Lynn Viehl - Darkyn 1 - If Angels Burn (v1.1) (9 page)

“
Oui
,” Cyprien’s assistant breathed.

“Shut up.” With ruthless efficiency Alex sliced off Cyprien’s featureless face, pulled it out of the way, and began the work to repair the massive damage to his skull.

Distorted bone stretched from his upper cranium down to the mandible, but his eyes were intact and the pupils reacted to light. His irises were an odd color, blue with a brown rim, like turquoise inlaid in antique gold. One part of her mind was screaming that he could see, hear, and definitely feel everything she was doing to him.

Something else kept her in RoboDoc mode.

Alex snapped out orders to Éliane for instruments as her hands flew. The bone healed a little slower than his tissue, but still required her to operate at top speed. As she excised and grafted, she began to create new surfaces that meshed and hardened beneath her fingertips. It was more like sculpting marble than operating on bone. She rebuilt each zygomatic arch, each lateral orbital rim, and reinforced the nasion.

Once Alex had extended the length of his cheekbones and got to the upper mandible, she discovered two unusual bilateral abscesses in his upper palate that appeared to be congenital.

“He has two holes in the top of his mouth,” she said as she probed them. “Was he born with a cleft palate?” From the wholesale scarring of his face it was impossible to tell if any had been there before. The knight in the painting had had no such defect.

“His
dents acérées
,” Éliane said. “You must not close them.”

“Right.” An invisible string made Alex’s head bob, and she moved on to repair the damage to his jaw.

The remnant part of her that had been shrieking to stop finally quieted. Which was good, because his jaw had been shattered and had healed over in five separate places. Collectively, a real bitch to put to rights. Once the bones were finished, she used the abridgment method to reattach Cyprien’s face and went to work erasing his facial scars.

Her patient never twitched a muscle.

Hours, days, or weeks later, she put the final tuck in one corner of Cyprien’s new mouth, waited for it to heal into place, and then set aside her scalpel.

“Give me some saline on a sponge.” When the blonde handed it to Alex, she began wiping the blood and bits of bone from his newly healed skin. When his face was clean, she looked at her assistant. “Well?”

“
Magnifique
.” Éliane’s thin face was deathly pale, but Phillipe looked ready to keel over. The blonde said something in rapid French to Phillipe, who nodded and trudged upstairs. “Doctor, we must bring him back to us. Call his name.”

“Mr. Cyprien—”

“Michael.”

“Michael,” Alex repeated dutifully.

The eyelids she’d remade for Cyprien blinked, and then opened. The dark lashes springing from the eyelid follicles she’d recovered and reimplanted were a bit thick, but they framed his aquamarine eyes nicely.

“It is over?” He sounded as tired as Alex felt.

“
Oui, maître. La chirurgie était un succès
.” Éliane touched his face. “
Vous êtes vous-même encore
.”

Cyprien reached up and took her hand away, and then gazed at Alex. “Do I look like the man in the painting?”

She should have been exhausted, grouchy, and ready to deck someone. “You look fine. Normal.”
Gorgeous
. Alex, however, was about to drop, and not from fatigue. The smell of honeysuckle was gone, and she had no idea how long she had been operating. Her stomach had constricted into a tiny knot, so she guessed at least twelve hours.

“
Merci, docteur
.” Cyprien sat up, swung his legs off the table, and gestured for Éliane, who hurried over. His repaired facial muscles appeared to be working normally, but he was visibly trembling. “
Je dois chasser
.”

“You are too weak.” Éliane clamped her arm around Alex’s waist and brought her closer to Cyprien. “Don’t you agree, Dr. Keller?”

Dimly Alex wondered if someone had dropped a bottle of perfume nearby. The air was suddenly, suffocatingly thick with roses, as if someone were stuffing them into Alex’s mouth and nose.

“He should definitely rest for at least forty-eight hours.” That was utter bullshit, but she needed to get the hell out of here, right now. “Can I go?” She wouldn’t press charges.

She’d just find a taxi and forget all of this ever happened. Or she thought she would, until she saw Cyprien’s eyes.

He couldn’t look away from her, either. “
Non
, Éliane. She has done enough.”

