing.

Three more weeks until Thanksgiving. No. I was holding the hand of my Thanksgiving right now.

{Exquisite art courtesy of Leonora Roy.}

ALEX CAVANAUGH GETS A VISIT ... from me!

ALEX CAVANAUGH:
http://alexjcavanaugh.blogspot.com/

is getting company at 5 A.M. Friday ... ME.

I talk a bit how music plays a part in my END OF DAYS and

how it really plays a part in all of my writing.

Alex was gracious enough to be a good host and patiently listen.

Visit Alex yourselves so my presence won't cause a slump in his comments!

This is another Friday Challenge too:
THE PERFECT EX from END OF DAYS ...

{A continuation from the last challenge}

Alice Wentworth and the shade of Victor Standish have been grudgingly allowed one last dance before the warriors of High Fae Queen, Oyggia, sweep down upon them.

Sinend turned to her liege. “What harm could granting them a last dance do, Your Majesty?”

Her winter frost eyes grew contemplative. “None. And there actually may be profit for me in it.”

Victor snorted, “Well, we’ll dance anyway.”

“How, Victor?” I husked. “We cannot touch and there is no music.”

He winked. “No music? With me in your head, au contraire.”

A melodic, bitter-sweet waltz sang in my head with the sighing of violins, and I knew it was echoed in Victor’s as well.

“And touching?” I asked. “What shall we do about that?”

He smiled as sad as the tune in our heads.

“What we’ve done since we first met, Alice. We mirror one another, moving in sync one with the other, heart to heart, movement for movement.”

He held out his hand. I placed my hand above his misty one. We began to dance slowly and gracefully. Hot tears blinded me and hid his face from me. And yet, they did not, for I had his eyes ever before me, whether awake or asleep.

Our last dance was much like our whole love affair. We were so close, yet so far apart. Mirroring each other in step and heart, but forever separated by our very natures. Still, we moved as one, fluid and sweeping. The melancholy tune tugged at me soul-deep.

We danced in sweeping steps that took us all along the circle of hilt-clenching warriors. Victor ignored them. He studied me as if trying to memorize each gesture I made, every word I spoke. We whirled and twirled in a dance of love unlike the one of death Skeggjold and I had taken but moments before.

I drew in a breath I did not need as I swung in circles in our last waltz.

“Are you dead? Are you a ghost? Oh, I must know, Victor, what are you?”

“In love with you, Alice. Leave it at that.”

“No, I simply cannot die without knowing.”

His wavering form kept dancing but his face grew grim.

“You will weep bitter tears at the price of knowing, Alice. Do you still want me to tell you?”

“Yes! I will not die without knowing just how you come to be dancing with me, to have helped me these past days though all say you are dead.”

He and I danced as one, our feet seemingly floating above the still smoldering grass. He brushed my lips with his.

They tingled upon mine. There were tears of farewell in his eyes.

“I can see where you would have to know before you died.”

He closed his dark eyes for the briefest of moments, opened them, and then looked so sad into mine. “Remember those painful adjustments Magda gave you?”

I nodded, “Yes, when she mysteriously said they had made me into what I needed to be. But to be what, Victor?’

He sighed, “To be able to see the me that was within you.”

I almost sobbed, “I do not understand.”

He smiled as if the act hurt him. “Remember when to fight Abigail Adams, you became mist within me?”

“Yes, and I took on a part of your memories, your skills ….”

Victor interrupted, “ … took on a part of me, Alice. I’m the part of Victor you took with you that day. I stayed with you all this time.”

Oyggia cried out, “Yes! I can kill a soul echo!”

Victor spun from me in the flow of the music. I saw his intent. He was standing far from me so he alone would be hit by the queen’s savage energy blast.

His eyes. Oh, God, his eyes.

He was not afraid, not a bit. He knew Oyggia would do this. And yet, he told me anyway … because I asked him to.

Victor was calmly looking at me with all the love in his spectral heart. I was blown to the ground by Oyggia’s attack. The world became one enormous explosion.

When I opened my eyes, Victor was gone. Not even a flicker of a wavering image.
He was gone not just from in front of me.

I – I could no longer feel any trace of Victor within me. None at all. My heart felt cold stone. My chest, my soul was empty, alone.

Victor, my love, was truly dead. Dead.

I heard an animal wailing in pain. I went stiff with a sick realization. That was no animal. It was me.

Me.

Oyggia crowed in triumph as I wailed on my knees.

She sang the words, “We come to it at last. The End has come!”

I rose slowly to my feet.

“Oyggia, do you have the steel to fight someone who is looking you in the face?”

(Yes, Hell is about to be unleashed ... just not in the way anyone expects.}

LOVE IS NOT BLIND, RATHER IT SEES WHAT OTHERS CANNOT_Friday's Romantic Challenge

Denise Covey and Francine Howarth

have given us the challenge to write a flash fiction based on I LOVE YOU BECAUSE ...

http://romanticfridaywriters.blogspot.com/

The post must be under 400 words and contain the title within the post.

{My entry is 390 words and comes from THE LEGEND OF VICTOR STANDISH,

detailing Victor's first meeting with the ghoul, Alice Wentworth, by the crypt of Marie Laveau at midnight.)

Alice murmured, “How did you read my thoughts, meal-about-to-be.”

“It must be some voodoo magic still clinging to Marie Laveau’s crypt.”

She took a step back. “How is that possible?”

I hitched myself up on a marble slab. “Pull up a seat. Maybe I can have you hear my thoughts.”

She sat beside me. I reached out and gently took her left hand and concentrated.

I stiffened as the swirling sea of her loneliness, her joy at being in touch with another hurt spirit swept me up.

I drew her into me, into my memories of burnt out ends of smoky days laced with violence, with the withered leaves of a thousand misunderstandings, and with the gropings of my heart to the uncaring hearts of others.

The autumn world of my days on the streets came rising up over the dark horizon of my loneliness. Lost friends, mocking enemies, the haunted eyes of Mother.

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

The light of hope shot through the shutters of fear as images of me wandering lost through the madness that was Meilori’s. My losing everything as I decided that for Captain Sam to live I had to die.

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

The circle completing its circuit. Resurfacing from the waters of our shared spirits. Our fingers parting. Her pale face looking at me haunted.

