"Christ, I can't carry on like this. I need a drink."
"You need salvation."
"Shut the fuck up. You don't know what I need. I need to get the fuck away from you!" He stood up violently, only to weave against the wall with disorientation and the pain blooming behind his eyes like a migraine.
He steadied himself. Then he headed down the alley. Out there, on the avenue, came the reassuring sounds of traffic and people and businesses open after hours, crime and pain and life and death, but at least they were human sounds, normal sounds, the sounds the real world made. He looked despondently around at this backalley space he was trudging through like the drunken bastard he was, the garbage littered wide and the rusting Dumpsters and the subterranean skitter of rats fighting over a burger wrapper under a heat grate somewhere and wondered for the thousandth time how everything had gotten so hopelessly fucked up in only a few short hours.
"And now?" Teresa said, dogging him even now.
He shook his head. He wanted to rage at her, but he had no strength. None at all. "I don't know."
"You know."
"What do I know?" he said "That I'm a corpse waiting to die."
"You know that with the Chronicle you can stop them. It can be your security, your saving grace."
"I don't know shit on a Tuesday," he said, leaning heavily against the corner of the building. Taxis and limousines coasted by, their windshield wipers screeking rubbery against the rain of diamond-hard droplets falling upon the city. Rain now. To freeze the snow into marble. He wondered when the winter would goddamn give it up already. "I don't know where the Chronicle is. I never did. Debra knew and Debra is dead."
"Paris knew," she said. "But Paris never told me."
He put his hot cheek to the soothing cold brick. "Which leaves us absolutely nowhere, Sister Teresa."
"But how did Debra know?" she asked. She took him by the arm, the desperation only barely contained in her voice, in her steel-gripped fingers and wide, light-refracting eyes. "Who told her? Who were her friends? You must know something...anything..."
He closed his eyes and shrugged. And giving up, her prisoner completely now, he supposed, he told her what little he did know.
"There is a woman I once knew"--Amadeus deflected a coral snake, snatched the head off a green mamba--"a great keeper of books and strange lore. I think"--he caught the head of that problem rattler, crushed its skull in his palm--"if anyone knows the way, she"--another rattler, a third mamba-- "will."
Amadeus stopped. The remaining snakes had retreated to the bottom of the tank. The rattlers were silent. They had given up at last.
"Again?" Sean asked expectantly.
"Enough."
"D'you know? Y'know, don'tcha? You know where he is?"
"Yes," said Amadeus, sliding into his robes. "I know."
"Righteous, man!" Sean gripped his master by the sleeve. "So we can, like, kick his ass from here to--"
Amadeus dealt him a two-finger cobra strike to the throat.
Sean flew across the length of the table and crashed into his chair, overturning it again. Supine on the Abbey floor, he moaned dazedly, coughed, felt the two tiny puncture marks at the base of his throat. Shit, man, that was going to leave a hell of a scar.
Yeah!
"Hodie mihi cras tibi," Amadeus hissed.
And though Sean did not understand the words, the sentiment was clear enough.
Mine.
Night.
Night in a club at 3:00 A.M., the time of the abyss, when the children of men slept and everything was neither here nor there. The club was in the basement of a burned-out brownstone, so most of the light was lost in the greying wood and rusted steel that rose more than seven stories into the night.
Night in the Abyssus. The walls, painted black, crawled with arcane characters and gangbanger badges in black spraypaint. On one wall was a religious mural of the Crucifixion done in rusty red and brown tones. The club was located near the docks, so even here the cold fishy stench of the bay invaded, pervading the warmer scents of cheap perfume and melting hair mousse and clove smoke and fresh flesh and blood. The pit in the center of the club was filled with men and women entwined with their brethren, faces flushed with lust and languor, heads thrown back in the grimace that was so like agony.
And on the tiny stage enmeshed in dogwire, presiding over it all like a high pagan priestess, she sang. She was like the victim of a vampire's obsession in silk gown and no shoes and naked arms ringed in delicate wreaths of barbed wire, and she sang much the same way, clinging to the microphone as if the weight of life and passion around her would drown her damaged soul. She gave strange performances, alternately whispering her taboos and screeching them as if she would tear open the fragile fabric of the night around her and let in every wayward earthbound deity.
They said she was a fallen angel, the infamous Eleventh Scholar. They said she drank the blood of children and offered the kiss of purgatory to virgins.
They said a lot of things about Leigia, not all of which Salvatori believed. Though he did know for certain that the boss lady had a thing for Leigia and she was strictly no-go territory where he was concerned. He could respect that. He supposed he had to.
Leigia finished her last set to a sizzling roomwide silence and climbed down off the stage. Sal shot her down a whiskey sour full of cherries, her favorite.
Three o' clock and the Abyssus teemed, just like Sal liked it. Lots of heat and teenagers, more goth than anything else here. Black hair and albino skin, red mouths and smoky grey eyes. Black paten leather. Painfreaks and vampire groupies and, sure, plenty of regular lowlifes too. A roomful of Cyndi Laupers and Boy Georges three days dead, a few geeks, the bearded poet type in worn army surplus jackets who quoted Nietzsche a lot, but he liked it; it was home.
Sal drew down a quartet of beers with enthusiasm. He'd be working at The Hole (as the patrons obstinately called it) for twenty-eight years now and it was a big deal. Talent night Tuesdays and Fridays, industrial metal band on Saturdays, blood orgy almost every night. Boss lady ran a tight ship but gave good benefits, decent pay. She and Empirius had made a good man of Sal, who'd seen nothing but tommy guns and bloodshed and human ghouls high on visceral violence most of his life.
