The slayer stood at the frozen midwinter's window and touched the immortal dolphins in their static flight, the twilight somber on his face like a mask, the glass cold as a bone under his fingertips. His breath plumed in the semidark with his sigh. Booker closed his eyes and heard the harsh, whispered echoes of precocious thirteen-year-old children, chosen brothers, at war with one another:
You can't go, you can't!
I can't stay, Book, not now.
Has he given you the Rite of Blood?
What kind of question is that?
Answer it.
That's none of your fucking business!
Silence.
Then: You never told me.
Book opened his eyes and tore open his tie knot. Hot as all hell in here, he thought, watching the steam of his exhalation frost the window pane opaque. He started drawing a little dagger on the pane, was molding the hilt into a form of a dolphin when he finally noticed the hem of his London Fog was smoking.
"Fucking shit!" he hissed and beat the blackening material out, feeling like the biggest damn fool on the planet for letting the psi get away from him. Goddamn walking Zippo, that's what he was. No fucking discipline...
He almost laughed at that. He was the one always going on about discipline like some fucking wise-ass Shao-Lin monk, giving Alek all those pained looks about his drinking problem. Fucking hypocrite. Yeah, that's what he was.
Flame-free, he checked the time. After five. Sundown. Shit. Somewhere out there in the city Alek was running free or getting ready to. Alek, a rogue. God, but that was a shiver. Debra had been a rogue. Heather MacNeil with her frequent bouts of lunacy had been a rogue. Not Alek. Alek wasn't mad.
Just headstrong.
Just a fool, he thought, rubbing at his prickly arms. He undid the garroting tie at his throat farther, then took if off completely, afraid it might catch. What had the fucking fool done? The Father had given them so much, a home, a brotherhood.
Book knew how it was. In 1958 the Father had stolen Book away from a group of white-jacketed Dr. Jekyll-types who sat him in a room all day and made him set playing cards on fire. He'd been alone back then, the memory of his mother and his little brother Tyrone's scorched bones lying mixed in the debris of their Eastside project still fresh in his mind. No father had ever claimed him, and after a few years Book had pretty much figured out why. His life had been an almost perfect carbon-copy of Debra's and Alek's and Eustace's and Sean's and all the other slayers', the same patterns and problems repeated in gently diverse ways.
But the Father had taken them away from all that. The Father had given them education and a purpose. Perhaps that purpose seemed strange and violent at times, perhaps they were asked to do things which frightened them, even appalled them sometimes, but it was a purpose, damnit to hell, and Book knew from hard experience that purpose was what kept you sane in this life, no matter how long it was. He'd seen people, mortal and otherwise, die for less.
Purpose was the glue that kept the masses together, his mother once said during the Movement.
Purpose kept you alive, when there wasn't any reason to go on.
The pager in his pocket buzzed him.
He ignored it.
Purpose, he thought.
And what purpose existed behind the kind of insolence and insult Alek was heaping upon the Coven? Book closed his eyes, trying to see through the film of Alek's insane actions, but all he saw these days when he closed his eyes were memories. School. Parties. Slayings. Alek. He saw a big strange old Colonial house, a door swinging open on a cell with this tall, black-haired white Brooklyn-born boy and his sister. A boy with no hope in his eyes. A boy years older than his body. A boy who could have been Book himself. A boy who became his brother, for chrissakes. A boy who believed in their purpose, a boy who sacrificed damn near everything for it. Like him. Just like him.
When the device in his pocket persisted after several minutes, a regular five-alarmer this time, he supposed, he took it off and tossed it to the floor. Fuck Doc Sacco, he thought. Fuck them all at St. Vincent's.
He glanced sidelong out the window, the city tinted grey through the hazy blue glass. He gritted his teeth. Aberration. That was what Alek was, an aberration, an ungrateful child. There was no purpose to this. It was all mindless passion...
He was pacing without knowing it. It was so cliched he hated it. Pacing. So hot in here, he thought as he unbuttoned his coat. Over on the nightstand sat an old ragdoll with a ratty worn face. He went over to it and picked it up.