Alice was shivering. 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 eyes. My heart skipped a beat. Her eyelids lowered. Her hand softened around mine.

A wild thought came to me.

I brought her cold hand up to my lips and kissed it.

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

“C-Could I what?”

“Turn out so special?”

Black tears welled in her eyes. “Love is not blind, Victor, rather it sees what others cannot.”
***

PERFECTION IS WHERE YOU FIND IT_Friday's Romantic Challenge

http://romanticfridaywriters.blogspot.com/

The leader of the vampires shoved me onto the porch leading to the entrance of The Bourbon Orleans and laughed, “Poet, your dream is about to become nightmare.”

I saw Alice shiver. She was looking at the four entrance columns , towering above us. Her face seemed to glow it was so pale. Her nose suddenly wrinkled like a rabbit’s.

“V-Victor, those columns ….”

“Yes?”

“They are painted with … human blood.”

The leader laughed low, “Makes you hungry, little ghoul?”

Alice began to shiver worse. The blood moon struck fire from the silver edging to her black Gothic Lolita dress. Sfumato! I glanced down at the moon doing the same to my white Mark Twain-style suit.

I sighed, angry at myself. You know, one day I would die, not because of what I didn’t know, but of what I had forgotten.

Like I had forgotten our clothes had been bathed in the Waterfalls of Eden, not once, but four times … with us in them. Such a thing was fatal the first time, much less four. But our love for each other had pulled us through.

I smiled like I was feeling that love as never before … which I was.

I reached out and squeezed her hand still smiling. “We are not of the night nor of darkness but of love.”

My suit and her dress flared like suns. The vampires screamed shrill yet husky. Reeling away from us, they burst into foul-smelling two-legged bonfires. They didn’t make three steps. They collapsed to go up like dry driftwood.

I brought Alice’s hand to my lips and softly kissed it, surprised that for the first time in our love that it was warm.

“People think they know who we are, Alice. They are wrong.”

She smiled with trembling lips. “Wrong.”

Alice embraced me, kissing me hungry, loving, and with the passion that I knew would never die. I shivered. We had kissed before but never had her lips been warm. Never. I ruined our kiss by smiling.

She pulled back. “You smile?”

“Your lips.”

She swallowed. “What about them?”

“They’re warm.”

“Warm? Your love has made them w-warm?”

“Our love, Alice.”

She mewed like a lost kitten having found home, rushing into my arms, renewing our kiss with even more passion.

Her hand reached around my neck, pulling me into it. She needn’t have bothered. I was doing just fine on my own. I pulled her body into mine, not roughly, but with all the tenderness in my heart.

I wasn’t an orphan anymore. In her arms, I was home.

I heard screams from behind the windows all along the balcony. Alice and I stepped back, looking up in shock.

Vampire bonfires flared behind each and every window where those leeches had been watching us being led to our supposed slow deaths.

They fell to the wooden floors. I made a face. It was certainly going to be a hot time in the old town tonight.
***

I'M HEARING VOICES + FRIDAY ROMANCE CHALLENGE

BLOOD WILL TELL HAS JUST HIT #23 ON AMAZON'S TOP 100 BEST SELLING CONTEMPORARY FANTASY BOOKS!

http://www.amazon.com/BLOOD-WILL-TELL-ebook/dp/B0050219BW

I'M HEARING VOICES challenge is :

Emotion Flash Fiction -

Emotion is the engine of a story. Pick an emotion and in a flash fiction piece of 250 words MAKE us feel it! We want to connect with your character.

It is also time for another Friday ROMANTIC CHALLENGE given by the always fascinating Francine Howarth and Denise Covey.

Today's theme is THE LONG, COOL APHRODIASIC.

My 400 word entry is from the sequel to my CREOLE KNIGHTS :

NEW ORLEANS ARABESQUE (in the process of being written.)

The cosmic conjunctions have aligned. The Nameless Ones strain at the unraveling barrier between them and our world.

After 7 years, Maija has released her sister, Meilori, from the bubble of frozen time in which she encased her in a trap of deceit.

Why?

To see her face when she tells Meilori that her beloved Samuel McCord lies dead by the tentacles of an exiled Nameless One he killed before dying.

The undead rabbi, Ben Teradion, is comforting the devastated Ningyo. He is Death’s measure to stop the invasion of The Nameless Ones.

Maija turns to mock the rabbi with the truth of his role, not realizing you simply cannot kill a man whom Death will not take. Shrouded in the Threads of Night, Samuel McCord, bleeding and battered, stands invisible beside her :

Maija laughed. “Death saved you for tonight, rabbi, to speak the name God gave Himself, that when uttered outside the Holy Temple would rend the very universe.”

Ben Teradion said, “No!”

Meilori whispered, “Death has come to revel in the end of life. For her, the death of the entire universe would be ecstasy.”

Ben Teradion husked, “But then --”

Maija nodded. “Nothing stands in the way of the Ningyo Empire to re-enter our home plane.”

The rabbi cried, “No! The Nameless Ones would return to our world!”

“Who cares?”

Meilori gestured, black energy hissing at the ends of her fingertips. “Samuel would have cared.”

The other Ningyo’s circled her as Maija husked, “Now, you die.”

I dropped the Threads of Night. “Don’t make me spank you.”

Maija yelped, “McCord!”

Meilori took a half-step back. “Samuel!”

“Do I know you?”

She looked as if I’d knifed her, and I regretted my joke. “For seven years, what got me around each corner was the hope of seeing you there waiting for me.”

She mewed like a kitten and rushed into my arms, her lips hungrily seeking mine. An electric connection completed deep inside me. The world made sense again.

I was home.

A trilling vibrated around us. Maija’s portal was opening.

I heard feet. The Ningyo’s were about to jump us.

“Padre, trust me. Say God’s name!”

Maija leapt forward. The rabbi bellowed.

His lips worked as if he shouted one word, but I heard the sentence he said two thousand years before as he burned before the Roman emperor.

“The parchment burns, but the words fly free!”

The sound flowed into nothing human --

as if Life had come to know itself by the simple act of hearing it.

It came from all directions. The lower notes rumbled as if from the depths of the earth. Higher vibrations trilled as if from the stars in heaven.

I was a human tuning fork, the marrow of my bones trembling. The vibrations cascaded around me and Meilori in a waterfall of sound.

