Three Immortals Walk Into A Bar...

Levant

I always want to be with her, near her, especially inside her. I crave her true presence, her physical company, but even in our dreams she brings me the solace of her love.

And dreams have their advantages. The more we share them, the more we learn to control them. For instance, in dreams, you can come as much as you want. Tonight I want. I’ve had a very vexing day, and I want to fill her up, over and over again.

I completely lose track, but think I must have had at least a dozen orgasms, when Maria laughs. “Enough!” she says. “Let’s just talk for a while.”

I growl, and thrust a few more times. “Never enough,” I murmur against her neck, “never.” But I roll off and to the side, taking her with me. The scene has changed, I realize, we are no longer on the grassy hillside overlooking Blackness Bay. We are now inside our chamber in the basement of the castle, lying together on our comfortable bed, the blankets tidily covering us, candles lit around the room. She must have moved us. I wonder how long we’ve been here. I was too occupied to notice.

She curls up against me, and her hand traces the filigree designs tattooed on my chest. They chase her fingers, coiling around everywhere she touches.

“I haven’t really asked you about your day,” she says, and I humph. She raises her head and looks at me. “Are you asleep at the airport?”

“Ugh, no,” I say. “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”

She kisses my chest, and the tattoos react with a rolling wave of darkness, careening across my skin, gathering around her lips. She lays back down. “Show me then,” she whispers.

I chuckle darkly. “Fine. You asked for it.” She seems to stop herself from asking a question, just relaxing and waiting for the dream to shift. I focus, remembering what happened earlier, and change the scene again.

So here I am, sulking in the Atlanta airport, crouched over a pointless glass of metallic-tasting whiskey at the back of the crowded bar full of tourists. There’s apparently a storm which has caused flight delays everywhere, and what was supposed to be a nice tidy ninety minute layover has drawn out to three hours, four hours, it is starting to look like five hours. All I want to do is board the plane and fall asleep so that I can meet Maria in a dream.

Then I see her, sitting a few tables away, watching me. Ah, yes, still a dream. I’m with her, and that makes it so much better. When I recognize her, she quirks a little smile at me, and lifts only her fingers from the table in a tiny wave, and waits.

When the skinny human with his two glasses of bourbon stops right in front of her table, she leans around him so she can still see me. But when he doesn’t move, just standing there staring at me for a couple of minutes, she gets up and comes to stand near me, leaning against the wall to watch. I’m amused to see that she has adapted to the setting, and is wearing her usual traveling outfit, black jeans and a black pullover hoodie with an Edinburgh logo. I wonder if she has added black lingerie underneath, whether she would have been so detailed. I resist getting up to check for myself, because I have to let the scene play out for her.

I hadn’t realized that Gregor was watching me for so long before he came over.

When he sits himself down at my table, I see out of the corner of my eye that Maria’s eyebrows lift. “Bold,” she says softly, but of course Gregor doesn’t hear it.

He gives me a glass, then says my name, and while I am growling and scowling Maria is watching him carefully, not sure where this is going. He introduces himself, which amuses her. “Is he trying to get himself killed?” she asks, starting to walk around him to get a better look. “Or is he coming on to you?”

I know what happens next, and I growl, this time at her, and she laughs at me.

I ask him how he knows my name, and he tells me that he thinks I’m interesting, and that he wants to get to know me.

“Oh yeah,” Maria snickers, “he’s totally coming on to you.”

Well, at least I know I’m not the only one who thought so.

She is surprised when he mentions her name, though, just as I was. I explode out of my chair and lean over him, ready to punch him right in the face, but he touches me. All of my shadows evaporate, and I lose all strength, and plunk back down into my chair.

I steal a glance to see her reaction. Her eyes are wide. “Oh!” she says. “What the fuck?”

I know, right?

Gregor apologizes and while I pull myself back together, gathering the shadows from every corner of the bar, he ridiculously suggests that we share secrets with each other. Maria gets very close to Gregor, inspecting him carefully, trying to figure out what is happening. He is oblivious, of course. He is only a phantom memory playing itself out in my dreams for her.

As he continues speaking, first claiming that he is a healer, and then that he has a guardian angel talking to him, she stands back, arms crossed, one hand held to her chin, clearly trying to puzzle it out. It’s preposterous, but she seems to be taking it more seriously than I did. When he mentions Tepes, she starts nodding her head, as though she is giving some credence to his story.

Then, he tells me that another vampire named Clyde is coming, and of course I jump up, thinking that this has all been a trap. Maria mouths, “Clyde?” at me. I know she’s never heard of him either.

