How immortal was the altar. In almost thirty-eight years it had remained unchanged. It perhaps bore a new and modern skin of graffiti and its red and gold paint was weak and its brass rings a long time lost, but at its soul the altar remained changeless. The fellowship of animals remained in their painful stances, heads tossed back as if in the death rictus of poison. So many years and its milky canopy mirrors reflected still the swarm of city lights and the rise and fall of the deathless sun.
Things change, they changeth not.
On the icy gravel path, Alek stopped. They were alone. Lone worshipers at the altar. Few New Yorkers ventured this far into the park at this hour of the abyss. Rather, even the insomniacs and dogwalkers and crazies would be staying to the gravel paths near Central Park South and along Lexington Avenue, waiting for the sun to burn off the mist and some of the cold and chase away all the monster they knew dwelled in the dark here.
He shivered quite suddenly and wondered if it was only the cold, looking on the barren benches, the night's worth of garbage clustering on heat grates, the rats squirming through the wired baskets on their early-morning foraging trips.
"Here?" Teresa said, creeping up beside him.
"Under the carousel. It's all he had time for before..." Another shiver. Cold. Danger. Or an echo of danger. Perhaps.
Another slayer. Not perhaps...
"He's here," Alek said.
"The Stone Man."
"Not Stone Man."
She withdrew Paris's ornate knife. It gleamed dirtily in the coppery sodium lights surrounding the carousel.
"Won't you go back?" he pleaded. "For God's sake, the sun--"
"I want the fucking Chronicle."
"You'll be blind in half an hour."
"Then let's do this already and quit arguing about it." She looked at him challengingly. She had opted for heavier, darker clothing this time. A wool coat and hat that made her look like some princess out of a Russian novel, black shades that wrapped around her eyes nearly completely. Not that the meager black fabric and plastic would help. In about an hour the sun would crest and turn her world into a watery red inferno she would no more be able to sustain than a man could bathe fully within the sun's unrelenting rays and not collapse, blind, from heatstroke. But trying to convince her to wait until nightfall was impossible. Trying to make her wait for him to return from this even more difficult. He knew. He'd been trying to convince her otherwise since they'd left the Marriott more than half an hour ago.
"Killing yourself won't be avenging Paris, you know," he said.
A crow called harshly and she looked up. The firs and the naked, narrow-boned maples writhed alive with a rich dark foliage of daybirds. He felt a shiver that was not fear. She turned away, met his gaze with such open hostility he found it incredulous that this was the same woman whose words had moved him so only an hour ago.
He spoke again, but now as if from great height or distance. "It was writ the animals would weep and music would come forth and black blood and a midnight sun, and the Covenmaster would not know another rising of the day."
Teresa looked cynically upon the carousel animals inside their cage of time and disuse. The revolver moved, out only laboriously, and not two whole inches. The stage protested even that. "The carousel has not turned in ten years, caro."
He breathed in the cold and the steel and listened to the gravel crackling like bone dust under his feet. I don't want to be here, Tahlia. I don't want to be doing this, Byron, my mapmaking friend. I want to be elsewhere, away. I want to be safe, I want to be hidden somewhere in the shadows of the city and not here, not now. I don't want to know if I can beat him. I don't care to know. I just want to be finished, finished...
Debra sighed and laughed disheartenedly. Afraid, Slayer? Are you a coward as well as a murderer, then?
The carousel clicked forward three paces and displaced shadow. And momentarily, before sliding back under a cloak of darkness, he saw it--a dark paralyzed mount with a figure sitting sidesaddle upon it. Still. Waiting for him.
Like in the beginning.
They had come full circle.
So.
Above a blackbird cackled and rattled the air with its voice. Teresa drew cautiously back, back off the path like some pre-recorded ballet, recoiling but not retreating. She looked at him, her eyes luminous and full of night and understanding. I would stand with you, but I know my place in prophecy. I know my place as Noah and Moses and Jesus knew theirs. To wait. You must go alone. Otherwise he will make me a pawn to make you do what he wants.
