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Alexander Raskin arrived in San Francisco from the east, at the end of a long, hard ride up from the deserts of Mexico. He had forty diamonds sewn into the hem of his long leather coat, seventeen gold dollars, and four pistols, two worn openly, two secreted in his clothing. On his tongue lay a secret for a Chinese doctor and in his pocket rested a letter for a lady lately resident of New York City.
Ten steps past the skeleton of the building that would become the Double Eagle Saloon, his horse stumbled to its knees and did not rise again. Alexander removed his pack from the saddle, drew his pistol and shot the horse behind the eye.
He tossed two coins to a pair of boys who stared at his pistol with hungry eyes. "See that he's given a hero's funeral," he said, and walked on.
As a tall black carriage rattled past him, he turned his head, and someone in the carriage woke up.
The secret netted him a small black vial, which he wrapped carefully in oiled silk and tucked into the seam of his coat with the diamonds. The letter was exchanged for another, shorter letter and a long kiss in the lady's boudoir.
He would take the train to New York City. But he wasn't in a rush; he had time to take in the sights.
Sight of a young lady's rouged nipples in a gentleman's club, for one.
Sight of sixteen of his golden dollars disappearing into the pockets of a cocky, Immortal, Irish bastard after his four bearded royals were speared by an impossible four aces; he thought he smelled magic, but it was probably just luck.
Sight down a long pipe in an opium parlor, after he'd bet his last dollar at the roulette wheel and green-eyed Fortune fanned the ball into his pocket.
Alexander sat and smoked and considered the Lady's wiles as perfumed pleasure wound through his veins. He was bored with San Francisco. He was bored with pleasure. He hadn't died in years.
He missed the war already. He loved an unfair fight.
He casually cocked a pistol under the table as an Immortal stranger draped himself across a pillow beside him. Black silk, black fur, shining black leather covering a deformed foot; a face lush with decadence and a purse heavy with coin. Beautiful. "Well met by moonlight," the stranger said.
The glimmer through the window was clouded by the smoke of a thousand chimneys. The Immortal vibrated with the harmonics of Alexander's teacher. They were brothers under the skin. "Are we strangers or are we enemies?" Alexander asked.
"Perhaps we're friends. We call to each other--our souls beckon one another. We have both tasted of the same sweet fruit." The man curled toward Alexander, legs drawn up underneath him, lips parted, eyes quickened with more than opium.
The smoke curled around them like the tails of dragons. "You would not like my bed. The vermin would bite your pretty skin," Alexander said, brushing the stem of his pipe against the man's jaw.
The man seized his hand. "That fruit is a pomegranate, and tastes of power," and he smiled as Alexander froze. "We share a master."
Alexander smiled and pulled him near, lips brushing the man's ear, pistol laid heavy between their thighs. His mind burned with the recollection of another dark-eyed lovely who had seduced him into the arms of death and nearly sucked his body dry of its soul. "Our master's children are cuckoos, fighting in the nest to push the others out. Who are you? And why should I not relieve you of the burden of your head?"
The man tilted his head back and stroked their cheeks together. "Here I am known as William Shore... but once I was called George Gordon." He leaned into Alexander, and the words were a kiss: "Lord Byron. And you will not kill me."
Alexander pushed him down painfully into the pillows. "And why not?"
Byron laughed up at him, eyes burning, limbs languid, and did not answer. Alexander's finger rested on the trigger... but he did not fire.
Dawn burned pink and orange through the windows of the carriage. Byron twitched the heavy drapes closed and settled back in the seat, smiling, eyes fixed on Alexander like a hypnotizing snake. "What is your name?" Byron asked.
"Alexander Raskin," Alexander said. "Known to my teacher as Alexei Vladimirov."
"Same name. Are you the same man?"
He had taken one head, and he was two men thereafter. "No," he said. "You are young," he said, remembering a small leather-bound book sent to him by his teacher, filled with passionate verse. No old man could feel that much.
"Next year will be my centenarian."
