Bitter Fruits (10 page)

Agony grips me and refuses to let go. His guilt runs deeper than the act in the bathroom. “I know,” I say, although it’s only a phrase of consolation. I don’t know any such thing.

“The first time, it was an accident. I just wanted to scare him. It was always a joke for him. He was my parents’ favorite, and it ruined me. He would never listen to me and when I complained, everyone took his side. I didn’t mean to hurt him; I just wanted to teach him a lesson.”

“So you hit him with a rock?”

He looks up. “It wasn’t supposed to kill him.”

“Rocks do that. They’re heavy.”

“Can I continue?”

“Sorry,” I say, and I am.

“After the accident, I fled, but they found me. At which point, it became a barrage of whys. I didn’t have an answer and I was angry.”

“So you were cast out?”

“I was told that I would be hated for eternity, that I would give rise to a race of creatures so evil that I would regret my own birth. So when he rose several days later and came to find me...”

“Didn’t that surprise you?”

“Of course, but I was relieved to see him, alive. I thought maybe-”

“Go on,” I tell him.

“He told me that she would make us both immortal. That she would wipe my sin from me.”

“Lilith,” I say.

He nods. “She didn’t, though. She didn’t even tell me that I was already immortal; had I not drank from her, there would be no cycle. She tricked me, so that I would be punished by always hunting and killing my brother, a reminder of the price of passion. And in a twist of irony-”

“Passion is all that sustains you,” I finish.

“Yes.”

“The Mark, though? I thought it was punishment for the murder.”

“Banishment was punishment for the murder. The Mark prevents me from being able to get close to anyone and it is a constant reminder of what I’ve done.”

“But Lilith couldn’t-”

“She didn’t,” he says. “It was Him. He also ensured that I could go out in daylight, but denied my brother the same freedom.”

“It seems like Alec got the short end of the stick.”

“His punishment was simple. The cycle. Mine is that I have to watch him suffer, knowing his death will come for him, watching the entire world live while I cannot. All I can do is plot to kill.”

“And again, if you
don’t
? If you refuse to kill him? Another plague?”

He sighs. “It isn’t an option. We would bring down the wrath of Heaven on Earth. When we accepted immortality, we accepted obedience to the cycle.”

“That’s stupid.”

Surprisingly, Caleb smiles. “Maybe, but I suppose in some ways, it’s not. I have to kill my brother, but at least I have had all this time to know him. Time I would never have had. I just wish that-”

“What?”

“There is a lot of time,” he says. “I don’t think you can appreciate just how much time. My brother does not want to get to know me.”

“I mean, you killed him. I guess he’s still a little upset.”

“There’s more, though. We began to change; after we went so long trying to find another way, only to realize it was impossible, we started to accept it. Again, there was so much time…”

“Something happened in Oxford,” I say.

“All these years, all these centuries, I have been the wanderer. I must kill him
time and time again. Somehow, though, we had found a way to try to make it tolerable. When he fell in love, though, it became too great a price to pay. He didn’t want to die. He feared his rebirth would take too long and she would forget him. When we could not find Lilith, I didn’t know how else to save him, except through her. If I could convince her… I never expected to fall in love as well,” he says.

“The same woman.
It’s happened before,” I realize aloud.

“Yes. Her name was Teresa.”

“What happened?”

“I adored her, but he had seen her first. She made me think she felt something for me, though. She made love to me as if she loved me as well, but it was meaningless. When the time came, she chose him.”

“So you killed them both?”

He shakes his head. “No. I relished killing him that time. It was the only time I took pleasure in it, but I couldn’t hurt her. I never told him. I allowed him to think that she had died. I erased all sign of her, all that he had left. She met someone else eventually, fell in love, and had a normal life. Neither of us ever spoke to her again.”

“So you don’t have to kill everyone? Alec said-”

“I don’t know. It had never really been a question. We’d never been in love and certainly not with the same woman. However, I fear it’s what the revenants are after. I think I changed something, but I don’t know what. Something in the cycle is broken; I may have discovered a
loophole. And now-”

“Now they will ensure that you don’t use that loophole,” I say, understanding. Someone wanted Alec to fall in love with me, because it would distract them both. It may also break what
is left between them; Caleb must have done significant damage after Teresa. If he kills me, the bond will be severed and Lilith will be safe. I just can’t figure out if she is the force behind it all.

