Immortal Muse

Copyright © 2014 by Stephen Leigh.

All Rights Reserved.

Jacket art by Tim O'Brien.

Jacket design by G-Force Design.

DAW Book Collectors No. 1646.

DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA).

All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

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ISBN 978-0-698-14006-6 (eBook)

T
here's no doubt about this one . . .

To my own Muse and live-in Daemon, Denise

This book is entirely a work of fiction, although it depicts several genuine historical characters. Let me repeat: this book is
fiction
. Not fact. Please understand (and forgive) that the details of actual people's lives have been taken and seriously bent and twisted: I have conveniently ignored facts that interfered with the story, and I have created incidents and interactions from whole cloth. In
no way
should the reader believe that the historical personages displayed here actually did or said what I have them doing and saying. These characters live only in an alternate reality of my imagination (and yours, while you're reading the book). For the
genuine
lives of these people, please go to actual historical documents and scholarly research—there, you might find something approaching the truth.

You won't necessarily find it here.

Thanks to Dr. David Perry, for helping me avoid egregious historical mistakes in Venice and Rome!

Thanks to my first readers, whose comments helped shape the book (and made it a very different book from the version that they read . . .): Loni Marie Addis, Anne Evans, Anne Gray, Kelly Moffett, Denise Parsley Leigh, Devon Leigh, Megen Leigh, P. Andrew Miller, Bruce Schneier, Justin Scott, Don Wenzel, Kathleen Wilson, and Hania Wojtowicz (and special thanks to Hania for the French lesson, and from France, no less!)

And most especially, I want to express my gratitude to my editorial muse, Sheila Gilbert, for her continued faith in my writing, and for making sure that each book has been the absolute best I could write at the time.

T
HE
B
ENT
C
ALLIOPE
REEKED of spilled beer and desperate egos. The aromatic combination spilled out of the open door, past the bouncer, and onto Rivington Street, wrapping insistent arms around Camille and shepherding her toward the tavern.

“Hey, Ink!” she called to the bouncer, sitting with one ample ass cheek on a rickety barstool to the side of the entrance as he texted on his phone. “Warm enough for you?”

Ink's pear-shaped body leaned back against pallid bricks. The yellow tubes of the
Bent Calliope
's neon sign glowed above him, lending the man the sickly pallor of the living dead. The hue didn't manage to make his thinning hair, too-wide features, or the poorly-drawn tattoos crawling his arms and emerging from the frayed collar of his plain white tee appear any more attractive. “Too warm,” he answered, glancing up from the phone. “Better out here than in there, though.” There was no ambition burning inside Ink at all; he had been sitting on the same stool the first night Camille wandered into the
Bent Calliope
a year ago; she suspected he would
still
be there, growing steadily older, heavier, and more sedentary, long after she left.

“I hope the beer's cold, at least.”

“When you find out, let me know.” He nodded his head toward the door. The white noise of a dozen simultaneous conversations drifted through the rumble of two-decade-old, stale music. “Half your crowd's in there already.” There was a subtle, possessive emphasis on the “your.”

“Thanks, Ink.”

Camille entered the
Bent Calliope
largely unnoticed as she passed through the crowd, one of the advantages of being significantly shorter than most people. Her group
was
there, as Ink had said: in the rear corner farthest from the jukebox speakers, where one could nearly carry on a conversation without shouting. Through the shifting forest of bodies, Camille glimpsed Morris' shaved head gleaming in the fluorescent lights, his dark skin beaded with sweat. Despite an early May heat wave, the
Bent Calliope
's proprietors had yet to turn on the air-conditioning. Morris seemed to be gesturing to someone to his left—probably Mercedes, who was also one of the regulars.

Camille could feel their pull, an almost physical tug in her head as if emerald ropes were snaking out from them to her, lashing around her and pulling her toward them, and yet . . .

There was someone else here. Someone whose pull was noticeably stronger.

Close to the polished, glass-ringed bar, Camille stopped. A man sat on one of the stools, his left hand cradling a pint glass. He was the source. He stared at her; when she glanced at him, the sense of instant connection made her inhale. A green aura hung around him, so bright that she wondered that none of the customers could see it. As their gazes met, he looked away quickly, guiltily. Camille continued to study him as he pretended to be looking at his foam-smeared glass. She could see the glimmer of a gold ring on his left hand, and her mouth tightened.
Well, there's a problem . . .
Camille sidled up to the bar near him, taking a stool that had just been vacated. “Hey, Tom,” she called out to one of the bartenders. “A pint, please.” She set a five down on the bar top.