It combusted almost at once into a mass of tattered cloth, stuffing and roaring red yarn. Cursing, Booker threw it down into the wastepaper basket beside the bed. The flames sprung up, blue in their heat, then died down. The doll burned fitfully for a second or two, then dissolving into white smoke and debris.
He closed his eyes as he fought to put the endless gout of psi back in the fireproofed box of his mind, like the Father had taught him. He hissed through his teeth, concentrating. A thread of sweat tricked down his brow.
Boooker...
He shook his head. He opened his eyes.
Oh Boook...
He looked sideways at the miniature pyre burning at the bottom of the basket. This was ridiculous. What, was he hearing voices in his head like some kind of fucking psychopath now? He shook his head, but an image came to him with all the shock of memory. He was no more than fourteen, showering, the water a roaring curtain between himself and the rest of the world. Yet the figure penetrated it. At first he thought it was Alek; then a pair of delicate female hands broke through the curtain and touched her white fingertips to his naked ebony chest. He saw her face, eyes flashing black beneath winged brows, a wicked, inviting smile...
Debra...
With a roar, Book threw the basket against the bookshelves, the flotsam of burned stuff filling the room with an acrid, hellish stench.
God help him, he had a sword. And he had another weapon locked none-too-safely inside his mind. And he had no compacture about using either one, so help him. If Alek and dead Debra wanted to play Crispy Critter with him then that was just fine, that was just...fucking...fine!
The stench of crisping fabric and scorched bone gathered in his nostrils and mouth and throat...
He nearly gagged with it all, with purpose.
He turned from the window and rushed from his brother's cell with scarcely a thought, but an entire mission simmering inside of him, taking form. Yes. He knew what to do.
Downstairs in the parlor he practically fell across Robot and Totty where they were sitting in front of the parlor computer. Home from the hunt and unscathed only because Alek hadn't actually gotten ahold of them, and here they were, plotting their next move already. Maybe they would have had a totally different perspective if they'd seen what was left of Kansas spread all over the rails of three different terminals. He doubted it though. Some folks just never got enough.
He stopped and glanced around the parlor, but their suicide king was missing, apparently. "Where's the wonderbrat?" he asked nonchalantly.
Aristotle glanced up, hooked his thumb around backwards toward the library.
"No shit?" Book buttoned up his coat to the chin. "What's he doing in there? He got a pit barbecue going with the Father's favorite texts, or what?"
Aristotle took a drag on his cigarette like he was insulted or something. He smiled to conceal a cough. A one-time geekazoid health-nut, he'd only taken up smoking last year when he joined the Coven and discovered smoking couldn't put him in a casket. "He's reading. Researching his psi." He sniffed the air, a bit overdramatically, but it wasn't his own smoke he was smelling. "You know?" he said with those bushy upraised Grocho-brows Alek always joked about, "Something some of us need to do?"
Book held up his hands. "Hey, man, no damage done." He plucked a cig out of his own coat pocket and lit up, thankful that the Father had never had fire detectors installed in the Covenhouse. Between Totty and himself and his psi--Jesus, but they'd be busy.
"Naw, you're way off," Book heard Aristotle say, and he almost thought the geek was speaking to him, but it was mute Robot he was addressing. Robot signed back angrily with fingers as thick around as bratwursts and yet so nimble it was a near-miraculous display of talent. He pointed to something on the McNally computer-map. Tapped it. Me right, you wrong.
Booker headed for the foyer, but Aristotle surprised him. "Hey...Book?"
Booker turned around. A shock of heat floated up through his body and came out his nostrils. It could have been Frenched cig smoke but it smelled like a human rotisserie. No one called him Book, except his very closest friends. Alek. A few others. A very few others. "What?"
Aristotle looked taken aback, then recovered and motioned him closer. You don't reeeeally want me closer, whitebread, do you? Guess so. Book obliged him with a look of pure menace. "Settle something for us," Aristotle said, showing him the monitor. "I say the rogue shows up at the Metropolitan next, Robey says Rockefeller Center. What do you think?"
Book looked at them both. "How'd you come up with these two locals, Sherlocks?"