“I can’t kill you, Nora,” he says. “I’ve become weak. Teresa opened something in me and I can’t turn it off. I tried. I thought I would stop you if you got in my way, if you prevented us from our goal. Now, I know I will let the world burn if it means saving you.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you. It isn’t weakness,” I tell him. “It’s love. Compassion.”

“I love you. I swore I would not allow myself to feel a thing, but I love you, Nora.”

I put my finger against his lips and kiss him softly. His blue eyes fill with tears as I undress him and then remove my own clothes. He doesn’t move to touch me, and I understand why. This must be entirely my choice. I reach over to him and place his hand on my thigh.

“I’m not Teresa,” I say. “This isn’t meaningless to me. Make love to me, Caleb.”

He cries out, but it does not stop us from falling to the ground with him between my legs. He moves closer to me and his hands brush my thighs; I can feel the hardness of him pushing against me. I reach down and open myself up, slipping myself over the head of him. His body tenses, but it’s only out of remorse; at the edge of me, he is willing.

“Caleb, please.”

He buries his head in my shoulder and slides himself all the way into me. If there is fate or destiny, this is it. Despite the purity of the ecstasy, being with Caleb is different than it was with Alec; there is as much regret as there is pleasure in the feeling. Clinging to him, all reason and all shame cannot deny that something about us just works. My body is suited to his; the way his hands move and the way he fills me are too real to be wrong. He lifts me closer to him and I am sure that my eyes reflect back his pain. As much as we both want this, the price is steep; yet as he slides in and out of me, it is a cost we both pay freely.

“It hurts to be with you,” he says. “But you are everything.”

I kiss him, a strange kiss for it’s soft and innocent, unmatched by his determined thrusting. Our bodies are not under our control and we fuck like the world is ending. However, when our lips meet, the kiss is pure; it is the kiss of lovers. His hands cup my face and I wrap my arms around his neck, reaching up to caress the back of his head. Our tongues touch and I want to stop myself from falling for him, but Alec’s face can’t break the spell. It may be impossible, but I am theirs equally.

“I love you,” I tell him between kisses. He responds by pushing himself into me as if he can bury his guilt. We hold each other and try to forget the future that we have just made happen. My pussy is tight and I clutch him from the inside, my orgasm destroying any chance we had of saving ourselves. When I shudder, the remaining thrills of him fading, he moves out of me and carries me to the bathroom. I don’t know what he intends
to do until he turns on the water and hot steam fills the room. Still hard, he readies the shower and I stroke him slowly and gently. In return, he grabs me and throws me against the wet marble wall once the temperature is to his liking. Caleb lifts one of my legs and enters me again with force.

“This is so wrong,” he cries, but it doesn’t stop him. He holds my hands against the wall with his free arm and ravishes me. The pulsating reaches through me and I move to help him lift me up. Now, with my legs wrapped around his waist and his hands under my ass, I get to work on him. The hot water pours over our bodies and I ride up and down, his cock the only sensation left for me. He knows how to make me come and it happens
again and again before I can’t do much else. In the final throes of my last orgasm, I reach out without thinking. My hands slide from his neck to his back and I brush the Mark as he shoves himself inside of me. Scorching pain shoots up my arms, but it fades as fast as it starts; his eyes register shock when nothing else happens. He leans down and kisses me, and together, under the warm shower, we cross the final threshold and the ecstasy is complete.

When we have both come, I let my legs fall to the floor and we pull apart reluctantly. The shower is still streaming overhead. We look at each other, naked and ashamed, but yet somehow placated. This had to happen and it is easier accepting some things. He starts to back away but I go to him, wanting the moment to last a little longer. My lips find his and again I touch his Mark, this time lightly tracing the scar tissue. I am surprised still when there is no cataclysm and I push him out into the bathroom, wondering if it’s the water alone saving me. It is a risky move, but I’m right; I can touch Caleb with no punishment. This only proves that we
are meant to be together somehow; I just need to find out how that is possible.