Her jade eyes, first wild with fear, soon grew as deep as the love I felt for her and she for me. A sunburst exploded with us in its burning honey center.

For the first time in two hundred years, I felt warm. Meilori smiled, then kissed me.

The universe might be ending. I didn’t mind. In her arms, I was finally home.
***

DANSE MARDI GRAS_Friday's Romantic Challenge

DANSE MARDI GRAS

I had never seen Captain Sam so happy. Meilori was back in his arms though it meant a target on my back. Mardi Gras was a thing of laughter within his haunted jazz club once again.

I felt like baying like a happy hound myself. Alice was flowing towards me in a black sleek dress whose long skirt was slit for the tango.

Her porcelain shoulders bare, long blonde hair a living waterfall upon them, long black gloves up past her elbows.

She leaned against me to the tempo of Grace Jones singing “Strange, I’ve Seen That Face Before.”

“What is this tune?,” she whispered in my ear.

“The Libertango,” I smiled.

“I do feel liberated,” she husked, running her toe up, then down my right leg.

“Me, too,” spoke Meilori as she slipped between Alice and me, whipping the two of us away.

Jade eyes which had watched Aztec sacrifices scream for mercy that never came stabbed into me.

“So you are the son I could never give Samuel?”

“We don’t have to be enemies,” I whispered, seeing a concerned Captain Sam taking up a frantic Alice in his arms to continue the tango towards us.

Meilori laughed a thing from nightmares.

“Oh, do not worry, Standish. Once I kill you, I will forget all about you.”

She gazed mockingly at Alice as she rubbed her body against mine, and I sighed, “You can destroy me as an enemy in another way.”

“Really?”

“You can make a friend of me.”

A Harlequin spun me from Meilori’s arms, shaking off her belled hat, long silk black hair tumbling down on colorful shoulders.

Maija. I wondered when she’d show.

Meilori gasped, “But you are dead!”

“Your savage of a husband only managed to kill my followers. DayStar saved me.”

I shook my head as Maija spun me in the female’s role of the tango and snorted, “DayStar doesn’t save. He damns.”

“To revenge myself against my sister, McCord, and you, I welcome damnation.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sam sweep Meilori in his arms as she whispered hurriedly to him. Marshall Hickok took up Alice and danced the tango awkwardly towards us.

Maija swept me down in a sudden dip, wrenched me up against her breasts (Aw, jeez, she didn’t believe in underwear), and hissed into my ear.

“Tonight I will pay you back for that ‘Menage a Trois’ lie you spread about you, your ghoul, and myself in 1834!”

I snapped her out, then back into my arms as the tango heated up. “Hey, I happened to ruin my reputation while improving yours with that!”

“I will kill you slowly for those words.”

“Take a number. It’s a long line.”

Another woman, this time dressed as Marie Antoinette, tugged me out of Maija’s arms. Despite the white wig, I recognized the insane cobalt blue eyes. Empress Theodora, ruler of the European Revenant Empire.

“Royalty first, Ningyo swine!”

My dance card was getting too damn full. Theodora laughed throaty.

“Ah, my subjects are whispering that I am renewing our tawdry love affair. Another lie you have sown about your betters!”

Father Renfield and Sister Magda were twirling effortlessly towards us, their faces grim. So was Sam with Meilori and Alice with Hickok. I smiled grimly.

Lady Lovelace and Margaret Fuller were scandalizing the crowd by dancing together my way. They were too far away to get here in time.

Theodora’s steel fingers squeezed my upper arms tight. She was about to pull apart my arms and make a wish.

I smiled sad. “You’re all alone.”

“My subjects are mixed all through this crowd within Meilori’s.”

“And still alone.”

I dipped her suddenly. Jeez, didn’t any of my enemies believe in underwear? I got a terrible mental image of Major Strasser. If I survived this tango, I was going to have to take a bath in Listerine.

“You are surrounded by toadies who are too terrified to say anything but yes to you.”

Theodora snapped up, pressing me close to her, running her own toe up and down my right leg. “And that is bad?”

“One day, your worshipfulness, you’re going to be at a terrible crossroads, not knowing which way to take. And those toadies’ words won’t help worth shit.”

I smiled wide, taking precise quick, flowing steps between her fast moving high-heeled feet as we moved fluid over the dance floor.

“Then, you’ll think of me, too stupid to lie – even to an enemy.”

Theodora studied me. “You would save my life? Why?”

“Because we’re both street gypsies. You’re just a clever daughter of a bear trainer who slept her way to the top. Me? I’m gutter trash. We’re alike and both alone in ways no one but we will ever understand.”

Theodora flicked flat eyes to Alice, and I shook my head.

“She was raised to be a Victorian lady. Like you, I was raised to survive in a world that didn’t want me to.”

“Alike and alone,” Theodora husked.

Her cobalt eyes deepened, became wet. Before I could react Theodora crushed her cold lips into mine.

“Hey, no tongue on a first date!”

Alice was suddenly by my side. Theodora laughed oddly, linking her arm with an uneasy Hickok. “Standish, you live … for tonight. You have given me much to think over.”

Alice’s pale face became all eyes. “What was that kiss about? What did you do, Victor?”

Sam and Meilori danced to a halt in front of me. I looked into the disturbed eyes of Meilori, sighing, “Followed my own advise.”

{Excerpt from Victor's sixth book, DANSE MARDI GRAS. The 4th & 5th? THREE SPIRIT NIGHT and DEATH AT CHRISTMAS.}

For other entries : http://romanticfridaywriters.blogspot.com/

***

***
(steamy in the middle and towards the end)

***
[MY FAVORITE TANGO SCENE}

THE OLD YEAR WAS DYING_Friday's Romantic Challenge

The old year was dying, the tolling bells ringing out its dirge in the night.

Alice squeezed my hand tight,

her death-cold fingers reminding me that I had someone to be strong for.

Shadows were heavy in the LaPrete Mansion's upper dining room.

Of the places I wanted to spend New Year's Eve with the ghoul of my dreams -- this was the very last.

Cezar Prodanescu, wheezing the prelude to his death rattle, spoke from the oak chair at the head of the dining table.

"Victor Standish, you and your ghoul cost me. That building was going to be my last project."

I shook my head. "The thousands of new Katrina orphans needed that place."