Aristotle fixed his glasses. "Well, that Byron fellow, he hid the Chronicle, right? And he was that Debra's thing, right?"
"He was never `Debra's'," Book said.
"But the Father said--"
"The Father is wrong. Debra was Alek's. Only Alek's."
"Jesus." Aristotle frowned, then recomposed himself. "Anyway, Byron worshipped her, right?"
Book nodded. We all did. Especially Alek. And now you're paying the price of that worship, aren't you, brother? Alek, where the hell are you?
"And her favorite spots were the Metro and the Rockefeller Center skating rink. So natch, that's the most likely places, right? Except that the Metro is really more likely"--he glanced up self-righteously at silent, glowering Robot filling up his seat--"because Alek can't skate."
Booker shook himself, tried to digest this bizarre logic. But what did you expect from this little whitebread wusshead who'd probably go into apoplectic shock if you took his computer away for a day? "Because he can't skate?" he parroted incredulously.
Aristotle blanched. "Well...he can't."
"How," Book asked, "do you know Alek can't skate? You best buds or somethin'? You hang with him, white boy?"
"No! It's just...I never saw him."
Booker laughed nastily and leaned in close to the whelp. "Alek could watch you screw the brains out of your girlfriend if he chose to, Totty, and you wouldn't know jack shit about it. He could kick your ass so hard you'd cough up your own heart. And here's the rub--" he leaned in even closer, until the whelp could feel his heat and sweat it--"he can slay slayers. You think a little thing like skating is beyond him? Hmm?"
Aristotle swallowed, said nothing. Booker reached out and petted him on the head like a dog, then took a handful of his scrawny, three-inch ponytail. Tight. Tighter. Until he saw tears gleam in Aristotle's eyes behind his Coke-bottle-bottom glasses. Book showed the whelp his teeth. "Leave Alek the fuck alone." He glanced up at Robot sitting so piously. Like himself and Alek, Robot was an elder, and deserving of more respect than this. But right now, goddamnit, Book felt a thousand years anyone's elder. He said, "I will tell you this once and only once. Next time you find out on your own: When you fight Alek you fight the Father."
Then he left the parlor behind with the two of them dumbstruck and staring after him. And made a point of slamming the door of the Covenhouse behind him. Hard.
It was another typical Braxton show. Awash in the Bette Davises and penguin men he moved, sipping nothing in passing, nodding at none of the empty comments and praises, the de facto center of attraction, if for no other reason than because he looked like none of them. He looked like what he was, instead. A tramp. A rogue. A rumpled, longhaired, underslept slayer. He looked like hell itself, and the crones who haunted these parties to see and be seen turned away as he approached, their diamonds still burning his eyes. He had thought of waiting until after the show, but, Jesus, they didn't have that much time left. Not anymore. Not with Amadeus so close. With the Stone Man practically on their heels these days. Braxton would have to find time for them, even if this was a show he'd scheduled for over two years or more.
Hot in here. As usual. Alek undid his coat and stopped a waiter tricked out in a black tux like some cheap Hammer film-style vampire, said, "Do you know where Charles is?"
"Charles, sir?" came the hesitant, heavy-lidded, Jeevesque reply. The boy looked positively puzzled.
Alek shook him. "Charles Braxton. The man who employs you?"
More querulous frowns from the boy. Alek decided not to push his luck anymore. He let the boy go. If he intimidated the waiter, the kid was liable to call security, and then there would be serious trouble to contend with. Too late, old man. Already he saw a couple of plainclothesmen swimming toward him through the crowd like a pair of idle hammerheads. Holding up his hand in a sign of surrender, he backed out of the room.
Apparently deciding he was more than a minor threat to aesthetics, they followed him out to the alley. They looked a little unreal, these two. Sort of like Abbot and Costello doing the Keystone Kops thing. Abbot's magnum was real enough, though. He stepped through the back door and put it in Alek's face while Costello with his paunch and self-satisfied looks unclipped the police ban radio disguised as a cell phone hanging on his belt.
"You don't want to do that," Alek said.