“Why can you touch me?” He asks, as bewildered as I am.

“I don’t know. But I think it means that everything between us is okay. It isn’t wrong, not if I can touch you without repercussion.”

“My brother,” he says and I see the agonizing reminder start to grow in his mind.

“We’ll address that when the time comes. I won’t lie to you, Caleb. I love you. I also love Alec, and when he returns, I won’t deny my love for you, either. We’ll just have to see what that means.”

“We are ruined,” he says.

“No,” I say and caress his back. Each time my fingers brush against the Mark, he responds with sounds of satisfaction. I imagine it’s the first time he’s felt this kind of love. “We are whole. The explanation will come, but I know it now.”

“I love you,” he says. He didn’t need to tell me, though. I already knew. He kisses me and I want him again, but we have work to do. We need to talk to Chloe and then find Lilith. It’s time to find a way to break
these two men I love from a curse that I can’t fight.

11.

No one has seen Chloe in days, which is the last thing I want to hear when we go looking.

“Yeah, we haven’t really been keeping track lately,” her roommate, Elizabeth, says. “She’s gotten kind of weird.” As if to accent her point, which I suppose is that she’s a moron, she pops her gum loudly in my face. I clench my fists.

“So you don’t care that she took off and hasn’t been back?” I know Elizabeth and company don’t understand what’s at stake, but Chloe has some pretty shitty friends. Sure, this is college, but we aren’t far from exams and, also, Chloe’s been out of her mind. You’d think someone would’ve thought to keep an eye on her.

“I don’t know. She isn’t much fun like this.”

“She isn’t
fun
?” I yell. “Your roommate - and supposedly friend - could be dead somewhere. She could have been kidnapped and trapped in someone’s basement. An insane drifter could be planning to wear her skin as a suit right now.” I’m aware that my arguments are not sane. I’m also aware that Elizabeth has already lost interest in this conversation. However, fury and human decency gather in my arms and fists. Elizabeth is lucky therefore that Caleb pushes me into the hall. I really want to punch her. He thanks her quickly and leads me to the emergency stairwell.

“Breathe,” he warns me.

“What a bitch,” I say. Scarlet and I have had arguments, but neither of us would just shrug and blow it off if the other was missing. I wouldn’t blow it off if
anyone
I knew were missing! I take a deep breath and let Caleb relax me. As fun as it would’ve been, fighting Elizabeth would not only have been unproductive, but it also could’ve gotten me in trouble. Being here in this empty and antiseptic stairwell is ideal at the moment. With nothing to go on, however, we’ve a hit a wall and it frustrates me. I like answers and I like feeling useful.

“What next?” I ask, needing a plan, anything to keep my mind from itself.

“I don’t know,” Caleb admits and sits on the top step.

I want to peel my skin off I am so anxious. I sit beside Caleb and think, trying to piece it all together.

“Here’s what I don’t get,” I say. “You and Alec have been around, together, for eternity or whatever. Don’t you ever compare notes? Figure out where there are loopholes? If you found one-”

“I found one by taking the one thing that mattered to him. He didn’t care to discuss possible flaws in the structure of our curse after he thought I killed his girlfriend.” He runs his hands over his thighs and knees, his own anxiety augmenting mine.

“He believes you’re cursed to destroy everything that he associates with. He thinks you killed Teresa, that you had to kill her, but you didn’t. It is probably worth a mention, since it could change everything.”

“I didn’t kill her, but she died eventually. What he doesn’t see is that I did him a favor.”

“How so?”

“He came back from the grave to find traces of her, hints that she’d died, killed herself, in fact. He never had to watch her die for real, let each day seem endless - even for one like us.”

“How did she die really?”

“Cancer,” he says and the heartbreak is still with him. It tears at me to see that he can still feel so much for a girl who has been out of his life for so long. I think about being immortal; it seems like, over time, you would lose your ability to miss the people you loved.
Sooner or later, you’d become numb. Yet both Alec and Caleb have shown that the pain just stays with you, on a degree no human being can ever appreciate.