She watches as my shadows start being dragged away from me again, and I know that she recognizes this for what it is. Not whatever trick Gregor played, but another vampire, older, more powerful, seizing control over the darkness. Her eyes are wide, but I don’t interrupt the dream sequence to reassure her. She knows I’m fine, and that somehow this turned out all right. I’ll continue to let her watch it unfold.

Clyde arrives, and Gregor invites him to sit down, and Maria scoffs. She looks at me sympathetically as I stand prepared for combat, while these two sit there staring at me as though I am breaching some rule of etiquette. “I agree with you,” she murmurs to me, again moving very close, this time looking straight into Clyde’s blue eyes as he gazes past her unseeingly. I think that she saw that flash of red there as well. “This all seems very suspicious.”

Glad my woman is backing me up here. I wasn’t wrong to be so leery of the situation. I sit down, though, to try to figure out what is happening, and as their ludicrously polite introductions play out she rolls her eyes and asks me, “Really?”

Then Gregor says the flights are all being canceled, before the announcement is made over the loudspeakers, and Maria’s forehead wrinkles as she tries to figure out how he knew, and I can tell she is considering his guardian angel story.

Gregor says that he plans to get a hotel room, and makes the mistake of asking if I’d like to come along so that I can dream of Maria. Maria starts to smile ironically, to hear herself referred to again in this memory, but then as everything goes to shit she takes a step back.

I throw my glass at him, Clyde pushes him out of the way, and while the other vampire is distracted I lunge at him, thinking now is my chance to escape from the trap they have set. After only a few punches, Gregor manages to grab hold of both of us, and we are instantly incapacitated, lying helpless on the floor under his hands.

Maria is standing over the scene, gaping at us. “What the fuck just happened?” she blurts out, while I lay on the floor beginning to disintegrate, my darkness gone, starting to collapse into dust just like I did the time that I was staked. She wants to intervene like she did then, but of course she can’t, this is just a memory, so she stands watching, her hands held to her mouth, her eyes wide, seeing me begin to die.

Until Gregor lets go of me, and my shadows start slithering back over towards me, filling my heart of darkness and bolstering my strength. She watches as I stand back up, relieved to see me in one piece, while Gregor dispenses with the security guards.

She is already staring in astonishment when Clyde vanishes. See? I told her that she wouldn’t believe me!

By the time we are outside at the shuttle stop, I can tell that she is dying to talk to me about everything, probably thinking that this demonstration must be almost over. But then, of course, the fucking werewolf shows up driving Clyde’s limo.

At this point, as she watches me stomp around the car ready to pound him, and then sees Clyde literally appear out of thin air to stop me, she loses it. She starts shrieking with laughter, tears rolling down her cheeks as I growl and snarl and stomp over to get into the front seat of the car, and she seems to have no sympathy at all for me any more. She is just too amused by the way that everything piled on top of everything else.

Well, I can grant her that the situation was utterly ridiculous. But come on, give me a break! All I wanted the whole damn day was to be dreaming with her, and now that I am, she is laughing at me! She waves her hand in the air, trying to get control over herself, and says, “I’m not laughing at you, Levant, just at this whole fucking scene!”

Well, okay then.

She climbs into the limo in the back with Gregor, and is again staring at him, trying to figure him out. She tentatively raises a finger and pokes him in the face, to which he of course doesn’t react at all, and nothing happens to her, here in the dream.

I don’t make her endure the entire stupid conversation they have on the way to the hotel, reminiscing about the American South as though they are old school chums heading to their class reunion. I shift the scene to the front of the Adabelle, and it makes her laugh again when she sees the second werewolf.

I’m glad this demonstration is almost over, I have a bone to pick with her. Laugh at me, will she?

When we get downstairs, and I am finally able to get away from the weirdos and seal myself into the vault, she stands next to the closed and barred door, while I lie in the bed, feeling the drowsiness that comes with being fully aware during a lucid dream.

“Come here,” I tell her, and she has immediately joined me here in the bed, naked as I prefer her to be while sleeping, and she is here together with me in the vault, in our dreams, and it is exactly what I wanted all day. To be with her.

“Laughing?” I say.

“Oh, come on, Levant,” she says, snuggling next to me, “it was objectively funny.”

I growl, and tug some of our shadows back away from her, and start curling them in ribbons around her wrists, pulling her hands over her head, watching her breasts lifting with the motion.

“Hold on,” she says, “that’s it? What is Gregor? What’s going on with Clyde? What are you going to tell Tepes?”

I wrap a ribbon of darkness very gently over her mouth to silence her. “I don’t care.”

“Mmmmph,” she says from under my shadow, and even that sounds amused.

“Later,” I say, and finish binding her to the four posts of the bed with my ribbons of darkness, and start kissing my way down her body, very, very slowly, until I am lapping at the honeysuckle between her legs, and she is writhing and moaning and gasping.