“She will not mind this one last service.” A slim hand stroked over Alex’s dark curls. “Will you, Doctor?”

Alex couldn’t reply; she was too absorbed by the changes in Cyprien’s eyes. She could have sworn that while she was operating on him that his eye color had been predominantly light, calm blue. But now those golden brown rims of his irises had expanded and darkened, as if they were trying to swallow up his pupils. Where were his pupils, anyway? Were they those odd sprinters of black in the center? A delayed reaction to the trauma of the surgery, or maybe something else…

“Good-bye, Doctor.” Éliane’s voice sounded dim, distant. A door opened and closed. A lock engaged. Footsteps faded away.

Alex didn’t mind being alone with Cyprien. The bitch, and quite possibly the world, had gone away. She could smell Michael Cyprien’s scent now, and it was like his eyes, startling, changing. Like the rose, unfolding thick petals, revealing a heart of secrets. It pulled at Alex like invisible surgical staples being pried out of her chest and pelvis. His eyes seemed to be bottomless shafts of amber gold, stretching straight back through his skull into eternity, like those two strange abscesses she’d seen, endless and enigmatic and swallowing up the light…

His hands were still shaking when he cradled Alex’s face between them. “
Pardonnez-moi, chérie
.”

She didn’t mind; he was very gentle. His breath crossed the short distance between their mouths, and the odd sweetness of it (candied roses?) made her lips part. He was lisping a little, but maybe it was because he had grown two enormous fangs.

Funny
. She frowned as strands of his white hair tickled her cheek.
I don’t remember giving him those
.

Then he turned her face to one side, and used them on her.

John Keller’s room in the rectory’s living quarters resembled a stark, claustrophobic prison cell. It contained a bed, a night table, and one postage stamp of a window, the glass panes painted black for privacy. An old wooden cross nailed to the wall above the bed was the only decoration. His order permitted no personal possessions, so the tiny closet contained nothing but John’s suits and high-mass vestments.

It had been hard to give up what Alexandra and the Kellers had given him over the years—the street kid inside him craved money, or what could be traded for it—but John had rid himself of everything. He had gone into the seminary passionately believing what his mentor had told him:
Christ is all you will ever need
.

All he had besides Christ were his few clothes and this room, lit by a bare, fifteen-watt bulb screwed into a center ceiling fixture. Enough light to see and move around without banging into furniture. Not enough to see clearly or waste electricity. Not enough to remove the shadows waiting to swallow him.

John didn’t mind, except at night. Under his pillow was a small but strong-beamed flashlight, and most nights, he slept with his hand curled around it. He needed it for the worst moments, when he jerked out of sleep, sure he felt a groping hand or the cold press of a blade. He’d hidden his fear from everyone, and only Audra had known how bad it was. She had been the one to understand that he wasn’t afraid of the dark, but of what came out of it. She had given him his first flashlight.

You turn it on and look around the room whenever you want, John Patrick. Then you say this prayer
: ‘
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, bless this bed I sleep upon. Mary, Mother, guiding light, keep me safe throughout the night
.’

Toward dawn on the fifth day after his sister had disappeared, John lay dreaming. Not of Alexandra, or the bleak years before the Kellers had taken them in.

In his dream John again walked through the Raul Pompéia, searching for Maria.

Being reassigned from the village to the urban parish hadn’t bothered him; he had made little headway with the shy, reclusive natives of the rain forest and hoped to do better in the slums. For a time, he had, especially when he was given charge over the dozen street orphans cared for by the mission. True, they were more eager for food at mealtimes than the Gospel he read. Rome had not been built in a day, and neither was a good Christian soul. He could affirm that from personal experience.

No, everything had been going well—superbly, in fact—until the day eleven-year-old Maria disappeared.

At first, the other children refused to tell John where the little girl had gone. When he wheedled the truth out of them, he was appalled. Maria wasn’t an orphan, but the youngest daughter upon whom a large and mainly penniless family depended. For her family, who were now starving, she had chosen to return to her former profession. She would be all right, the orphans assured him. There were plenty of cruising motorists and tourists who had the thirty centavos it took to buy an hour with a
menina do doce
.