“Sorry,” I say. “But he never saw her again after he came back? She didn’t go to
him? You said she loved him. Why wouldn’t she-”

“I had to wipe her memory.”

“Cool. You can do that?”

Caleb laughs at my distraction. “Yes, but not really the point?”

“No,” I smile. “What do you mean you had to, anyway? What would’ve happened if you’d let her see Alec when he came back?”

“I don’t know, but it’s how these things work.” He
’s closed off, though. There’s something else.

“You were jealous,” I say.

He doesn’t say anything. The skin along his fingers and knuckles is drawn and white. Alec doesn’t know; he thinks Caleb
had
to kill Teresa. He’s spent fifty years believing she died, but the whole time, it was just selfishness.

“You let him think she was dead - because you couldn’t bear to see him happy.”

“It was more than that. I didn’t know how long it would be, what the trial would be like, the toll it would take. Also-”

“You need to tell me,” I say.

“The week before - they had a fight. He was growing moody, knowing what was to come, worrying about returning, what she would find. He knew that I was close. I’d been watching them. She left him, headed to a pub in town, and drank herself silly.”

“And went home with you?”

“I’m the monster. I never had much joy. I can make women come home with me, allow me to feed on them, trick them into wanting me. What I can’t do is make them love me. She talked to me that night, at the pub; she told me her story. When I brought her home…”

“Caleb, she was a drunk girl looking for a way to hurt her boyfriend. It meant nothing to her.”

“I know,” he says and his hands tighten against his thighs.

“What happened?”

“I had the worst intentions when I met her at the pub. I wanted to show him that she wasn’t worth losing everything for. However, when she looked at me that night, the way no one ever had… I thought maybe there was a chance I could be something else. Something other than what I am.”

I link my hand through his. “Just because she didn’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t true. What about
your Mark?” I don’t know why it’s where my mind goes, but I want to see if it’s different this time.

“I told her it was an injury, not to touch me. She wasn’t interested in me, but at the time-”

“Right. So what happened?”

“In the morning, she discovered some of his things. She had no idea that we were… that I was-”

“Her anonymous one night stand became something terrible, something unforgivable. She went looking for a way to hurt him, only to do the one thing that would destroy him,” I say.

He shakes his head. “It didn’t bother him. He said they could work through it; he loved her that much.
But when I came for him… She saw it in the newspaper first. There was no way to explain.”

I understand so much more now. The problem with Alec and Caleb is that they think they
are doing what’s right by keeping secrets, but it was their secrets that ruined everything fifty years earlier. Now Alec believes that Caleb killed Teresa out of jealousy, when, instead, he did what he felt was right.

“But how did he come to think she killed herself?”

“She came to see me. In the prison. She had left a note for Alec, was threatening to kill herself. She told me that she knew what we were, that someone had come to her-”

“Lilith.”

He nods. “It was too dangerous. She was talking of dying, of letting Lilith change her. There was no other way. I wiped her memory and sent her to start again. I wanted him to think that I had some decency left, that I wasn’t the one…”

“But it backfired. Because he thought you drove her to
it, that
he
drove her to do it because of what he was.”

“Yes.”

“So why keep it from me now? Why not tell me everything? If Teresa had known before…”

“Nora, we’re immortal not imperfect. We don’t have the answers to the heart any more than you do.
Now that you do know, however, would you make the same choice?”

“If I could turn, be with you forever?” I ask.

“Yes.”

I nod.
“I would.”

“And that is why you are a risk. If you turn, we cannot break the curse, but unless we break the curse, we can never truly know love.”

We sit silent for a moment, contemplating the conundrum. I shake the heaviness off me and bring the conversation back to Teresa, to what triggered what’s happening between them now. “So he never saw her before she died? When she died for real?” I feel the agony Alec must have felt. I imagine what it would be like if he was suddenly taken from me and then I discovered several decades from now that he’d been here all this time. Only to learn that he was now actually gone. It would be like losing him all over again, a suffering too great to bear.

“No. Like I said, neither of us ever talked to her again.”

“So, how do you know what happened to her?”

“I followed her.”

“For how long?”

“Thirty something years,” he admits.