"You made the buyers think it was haunted!"

"What can I tell you? My mother's good at making ghosts."

Cezar's son scowled at me. "Because of you we have been made to endure this tedious Romanian ritual."

His wife, sitting beside him, patted his hand. "Andrei, remember your blood pressure."

Cezar snorted, "All you care about, Andreea, is that bearer bond right beside that New Year's Eve Mask."

Her daughter whined, "Grandpapa, must I wear this mask, too?"

He flashed a dying wolf's smile at her. "If you want your own bearer bond, Doina, yes. Besides, I made yours a faerie princess. And you only have to wear the mask until the bells stop."

Her brother glowered at the mask on the table before him. It bore an uncanny resemblance to Alfred E. Neuman. "Look at what he wants me to wear!"

Cezar snorted, "Then, don't wear it, Gavril. But you will receive nothing!"

Reluctantly, Gavril put it on. Andreea looked with disgust at her own mask in the shape of a wrinkled old shrew. She fondled the bearer bond. She put on the mask.

Andrei flicked dead eyes to the pig mask and barked an insult of a laugh. "You have made me wear so many masks, Father. What is one more?"

He put it on. Cezar pointed to the braying donkey mask in front of me. "Wear it and I will call off my lawyers from delaying that orphanage."

I shook my head. "The deal was you would do it if I showed up."

His smile reminded me of a snake's - but without as much humanity. "The deal has changed."

I shook my head. "My word hasn't. I've showed up. No jumping through hoops."

Alice lightly touched her mask on the table top done up like a snake's face. "Victor, the orphans."

Cezar turned to her. "Don the mask, and I will still call off my lawyers."

She took her hand from mine. She picked up the mask, slowly bringing it to her face.

I went cold.

Something was brewing, but I knew Alice. If I told her not to, she would do it out of spite.

Cezar looked nothing so much as a vulture as he watched her, then turned to me. "Tell her not to, boy. You want to."

"I - I love Alice too much to take away her right to choose."

Alice's eyes rimmed in black tears. "So I choose ... you."

She placed the mask down.

Cezar scowled and put his skull mask on.

He slid Alice's mask to Doina. "Wear it, and you will receive ten bearer bonds."

"T-Ten?" She tore off the faerie mask, putting on the snake one.

The tolling bells were reaching the end of their countdown. The Prodanescu clan glared at their patriarch. Alice smiled softly and took up my hand again.

The tolling died away. Andreea wrenched her mask off. Doina screamed wetly. I felt like screaming myself. The mother's face was an exact copy of her mask. Andrei ripped his mask off.

A wet pig's snout quivered at me. Doina sprang from her chair, sending it to the carpet. She raced to the ornate mirror. A snake's face stared slit-eyed back at her. She started screaming in peals I knew would never stop until her last breath.

Gavril just sat shivering in his chair. Alice slowly, slowly reached out to Cezar's mask. As soon as her fingers touched the mask, the rubber band crumbled to ash.

Cezar's skull mask dropped.

Andreea began to titter in gibbering madness.

Though dead, Cezar looked merely asleep.

I turned to Alice. "Next New Year's Eve? No parties."
***

LOVE'S LIGHT IS A PYRE_Sparkles Friday Romantic Post

CONTEST UPDATE :

DINA HOWELL just won ALEXANDER SKARSGARD (ERIC NORTHMAN)'S AUTOGRAPH!

DONNA HOLE just won a photograph AUTOGRAPHED by ANGELINA JOLIE!

REVIEW THE LEGEND OF VICTOR STANDISH and enter now to get in on all the other prizes yet to be given!

The icy mists flow like lost love's seeking echoes across the bayou bordering my apartment.

SPARKLES is the prompt for this Friday Romantic Challenge.

Sometimes the magic seems to slip away in the rush of plucking fingers of Christmas obligations and demands.

Fallen, the last fae,

she of the woodfire heart and storm lightning thoughts,

whispers,

"Souls move slowly to their journey's end;

destinations are where we begin again.

Like ships sailing far across endless seas,

trust in starlight to lead the way."

So here is my SPARKLES post from BLACK ROSES IN AVALON

http://www.amazon.com/BLACK-ROSES-IN-AVALON-ebook/dp/B005GQN03C/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1323803244&sr=1-1

where Blake Adamson and Fallen, the last fae, find themselves deep in a dangerous, mystic forest deep within fabled Avalon :

Fallen reached out and grabbed my hand. "Somehow, I feel as if not all the powers of Darkness can separate us now."

I caught Epona, Queen of Unicorns, sharing a haunted look with her mate. Fallen hadn't noticed. And I was glad. She looked so happy that I wanted it to last as long for her as possible.

Something like a premonition, but more certain, swept over me.

And deep down, I knew that this was our first, our last, night. Something terrible was about to happen. So terrible that it would shake the Sidhe nation to its core.

So terrible that it would permanently scar Fallen ... and be the end of me. The Darkness was falling, and I would never see the light again.

I looked up into the twinkling stars peering down on us from between the branches of the ancient oaks above us. 'Oh, Father, may you light the way for Fallen when I can't be there for her, please.'

I waited for an answer of some kind but only got aching silence. I sighed. Maybe that was a kind of answer in itself.

I jerked as Fallen, caught up in her happiness, started to sing. It was ethereal, haunting, yet filled with love and passion and hope. I looked back up into the endless depths of the stars.

Maybe this was the only real answer, to cling to love while it was ours and let the future stay in the wings until it came shambling out onto the stage to reach out for us.

"All time and space are one to hearts in love," sang Fallen, her eyes locked on me.

"Death, pain, darkness but phantoms to be overcome," she trilled, reaching out and squeezing my hand gently as if reading my mind.

Her voice rose, twirled, and caressed me. As her words went from Sidhe to Angelus to some tongue so old that even Solomon's gift didn't translate it.

Then, I realized the tune had changed to the melody Fallen had identified as the lullaby sung to her by her unknown mother.

And the breath caught in my throat as I saw long, delicate wings of ethereal energy fluttering from between her shoulder blades.

Epona's eyes widened as she spotted them at the same time that I did. Azure shivered between my legs as he, too, saw Fallen's sparkling wings of fae magic tremble and beat to the rhythm of her song.

