Sometime after midnight, the Covenmaster of the New York City branch of slayers rose to standing on the golgotha's sacred dais, the sand of the spent host crunching under his heels and a deep long Abbey breeze casting the few remaining white crystalline hairs like spider's silk against the altar's thousands of bony faces.
The skull in his hands crumbled away,
The Covenmaster let the bone dust fall between his fingers, then he put out those hands to see the grinning wall of dead bones. "Exegi monumentum aere perennius," he said and smiled. The shell was finished, the creature reborn once more. He took away his hands and explored his new body from collarbone to hipbone. So strange to be young and new again. Each time it was a new experience, but after so many years, so many hosts, it was an experience he grew accustomed to very easily.
He went directly to his cell and shook out his good homespun clothing, put them to his face. In his imagination he could still smell in them the salts of the Atlantic, and the pitch and greenwood of the great ship. He remembered his covenant with the church and he remembered what it meant. He was tempted to dress himself in these clothes, the collar and the cloak and the Quaker's hat--but to do so, he knew, would be to undermine all his work this evening thus far. Instead, he went to Sean's cell and found among his things a T-shirt and jeans and his slayer's coat made of leather. He found the whelp's wrist blade with its intricate little mechanism, and this he strapped on his forearm and tested the slide of the blade using the knowledge inherent to the temple. Satisfied, he armed himself with a sword as he had always done in the past before a great mission. Not his sword. Hanzo's sword.
Alek's sword.
Alek.
Yet would be their time.
He went to the parlor and summoned the remnants of his Coven down to the Great Abbey. Aristotle fidgeted in his seat and thrummed his fingers as Amadeus explained his instructions to them. Robot said nothing, of course.
The shadows of the skylight grew long. Nightfall. And finally, when silence fell across the Abbey and he had finished his address, Aristotle said, "So, like, when did God die and put you in charge, whelp?"
Amadeus was crouched atop the Coventable in front of the whelp, his wrist blade under the whelp's chin before all the words were out of his ignorant mouth. "About an hour ago, actually. Cross me not, Aristotle." He smiled.
Aristotle gasped soundlessly with the instrument pressed firmly against his carotid artery. He swallowed, gathered what little wits he owned. "What--oh, Jeezus Christ--he was right--someone really was going to kill him--"
Robot was on his feet, coming around the table like a train. Without removing the blade from Aristotle's throat or otherwise turning away, Amadeus sent his messengers out, heard and felt them wrap like Punjab lassos around the bulk of Robot's body and lift him quite literally off his feet. Robot sucked in great, greedy mouthfuls of air, the only sounds of terror the big mute was capable of making, and flailed uselessly in the grip of Amadeus's personal, Medusan retinue of servants. They rattled irritably and tossed him away like a child tossing a rag doll across the room in a fit of temper. Amadeus stepped down off the table, lithe like a cat, and cast his blind gaze down upon the Coventable. It trembled and rattled a moment as if under the spell of a lunatic seance. Then it turned end over end and splintered into shards against the far stone wall.
The tapestries rippled as if touched by invisible ghosts.
The golgotha herself moaned dryly.
Amadeus felt the vibration of the shattered wood vibrate all throughout the floor and up through the soles of his feet, and he knew Aristotle felt the same. "Do you believe in your heart that the Sean boy is capable of these kinds of miracles, whelp?"
Aristotle, frozen in his seat, still as a statue, still as a victim of the alien powers at work suddenly in his life, squeaked, "No. Father."
Amadeus drew the wild tangle of his hair back into a tight halo around his head. He smiled and let Aristotle see the old Lilithine blood rise in his eyes. Then he snapped the wristblade back and gathered his coat close to himself. He went to the great oaken double doors and threw them open to the above and the night and the city cowering like a collection of children afraid of the dark. To Alek.
Wind whistled down the corridors of the old house like whispered promises.
"Then let's get it on then, man," he said.
Inside the overstuffed chamber he awoke. He blinked up at the armory of defiant monsters' and heroes' faces hanging on shields over him. And frowned. He shifted his weight, cramping his back on thin leather and sharp, nail-like coils. Pungent old tobacco, familiar.
And when a chill came to his temple he gasped. Where was he? A hand. But whose? Very dry.
"Mrs. B--Tahlia," he guessed.