"He will try to kill you," she said.
Again Debra laughed, but like a wraith, sneeringly.
Afraid, Slayer?
"He had that power," Alek answered. He went to her and took her knifehand, held up the lethal little weapon, touched his tongue to the edge. He felt no pain. He did taste his own coppery sweetness. The final host. It would bleed slow for hours and keep his battlehunger up. He touched her hair but did not kiss her, not now, not when he wanted to touch the anger and the emptiness in his childhood heart. Finished, he walked, alone, toward the altar.
The dark horse ticked forward as if summoned to meet him. And now it did not slide. And the master of the horse appeared fully, unshielded. Just like that first time in the cold and the dark, but that his face was turned down and away and a wide round Quaker's hat concealed his beautifully awful features.
Alek mounted the stage and stopped. He narrowed his eyes on the silent figure and waited.
After a moment the hat was tipped up and back on the blonde head. Tiny filed teeth grinned up at him, gleaming like pearls in the dark. "Hey there, man." The slayer's coat slit open to show an old Radiohead concert T-shirt. Alek flinched back, lurched against the dolphin at the sight of the spineless little prick that went around calling himself the Chosen.
"Drunk again, sailor," snickered Sean. In his slayer's coat and his own modern wrapper shades he looked nearly comical, like some kid broken away from his Halloween frat party and come to haunt the Park and the carousel just to be a pain in the neck. He lounged back on the carousel horse as casual as a cat. "You know, man, you look righteously disappointed. You were expecting, maybe, like, Count-fucking-Dracula?"
"Amadeus," Alek said uncertainly. "I was expecting Amadeus."
Sean pouted. "Real shitter, man. As it turns out, the Father's busy making excuses to the Vatican on his goddamn knees, man. And all because of fucking you. So looks like you gonna have to make do with me."
Alek recovered, leaned around a pole. "Fine. This should take about five minutes."
Sean pigged his eyes and offered Alek the bird. "Fuck you, man."
Ring finger? Alek sidestepped. Not right. The little shit would not get that wrong. Would not--
He eyed the Stone Man closely, flesh thin and translucent and almost blue in the moonlight, earlobes naked of their decorative arsenal of steel and bone. Where were his trophy teeth on their wires? His leather jacket and his chains?
"You've changed, haven't you?" he said.
Sean smiled crookedly as he eased himself down off the horse. He made a flouncy gesture with his hands, like he was maybe pushing back a theatre curtain only he could see. "Maybe I'm assuming my role as Covenmaster."
Suddenly, the dream--
Sean with his master's eyes, his master's smile.
I am Amadeo...Asmodeus. I am the Chosen. I am the Coven...
"No," said Alek, looking around nervously. "You're lying. Why are you lying?"
...the sword with a blood-blackened hilt. All that you see I command...
"Who the hell are you?"
Sean snickered. "The Stone Man."
Alek shook his head. But what had he expected, a transfiguration? The face was unchanging, offering Alek nothing. But the mind...a book suddenly, pregnant with history, with time, its words twisted into the languages of other places and other people and scribed in blood. It toppled, that book, tumbled over, its pages opening like wings in flight, its words clear and sharp and utterly false. Ugly. Such pain. A twist of the soul. And inside the private chamber of Alek's mind, at the very height of understanding, a seeping voice like a whispered battlecry:
Memento mori, beloved.
Amadeus's hand, which was Sean's but not Sean's, flickered out. Alek saw a brief glimmer like the sun before it strikes the horizon. Then a bloom of scarlet burst heavenward and splashed the dark horse's paralyzed flank. It painted the Sean-thing, his hair, his empty lifeless face. Ideograms of blood splattered across Sean's shades like a talented if disturbed child's artwork.
Alek tottered back in defense, but too late. There was a narrow, unfelt pain in his throat. He put his hands there and felt a fast, cold spring. He looked down at himself, at the red life that was his but also Teresa's and Debra's racing out of him and embracing the ground, turning the snow pink as candy floss at his feet.