"If you live that long." The sound of a challenge, but not the heart of one. Alexander couldn't bear to rip his soul apart again. "You are very young."
"Every man has a natural span. I was always destined to die young," Byron said.
Alexander looked at him sidelong.
Byron smiled, raised Alexander's hand to his mouth, and kissed his fingertips.
Byron's house was filled with rich, modern furniture, beautiful youths, and gilded whores, all scattered with abandon about the premises. A girl slept pillowed on the breasts of another at the turn of the stairs; Alexander stepped carefully over their naked limbs.
"I do so love San Francisco," Byron said. He loved any place where glimpses of the machinery of the future were so clear. He was hungry for progress, starved for novelty; he never looked back. He bit into time and let the past fall forgotten to the floor.
Alexander watched Byron's back warily, always conscious of the secrets on his person, always seeking the hidden trap. But Byron stripped his clothing away as he walked, letting them drop among the plucked roses and fallen women. By the time they reached his bedchamber, he was nude.
Simple pleasure. Alexander slid the coat off his shoulders at the door, and the shirt on top of it in a tidy pile. Pistols, belts, kerchiefs; his hat. He let his trousers fall and kicked them free of his boots. He never went naked, not entirely, especially not when there was an Immortal around.
Byron sprawled on the bed, bare and beautiful, soft and effeminate, a practiced seducer. His twisted foot was tucked away in the bedsheets. His eyes flicked down to Alexander's boots. "Are you hiding weapons or wounds?" he asked, drawing his foot into the open. "I hide nothing."
Alexander's soles were fragile, but intact. A knife nestled alongside each Achilles' tendon. Alexander reached out, taking Byron's foot in his hand, and kissed Byron's knee.
Byron sat up and wove both hands into Alexander's hair. "My teacher was like you," he whispered into Alexander's eyelid. "Secretive, revealing nothing," he kissed against Alexander's cheek. "But revealing everything in that silence. I know his soul," he murmured into Alexander's mouth.
Alexander met his eyes.
Byron stared into him, and then he smiled. "Yes. Do it."
Alexander plunged his knife under Byron's ribs. He cut a slit long enough for his hand, and forced his hand under the bone, over the viscera, until he touched the heart. At first Byron bared his teeth and sweated from the pain--but then he healed around Alexander's hand, and writhed in alien pleasure.
"No mortal could feel this," Alexander said. Byron's heart pulsed wildly against the palm of his hand, compressing it painfully against the cage of bone; the tendrils of his Quickening crawled up and down Alexander's arm. Alexander pressed his fingers into this engine of life and Byron gasped.
"Oh," Byron whispered, "we have one pleasure, one mind in this--we are brothers--"
Alexander squeezed. The muscle of the heart was tough as oak, but he pierced the slippery artery with his sharp nails and felt the blood surge free.
Panic rose in Byron's eyes, wild and urgent and animal. He clawed long rents in Alexander's arms as his heart was interrupted in his rhythm and died as their blood mingled on the bedsheets.
In the afternoon, when he healed and awoke, Byron would look back on this death as an obscene pleasure, one among many. He would forget all his resistance.
Alexander wiped the blood from his hands on the fine linen sheets and dressed himself. He took the rings and other jewels from the casket and slipped the purse from Byron's waistcoat. He slit the tip of his finger with a knife and left a drop of blood on Byron's lips.
Beautiful, even drained and dead. Seductive. Distracting. A siren, drawing him from his task. A romantic, looking for a glorious death.
Alexander would not be his death. He had things to do.
He bought a first-class ticket to New York City. On the way, he re-read Byron's verse.
In New York, he delivered the letter, secreted the black vial in the care of a bank, and took tea with his teacher's wife in her small, clean parlor; then he helped his teacher mulch his rosebushes for three days. On the third he received a short note, which he burned before traveling to London.
His teacher regarded the papery ashes in the fireplace of his library and smiled. He told his wife five lies about his student before breakfast.
THE END.
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