As Tom placed the glass under the Guinness tap, Camille noticed that the man was watching her again, this time via the mirror behind the bar. She could see her reflection also: a woman most people would guess to be in her early-to-mid-twenties; wavy, auburn hair settling just below her shoulders; large green eyes; petite enough that she sometimes still found herself being carded. Again, when he realized she had noticed his attention, he turned back to his glass once more. The feeling of connection remained, the sense of needing to know who he was, what he was. Inviting tendrils the color of spring grass slid from him toward her and she wanted to touch them and taste them, but she did not. She watched and she wondered: he was a painter, she had almost decided when Tom set the Guinness in front of her, curtains of light-brown foam still falling from the head into the darkness of the stout. She let the drink settle. She felt the stranger's intention in the moment before he moved, frowning a bit as he slid from his barstool, circling behind the two other patrons between them. She could feel him at her back, a pressure all along her spine. He enveloped her in his unseen radiance, and it was nearly too much to bear.

She waited, taking a slow sip of the Guinness and licking the foam from her lips. When he still didn't say anything, she turned slowly on the stool. His hair was a sandy brown and longish, scraggly enough that it looked like it had been months since it had last been cut. Strands frothed around the collar of a blue sweater over an oxford shirt; the sweater was rumpled, as if he just pulled it out of an overstuffed drawer and put it on. He had the build of a runner. His height was perhaps six feet or an inch or so taller. She held his gaze for a moment: his eyes were that shade that might be a light blue, a pale green, or even a dappled gray depending on the light, and she liked the faint crinkles at their corners, which told her that he smiled a lot.

She glanced significantly at his left hand. “You're supposed to take that off first,” she told him. “Though the white line would still be a dead giveaway. Women know to look for it.”

She was pleased to see him flush, and more pleased to see that he made no attempt to cover the ring with his other hand or put it behind his back—though he did glance at her own unadorned left hand. Instead, he held up his hand as if seeing the ring for the first time himself.
No, not a painter, or there'd be pigment under those fingernails . . . Maybe a writer?
“That's not why—” he began, then shook his head. She found she liked his voice, too: a warm, easy baritone.

Why are they always already married? It just makes things complicated.
There was no answer to that. There never was.

He gave a long exhalation that sounded more like a sigh. “Look, umm, jeez . . . I don't really know how to say this. It's just . . .”

Camille found that she was smiling in spite of her reservations; his smile in return deepened the lines around his eyes: a genuine smile, an inviting one. “It's just . . . ?” she prompted.

Another exhalation. “I'm a photographer—a professional. That's how I make my living. I was wondering . . . Have you ever modeled before?”

“If that's a pickup line, Mr. Married Photographer, I have to tell you that it's really beyond lame.”

He was shaking his head before she finished. “No, no,” he said hurriedly. “It's . . . well, you have an interesting face—and an interesting accent, too, I have to say. What is that? French?”

“French by way of Italy and other places a long time ago—though I'll give you credit; most people don't notice it anymore. And, yes, I've sat as an artist's model if that's your question,” she answered flatly. “And I don't do porn,” she added. “Hard or soft core.”

Another headshake. His eyes widened. “Umm . . . Good. I don't either.”

“So there are no nudes in your portfolio?”

The color was still in his cheeks. “Well, yes. A few. The human body's beautiful—which is, I know,” he said hurriedly, “what every erotic photographer says. But I don't do anything prurient. At least, not to my mind.”

“And I'll bet all those nudes are female?” He didn't need to answer; she saw the answer in his face. “Uh-huh.” Camille took another sip of the Guinness.
You should get up and walk away. Go back to the ones you've already chosen. You don't need this one, even if his green heart is so interesting. Are you truly ready for what that would mean? Are you willing to take the chance of fouling up what you're here to do?
The tendrils of his soul-heart slid around her, enticing. She felt, also, the dangerous blue strands within it. But knowing what she
should
do didn't seem to matter. She didn't move to leave, stroking the rim of her glass. “So you do
art
, not wedding shots and not porn.” She already knew the answer; she would never have stayed otherwise, would never have talked to him. She would never have noticed him if it were any other way. The connection would not have been there.

“Pretty much. Along with some commercial stuff now and then to pay the bills.”

“New York's full of people who call themselves photographers,” she said. “The city's positively
stuffed
with them.”

“I'm different.”

“Of course you are.”

He reached into the pocket of his jeans, pulling out a small flash drive, handing it to her. A name—David Treadway—was screened onto the black plastic in bright yellow letters, along with an address, e-mail, and cell phone number. “My business card and portfolio,” he told her. “Why don't you take a look at the sample shots on the drive? If you like them, and if you're interested, give me a call.”