"You got it, kid." Through the haze of her cigarette smoke her face shone like a white jewel, like the visage of some wartime songbird he'd forgotten the name of.
Alek tried to rise, but his body hurt in too many places--his hip, his ribs where he'd fractured one in his fall on the icy alley floor--and he gave it up after a moment of effort and too-much pain and lay back down.
Tahlia undid the buttons on his shirt, took a wad of cloth-wrapped ice from an empty ashtray beside her and pressed it against his side. The immediate pain took his breath away. After a moment or two, Alek found he could speak. "How--?"
"Teresa brought you back. I'm strong, but not strong enough to haul your bulk, let me tell you. You're goddamn heavier than you look!"
He groaned and tasted cotton in his mouth, a hollow ache in the pit of his stomach. His body was mending, but it was running out of juice again. He was hungry. He ignored it. He concentrated on the stinging ache in his side instead. How do you know where I need it, Tahlia? He made a face--he felt like he was breathing through ground glass--and decided not to verbalize his musings.
"I have my ways," Tahlia answered and smiled at her patient's astounded expression.
Alek carefully shook his head. Byron's blood had worked mysterious miracles over Tahlia's mortal flesh, that was for certain. "More to you...Tahlia...than I thought," he managed.
"But of course," Tahlia proclaimed with her big false pride. "I am a veritable jungle of talent, don't y'know." She winked. "An old jungle, granted, but that fact need go no further than this room, right?"
Alek laughed and that hurt too. "Help me up?"
Tahlia eased him into a slumped sitting position. And when she was certain her patient wouldn't slide, she poured Alek a mug of spicy foreign whiskey from the decanter on her husband's desk and handed it to him.
Alek put it to his lips, then away. The smell was unbelievably offensive; how could he have ever drunk this stuff in the past? "Tahlia," he said, holding onto the mug to be social, "exactly how much to you know?"
"Know." Tahlia settled on an art stool and tapped her temple thoughtfully with the painted tip of one finger. "About art, a lot. Other things, some. I do know that Amadeus is a bastard of the first school, though. I know last time I seen Byron was the winter of `62 when the worm set his dogs on him. I do know what the Father's dogs can do. I know I never seen Byron again after he took to his heels." She stroked her chapped bottom lip with tragic ease. "I do know I want you to kill the fucker for me and for Byron and mostly for yourself."
Alek sat back on the couch. "I don't know if I can do that, Tahlia. I don't know if I'm good enough."
"Then you ain't never gonna be free of him, are you?"
Alek set aside the mug of whiskey and pressed his face with both hands. "My God, Tahlia, if you knew so much about this, about me, why the hell didn't you tell me anything when I was younger?"
Tahlia gave him a sidelong look. "Well, for one thing, I didn't `know' much of anything. All I knew about your people was what Byron told me, which wasn't much. And after he was gone, I knew nothing at all."
"But you knew about the Coven. You knew what I was." He looked up, then dropped his gaze apologetically. "No, that's wrong. I'm not your responsibility. Jesus, I'm treating you like some parent that didn't come through for me."
"And if I had told you," Tahlia asked, "would you've believed me about the Coven? Would you have believed the words of Tahlia Braxton over Amadeus?"
He said nothing and tried desperately not to feel like a complete fool in her presence.
Tahlia sighed and resettled himself on his stool. "Kid," she said, "we all gotta get where we're going in our own time. No rushing it. Besides, I always knew you'd figure it all out one of these days. Was always there, y'know. I seen it. Your girlfriend seen it too."
Alek's hands dropped away as a sickening dread filled all the empty places left inside of him. He sat up, his eyes skating over the whole of the room. "Where is she? Where did she go?"
Tahlia's gaze flickered toward the alleyside door.
Alek stood up, then weaved abruptly against the wall as the world twisted sideways on him. His ribs throbbed, his head ached--but there, already all the discomfort was fading. "I need to tell her...tell her what I know."
Tahlia scooted off the stool to steady him. "Whoa, kid. Know what?"
He looked down into Tahlia's upturned face, her small, brilliant, quizzical eyes. "The Chronicle," he said, "I know where it is. The real one."
Tahlia's smoke dropped out of her teeth.
Alek smiled and leaned over and kissed the side of Tahlia's cheek. "Thank you," he said. "Thank you for everything, Mrs. Braxton. I mean it." And then he escaped Tahlia's hold on him and went to the door.