On the stage the Sean-thing was standing, sliding the dripping wristblade back into its secret sheath. The thing cocked its head sideways, a curious animal, an artist fascinated by his work.
Alek knew then. He understood everything, or suspected it. Sean would be laughing at him; only Amadeus drew blood piously. "Father," he whispered in words and blood because it was true, because it was him, it was Amadeus...
The wrappers were ripped away like some final disguise and Alek saw beneath, saw the lizardlike eyes, and looked away. Before him the park rocked a little to and fro as if the entire world were perched on a great swinging, cosmic pendulum. He shivered, felt so cold on the inside, white cold, cold as silence. He gripped the wound at his throat, but it was an action entirely reflexive. He could no longer feel his outer shell, only his insides, his veins and arteries as they began to collapse in line and shut off odd portions of his body. Taste was gone. No hands. He felt a terrifying lightness gathering under his heavy coat.
"Look at me, mein Sohn."
He did.
"You are dying," said Amadeus in Sean's voice and cadence and yet his own harsh accent. "The blood is the life after all and the life runs out of you now. Will you try and catch it?"
He tried, but it ran obstinately through his fingers.
Powerful, hulklike arms took him from behind. Not Amadeus. Too great, even for the Father. Robot. The enormous ball-breaker of a slayer gripped him firmly around the waist and kept him upright on his knees, not unkindly but with enough strength to indicate he had no intention of fucking around if Alek started to struggle. Alek did not struggle. There was no strength left to struggle.
Breathe, blink, look up--no.
A shadow...
No.
Teresa stood on the edge of the bicycle path, eyes riveted on his struggle, oblivious to the shadow slinking up behind her. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out of him but blood and a mewling kittenlike noise. His eyes instead went to the shadow, widened. Teresa turned then, but it was over already.
Aristotle turned the million-candle-power halogen on her face. Teresa screamed and hid her face.
Aristotle giggled like a schoolboy playing a nasty prank. Teresa turned around and went down on her face, Aristotle's knee in her back.
Amadeus nodded.
And then everything happened at once.
Alek balked the moment Aristotle, the prick, started to pick Teresa up. But Robot was having none of it and tightened his hold on Alek's waist until Alek was certain his newly-mended ribs were going to be crushed to powder in the slayer's massive hands. Aristotle picked Teresa up in a fireman's carry; Teresa hissed and whipped around like a cat, her hands reaching for Aristotle's eyes, missed, tore a flap in his cheek with her fingernails; Aristotle cursed, swung around, cracking the back of her head against a tree trunk. Teresa slumped over his shoulder, as still as the dead. Cursing still, Aristotle couried her semiconscious body over to his master, a dog eager to please.
"The little whore," Amadeus muttered and gripped Teresa's face in one massive hand, his nails cutting black furrows in her white face. "Open your eyes, little whore."
The pain revived her. Her eyes fluttered. She worked them open. Her body shuddered, but the pain was too much for her. She sighed, almost a word, her blinded eyes bleeding slits.
"Paris was a fool," Amadeus whispered and backhanded her across the face, knocking loose her hat, knocking down her long, long hair, knocking her off Aristotle's shoulder and to the ground like a lifeless lump. "Alek is a fool..." Again the hand, a spurt of blood too dark for human broke from between her split lips. "You cunt..." He took her by the face, took her again, took her so hard he lifted her off the ground like a child's doll.
Kill you, Alek thought to Aristotle, standing nearby and watching, the eager-dog look plastered all over his bleeding geek face. Kill you like Takara. Rip you fucking apart...
He tried to lunge with what was left of his strength. Nothing. And now Robot scarcely held him.
Amadeus turned around and whispered to Robot: "Hold him up so he can see."
Robot did. Proudly.
A real challenge, eh, Robey? Holding a semiconscious man upright so he could watch a woman being tortured? You're such a man...
Amadeus flicked his wrist. Again the blade, glowing like an evil blue light, ghostlight--
Again the lunge. Alek felt it surge through him from some dark inner place of strength--
He moved, made it a foot.