"I don't wanna kick your ass between your teeth, boy," Abbot answered in a northern redneck drawl that did little to support his Bud Abbot image, "and I won't, jest long as you stay right there. Here?"
Alek grabbed the gun and turned it on the man, the man's hand still attached to it. The wristbones sounded as noisy as a kid smashing down a bowl of corn flakes with a spoon. Abbot screamed hoarsely. Costello pulled out his own little cannon. And maybe he wasn't a slo-mo hick, maybe he was a born-and-bred city boy the same as Alek, but that didn't make him quick. Nothing could, just right then. Alek mule kicked him in the groin, doubling him over and sending him into the side of a Dumpster with a hollow thump.
Costello groaned, scrabbling at the asphalt and his lost toy. Teresa stepped out of the shadows of the Dumpster and gripped him by the back of the coat, bashed the back of his skull against the side of the Dumpster again. Finally, Costello slumped down into dreamland.
Abbot continued to wail irritatingly. Alek wrenched him over so the man flipped onto his back on the pavement. He put his booted foot over the man's face and was just about to rub it out like old cabbage when the voice at the mouth of the alley caught his attention.
"Don't do that to Lenny. He's slow, but loyal."
Alek looked up.
The woman stood there like a stark black Elvira outline burning against the streetlights of Madison Avenue. Alek tried to put the voice together with the outline and failed horribly. Presumably the woman had followed him here from the party, and that meant she knew him or had business with him. For a moment, from the angle of the outline, the easy, angled curves, he almost expected Akisha to step forward, fully reformed and beautifully alive. But then the figure shifted, coming a series of steps closer, and Alek finally recognized the woman.
Not Akisha. Not one of his own.
Mrs. Tahlia Braxton chuckled a little in that gravelly Lauren Becall voice of hers like he had said something witty or wise and took a long drag from off her cigarette. She Frenched it as she came over to study her downed man. Charles's powerful wife was dressed in an outfit typical of her style, a white linen jumpsuit bare at the throat and arms, a torc of silver with a red tiger's eye at its center around her naked throat. No coat or stole. Alek thought she must be frozen to the pavement, but she showed nothing of discomfort as she prodded Abbot in the side with one white designer boot. The boots were platformed-heeled, then again, Mrs. Braxton stood nearly as tall as Alek himself; the heels must make her feel like a giant.
He had only met the White Bird as they called her once or twice at these parties, but each time he had come away with the feeling that Braxton's better half was just that--smarter, suaver, a regular iron hand in a silk glove. Now was no different.
"Get up, Lenny, and take Morton down to Emergency."
When Lenny did nothing and only continued to stare up at the two of them with lemur-eyed fear, Mrs. Braxton tossed her cigarette aside and lifted her eagle-eyed attention on Alek. "Get this sot to his feet?"
"Sure." Alek got Abbot up, trying not to make it look like too easy a task. God knows what she'd already seen; he didn't need her asking him where all his Superman strength came from. Between himself and Teresa they managed to get the Keystone Kops to the curb and Mrs. Braxton's waiting limo.
Mrs. Braxton directed her driver to St. Mary's, then shivered and turned, opened the silver monogrammed cigarette case in her pocket and lit a filterless smoke. She rubbed at her arms, seeming to feel the cold at last.
"Look, Mrs. Braxton--"
"Tahlia."
"Tahlia," Alek said, "This is a mess."
Tahlia shrugged like it was no big deal.
"I'm just trying to find Charles. I--"
"Dead."
Something jumped inside of Alek. "Charles is dead?"
"For the last fifteen years. Haven't you noticed, dear?" With peaked eyebrows, Tahlia headed up the steps of the Metro, her heeled boots clopping on the stone stairs of the Beaux-Arts structure crouching above them like a lost temple out of some Greek mythology.
A temple. And his last hope. The last marked spot on Byron's fucking map...
Alek dogged her. Didn't know why. It just seemed that he'd met somebody forgiving enough to know the score around here. Maybe Tahlia knew even more that her cantankerous husband. Or maybe it was just desperation. Probably it was desperation. Alek thought about Teresa's words this evening as they left the rectory of the church with its bloodred candles and pale saints and haunted priest. One last hope, mio caro. One last hope...