And for a moment, the unicorns slowed their movement to stare at my love just as bewitched as I was by the haunting beauty of her singing. It seemed that the four of us had walked into a medieval tapestry or painting :

A faerie princess, her mortal lover, riding the King and Queen of all unicorns ensnared by the cascading notes sung by Love which cannot truly die.
***

THE INN AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Winter spirits are moaning outside my window. Love. It has its seasons.

The winter of it is heart-breaking. Come. See the snow-shrouded Inn at the End of the World.

DayStar has cast Victor Standish and the Victorian ghoul, Alice Wentworth, far in the mists of prehistory to New Zealand. Alice, in a fit of temper, has bitten Victor on the cheek.

Unlike his other wounds, it is not healing. Along the way, Victor has made another friend, the mystic sword, Morgyn, housing the spirit of Morgyn Le Fay.

Now, drawn by the aroma of hot chocolate, the only non-flesh thing Alice can digest, the two of them stumble on The Inn At The End of the World ...



In the snowy, shadowy glade ahead of us was something right out of an illustration for a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. It was a towering, strange tavern with odd turrets, stabbing into the umbrella of heavy branches from the bordering, misshapen trees.

Jeez, the only thing missing was a sign saying "Abandon hope all ye who enter here." The weathered shutteres were closed. I squinted for a clearer look.

That was when I spotted the claw marks gouged out of their faded wood. I shook my head as I realized just how deep those claws had cut. You could almost imagine Robin Hood's men guzzling ale in such a place.

No, the "feel" of the place was all wrong for that image. Robin of Lockley's men wouldn't be in such a evil tavern. Yeah, it might sound odd to you, but the inn had a feel of evil to it,

as if it were a place where the shades of damned knights would look hollow-eyed at one another, waiting for an unsuspecting innocent to wander in and never leave.

And this time, said innocents were me and Alice. I glanced at her cold, killer's eyes. Alright, said innocent was just me. I looked back at the inn.

Even from as far away as it was from us, it still gave me the shivers. Once in the woods, I had spotted a coiled rattler on the other side of the road.

My head had told me that it couldn't hurt me from that far away, but my goose-bumps had told me different. I listened to them.

And now, my goose-bumps were telling me the same thing. I called out to Alice who was stalking silently towards the shadowed tavern in the much too quiet glade.

"Alice, please stop. I'll even dig our way through the roof. Just stop, and listen to reason for once."

She turned her head as she kept going and hissed low,

"I could grow very old waiting for you to dig through that wooden roof, feeble-fingers."

She looked back towards the tavern. "I wager we could go through one of the windows."

I sighed, "Look at them. The shutters are all bolted and padlocked -- on the outside."

"Listen to him, Ghoul," snapped Morgyn the sword on my back, "Think for once. Why would they lock the windows on the outside?"

Alice's eyes slanted up to become fully flesh-eating ghoul.

"Perhaps because they secured the place before they left for the winter? Why ask me? It is simply deserted."

I ran my fingers through my hair. "Then, who's making the hot chocolate we're smelling from inside the place?"

Alice whipped back her long mane angrily. "Oh, I am too hungry to play twenty questions with a moron and his sword."

I rubbed my face in frustration. "Think, Alice. Maybe those shutters are locked to keep anyone stupid enough to wander in there from leaping back out? Did you ever think of that, huh?"

She didn't even answer me. Alice just spun on her heel and stormed ahead. I followed quickly after her, grinding my teeth.

Where had our love gone? Where? My throbbing cheek told me.

Consumed by her hunger for my flesh that she had awakened.

That's why she was acting so angry. She was howling inside over the death of our love ... and my death ... yet to be.

My steps slowed down as a terrible thought hit me. Maybe the shutters weren't locked to keep somebody in, but to keep something out. But what?

A weird stirring tingled deep inside me, and The Father's low, small Voice spoke one word : "Sunlight."

I frowned. Sunlight? Why would anyone want to keep sunlight out of a place?

My scalp tingled and got tight as the obvious answer came to me.

Revenants.

My headache got worse. And even with the scent of hot chocolate strong in the air, my appetite took wings. I breathed in deep as I came to a decision.

Alright, if I was really going in there, it was past time to start setting up a few surprises of my own. I smiled grim. If those ambushers liked darkness so much, I'd arrange to shed a little light on things ... and them.

I stopped. Very, very carefully, so as not to make the slightest sound, I drew back the shutter bolts with my fingers. I broke out into a sweat. The darn things were rusted and stiff.

But I finally managed it. And with the lock picks Captain Sam had given me, I opened three of the padlocks and gently took them off, laying them ever so softly on the strange grass. I smiled bigger and wiped my sweaty forehead.

Now, let them try something.

Morgyn trilled low, "Truly, Victor, thou acts like Arthur. Unlike the ghoul, who does not act, but merely reacts."

Alice might not have stopped for me, but she spun around at Morgyn's insult. "I heard that, toothpick."

I sprinted up next to her. "Then, maybe you'll hear this : do the names, Hansel and Gretel mean anything to you?"

"Yes, they mean you will read anything. Come, let us spring this trap."

She turned to walk the dozen or more steps to the heavy oak door. I ran after her and managed to catch up to her three feet before she bounded into disaster. I jumped smack in front of her.

"Do you know who was sorriest when the prodigal son came knocking at the door?"

Alice rolled her eyes. "Oh, Victor, if you can remember the joke, then why cannot you remember you have told it to me. Twice. This week."

"Maybe I would remember if the moral of the joke ever sank in with you. The fatted calf, Alice, the fatted calf!"
***

UNDER A VOODOO MOON_Friday's Romantic Challenge

It is midnight by the bayou bordering my apartment. The tolling has died but for the echoes.

Lady Night whispers, "Little Lakota, you think you know. You do not.

The world is not what you believe nor what you wish.

Life has its hungers. So does Death."

Denise and Francine have given us the prompt, HAUNTING, for tonight's challenge.

http://fridaynightwriters.blogspot.com/

My entry, UNDER A VOODOO MOON, is , not too surprisingly, from Victor's sequel - THE LEGEND OF VICTOR STANDISH : UNDER A VOODOO MOON.