She held up the drive. “I know your name now, David. Aren't you supposed to ask for mine?”

“Give it to me when you call.”

“When? Not if?”

“I'm figuring you'll like the shots,” he said. His smile appeared again, a flash of teeth and a crinkling of his eyes. The color of his aura deepened, and with it the feeling of connection, of needing to know this person, became more urgent inside her. Strange colors rode in the emerald, colors she'd seen only a few times before, and that scared her more than the fullness of the energy. “Look, I have to be going,” David said. “I really hope you like what you see.” He nodded toward the flash drive. “Give me a call. Or e-mail me. I'm serious; I'd be interested in working with you. I can't pay you much, but there'd be something in it for you.”

He hesitated, shifting his weight from one leg to the other. She put the flash drive in the pocket of her jeans. “I'll look at it,” she told him. “From there, we'll see. Is that good enough?”

“Sure. I'm fine with that.” He was staring at her, as if he were trying to memorize the lines of her face.

“You have to go,” she reminded him.

“Yeah, right.” He favored her with another smile. Yes, the lines at the corners of his eyes folded nicely. “Talk to you soon, I hope.”

This time he did turn, sliding between the people behind him and heading toward the door. She watched David as he opened the door of the
Bent Calliope
and nodded to Ink; she
felt
him leaving as well—the creative energy, the potential bottled inside him, the connection, his soul-heart—until the door closed again. She touched the pocket of her jeans, feeling the lump of the thumb drive under the cloth, touching it the way she often touched the pendant around her neck, stroking it as if for reassurance. “Damn it,” she whispered aloud. “I don't need this. Not again. Not now.”

Now that he'd left, she could again sense the others in the back of the room; they'd been lost in his larger wave. She took her glass from the bar, leaving the change Tom had put on the bar top, and threaded her way through the crowd. She slowed as she approached the group, though. Their energy illuminated the air, like a sun shining through forest leaves, light just beyond the range of the visible, and she could bathe in it and take it in. It would nourish her. Yet . . .

Morris would be talking about his latest project—something properly avant-garde and inaccessible, like the video of his ice sculpture melting in real time that had garnered him some interest in
The
Times
last year. Rashawn's forearms would be spattered with paint from her current work. Kevin's hands would be restlessly drumming on his thighs as he sat, as if part of his mind were still attached to the drum kit back in his apartment. Mercedes would be sitting silent and listening, watching, and imagining each of them as a character in her novel. And Joe . . . And James . . .

Artists all. Creators all. And when Camille arrived, they would all turn to her—smiling or dour or somber—and they would all want to talk to her, to pull at her mind, to ask her opinion, to tell her what they were doing . . .

To take what she had to give them.

“Her crowd,” as Ink called them. Her entourage. Her lovers, many of them. The ones who fed on her, and she on them in return.

Camille's forefinger traced the outline of the thumb drive through her jeans. “Fuck,” she said.

She turned, set her half-full pint on the nearest table, and left the bar.

 * * * 

S
he took the thumb drive out of her pocket and inserted it into the side of her laptop. A few seconds later, the icon showed on her desktop: “David Treadway—portfolio” underneath it. She double-clicked on the icon, then on the first file in the window that opened.

An urban landscape wrapped in snow filled her screen: the side of a tumbledown tenement building dark against a pristine white blanket. She found herself nodding immediately at the composition, the way that a shadow led the eye toward the lee of the building where a figure huddled, hands shoved into the pockets of a ragged overcoat, the blue trim the only bright color in an otherwise monochrome painting. The man's face was grizzled and his eyes were slitted, as if the light reflecting up from the sunlit snow pained him. The figure was sized perfectly in the landscape: large enough that the canyoned face could tug at the viewer's emotions, yet not so large that he dominated the photograph. She thought perhaps the photo had been taken somewhere in the Bronx.

A moment of poetry seized and frozen by the lens: Camille pressed her lips together and opened the next file.

Black and white, this one: two wild mushrooms caught in strong chiaroscuro, the light molding their forms beautifully, with another gorgeous composition that held the eye. But what stopped the photo from being just a nearly abstract composition was the shadow of a hand, as if some unseen observer was about to snatch away one of the mushrooms. It gave the photograph a tension it wouldn't have otherwise had. The composition reminded Camille of the sterile arrangements by Edward Weston of seashells and landscapes: beautiful composed and technically spectacular. Weston's work had always struck her as aesthetically accomplished but somehow passionless and empty, lacking the “something” that had made his friend and contemporary Ansel Adams a genius behind the viewfinder and in the darkroom. Still, Camille had to admit that even Weston had discovered emotion when he found Charis and started photographing her. . . .