Tahlia turned to face him at the top. "Yeah?" she asked with her brusque Long Island diffidence.
"I...don't know how to put this," Alek said.
Tahlia's eyes narrowed. An older woman, but she had the most ageless face Alek had ever seen on a mortal. He reminded himself that next to nothing happened in this town without Tahlia Braxton's approval. She was quite literally a one-woman mob, probably capable of committing murder itself and getting away with it. And here he was, begging her interest.
He said, after a long breath, "I really don't know how to ask you this, but do you--can you--I--"
"We were lovers, Byron and I," she said.
For a moment the world itself took a half-turn around him. He looked out at the rough beginnings of a savage midwinter's storm gathering in the form of chrome-colored clouds above, the missions and soup kitchens locked tight against the night on distant 79th Street, wondering when the world had gone another level of crazy around him. Finally, he looked again at Tahlia. He swallowed, felt the curious edges of fate or coincidence brush past his shoulder like a wing. "Excuse me?"
Another cigarette. Suddenly he saw the worry and the past, some secret sorrow, take root in Tahlia's storm grey eyes. She said, "This--it's about Byron, right?"
Alek shivered, but not from fear. "How do you know that? Or dare I ask that question?'
"You dare," she answered him levelly. "But dare ask it in the warmth of Charles's office, won't you? I'm freezing my ass off here."
He nodded. But just as he did so, just as he was about to follow Tahlia inside to discover her secrets, another shiver. And then a dark, bone-slender figure moved out from behind one of the Corinthian columns at the other end of the museum. It had begun to snow. The figure stood maybe a hundred feet away, but even were the storm a living holocaust of white, he would have been able to identify it alone by its feral, saintlike posture. With a tip of his head the man started down the wide Roman steps.
Alek said, to Tahlia, "Will you give me a moment?"
Without a word or change of expression, Tahlia walked away, toward the wide double doors of the Metro. A bellboy ushered her inside. No answer. But her posture, the turn of her shoulders, said a universe of things. Be quick. We have much to discuss. Teresa started toward him, but he held up a hand. Wait for me? She nodded and he turned back.
Booker, standing on a step halfway down the stairwell, sank his hands into his coat pockets and looked over his shoulder at the banners hanging on the face of the Metro. He sighed as Alek approached, his breath pluming in the near-dark.
A moment of silence passed, and then another. And then he said, "I remember a time when we stood at a window and you shouted at me, and I think the entire house shook for you." He laughed. "I even remember your face, your expression, that Brooklyn-born don't-the- fuck-get-in-my-way look you were wearing. Funny the things we remember most."
"I don't have a sword," Alek said, stopping a step below his brother, their gazes even.
"But the house shook. It was yours. It was always yours."
"The house was his, Book."
Booker sighed once more, looked at him, past him. His flesh was beaded with the sweat of his unreleased energy. Alek watched the falling snow melt off his face and shoulders in tiny, running rivulets of moisture. He was an island of suffocating warmth in the midst of the cold night. "Do you really believe I want to kill you, brother?" he asked.
"Yeah."
Book laughed miserably and the heat was gone. "Should know better than to try and outfeel an empath. You fuckers know other folks' feelings better than your own."
"But you won't do it. Yet."
Book snorted, looked away. "I should. I'm really thinking about it, Alek."
"Don't try. You don't want to find our who's better," Alek said and watched the wounding of his words. "It'd kill me, but I'll cut you down in this war if you intercede. I want him, Book. I want his head."
"He gave you everything, you bastard."
"What he gave me was corrupt and spoiled."
"This is madness!" Book laughed viciously, turned his back. "Debra's madness."
Alek moistened his cold, cracked lips. They were perched on the ledge of the world now, teetering, ready to fall. And now, with no voice and no argument he was forced to explain to this man what he could not explain to himself.
"He saved you from Debra," Booker growled. "Christ, Alek, he saved you from yourself! Do you know what would have happened to you if he hadn't intervened? Do you have any fuckin' idea what you'd be today?"
"I wouldn't be a slayer."
