Drawing Blood

All at once it hit him: this was power too, just as surely as smashing your fist into someone’s face, just as surely as putting a hammer through someone’s skull. The power to make another person crazy with pleasure instead of fear and pain, to have every cell in another person’s body at your thrall.

+ He wasn’t much for erasing anyway. Sometimes your mistakes showed you the really interesting connections between your brain, your hand, and your heart, the ones you might otherwise never know were there. They were important even if you had no idea what they meant. Like now, for instance. Coming back here might be the biggest mistake he’d ever made. But it might also be the most important thing he’d ever done.

Didn’t he have to admit, begrudgingly, that in some extra-perverse corner of his brain the idea of having to be out of town before sundown appealed to him? New Orleans had been the only constant thing in his life. But didn’t he yet an itchy foot sometimes, didn’t he sometimes think about just throwing all his stuff in his car and going? Of course he did. Everybody did, even normal people, the ones with triple mortgages and orthodontists’ bills and responsibilities to everything except what they really wanted.

Out here the wild things are healthy, the old trees whose roots find sustenance far below the ill-used layer of topsoil, the occasional rosebush gone to green thicket and thorns, the unstoppable kudzu. It is as if they have decided to take back the land for their own.

They were kissing again, carefully at first, learning the shape and texture of each other's lips, testing the sharpness of the teeth behind them. It's too fast, said a panicky voice in his mind. And too dangerous. He'll drink your juices, taste your brain, crack your soul open like an egg! Hell, I think I want him to do all that.

Trevor cupped his hands around it, felt Zach's heartbeat throbbing between his palms. The skin of the shaft was textured, slightly rippled beneath the surface. The head was as smooth as satin, as rose petals. Trevor rubbed his thumb across it, squeezed gently, heard Zack suck air in through his teeth and moan as he let it out. He could see blood suffusing the tissue just beneath the translucent skin, a deep dusky rose delicately purpled at the edges, crowned with a single dewy pearl of come. It was as intimate, as raw as holding someone's heart in his hands.

Terry remembered a summer two or three years ago when there had been a plague of luna moths (...) One night Ghost has mused aloud that to the bats, the moths' blood must taste like crème de la menthe.

A heart like an artichoke?” “Oui. He has a leaf for everyone, but makes a meal for no one.

It was as if America had begun the decade of the eighties by shattering some great cosmic mirror, except that the seven years of bad luck hadn’t ended yet. The wizened, evil-faced dybbuk in the White House had been as alien a being as Trevor could imagine, a shriveled yet hideously animated puppet thrust into power by the same shadowy forces that had controlled the world since Trevor was five, forces he could not control, could barely see or begin to understand.

Trevor slowed the car to a crawl, made sure Zach was breathing, speeded back up to twenty or so. If he rolled through stop signs, he could drive all the way to Kinsey’s house in second gear. It would be hell on the clutch,

The art was in learning to spend your life with someone, in having the courage to be creative with someone, to melt each others souls to molten temperatures and let them flow together into an alloy that could withstand the world.

Birdland was a mirror. You could shatter it and cut yourself to ribbons on it, you could obscure it with blood. Or you could be brave enough to look into it with eyes wide open and see whatever there was to see.