(Victor and Alice have been flicked back to the year 1826 by the eerie supernatural entity, DayStar, like you or I would brush away knats) :


The blood moon leered down on Alice and me through thick, silent mists snaking above us. The mists were the only things silent across the grassy courtyard.

Drums beat wild rhythms as rocking black men chanted, their wide eyes glazed over. In the shadows of the huge bonfire, black dancers wheeled about, long machetes flashing in their fists.

I was so scared it felt like my skin was about to leap off me and do the Mambo with my skeleton. I knew where we were from pictures in that book on voodoo in early New Orleans :

Congo Square, across Rampart Street from the French Quarter. But a very primitive French Quarter. Place Congo was its name this far back in the past.

I reached out and took Alice’s ice-cold right hand. My heart calmed. With her at my side, I could take on monsters.

With the musk of sweat, alcohol, and hate heavy in the humid night air, Alice whispered in that odd British accent of hers, “Victor, we are in serious jeopardy here.”

Now, when a flesh-eating ghoul says she’s afraid, even a mongrel like me knows that life has just hit a new high in low-down.

The drums suddenly stopped. And every wild eye turned to us.

I winked at her. “You think?”

A tall woman, her black face glowing with deadly grace, spoke soft, yet it carried out across the dancers and slithering snakes on the grass.

But none of them equaled the boa across her shoulders.

“You two do not belong here.”

Alice murmured, “Look at Marie Laveau, Victor. She is such a striking woman.”

I grinned dry, “Even without the snake.”

A small, crooked old man limped to us. “She be right.”

He turned to Alice, his voice gaining an edge. “’Specially you, nzumbe.”

I stiffened. “That’s Myth Nzumbe to you, Fright Face.”

Alice lips got tight. “Is everything a jest to you, Victor?”

I gave her icy hand a squeeze.

“Never you, Alice. But you can’t let monsters see you sweat.”

Alice rose a prim and proper eyebrow. “I never sweat.”

The old man limped closer. “You be half-dead, now, Miss Nzumbe. Soon you be all dead.”

I shook my head. “Don’t count on it, Legba.”

He stepped back an inch. “You know me?”

“I know of you.”

“Then, you knows how powerful I be. I be the origin of life!”

I snorted. “Get real. That would be Elohim. And I’m pretty sure you’re not Him.”

Legba husked, “So sure are you?”

I nodded to the squirming reptiles on the grass.

“Pretty sure. He’s not real fond of snakes. He took their legs away, remember?”

He cackled, “But Erzulie be fond of dem, and she be right behind you, boy. Erzulie, loa of Love and Death.”

I turned to face the tall black woman with scars on her face and smiled,

“That’s a new look for you, Mother.”

“No, child. ‘Dis face be veeery old. And you be in bad trouble.”

I winked at her and copied her accent, “Dat be an veeery old story, Mother.”
***
Katrina sent shock waves through the economy of New Orleans that nearly submerged the city and its valiant citizens. I have donated 100% of the past two months profits of THE LEGEND OF VICTOR STANDISH to the New Orleans SALVATION ARMY.

Of every copy of LEGEND I sell from now on, 10% of the profit will go to them as well. So not only do you get an eerie, absorbing story, you help the hurting in New Orleans. How neat is that?
***

WHISPERS ONLY THE DEAD MAY SPEAK_Friday's Romantic Challenge

We are nearing THREE SPIRITS NIGHT

that eve when things can cross over to our world,

none of them lovers of Man ... except as a meal.

Francine and Denise have given us the prompt, WHISPERS, to do with as we please ...

http://fridaynightwriters.blogspot.com/

Three heroes are all that stand between those spirits and this world in the strange city, Renaissance.

Listen to the haunted thoughts of one of them, the one who understands the Hunger that drives them the most : the Victorian ghoul, Alice Wentworth …


There are whispers only the dead may speak. Secrets only the dead may know. Still I do not comprehend why Victor insisted on walking blithely into this ambush.

Not as the living do the dead see :

one moment frozen after another.

It is why we are distanced from the hearts of the living.

Except for Victor Standish.

My Victor, of the gypsy laugh and poet’s heart. Our love breaks the chain of reason. But deep in my dry bones,

I know that love will one night break my heart … as I eat his.

This frozen moment may spare us that …

I see Renaissance’s mayor thrust Maija, who lured us here to be eaten, into the onrushing hungry soul-echoes.

“Ningyo whore! My father’s race cast yours out of their dimension. Did you think I would ally myself with you? Come, Citizens, feast!”

As Maija tumbles to the floor, he laughs, “All you touch you can drain. All that is water you control. They are ghosts, filth. Now, you die.”

Thunder rumbles as Captain McCord growls, “You first.”

His strange Colt bellows. I clutch my ears as if the sound itself would kill me. I watch as the Mayor grabs his chest. I have never seen the like. With the swirling of an open drain he seems to spin into nothingness.

McCord yells, “Maija, they are echoes of life but life still. They shape themselves from mist. What is mist but ….”

She smiles like a released demon, “Water!”

Even I, who live off the flesh of the living, am sickened by the atrocities she inflicts on the screaming soul-echoes.

Victor laughs, “Boy, you guys sure picked the wrong dance partners!”

The survivors laugh themselves as they turn to one who appears helpless. My Victor helpless? Never! Not while I stand by his side.

They halt as I flow to them. They thought me ghoul. Fools. Not ghoul. Not ghost. Not revenant. I am unique.

Shaped by my mother’s mishandling of voodoo to make me a zombie, I became Other … when Victor’s mother took me for hers.

My hunger is about to be satisfied. I stiffen as Victor smiles. This is why he walked into certain death …

to feed the one he … loves. Tears burn my eyes.

I am loved.

I turn hotly to them and whisper words only the dead have ears to hear. “I am not ghoul, leeches. What am I?”

I feel my lips pull up in a Cheshire grin. “I am the far end of the graveyard where the nettles grow. I am the Jester in the Theater of Bone. I AM HELL TO PAY!”

I sweep over them like the Death that took the first-born in Egypt. I flick undead eyes to McCord. He had been speaking to me as well to let me know I could … eat them. So I do.

His strange Colt bellows. Maija laughs hellishly. The soul-echoes scream.

I eat.