"Hold him, God damn you!"
SSSliiit.
A fistful of Teresa's beautiful auburn hair fell in a heap of silky red-ebony at Amadeus's feet. The Father's eyes stayed barren, no feeling there. Just an act of fucking barbarism, like anything else in his life. He went to work again; again he robbed Teresa of her wonderful hair. And when he was done there, her hair cropped, he went to work on the front of her coat, slicing away the buttons--shucking the material off of her like a hunter skinning some great animal of prey of its pelt--so she lay on her back on the gravel path in only her black slip, her neck and arms bare to the cold and her assailant. Alek couldn't help but think of her stories, the freaks and psychos she had endured, beaten at their own game. Did you know it would end this way? In this ignominy? Again her eyes fluttered and the muscles of her neck and arms tensed as she tried to swim to the top of consciousness.
Amadeus reached down like a man about to touch the cheek of a sleeping woman and instead struck her with the sharp of the blade. Alek shuddered, pain felt. The marks were like tar on her cheek and throat. A profanity. A sin. All that white perfection marred like that--
Alek coughed and wiped away the blood that came off his mouth. Then almost suddenly he gave in to a vast urge and went down in the cold snow and cold blood mingling into an icy pink froth all over the altar. He knelt, his hands over the maw of the wound as if he would salvage what was left and hold it in long enough to fight one last time, one last time for her...
It refused him and only raced away.
He forced up his trembling eyes, made them focus through the gathering crimson dusk on the Sean face with its black Amadeus eyes. Its unfeeling eyes. Empty eyes. Voids. "Why--you--doing this?" he asked with painful effort of clarity. "Why can't you--let me--be?"
"Fool's philosophy," said Amadeus as he used his booted foot to kick Teresa over, and then brought the crushing weight of his heel down onto the small of her back. The bones of her spine crackled like kindling. Teresa let out a long, susurrating breath. "Things cannot be. Things must be made."
"Hate--you."
"Hush." He kicked her back over onto her broken back. "I drown in love for you."
"You're filth," Alek spat bloodily. "A plague--hope the prophecy--puts you back--in hell!" And with final, near-impossible effort, he broke from Robot's grip and crawled past Amadeus, toward Teresa's desecrated body.
Amadeus stepped on the tail of Alek's coat. "Foolish, my beloved. The prophecy has been rendered null."
Alek strained, but his bones were water, his blood air, and he collapsed with his face to the snow inches from Teresa's paralyzed hand. "Not true."
"It is." Amadeus took a fold of his coat and jerked him back like an evil dog on a leash. "Amadeus must die for the prophecy's sake. I am not Amadeus, I am der Neugeschopf--a new creature."
No!
"I am a hybrid."
Nonono--
"Crucify the whore, my slayers."
--NOOO!
Aristotle stretched her out on a patch of snow, arms out, legs set neatly together like someone in mid-dive. Teresa suddenly came alive and snapped her jaws on his arm as he was pulling back, and Alek felt his heart leap at the sight. "Bitch!" Aristotle spat. He cracked his fist and Cornell college ring against her cheek. More blood. More. Robot came next with a gym bag and set it down. Planned this, then, they had fucking planned it--
He withdrew a ballpeen hammer and a pair of iron railroad spikes.
Alek tried to shrug free from the skin of his coat, saw himself do it, escaping it like a moth from a cocoon, escaping it to wreck hell on earth on these fucking barbarians, but Amadeus took a fistful of his hair and wrenched brutally back. Alek fell in a crumpled, bloody heap.
He closed his eyes, buried his face in the snow and blood.
All through the work, Teresa made a series of long raspy noises, not human, not vampiric. Throat-scorching wails like nothing he had ever before heard. Like a soul being torn apart, spiderwebbed by a force it had absolutely no control over.
Then she fell silent and Alek opened his eyes, blinked them clear of tears. Staked to the earth at both wrists. Staked and held by iron spikes and awaiting the coup de grace punched through the heart to stop its immortal beating. The Old World method. The method before the eastern slayers had lent the west their katanas and their mercies.