“
Hei, padre
.”

John turned toward the voice, although it wasn’t Maria’s. Neither was the face. This lost soul was at least ten years older, not a little girl at all, although she had the same underfed scrawniness and wet-black eyes as John’s missing charge. She was chewing gum with a slow, mechanical motion of her narrow jaw. The sweat-stained shirt open to the waist bared a V of bony sternum and the outer contours of slightly deflated breasts. Her miniskirt was skintight at the hips; a parenthesis of air appeared between her emaciated thighs.

Father
.

Recognizing the type, and the intent, John changed direction. The voice called out again on a waft of mint-scented breath. “
Falaram-me de você
.”

I’ve heard of you
.

John had made no secret that he was looking for Maria, but he didn’t know how anyone here would have heard of him. The mission was over three miles away, in a part of the slums where there was less risk of getting one’s throat cut. The inhabitants of the Raul Pompêia did not attend mass.

Fear that Maria was already working the streets—here, in this hellhole—drove him to the alcove. “
Que disse
?”

“You American, yeah?” Brown, soiled fingers curled around the plain pewter crucifix John wore and gave it several obscene pumps.

Father Keller
.

John gently extracted his cross. It wasn’t this young woman’s fault that she had been trained from birth to entice a man, or that she didn’t understand the sanctity of the priesthood. “I’m looking for a ten-year-old girl named Maria. She ran away from the mission.
Comprende
?”

Black, soulless eyes flashed up. “No Maria.” She slid her matchstick arms around his waist and locked her hands at the curve of his spine. Her smile was as joyless as the mechanic grind of her narrow hips into his. “Me.”

He tried to thrust her away, as he had every night he dreamed of her. “I’m a priest. I’m a priest.”

“I like priest.” She clung to him, and her voice changed. “Please, Father… please…”

“Father, please!”

Someone shook him out of the nightmare.

“What?” John sat straight up and nearly struck Mrs. Murphy in the face with the flashlight.

The older woman reeled back. “Sure and I’m sorry, Father, but you have to wake up now. Himself is here, and waiting on you.”

John automatically hauled the sheet up over his shoulder and rolled over to face the wall and conceal his morning erection. “Who is, Mrs. Murphy?”

“His Grace, the archbishop. He’s come to see you personal, Father.” She made it sound like an audience with the pope.

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

John stripped out of his nightshirt and used a wad of tissue to wipe the night sweat from his chest and armpits. His penis, still engorged and stiff, bobbed to his movements like a conductor’s baton. One unpleasant side effect of celibacy was getting erections that often lasted for hours.

Viagra had nothing on the priesthood.

If Mrs. Murphy hadn’t woken him, John probably would have ejaculated in his sleep, and there would have been the linens to deal with again. Another trip to the coin Laundromat around the corner, where John went after bad nights to wash the semen stains from his sheets. He told himself it was to preserve Mrs. Murphy’s delicate sensibilities, but in truth it was self-assigned penance. Each time he went there, people stared with accusing eyes or whispered behind his back. He sometimes wondered if they could smell the sin on his bed linens as he came through the door.

I am not worthy, Father
.

He was hard as granite, though, thanks to Mrs. Murphy and the interrupted dream, and no amount of concentration could make his erection subside. The monks at the seminary, all Franciscans of the First Order, had instructed him not to touch or even to think of touching himself.

Only the briefest touches, only to urinate, only to bathe
.

Self-stimulation violated the vow of chastity, and it was an everlastingly sinful act to spill his seed through masturbation. A man’s semen was to be produced only inside the vagina of a woman, to serve the purpose for which God had created it: to impregnate her. Since a priest was celibate, he had no legitimate reason to encourage that sort of production.

On the other hand, one did not sport a boner during an audience with the bishop.

In a few days, it won’t matter
. When John took hold of his shaft, his testicles tightened, as if shrinking from his own touch. A certain acid amusement tinged his bleak mood.
At least I still have good Catholic balls
.

Hei, padre… hei, padre… hei, padre…

John ignored the guilt and the memories, and began to work his fist methodically and rapidly. Like the candy girl from Rio, he took no joy in the act, and his eyes never left the wooden cross on the wall.