The storm begun earlier was finished, and now only the wind lisped through the narrow straits between buildings. A sheer white rime of snow had gathered on parked cars and telephone wires and well-nigh everything else that was static and unable to escape the gentle wrath of winter.
Alek stopped on the walk outside the Metro and glanced around at the rubbernecked traffic and the homeless cowering back in doorways, trying to determine which way to go. He chose a direction at random. And for the next hour of nonstop walking he felt out of step with everyone around him. They all--or most of them, anyway--seemed so damned purposeful, these people. So driven. He watched them in amazement, realizing that he used to want to be one of them. One with them. No more. He stood in the middle of the mad bustle of Grand Central Station in wonder at how he could have lived such a false life for so long without seeing behind the stage-prop scenery at the barren futility of it all.
A face in the crowd. His lifelong dream. To just be an Everyman. And now? He was a rogue. A slayer. No, The Slayer. Yes.
The new knowledge clinging to him like an epiphany, he waded carefully into the crowd in some half-hearted attempt to catch the sub. But the sub to where? he asked himself. Back to Rapper's building? Someplace else? The Empress? Rockefeller Center? Where? Where did Teresa go when she wasn't with him? To his horror, he realized he had no clue, none at all. She might have flown to the moon, such was his helplessness right now. To know--to have the knowledge she sought for so long, the whereabouts of Paris's Chronicle--but of course his damned stupid, passionate outrage had to intercept all that. Critical mass at the most horrible of times. He'd been cruel and cretin and she had learned to hate him. She had walked away, but that was fair and just, wasn't it? It was, after all, what he had struggled to achieve in that godforsaken alley only an hour ago. He felt a stab of regret under his heart. Regret, of all things. Useless, that emotion, Teresa had said in a time when she had believed he was an angel. But regret changes nothing--
He leaned against a lamp post and tried to think, to imagine where she would go. If only she would feel for him, feel with their special bloodbound senses the new surge of hope, of knowledge, in him, maybe she would come get him. Or at least tell him where she was.
There was an interesting thought. He had never tried it, but if she could feel his presence anywhere in the city as she said she could, could see his dreams even, then why couldn't he? He started walking again. No real direction, just walking, letting the streets take him up and down. Where are you? Tell me where you are. Broadway. He looked at the signpost. Are you here? Is this the reason I've chosen this direction? He kept walking, looking, feeling the cold and the feelings under the cold. He heard his heart, heard the rush of his blood, imagined it drawing him to her like a strange compass.
He found himself standing at the door of the revolving bar at the Marriott. He went inside. Nothing. But near. Now he felt it. Subtle. Like the ache in his side. He passed through the bar to the left and found himself in the lobby standing amidst the red plush carpet sea between the visitors to the city and the haggard bellboys.
The nightclerk looked just as haggard and a great deal less trustworthy. "Can I help you, sir?"
He already knew Teresa was somewhere in the building, probably on one of the upper floors from the feel of it. What he didn't know was whether she had created any obstacles to his seeing her. "Did a woman check in here? About this tall? Very pretty, with long auburn hair? Green eyes?"
The nightclerk looked annoyed. "I'm sorry. You are mistaken."
"I'm not mistaken." But he saw now. The man was used to these midnight rendezvous, escorts and their clients, and like any good New Yorker, he let people make money and kept his mouth shut. An admirable quality at any other time but this.
"What room?"
"Excuse me?" The man shuddered, but only a little.
"What. Room." Alek narrowed his eyes and pushed...
"1010, sir."
"Thank you."
The first discovery that Alek made on entering room 1010 in the Marriott was that Teresa wasn't alone. A human male was with her on the bed, powerfully built and probably attractive from what he could see of the intruder by his bare, ebony back and baggy-khakied ass. Bald head. Six-hundred-dollar sneaks. Some battle-rap type Alek would probably have recognized from an M2 video if he really thought about it. Maybe even a nice guy in some other life. Right now, only an intruder. Alek went to the bed, faster than either one of them could react, gripped a fistful of the man's pants seat, and peeled him off of her.