Yeah, Akisha was okay, took none of the schtick the patrons who sometimes got high and rowdy after a band cooled down were apt to hand the barkeep. Even going so far as to install a couple of human familiar-heavies at the back door. Pip and Kyle. Wussy names, but Sal wasn't fooled none. Pip was an Outback brawler with Lou Ferrigno's face and Mike Tyson's left hook; Kyle was no better--an ex-Navy Seal, he'd eaten army privates for lunch during Desert Storm, or so the stories went. Some fancy work back there. Yeah, Akisha was a fine woman indeed. And Empirius--well, shit. Sal spat on the floor and crossed himself, first upright and then upside-down. It was just too damn bad about the boss man.
But Sal also knew that when you were living life on the edge the way his breed were apt to do, you couldn't go around hanging your head all day and mourning the passing of every vamp you knew. They died too fast. Shit, faster than some humans, the way the slayers culled the herd
And anyway, it was Saturday and Saturdays were a fine night. Plenty of controlled chaos, lots of overheated bodies and quick smiles. Everyone getting down and ready for Shrapnel's first set, Leigia warming them up, getting them heated and wanting more. Nights like these were goddamn magic. Blacklights poured down through a crowd of chainsmoking teenagers and cleaved like purple cream to the base of the raised altarlike stage in the middle of the Pit.
Sal fixed a couple of triplehammers and shot them down the bar at the two kids with carefully scarified faces and links of chain sewn through the tender skin of their scalps. One, the androgynous girl, Sal thought, smiled. Maybe later, sweetheart, he thought to her. Onstage the long-haired, body-pierced members of the band were tuning up and getting ready to serve and command their people like a cliché of black-eyed underworld gods. None of that battle-anthem streetbeat stuff to start with; Shrapnel was a sophisticated barbarian. Kill me, eat me, suck me dry, then do your brethren, my little brothers and sisters. God, but it was too righteously cool for this jaded new millennium.
Sal was shuttling off more beers to the waitress when he saw Knight come in. Over the years he'd seen the full gamut of goth, overpainted lips and overbled skin, that forced worldly look the kiddies put on for their brethren. But Knight was a regular scare, even in Sal's book. Not goth. Knight was the real thing. And a slayer. Goddamn fucking slayer. Knight looked around a moment as if to re-familiarize himself with the joint, and in the shadowy dimness of the club his eyes looked huge, black as sin, as if he were absorbing every last particle of light in the place. Fucking cat eyes.
Sal buttoned up the neck of his white oxford shirt and wondered who was next on the chopping block.
Knight looked his way.
"Shit." Sal stopped shaking the tin cylinder for the kahlua he was making as the slayer headed in a bee-line for him. Big guy, was Knight, the typical artist type, long fingers, longer hair. But unlike the other creative fifty-year-old lushes in the Village Sal knew, Knight spent his nights wielding steel and pulsing and sieving members of his own fucking breed. There wasn't a soft spot in his whole unaging body. Sal's eyes moved self-consciously to find Pip and Kyle.
Maybe trouble.
Kyle nodded, folded his big he-man arms across his grey fatigue tanktop.
"Salvatori."
Sal set the kahlua shaker down before he dropped it. "She ain't in," he said automatically.
"She's always in," Knight responded. "Remember what I said about you fucking with me, Sal?"
Sal shuddered and looked away. "Leave her alone, will ya? Haven't you done enough damage here?"
Knight looked taken aback by the outburst.
Sal thought to kick himself. Real good, Salvatori, he thought, you're a total Einstein. Probably it's going to be your fucking neck attached to your fucking big mouth on the line now.
But to his utmost surprise, instead of reaching across the bar and making Sal intimate with that oversized pigsticker of his, Knight looked down and away. "Would you buzz Akisha please? I'll understand if she doesn't want to see me."
"Huh?"
"Please." He looked up, his eyes inky. A tear? "I need to see her."
Sal shook his head. Poor fucker. Akisha was great about everything down here--but upstairs was a different matter completely. No one saw her without an invitation, except maybe Leigia, and even there Sal wasn't certain the dame could just come and go as she pleased. It was Akisha's only vanity. And she certainly wasn't going to want to see the face of her bound lover's murderer. Still, he might as well make a show of it, just in case Knight was hauling that pigsticker around with him; he picked up the phone and buzzed Akisha's office on the twentieth floor.
"Knight wants to see you, Mistress," said Sal. "You want I throw him out?"
Damn his courage! Was he going fucking crazy in his old age? he wondered.
"Knight?" came Akisha's slithering voice.
Sal glanced up at the slayer. "Yeah, big guy, black hair--you know, the one with balls enough to show his face `round here after carving up the Master?"
There was a lengthy silence. Sal could hear the static on the phone. He could hear the breathing of the slayer. He could hear his own breathing. It was like a fucking Carpenter film. He'd scream if Akisha didn't say something pretty soon.
Finally: "Send him up to my lounge, Sal."
Well, this is something new, thought Sal. He hung up the phone numbly. "Go on up," he told the slayer. "Twentieth floor. Stairs at the back."
"I know." Knight nodded and smiled, showing the tips of his petite but still impressively sharp set of eyeteeth, almost like he wasn't embarrassed by them. Then, without aplomb, he crossed the Abyssus to the back to the service stairwell and started to climb. And it was the damnedest thing--it was as if he'd expected no other reaction.