Amadeus stood staring down at her, the last spike in his hand. He was speaking, speaking low and intimate the words of the Old World exorcisms. The nonsense. The gibberish in Latin. The unholy inversion of Last Rites. He crouched low, the words "Fucking whore" on his whispering lips, and Alek closed his eyes a second time.
Teresa's screamed, inside his mind and out, over and over like a machine.
He lay motionless, spent at last. His body was elsewhere and all he was now was what he could feel and what he could think, and what he thought now was how immortality was such an ephemeral thing. So tired. So old. All he wanted was to rise up and fly, fly, out into the night, because it would make the grownups angry and who cared if the grownups were angry? But Amadeus was straddling his body now as he had Teresa's a moment earlier and he was pinning Alek to the ground like yet another victim and now that was quite impossible, wasn't it?
Amadeus kissed his mouth and the chains of tears on his face. "Why have you done this, my most beloved?" he spoke to Alek's heart. "Why do you struggle? You clung to me once, a child in your fears and sadnesses."
Alek shook his head, once. "Deceived--me."
"I created you," Amadeus hissed. "I loved you best, you ungrateful child. Who could love you but I? You came to me a devil and I made from you an angel, and how do you repay my work, but with deceit and betrayal. I should destroy you for your sins, no? But I am overcome with love for you still." Amadeus smiled, drank the blood from off his child's cooling lips. "I created you. And I will create you again." He touched Alek's heart, wholly rejoiced. "There--only a beat away."
Alek spat the remainder of his blood in his master's face. But the beads of blood on the Covenmaster's lashes were simply blinked away like red tears. "My journey's end," he said. "My true temple."
NO! NOT YOURS!
Amadeus kissed him once more, almost sweetly, his sharp little Sean-teeth lancing Alek's tongue, gagging him. And within the wet, private universe of Alek's mouth he tasted of Alek's blood like a holy Communion. I will not die, he said. I refuse it. You were always in my visions, Alek, you who will be the greatest among my slayers. I will not be cheated of my promised one. Your psi will make me omnipotent; your body will make me eternal...
Lied to me! You said you would be no Orpheus. You said you would preserve only the Coven!
I am the Coven.
No, no, nonononoNOOOOOOOOO...
"Hush," Amadeus whispered as he combed away the ropes of hair clinging to his acolyte's frozen cheeks, kissed him lightly, almost fondly. Kissed him hungrily.
Alek felt nothing, every touch a distant ghost. Every thought foreign, lost in memory...
"Yes, yes." Amadeus undid the rabato at his throat and pressed the edge of the wristblade across the small triangle of white flesh there. A red crescent like a smile appeared, and Alek's dead body convulsed with horror. He closed his eyes. No, no, he wouldn't, he refused--
"You lie in the cradle between life and death, beloved."
No. And again no. And yet again NO! He wasn't afraid to die, not like Amadeus, not like his Father, who knew nothing, had learned nothing. Coward. He locked his mouth.
Amadeus cracked his palm against Alek's cheek, rocking his head to one side as if he were again a child. Steel in his mouth. Ichor. Bitter heart of war, love turned to venom, spillage, bad vintage. Amadeus kissed him urgently, shattered the flesh of his lips with his teeth. He framed Alek's face inside his stony hands. "You will honor my will, Alek Knight," he whispered and ran his fingers over the tears and blood, down his throat and over his heart. Under his coat. The touch. No. But it found his most vulnerable places and he couldn't help himself. He arched against his master like a puppet with its wires pulled taut. The fire was there as always, the goddamn hunger that no amount of slaying vanquished...
Amadeus leaned low so that Alek's mouth was pressed to the freshly opened wound and circled his arms around Alek's back. Blood rouged his lips and cheeks, bubbled up his nostrils. He tasted life, survival. The sweet sharp crimson fruit of paradise itself--
"Drink," said Amadeus. "Let me create you. Let me fill you and complete you with the life as I was always meant to do. Drink, Alek. Drink until I move within you."