"Whadda fuck!" Homeboy ranted in a nice tough Harlem-inspired yawing as he pedaled his legs and pinwheeled his arms. After a moment of intense effort, Homey managed to twist his head back on his short, thick, bullish neck. He showed Alek his double row of pearly-nice, Hollywood-capped teeth. "I'm goan fucking cut your balls off! Pput me dooown, motherf--! Alek put him down. Hard. "Get your clothes and get out of here," he said distractedly as he watched Teresa sit up on the bed. She was dressed in a black lace slip and garters and stocking with stalks of butterflies embroidered along the backs of her legs. Her motions were fluid, openly inviting, and Alek had to swallow down an urge to turn back to Homey and rip his goddamn head off for seeing her this way. He felt like a jealous, irate husband in a Jane Austin novel. Gentlemen, take your pistols and ten paces...
Homey obediently went for his shirt on the bed--then grabbed Alek by the arm instead and swung him around, tried to land a four-ringed knucklepunch to his face. Alek caught it in his fist. Held it. He looked Homey in the face and felt the man's pulse tick with useless, angry energy. The man sneered.
Alek sneered back. "I said. Get. Out."
"I paid good money for the cunt," Homey said. "You her fuckin', cocksuckin' husband or what?"
Alek let the man's fist go. Grabbed him by the back of the skull instead and thrust his own weight against the prickass, sent him crashing back into the wall beside the bed. He felt the drywall groan, give. Homey's skull banged against a stud. The vase of fake orchids on the nightstand beside the bed rattled, danced, fell over.
Homey blanched, choked.
Kill him, he'd like to fucking kill the motherfucker's ass.
Alek let go of his head and stepped back.
Homey looked down and stared at the forty-six-inch ceremonial tachi sword slung up tight under his balls with wonder for where it had come from and how fast it could have found its way there.
From one brotha to another, thought Alek, and smiled with genuine malice. "We want to be alone," he said, raising the sword ever so slightly. "Get it?"
Homey put his hands up in an authentic I-give-up-man gesture and reached for his shirt for real this time. Without putting it on--or for that matter, without even reaching for his wallet lying on the nightstand beside the overturned vase, an act that would have made him cross the path of the tachi--Homey backed away to the door and opened it behind him, slunk out backwards, gold chains a-jangling, grey-faced, defeated.
"Put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door, won't you?" Alek asked.
Homey took the sign with him and slammed the door.
Alek put the sword down.
Teresa crossed her legs. Though her face had hardened from the moment of his arrival, she seemed to be having trouble maintaining it now. "He and his friends have a lot of money and he could have recommended me," she said.
He said nothing; he watched her face, all of it cold, unbroken ice, all reflection, as if she were doing her damnedest to hide what lurked inside. She looked away. "My time is money. And I would appreciate it if you would leave now."
"You gave up on me," he said to her at last.
She looked up then. "You gave up on you."
He opened his mouth to say...what? Suddenly his whole being rebelled against this and he had to take a step back, away from the slayer in himself--that Amadeus-made creature with armor as black and hard as beetleshell. Silence roared up between them like an icon to his pride. But pride, like regret, was a useless emotion. He broke it. "I'm sorry I disappointed you, beloved. I'm sorry I made you hate me. I really am."
She tilted her head. She flushed. "Don't be so stupid."
"Am I? Stupid?"
"You are if you think I could hate you." She dropped her eyes, her lashes like crimson fans on the marble-white planes of her cheeks. "I was angry, caro. You angered me. No one has angered me in a long time."
He approached her. He touched her hair freely in response, wound it like silk around his fingers. Then he kissed her with all the fierce hunger of his passion, kissed her, unafraid at last of that passion, and he heard his twin's contented sigh echoing up through the tunnel of his soul. He broke the kiss, kissed her again, and again, said to her, breathlessly, against her mouth, "I'll never disappoint you again, I promise. I swear it..."
"Your eyes." She touched his face and shook her head. "You're different, What have you seen?"
He smiled mischievously, brimming.
Her dark eyes brightened. "You know."
"I was shown."
"Where then?"
"So close, so, so close. Yet a lifetime away." He took her hand, He studied her face. Loved her eyes. The planes of her cheeks. Her eyelashes. Her rare smile. Loved the strength and determination in her heart, the many wisdoms in her mind. Loved her...not as a lover, he realized, but as a student loves his sensei, all but worships her. "Come, fly with me. Let me show you."
"I will...but..." She shook her head with wonder.
"What is it, Teresa? What?"
She looked deep into his eyes. "What are you?" she whispered.
He stood up. "Complete."