Suddenly, ball bearings, washed in the Waterfall of Eden, pepper the air behind me. A blur of movement. I smile. Victor is twirling in what he calls, in his quaint fashion,

a Full Arabian Cartwheel. He lands lightly behind me as three soul-echoes learn that acupressure can kill the undead.

He whispers, “Alice, you have to watch that lovely … behind of yours.”

I whisper back, “Why ever should I do that? You watch it enough for the two of us.”

He smiles wide and kisses me. I wait with dread heart for his lips to flinch from my cold ones. But they do not.

Not even a little.
***

LOVE SEES UNDER THE MASK_friday's romantic entry

The iron tongue of midnight tolls hauntingly beyond my apartment terrace.


The meandering bayou betrays its existence only by the wavering reflection of the almost full moon.


The night-cloaked owl keeps asking its one word question. “WHO?”


Who are we? Who will ever love us?


Francine and Denise gives us the prompt FIRST LOVE to spark this Friday’s romantic post.

http://fridaynightwriters.blogspot.com/


Victor Standish’s lonely heart bleeds the ink that this post is needing. As the story begins, midnight is tolling, too. By the crypt of Marie Laveau.


He has just met the Victorian ghoul, Alice Wentworth, for the first time. Her stomach growling for his flesh, she hesitates to feast on this lonely-eyed teen. She asks what brings him to her graveyard.



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 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 struggle, of the withered leaves of others’ 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 snap of the neck that cost me Suze and brought the mysterious undead Captain Sam into my life.


The yellowed papers of memory 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 Alice’s lonely 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.


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 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. “Turn out so special?”

***

ROCK CANDY CUTS_Friday's Romantic Challenge

The distant clock tower is tolling midnight once again. The rolling thunder is as hollow as its bells.

As hollow as many of us are, carved out bit by bit by the razored acts of betrayal and disilusion.

This is the month of the carved pumpkin - the symbol for the state of love in our hollowed-out world.

Denise and Francine have given us the prompt ROCK CANDY :

http://fridaynightwriters.blogspot.com/
Here is my entry :

Evil often wears sex as a mask. The Venus Fly Trap is rather pretty ... at a distance.

I watched a pretty girl in a pretty short skirt arguing with Captain Sam at his table. He kept shaking his head at her.

He was a gentleman and all. His Stetson was off, sitting on his rune-carved table ... just like she was a lady.

Ada Byron once pointed this famous rock star out to me. "Victor, to say she has the morals of an alley cat is to insult alley cats everywhere."

I smiled so bitter it tasted of salt. I figure the last man who thought her a lady had been blind. I looked around, trying to spot Alice and wash this bit of empty soul from my mind with the sight of the reason I took each breath.

I looked at the black rose on the table beside me. Since Maija, it was the symbol of our love and our trust in each other.

Great. Miss Lust R Us was walking towards me, her hips swaying like the lazy swell of the tide on some island beach. Her shiny skirt was so short it could have been mistaken for a wide belt. Her top was more bra than blouse.

She tugged down on it to give me a good glimpse of her ... flotation devises.

"I'm Rock Candy," she breathed, wetting her open lips.

"Of course you are. And they sell lip balm down the street."

She pouted, wiggling without moving, "Victor Standish, your wit will not save you. Your lout of a mentor has refused to let me sing at Meilori's."

"It's his club."

"As you are his beloved ward. I am going to destroy you."

"Lots of luck with that, she-bitch."

"I am Circe's daughter, fool. No mortal man can resist me."

She raised her eyebrow. No! My mind was fogging, my will draining. Rock Candy smiled like the succubus she was. My eyes tore themselves from hers, falling on the black rose I intended to surprise Alice with.


I heard Alice's voice within the crypt from the midnight I first met her :


'I feel tears bleed from my dead eyes. I will find flesh to tear and rend. I always do.

But love? Never. Never will there be love for the thing that I have become. Never.'


Then, I saw the memory of her walking into Meilori's next to me for the first time :

I saw Alice’s eyes light up upon walking into Meilori’s. She looked like a little girl on Christmas morning. Her jaw dropped in wonder, and she squeezed my arm in joy. I smiled ear to ear. I caught Ada looking at us and brushing away a tear.

I heard Alice murmur, “I could cry such tears as angels cry.”

“Milton’s PARADISE LOST?, “ I asked.

“Close but no. It is from Milton’s LYCIDAS.”

“You’ll have to read it to me sometime,” I said.

Alice turned neon blue eyes that seemed both happy and sad. “No. Rather I would read you something Christina Rossetti wrote.”

She leaned in close and whispered,

“Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live

My very life again though cold in death :

Come back to me in dreams, that I may give

Pulse for pulse, breath for breath.”

And just like that, Rock Candy's spell was broken. I looked at her sad. She would never have what Alice and I shared.

"Good ... not in the moral sense, of course ... just not good enough."

"Impossible!," gasped the succubus.

Suddenly Alice was beside me, her hand going for mine. The other had the black rose in it.

"Nothing is impossible for my Victor!"

I squeezed her hand. "No, Alice, nothing is impossible for US."
***

LOVE IS AN OCEAN WITHOUT SHORES

THE DEEPEST WOUND IS LONELINESS_FRIDAY ROMANTIC CHALLENGE

My entry for Francine's and Denise's Friday Romantic Challenge :

FEARFUL HEART.


http://fridaynightwriters.blogspot.com/

FEAR.

It comes in many forms. Ask a prison warden what a prisoner fears most, and he will answer : solitary confinement.

Yet, all of us exist in the solitary confinement of our minds --

which leads me to my 400 word entry from the YA urban fantasy, DAYSTAR'S ORPHAN. At the end of BLACK ROSES IN AVALON, Blake Adamson makes a terrible mistake, whose consequence lead to LAST EXIT IN BABYLON.

But it also created a "bubble universe" where his life was rebooted and Fallen, the last fae, has just rescued the 14 year old Blake from DayStar's clutches, mangling him terribly with her long claws in the doing of it :


Fallen crabbed slowly back away from me on her knees, still shaking her head in horror.

"N-No. No! Oh, Blake, I told you I-I'd be a hard friend, but not like this!"

I shrugged, trying to hide how much it hurt, "Show me a rose that doesn't have its share of thorns."

"I'm no rose," whimpered Fallen.

"To me, you're as much a rose as the black roses whose perfume you have in your hair."