"No, you'd just be out there on the streets ripping throats out."
Alek breathed in a mouthful of cold, bitter air. He tasted steel and acid and the coming war. "So he takes us in, so he gluttons us with books and art and music, so what? So fucking what? It's still there, Book. The madness. You act like some fucking virgin! You mean you never think about it--killing something? Maybe someone--"
"Course I think 'bout it! We all do, damnit. But thinkin' don't make us animals, the doing--that's the problem. But that's why we have the Coven, the slayings."
Alek hurrumpted. "You think killing all those vamps takes it away? You think you'll wake up one morning and it'll just be gone like a virus or somethin'? All the killing used up? I think we're stuck with it forever. What do you think? You even have an opinion of your own anymore?"
Book let out a raw breath. "I think you're crazy as bat shit, Alek."
He felt numb. Nothing could penetrate him now. Nothing at all. His armor was fully-forged. "He killed Debra," he heard himself say in a scorched voice too full of years and sorrow. "It was all his game. He killed her so he could have me all to himself. He even bent the prerogative of the fucking church to have me. And believe me, there's nothing pure in his intentions, Book, nothing at all."
Booker looked appalled, as if his brother had spoken against God Himself, uttered the blackest profanity. He shook himself, looked everywhere. "You know what we are and you know what it means. You know what it's like to belong to no one and nothing. The Coven is everything, brother, because it's the only thing." He shook his head. "Goddamnit, I don't want to watch you die, but I don't want the Coven to die either. And if you kill it, you bastard, I'll kill you back, I swear to God I will."
Alek nodded, turned away his face and let the storm buffet his profile to numbness. He watched the limos skim down Fifth Avenue like black sharks on their way to a mass feeding frenzy. "I suppose then it's going to he different the next time we meet. We won't be brothers anymore."
"Can you accept that?"
"I suppose I have to." He blinked the snow from his eyes, wiped it from his cheek and throat. "He's killed, Book, you know. The innocent and the guilty. He killed Akisha. That wasn't sanctioned. It wasn't even necessary. Sean's a killer too."
"Casualties of our war, Alek Knight,"
He felt cold. "I just wanted you to know."
"I know." Book laughed again in utter despair and drew his sword. A bone-handled tachi, it reached an easy forty-six inches. He turned and set it against his brother's collarbone. It gleamed there like the dirty white ice at his feet, utterly real. Cold.
"You'll be celebrated a thousand years," Alek said, watching Book's eyes and not the sword. "They'll put your face in the Abbey. Hell, they'll probably make you Covenmaster." He felt nothing. "Is that what you want?"
Book's lips quivered back in a silent snarl. He looked ready to spit venom like the legendary Lilith who had created them out of Adam's wayward seed. But instead of striking, either in weapon or word, he dropped the sword to the snow and started down the remainder of the steps.
Alek picked it up. "Book?"
Book turned around. The snow melted and ran away from his feet in a widening pool like stop motion photography or some sort of special affect. Slowly it rivered down the stairs of the Metro. Bubbled. Boiled. "I don't need a sword to do you. Remember that."
Alek said nothing, did nothing. Only nodded.
"Take it," Book said. "Maybe it'll save you. Maybe not." His expression fell from anger to utter neutrality. He said everything and nothing at all in one long tragic glance. I love you. I hate you. Go to fucking hell, you damn traitor--
"How did you know to find me here?" Alek finally said, anything to break the silence and the cold and the unnatural heat weighing in on them both.
Book looked back. "You suck as a skater, white boy."
Alek shook his head with puzzlement. "What?"
"Just an educated guess, is all."
"You going to tell him I'm here, Book?"
"What do you think, brother?" be answered. Then he turned away, and on the ledge of the world Alek watched him walk away, shrink into a featureless twigman down on Fifth Avenue, a bit of darkness against the pale foot of the Metro.
"Damn you, Book." Alek snuffled, breathing in the white claustrophobic air and the bitter snow and cold and the deep heart of midnight. He waited for at least a single tear to fall, but it was stubborn in the end. And after a few moments he gave up and started back up the stairs.