No, he thought, no, goddamn you, don't you dare give in, even as the memories and the night and all the horrors brought jewels of agony to his eyes. He tried to blink them away, but where was his strength? Where was Debra? And did Teresa forgive him? Could she? So near, they had been, so fucking near--close enough nearly to touch the Chronicle.
He groaned and wept as his body betrayed him and he licked his parched lips and bit the sweet wound, bit into it, seeking. Like water on a fire, no, wine in the throat of a dying man, a victim of the sun and desert--
"Yes, yes, my love..."
He strained and drank, afraid to move, to lose even a dropful. He clung to his master and maker and drank. And he drank, wondering what creature he and Amadeus were writ to be and who had set the benediction. He drank, wondering what part of himself, if any, would remain and if he would have the will above that other entity to remain and fight. He drank, wondering what he would feel as he slid down into the belly of the beast and he hoped to God and to Debra and to Teresa and to all those whom he had betrayed that he felt absolutely nothing.
Inside his white soundless sphere, Booker stopped in his pacing as if struck by an invisible barrier. His eyes moved analytically around the room, yet he recognized nothing, identified not a thing, as if the world around him had suddenly decided to alienate him.
On the muted television the lily-faced heroine embraced a beautifully horrifying Count Orlock, offered herself up as the sacrificial lamb for all the good of a 1920's mankind. Book could not find the metaphor and so he took up the remote and changed the channel to MTV.
He watched artists sing about their sorrows and felt himself drift, lost among it. He groaned and tossed the remote to a cushion of his fashionably noncolored love seat. He turned full circle, the room too large, turning too fast. Where was Alek? His brother when all the brothers had gone, his best friend in all the world and fucking beyond? He had to find him--had to.
Why?
Didn't know why. Had to--
Where? The city's a big place, fool.
Silly--he knew. Of course he did. He knew this time without Aristotle's insight and stupid suppositions. He knew--
The beginning place.
"Your empathy must be rubbing off, brother," he said and reached for his coat lying on the floor.
Tahlia cast the cat skull across the full length of her husband's office. It hit the gorgon-face shield like a missile and clattered to her husband's smoking couch in shards.
In a single sweep she cleared the desk of its homey clutter, blotter and banker's lamp, decanter and Roman amphorae, In Files and Out, Charles's tobacco carousel--which struck his favorite stuffed pheasant down from his perch, so what?--books and maps and the framed portrait of Charles the warrior in fatigues between two other men in a faded grey jungle half a world away. All of it in a noisy waterfall to the floor.
There.
Exhaustion displacing rage, Tahlia slumped against the edge of the desk, one hand in her sweaty hair and the other over her heart. You are long over the hill, Tally, whatever the face may say. Gonna give yourself a heart attack. Yeah.
"No!" she answered, and strange this voice: it was not her own. It was the voice of some other Tahlia, some younger Tahlia. The voice of the woman who had sat all night in a cafe on Columbus Street listening to bad beat-generation verse and rattling her glass and stomping her feet with the best of them as the rest of her withered and curled up like an old rose and died inside. The woman whose heart knew that Byron was never late, never in all their thirteen years late for one of their dates, and that late tonight meant something more than late. The woman who knew that like she knew these Beatniks and their lousy poetry but who was too much a coward to admit to it. The woman who had drunk herself into a vermouth-inspired stupor that night and then drove home to her converted loft apartment in the Brooklyn Heights and cried herself to sleep and stayed, aching, in that bed for three whole days, nursing the horrible knowledge she had like a disease. That woman, the voice of the woman ages younger and not a little feral with emotion, a voice armored in steel and war and all the things that were lost forever.
This new-old Tahlia sobbed, "It can't end this way, kid. Please, please don't let it end this way." And that Tahlia went to her knees in sobs on the floor of her husband's office with the pulsing pounds of gaiety just beyond the walls but years out of reach.