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The sponge moved in a slow, jagged rhythm across the scapula. Warm water darkened the downy under-layers of the wings, a muddy slurry of dried blood and the chemical grit of golden dust swirling toward the drain.
"Beirut." Daniel’s gruffness was undercut by the care with which he separated two matted feathers on your left wing, barbs locked in dried filth. "Summer of ‘87, got a fixer named Walid who keeps a pigeon loft on his roof. We’d spend half the night up there while the shelling walked closer from the Green Line. Him with his birds, me burning through Tri-X like it grew on trees.”
The comparison tracked otherwise. You had watched pigeons from the gargoyles of six cities, observed them preen themselves raw, coating their barbs in oil until they caught the streetlights in iridescent slicks.
"Thought he’d cracked." Daniel continued, his thumb working a clot of red crust loose from the quill. "Trauma response. Man watches his brother take a round to the chest, suddenly he’s running a bird spa. Coping mechanisms are a bitch."
You watched humans make wars over borders, gods, or whose grandfather had insulted whose grandfather, then sent other humans to document the aftermath with cameras and notebooks. The ones with the picture-capturing devices always died first. The ones with the papers and pens lingered, collecting quotes from mothers who’d lost sons, though you never understood how words in the right order might explain why humans kept shooting each other over lines drawn on maps by dead men in powdered wigs.
Daniel explained it once, drunk on arak, something about the real shit. You didn't understand that either. The pile of bodies in Sabra looked no different when described in the so-called New York Times versus left unmentioned. But you nodded anyway; your kind kept records too, once.
"Must we, Daniel." The other immortal’s voice came from behind you, whose arms encircled your waist beneath the water.
In those camps, human mothers had been trying to keep human children quiet, though inhumane shells never cared about quiet.
The sponge hit the graying water with a splash.
"No, listen. I’m saying the kid's feathers are cleaner than Walid's prize racing homer after a three-hour spa day." Daniel reached for the specialized oil on the toilet tank with the label FOR WINGS ONLY in cursive. "And those birds were the only good thing in that whole fucked city."
"A vulgar compliment." Armand’s lips brushed the wet shell of your ear from behind, his touch grounding the floaty sensation in your head. You stared at the grout lines in the tile, some tethered part wondered if the human named Therapist taught him similar words like "dissociation," too, along with a dozen others he deployed like talismans.“Though apt.”
Your wings knew the difference between present and absent better than your brain did, nerves left of what existed and what had been damaged. מַלְאָךְ or malā'ika or ἄγγελος or some others. Ingrained was the biological imperative to maintain the apparatus, same as pigeons.
Oil spread across Daniel's palms.
"Those two dipshits nearly tore them in half,” Daniel muttered, working the oil into the barbs. “Fucking wishbone contest."
Humans broke bird bones to divine the future, which had always struck you as optimistic. The future wasn't hiding in a chicken carcass. Vampires broke them for entertainment. You were neither and had never understood the satisfactions of either camp.
"The Frenchie," His fingers pressed the discoloration on your neck, lighting a nerve that made your wings flair instinctively. "Bit here."
His pupils blew wide as the scent of the healing wound hit him. There, too, distinct from Lestat’s tearing, lay a different mark. Two clean, surgical punctures.
"And here." Your inner arm.
"And I’m pretty sure he left a handprint on your ass. Congratulations. That'll photograph beautifully for the restraining order."
His thumb found the bruise on your hipbone and pressed. The amber of Daniel’s eyes flared at your hiss.
You pulled away. "Ow."
"Yeah, I know." He followed, mouth chasing the junction of your neck and shoulder, teeth scraping lightly at the first bruise. "Wanted to see if I could taste him again."
"Verdict?"
Daniel pulled back, ran his tongue over his fangs, expression crossing that of a man who’d drunk spoiled milk. "Bordeaux and unmedicated personality disorder."
Armand's hand caught Daniel's jaw, the pad of his thumb swept across Daniel's lower lip, catching the residue of tasted blood. "You’d taken too much of him into yourself, beloved."
Daniel leaned into the touch with a hard-won shamelessness, the fledgling who had once flinched at his maker's proximity now pressing his cheek into Armand's palm as if starved for it.
"He was posturing. As is his wont.” Armand exhaled in the wet hair at the nape of your neck, though his russet eyes never left Daniel's. "Lestat wished to see the extent of your durability, and like Ganymede, you two obliged him."
Zeus's cupbearer, snatched from a field in Troy, depending on which source one believed. Zeus’ beloved, if that word meant anything when applied to beings like them. From the Rubens: the eagle’s talons digging into little Ganymede's thigh as the boy's face turned away, body slack in a posture that could be read as ecstasy or dissociation. Depending on what the viewer wanted to see.
Daniel’s hand slid down your arm, found Armand’s wrist beneath the water, and squeezed.
And maybe Greek myths were corrupted remnants of older revelations; every story about theft was a story about rescue, and every story about rescue was also a story about theft.
"What I did," Daniel grinned a flash of white, fanged violence, "is bite him hard enough to make him bleed. Cried about his shirt while Louis made the face— you know the one."
"I didn’t." You huffed. "My tongue was otherwise occupied in Louis’s mouth."
"You had your tongue in a lot of places tonight, sweetheart."
Buzz. The phone on the toilet tank lit up the dim room, vibrating against the porcelain.
"Speaking of the devil," Daniel grunted. Flicking the screen to silence without checking the text. "Wants to know if you’re icing the wings. He says you're running high."
You rolled your eyes, head lolling back against Armand’s shoulder. "Tell him to go to hell."
"Louis de Pointe du Lac carries hell in his breast pocket, my dove," mumbled the lips against your nape. "He has no need of travel."
You hummed in agreement; the children of the Creator, dead or alive, were all sepulchered in His bodies. Living tabernacles for the cold ones.
“You gotta stop letting ‘em toss you like a chew toy." Daniel leaned in, kissed the spot he’d pressed earlier. “A very alien and sexy chew toy, but still.”
"So did you, Danny." You caught his chin, forcing his gaze up, revealing the purpling crescent on the curve of his throat. Armand’s mark.
The said accused's arms tightened around your waist. "I took what I had to have." You could even hear the pout.
On the other side of Daniel’s neck: a matching abrasion left by Louis.
"Yes, yes. And I'm sure you filled out all the proper consent forms, boss.”
Daniel tapped your hip. "You back with us?" He asked, his mind brushing against yours. A rough, static-filled search for the glassy vacancy of the Mind Gift or the chemical fugue of the pollen. "No space cadet shit.”
Ground was the place where bodies were buried and buildings were built and vampires slept beneath floorboards. Strange was the mortal fixation with ground, or in this case immortal.
"Understood," you crooned into his palm nevertheless, kissing the lifeline.
Daniel leaned forward, ignoring the water that soaked the front of his cotton shirt, and pressed his forehead against yours. For a long moment, there was only the sound of the water and the synchronized drag of breath; three lives briefly idling in the same gear.
Armand rose first, lifting you with him, water sheeting off his body in the low light. Daniel followed, grabbing towels, wrapping one around your shoulders while Armand—somehow dry and already covered with his own—attended to the wings with another, the two of them working in tandem like they'd been doing this for decades.
Which, you supposed, they had, in one form or another. On and on history went, the serpent of sand and starlight coiling into infinity.
"Stop thinking so loud," Daniel grumbled. "Bed, now. And if you so much as squawk before sundown tomorrow, I'm putting you in a kennel."
"You'd miss me.”
"Yeah," Daniel pressed a kiss against the wet crown of your head. "Tragedy of my fucking existence."
The door clicked behind you.