Fallen shook her head and, with self-hate in her voice, whispered, "I'm no rose."

"Not a tame one, for sure. But don't you know, Fallen? The wild roses have the sweetest smell."

Her long faerie face all eyes, she said softly, "Your lips just twitched, there, Mr. I-Don't-Lie."

I looked at her with so many warring emotions going at it inside me. Did I dare tell her the truth? I saw the lonely, self-hating hurt in those wet green eyes and knew I didn't have a choice.

"It's ... It's not just when I lie that they do that."

"Then, when else?"

Did I have the nerve to say it? "Ah, well, ... they've been known to do it when ... when -"

"When what?," murmured Fallen, edging closer, her green eyes seeming to swallow my whole world.

"When, ah, I'm ... next ... to a pretty girl."

There, I had said it, and I could feel my cheeks blushing. No. Fallen looked miserable. Man, couldn't I do anything right?

One single tear rolled down her cheek. "B-But that's just it. I'm not pretty. I'm not! I'm not even a girl. You heard DayStar. I'm a frea-"

Her next word I knew would break my heart so I didn't let her finish.

I took both of her hands in mine.

"-a wild, beautiful rose," I said soft, and without even realizing what I was doing until I had gone and done it, lightly kissing her fingers, claws and all.

I stiffened. Oh, man, what had I done? -- oh, no.

Big tears welled up in her jade eyes. She just looked at me for what seemed a frozen eternity. Why did I always screw up? Why?

Then, so fast it was a blur, she bent and kissed me softly on the cheek,looking as shocked as I felt.

My lips not wanting to work right, I knew better than to try and say anything, so I just smiled shyly back.
***
SOON THE DETAILS FOR MY MYSTERY MIRACLE CONTEST WHERE ONE LUCKY PERSON WILL WIN A KINDLE FIRE!

A BLUE MOON TO DIE FOR_Friday's Romantic Challenge

I'm prior-posting this 5 days in advance :

feverish, coughing, and chest pains. The ghost of Mark Twain keeps telling me that dying's not so bad.

"As compared to what?," I ask.

He takes a slow puff of his cigar and snorts, "Being nibbled to death by critics."

That's Samuel for you!
***
Denise and Francine have given us the prompt of BLUE MOON.

http://fridaynightwriters.blogspot.com/

So many things happen only once in a blue moon :

friendships with kindred spirits as I have found here in blogdom.

pursuing your dream with gusto.

and true love.
***
My entry is from THE LEGEND OF VICTOR STANDISH :

Victor has taken his newly found love to the infamous drug kingpin, the Snowman and his hitwoman Ice. The terms "Snow Cone" and "Ice cream" take on new meaning for Victor.

Alice and Victor hear Samuel McCord, Father Renfield, and Ada Byron rush to rescue Victor.


Alice whispered, "Victor, the McCord will kill me when he sees what I have done."

I patted her hand. "Not with me here. He and I are friends."

"The McCord has no friends when it comes to justice, Victor. You will see."

I heard Father Renfield scuffling with my friend outside the door.
"No, Sam, let me go in first. Let me see ...."

"No," snapped Captain Sam.

"Yes," said Ada, and I saw her zip in through the open doorway.

She pulled up short as she saw what remained of the Snowman and Ice. She looked at Alice. And I remembered the blood on her lips and fingers.

Ada gasped, "Oh, my stars!"

Renfield darted past her, looking at the bodies, then at Alice behind me. "Bloody Hell!"

Captain Sam rasped, "Dear God, what did that fiend do to Victor?"

And suddenly he was in front of my two friends. He seemed untouched by the Snowman's guards, his smoking Colts still held in his hands.

He looked at me, then at the bloody remains of the Snowman and Ice.

Soft and low, he spoke to me, "Victor, move away from the ghoul. Now."

I shook my head. "Her name's Alice, sir."

His words were soft thunder. "Move away from Alice, son."

"She's my ghoul friend, sir."

Alice kicked me in the right shin. "Damn, Alice! That was the one place on my whole body that didn't hurt!"

I saw Sam angle for a killing shot. "You know, Alice, blocking you from harm is hard enough without having to do it hopping about on one foot."

Ada cocked her head as she studied the two of us. She slowly smiled.

Alice hissed, "Do not EVER call me that again, Victor!"

Sam raised both Colts, and I rasped, "You'll have to shoot through me, sir!"

His pale face was hard. "I'll do what I have to, son. Please don't make me shoot through you."

"No!," screamed Alice. "Do not kill Victor. Kill me if you must, but leave my Victor alone!"

Everybody's eyebrows rose up at her word "my." Ada patted down Sam's Colts.

"Oh, do put away those behemoths, Samuel."

"What are you talking about? Look at what she'd done."

Ada shook her head. "No, look at what Victor has done."

"Have you gone loco?"

"Have you gone brain-dead, Samuel? Miss Wentworth has never strayed more than a block from her cemetery in all these years. No, Victor led her here to avenge Susan and punish vermin who needed it.

She looked tenderly at Alice. "Samuel will not hurt you dear."

"I won't? She's a ghoul, Ada."

"No, Samuel. She's Meilori."

He stiffened. "What did you say?"

"Oh, Samuel, real love comes but once in a blue moon. Think 1853. Look at them. Look at the way she looks at him. The way he was about to die for her."

Ada smiled as if it were an open wound. "She's Meilori, and he's you as you both were aboard the DEMETER in 1853."

He slowly turned to study us. He closed his eyes as if what he saw hurt him too deeply to keep on looking. He holstered his Colts.

Alice smiled at Ada. "You should have seen him do his Parkour."

Sam raised an eyebrow at me. "You know that?"

I nodded. "Learned it in Cleveland from a sensei."

Renfield barked a laugh. "He learns a French skill from a Japanese Master in Cleveland. Victor, you're a bloody riot."

Alice hugged my right arm. "He's a hero. My hero."

Sam sighed and doffed his Stetson to Alice. "Miss Wentworth, would you do me the honor of coming to Meilori's?"

Alice hushed, "Meilori's? Oh, could I? I have always wanted to go."

I patted her hand. "The first time's the worst. But don't worry. I'll be by your side."

Alice smiled soft. "Those are the only words I will ever have to hear to feel safe."

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ada's lips move silently. But I read the words : "... and loved."
***