“Wow.” I can’t imagine losing either Caleb or Alec, but the idea of keeping tabs on them for thirty years, of watching them go on to have lives without me - it’s a thousand times worse. I wonder if Alec or Caleb really ended up suffering more. For Alec, he had to live with the guilt that he caused Teresa’s death, but for Caleb, he had to watch her live, love, and then die. “That must have been tough.”

“You have no idea.”

“No,” I say. “I really don’t. But what of Alec all that time? How did he not know?”

“It’s been a long time. We aren’t inseparable.
And that time, well, he wiped the slate clean. He told me that we would break the cycle this time because he would never be my brother again. Except in name. So, only for the last year or so, as the cycle comes to a close, we end up linked, brought together; otherwise, we avoid one another as much as possible.”

“
You’re brought together so that you can do what must be done?” I ask.

He nods and takes my hand. “I hate it. I just want it to end. I would die to have it end.”

“But that isn’t an option,” I reply.

“Do you say that because it isn’t - or because you don’t want it to be?”

“Both,” I answer. I kiss him, wanting him to understand that what I told him is true. Even if sacrificing himself for Alec were a choice, I wouldn’t let it happen. There has to be another way, a way to keep them both from harm.

“What brought you here?” I ask. I can still taste him on my lips.

“Lilith. We think she’s been here,” he says.

“Here?
As in on campus?”

“Your professor-”

“Henry,” I correct.

“Henry. He’s been looking into stories of Lilith. There is one legend in particular, one that has a great deal of truth in it.”

“What legend?”

“You see, as I told you,” he begins. “I didn’t need to be turned. I was already immortal. When I
was cast out, it was with the threat that I would create a race of monsters so evil that the world would remember me as the father of all that it hated. So when my brother came to me-”

“After he turned,” I add.

“After he turned,” he continues, “I just wanted to fix it, to make it right. He told me he had met a woman, a beautiful woman who had shown him that love was powerful and would save us both. She was everything he said she was. Her eyes and lips something your painters could never capture, her body-”

“I get it. So this ridiculously hot chick offered you what?”

“A chance to cleanse myself. She said that I was punished because it was my fate. However, fate can be changed, destiny adjusted. In exchange, I needed to swear allegiance to her. She told me that it was my father’s fault, that I was born cursed because of him.”

“So you were a tool for her, a way to exact revenge on the man who wronged her,” I say.

“Hell hath no fury,” he smiles.

“All right, listen. I am absolutely positive it was at least partially his fault.”

Caleb laughs. “Probably. Anyway, I agreed because I was foolish and racked with guilt.”

“Abel’s death,” I say.

“Right. So, I agreed and she made love to me for days. It was-”

“There are some details you guys can totally feel free to leave out, you know.”

He smiles. “Nora, Lilith is a monster who seduces and destroys men. You don’t need to be jealous.”

“Still,” I argue.

“Besides,” he says and his hands move to the button on my pants. “If you want me to prove that you are far more of a woman than she ever was, I would be happy to oblige you.”

I should say no. I should be focusing on the evil we are facing and not the burning between my legs. I should not be jealous of ancient history and should not need Caleb to prove that I’m more to him than an evil demon. I certainly should not be willing to spread my legs for him here in the dirty dorm emergency stairwell. However,
should
is a tricky concept and his fingers are far more convincing than all of the shoulds. He tosses my pants aside, letting them land in the corner of the landing, and then my panties follow. I don’t even take off my shirt as his head moves between my legs and his tongue slips inside of me.

“Caleb,” I moan.

The landing is cold and hard, but I can’t speak while Caleb’s tongue works over my clit. I need him, all of him, regardless of place. I clutch at his head, my fingers buried in his dark hair, and he brings me to climax within minutes. His tongue slips in and out of me, tempting and teasing. My hips rise from the floor and I push my thighs against his face as he continues to draw the orgasm out of me. The sounds of my pleasure echo through the stairwell, but there is no way I can stay quiet. I fall back to the floor as the last shock registers. As he moves away, his fangs brush my cunt and I love the sharp tease. This might be dangerous, but it is certainly fun.